If there’s one game that we can bet will bring us nostalgia in spades and child-like euphoria, it is the Pokémon RPG games. Sure, we’ve tried our hand at games of different genres in the same franchise, such as Pokémon Go, Pokémon Masters and more, but none hold a candle to the heights the RPG games reached, in our opinion. Pokémon Sword and Shield (we played Sword) brought back those fond memories and it also brought sheer wonder. The evolution of the game from its GBA days is so drastic that we often found ourselves being victims of those pesky ninjas cutting onions nearby. Pokémon Sword feels familiar, yet there are many added elements that surprised us, for good or for bad. The game, while magnificent in many aspects, is not one without its fair share of flaws. Let’s dive right into it.
Storyline: Familiar yet different
We all know that Pokémon RPG games have a tried and true formula they tend to abide by. In Pokémon Sword, you’re a preteen, new Pokémon trainer that sets out on a journey to capture Pokémon, you take on the league consisting of eight gyms and finally make your way to beat the Champion. Sounds familiar? If you’ve played any Pokémon game before this, of course, it does. Nevertheless, within this seemingly linear and predictable storyline are plenty of tiny nuances that have been changed that do provide it with a breath of freshness.
For instance, Pokémon trainers aren’t guaranteed to enter the Pokémon League. In the storyline, you start off at home with your mom (absentee dad as per yoozh) in a sleepy village named Postwick, when your friendly rival and best friend, Hop, tells you that the all-powerful, ‘unbeatable’ Champion of the Galar region, Leon, who is also Hop’s brother, is coming home soon. He entrusts you with your starter (we picked the Water-type Sobble). This is a deviation from the Pokémon professor usually handing you your Pokémon. Also, he only agrees to endorse you for the Pokémon League or the annual Gym Challenge after both, Hop and you, have shown him your mettle at battling.
Another twist, right off the bat you enter a suspicious route while chasing after a Wooloo and encounter an odd presence. A wolf-like Pokémon and no matter what move you use the mysterious Pokémon is unfazed. Immediately, you dive head into the mysteries of the storyline and the legend of these powerful Pokémon. However, you’re also harshly pulled out of it as time and again in the game, you’re told by the Champion or some other powerful character that they will take care of the issue and you must concentrate on the Gym Challenge. Sheesh. We wonder if it would have been more fun to play as these characters instead.
Nevertheless, the character does find himself/herself in the midst of all the mystery and legends time and again, and you are finally the person to solve the mystery of the Darkest Day and save the Galar Region from the bad guys. What team are the bad guys in, you ask? Well, it’s not a team but the Chairman of the League itself that is threatening impending doom in the region. There is a Team Yell (much like Team Rocket, Team Aqua, etc) that you battle time and again during the course of the game, but they end up HELPING you instead of obstructing you in the end.
Gameplay: Numerous quality of life changes
In over 25 hours of gameplay, we came across multiple quality of life changes, some of which were definitely blessings while some had us miffed. Harrowing gameplay mechanics we used to be complacent about were overhauled and we were overjoyed! For example, you can skip tutorials now! You do not have to sit through a tedious and mind-numbing Pokémon catching tutorial if you’ve already played the previous games and these kinds of changes are ALWAYS welcome.
Another improvement, in our opinion, is that traditional random Pokémon encounters in the grass have been tweaked. You can now see most Pokémon wandering around in the grass and say, if you don’t need this particular Pokémon for your team or have already caught one, you can simply weed your way through the grass while straying away from that Pokémon. There are surprise encounters as well, but the game forewarns you with an exclamation point when you’re heading in the direction of a wild encounter. You can choose to engage or avoid it. Gone are the days of stocking up 50 max repels…
Some Pokémon are only found through random encounters, so, if you have your eye on one that can be caught this way, you will have to go through some wild encounters. We wanted to catch a Jangmo-o that had a 5% chance of appearing through such encounters and boy, did it take some time. However, some wild Pokémon which appear above the grass chase you. So, even if you try to avoid them, they can run up to you and catch you. Repels do not stop this, which we thought was extremely counterintuitive. However, due to the sheer variety of Pokémon in different routes, you never quite face the ‘Zubat or Geodude problem’ like previous games, where every wild encounter is almost the same making it dreary and monotonous. There are multiple different types of Pokémon in a route which makes random encounters that much more fun!
Gyms are pretty much the same, there’s some sort of puzzle along with a few trainer battles along the way. The puzzles were quite interesting, and some were rather challenging too. However, the final battle with the gym leader takes place in a full-blown stadium with crowds cheering you on. Finally! An atmosphere to match the adrenaline rush we feel during battles.
HMs are extinct. If you’re wondering how you’re going to fly or surf, it’s pretty easy and convenient actually. You fly using the Corviknight Taxi Service and Surf with your bicycle itself which turns into some hybrid sort of water bike. The flying service is available pretty early on which ups the convenience if you want to pay a visit back to a route or city you’ve already been in. The water bike feature, however, is an upgrade that shows up after a while. The transition between cycling and surfing is seamless. No more pressing of buttons, just seamlessly ride from land to the water body. These services make backtracking and just simply traveling around a breeze in Pokémon Sword.
TMs, on the other hand, are still very much present and available in different areas during the course of the game. However, you now have TRs (Technical Records), which are basically TMs but fragile. Much like the earlier generations, these TRs break after a single-use. And unfortunately, all the super-powerful moves such as Blizzard, Flamethrower and more are TRs. These are found in something called Max Raid Battles which happen in the Wild Area, which we will explain below. One TR can be found multiple times as well.
Other quality of life changes include Pokémon Camping and accessing Pokémon boxes from your bag itself to switch out team members. While the second is self-explanatory, the first is basically a camp you set up for you and your Pokémon in any wild area (route, cave, etc) where you can engage with your Poké pals (talking or with toys) and make food (curries) which heal your team’s health and PP. It’s quite useful during long routes but, in our opinion, it does make the game too easy. However, it’s better than games such as X and Y where routes had doctors or nurses that would heal you. At least, here you need to gather ingredients to make curries.
The sprawling wild area and Dynamax/Gigantamax Pokémon
The Wild Area in Pokémon Sword is really the closest a Pokémon game has ever gotten to a Breath of the Wild-style open world. It’s a sprawling, gigantic wild area with tons of different biomes with different weather conditions. Here, you can explore the area thoroughly while taking control of the camera as well with the right joystick. Large (and extremely over-leveled) Pokémon walk across paths where there is no grass while the grass patches in different biomes are home to different Pokémon. Additionally, the weather is also dynamic and changes almost every day.
Sadly, some Pokémon only appear under specific weather conditions in specific biomes. Waiting around days for that to happen can sometimes be taxing. We found a simple hack for this, simply change the date in the Settings of your Nintendo Switch and the weather will change as per the date. Here’s an article that details which date coincides with which weather condition.
Coming back to the Wild Area, after you get over the massiveness of the area and the gigantic, over-leveled Pokémon, you will realize that the area looks very bland visually. The developers could have done SO much with this. You see a few steep cliffs, some groves of trees, lakes, and islands. But all in all, it doesn’t look exciting and most of the space is blank and unused apart from the grass. Nevertheless, we are only excited by this since it can be made so much better in the future, visually. Practically, the Wild Area in Pokémon Sword is extremely fun and it encourages you to explore and catch various types of Pokémon. It breaks the linearity of Pokémon stories by adding Pokémon that are much higher levels giving you the feeling that they are part of the world and you have to work your way up to them. Also, if you do manage to beat these Pokémon, you get huge amounts of exp.
In the Wild Area, you also have Max Raid Battles where you will find a Dynamax or Gigantamax Pokémon. These Pokémon are massive versions of their original form. The difference between the two is that Dynamax Pokémon are merely bigger in size while Gigantamax Pokémon also change aspects of their form in addition to size. These battles are fought with a total of 4 trainers including you. The ultimate goal is to drain the massive Pokémon’s health as a team. If you do so, you can even attempt to catch these Pokémon (usually rare). After defeating or catching the Pokémon, you get several rewards including curry ingredients for camping and EXP candies which you can feed under-leveled Pokémon to give them a little boost in levels.
These Dynamax/Gigantamax Pokémon also appear in gyms and you can also Dynamax your own team once per battle for four turns. Gym leaders typically use this on their last Pokémon and it is pretty predictable. However, one improvement we definitely noticed in Pokémon Sword is that you can tell the difference between wild Pokémon and trainer Pokémon. Pokémon with trainers use more crafty moves and don’t usually make stupid moves such as using Supersonic again when the player is already confused.
Some unappealing changes
One change in Pokémon Sword we really didn't appreciate was where your entire team is healed up, PP and all, at the end of every gym battle and more importantly, every League battle. Each and every one. There’s absolutely no challenge anymore since the Semifinals and Finals in the Gym Challenge had trainers that had Pokémon of lower level or the same level as ours. Using type advantages, you can easily beat them and you’re ready at full health and full PP for the next ‘challenge’. The only challenging battle was the Champion battle, and only by a hair, since his Pokémon were merely 5 levels higher than the reviewer's. Additionally, having a huge open-world area is extremely cool, but exploring it thoroughly can cause you to be seriously over-leveled which takes the challenge out of the end game completely.
Apart from this, there is no option to turn Exp sharing off and the entire team levels up incessantly whether you want them to or not. This makes it easy to become over-leveled yet again and also takes the granular control over your team out of your hand, which can get aggravating. Another issue was caves. Remember Mt. Moon? One of the most challenges caves in a Pokémon game. Or the Silph Co. building with countless portals and mind-numbing madness. We sorely missed the complexity of routes and buildings in this game, especially caves. They were, for the most part, linear, with maybe one or two diverging roads. Bland. Boring.
You also have a move learner, move tutor and nickname rater (all one person) in each and every Pokémon centre. Gone are the days of hunting down the move relearner with a bunch of heart scales to access those super-powerful egg moves. Do we like this change? This one, we’re actually split about. While it was infinitely more convenient, it did remove another major challenge in the game…
And of course, there’s the huge National Dex controversy. The one where you cannot transfer your Pokémon from previous games to this one. The developers faced huge flak regarding this decision even though it doesn’t affect 90% of the players probably. Still, the remaining 10 or so per cent are extremely passionate about this, like they should be since they are completionists, and this decision puts a huge kink in how they’ve always played the Pokémon RPG games.
Verdict: several steps in the right direction
Playing new Pokémon RPG games have always been exhilarating experiences and Pokémon Sword was no different. The storyline was almost as good as Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 (which we consider one of the best), the graphics were beautiful for the most part (except the wild area) and the Wild Area was a brilliant, exciting addition. However, the Gym Challenge did disappoint us because of how easy it was made and the Galar region had far too many inaccessible buildings or empty houses for our liking. Most things were half-assed (okay, maybe 3/4th assed) which made the game exciting and fun, but in actuality, it could have been much much more. Nevertheless, what we have learned over the course of over 2 decades since these games’ inception is that none of them are really perfect but they’re all a hell of a lot of fun, nonetheless. Pokémon Sword has some aspects that definitely feel like a step in the right direction, but the lack of challenging caves and buildings feels like deterioration. Still, it was a fun ride that provided us with 25 hours of nostalgia, wonder, and excitement, for the most part.
SKOAR – 7/10
MOAR:
Developer: Game Freak
Publisher: The Pokémon Company, Nintendo
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Played on: Nintendo Switch (2019)
Price: Rs 4,299
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Dhriti Datta
Perpetually sporting a death stare, this one can be seen tinkering around with her smartphone which she holds more dear than life itself and stuffing her face with copious amounts of bacon. View Full Profile
