Pokemon Sword And Shield; Our Retrospective

So here we are. 3 months after the momentous release of Pokemon Sword and Shield and we've finally completed the main story! We really wanted to talk more about it as an extension of sorts to our Pokemon Shield video we previously uploaded to YouTube. That particular video came out about a week after the game's release to the public and we would strongly recommend watching as there will be some light references here and there in today's blog post!

It's nothing too intense but provides a ground work for how we initially felt about this particular installment. If that's something that interests you, you can watch it below!

With the conclusion to the vanilla experience of the game, we wanted to take some time to reflect as well as talk about what worked and maybe one thing that may not have worked super smoothly in hindsight.

While the exclusion of older generation Pokemon, save for a few "fan favorites," was a sad point of contention with the Pokemon community as a whole, it did allow the newer Galar region Pokemon to kind of shine in their own sense. In any given Pokemon game, it can be somewhat neat to stumble upon the older classic Pokemon from time to time but the focus was shifted this time around. With Pokemon Sword and Shield only including around half the previous cast, you never knew what was around the next corner in regard to new Pokemon specifically.

To us, this gave us a more lasting impression beyond a few new Pokemon that were obviously going to be instant favorites such as the Pokemon who looks like a corgi, or that really basic sheep Pokemon people went crazy for during 2019's E3 trailer earlier last year. In fact, our Pokemon team at the end of the game was a mishmash of old and new alike trying to find some kind of synergy while also enjoying some new favorites. Of course we had our trusty water-type starter, Sobble, now an Inteleon but we also had Toxicity, a Pokemon with a very grunge-punk rock aesthetic as well as an old favorite of Doza's in particular, Cofagrigus, an Egyptian coffin-ghost Pokemon.

Now with the announcement of the season pass featuring two new regions themed after an ancient island and winter wonderland respectively, we'll be seeing 200 more Pokemon new and old. Not only that, but they are also really pushing the designs and themes of some already very established Pokemon pretty far and it's going to be really cool to see how that pan out.

However, there's one thing we are really looking forward to in the new sub-regions and that is their wild areas. The Wild Area in the base game was a significant shift to the Pokemon content cycle and we touched on this a bit in our video. Previously, you had a somewhat linear journey to follow. You pretty much took the same path every other player in the world was going to take with little to no variation.

Now the latest game(s) are still fairly linear, but the Wild Area serves as a sort of open-world portion of the game not previously attempted in any Pokemon before to this degree. As with any open-world game, the struggle with them is not what you do in them but what you can do in between the more engaging bits. In other words, is there enough content to engage with in between major cities, other hubs of action, or story development?

The answer to that question is a soft 'kinda.' While there were plenty of things, Pokemon or not, to interact with, there was always this nagging feeling of wanting more to do. In a nutshell, you maybe had 3 or 4 distinct activities to play around with. Raids, berry trees, and Pokemon spawns were plentiful enough as passing distractions in between progression of the main story. The new camping system with it's mini features such as cooking and being able to play and interact with your Pokemon team was a nice touch too. However, you couldn't really stay in the Wild Area for prolong periods of time.

The biggest reason for this, we feel, is the idea that the more time you spend in the Wild Area, as fun as it was, the more your team will start to further out level and therefore cause you to outpace the content, taking some wind out of the main story's sails when you know you can breeze through any of the supposedly tougher battles. After a while, we felt like we couldn't afford to spend anymore time in the Wild Area due to this fear. We didn't want to sap our own experience and enjoyment of what is supposed to be the hypest moments of the story.

Speaking of which, the story near the end gets pretty bonkers. It kind of goes from a chill "oh, something is gonna happen, don't know what, but something" to "OMG, things REALLY got out of hand and now I gotta hope I can fix it!" Tonally, it went from a Saturday morning cartoon to a late night anime in some ways if you know what we mean. It was a bit jarring but it's not like Pokemon hasn't done this in previous years. Just look at almost any Pokemon movie. Heck, look at Detective Pikachu!

Also, how was the ending for us in terms of challenge???

Well, it actually wasn't destroyed by over-leveling! The game does try to counter you and set up more powerful strategies by the end of your journey during the more intense Pokemon battles. However, if you're a long time player of the series, by then you probably diversified your team in terms of Pokemon typing advantages and disadvantages and worked out some kind of team synergy.

For us, we pretty much settled on our team around the 6th badge and just dug our heels in with the idea that the most important thing was to complete the game rather than fully smooth out our team's strengths and weaknesses. We mention this because we actually felt the shortcomings here and there while the game attempted to exploit those weaknesses as best as it could.

While some battles were won nearly unscathed, there were a few that took down 2 or 3 of our Pokemon when not using any healing items during battle (you know, just to see how close we could get to losing "fairly"). Sometimes there would be grandiose and bombastic dialogue preceding a big battle, and then we'd just stomp the opponent. Thankfully that wasn't always the case. We also didn't look up any strategies or spoilers to what or how strong our opponents were going to be. 

By the end of it, we were a few levels within the final battle so we commend this game for trying to give us a challenge. That being said, we do have a disclaimer to share with you all about this here; we didn't train at all after getting our 8th badge and the level jump doesn't kick in until you are a few battles in to the big tournament event. Here’s how our team looked in the end.