LogFAQs > #930087973

a shadow of a former great

Pokmon Sword and Shield add some brilliant new creatures, but like their gargantuan Dynamax forms, the games feel like a hollow projection.

This is a new generation of Pokmon games that promises much, with brilliant new Pokmon, a raft of intricate system-tinkering for long-term fans and a series-first stab at an "open-world" area. But all that's new seems to have come at a cost - and the cost is almost everything else in the game.

In essence, despite the clamour and the rage, the lack of a National Pokdex is not the problem. The real problem with Pokmon Sword and Shield lies much deeper, or rather where that depth ought to be. There is far more than a whiff of troubled development to these games, brought about by an astonishing lack of complexity, texture, and flavour in almost every place where you'd usually find it in every Pokmon game that's come before.

In fact, Pokmon Sword and Shield is entirely dungeonless. There is no route or cave or building or wood more complex than Red, Blue and Yellow's Viridian Forest, the tutorial pseudo-dungeon at the start of generation one. Nothing in the game comes close to even Mt. Moon or Rock Tunnel, let alone the twelve floors of warp-pad mayhem in Silph Co. - all first-generation locations that were fully realised in Pokmon Let's Go Pikachu and Let's Go Eevee, both ostensibly remade versions of the classic games, but for children.

At a certain point, Pokmon Sword and Shield's lack of substance is almost a parody. Time and time again some rumble or crash or moment of panic will happen out of shot, and you'll think - finally! - it's your call to action. But no. Every inciting incident, every kick-off point for act two, any shred of anything happening at all is batted away with a simple "I'll handle this, you carry on" from the Galar's resident in-game hero and Champion Leon, to the point where you wonder how much more fun you'd have in his playthrough instead of yours.

It goes on. Traditional gyms return - a puzzle first, followed by a battle - but the promise of a minor league amounts to a single mention of it in passing dialogue. There are fewer trainers on routes than there have been before. There are fewer routes than there have been before. A climactic conversation is played out, in silence, over static artwork. Another climactic battle sequence, for some reason, had no music. Even the NPCs dotted around the world seem to have less to say. There's so little "legend has it...", nothing by way of real explanation or construction of the world, at least until the final phases of the story. There are so few books to read, or nooks and crannies to explore. By Pokmon's own standards it's dire, and the comparison need not stick to early generations: even Sun and Moon had hidden holes in the wall leading to secluded beaches and undiscovered caves.