Pokemon Pokopia Is Stellar, But It Could Be So Much Better

Pokemon Pokopia is shaping up to be a major critical success for Nintendo, as well as one of the top-selling Pokemon spin-offs. It's not hard to see why--it's a massive game with lots of Pokemon to befriend, lands to beautify, and puzzles to solve. Fans have been digging in to unlock its secrets, already rallying around new characters like Mosslax and Peakychu, and showing off their perfect communities.

Yet in our time with Pokopia we've found a few points of friction that could be smoothed out to make it even better. With the caveat that cozy games are designed intentionally to include some busywork, there's always room for improvement. We have a handful of suggestions, as hopefully Nintendo plans to support this game for some time to come. Check them out below, and for more on Pokopia, be sure to check out our Pokemon Pokopia review, or for some tips check out the Pokopia guides hub.

Shared Storage Across Boxes

It's a classic issue with building games like Stardew Valley and Minecraft--as you start to accumulate more and more stuff, you run out of places to put it. Pokemon Pokopia lets you expand your pockets to carry a lot of items, and you can get boxes for storage as well, but with the massive amount of different material types that you'll naturally pick up as you find more decor, you're still going to run out of room. It makes sense to need to store things in boxes, but one problem a lot of players run into very quickly is having too many item boxes. It's not uncommon to have at least two or three item boxes in each biome, and you may not remember where you unloaded certain items you didn't need at the time.

The ideal solution would be one huge box that stores everything in one place, which you can access from anywhere. This would be effectively like a cloud computer--or, more familiar to Pokemon fans, the PC storage system. Instead of setting up physical boxes and struggling to remember where you left some random doodad, you'd be able to see all of your items at once, from anywhere. Preferably this would automatically link all of the boxes that are already spread around the world as well.

Larger, Interlocking Map

After spending some time in the world of Pokopia it becomes apparent that the gates to different biomes actually form a circle, with each biome connecting to two others in a daisy chain. That knowledge might help you get around if you happen to know a shortcut that connects you to your desired location a little faster, but that also means you need to keep the basic layout and gate connections straight in your head. It's a little extra mental energy that doesn't seem very necessary or additive in a game like Pokopia.

The solution, naturally, is to expand the map. Instead of a single small map appearing when you pull up your Pokedex menu, there should be an option to view the map in isolation, and to expand it outwards to see all the connecting gates at once. That will help you plan routes, as well as just make the map easier to see and to make sure you explore all of the various biomes.

Better Fast Travel

For those times you do need to zip between biomes, the easiest way is to automatically teleport back to your designated "home" in the area--whichever house you've marked with your Ditto flag. It works well enough, but it's also somewhat limited, especially given that some biomes are very large and could benefit from multiple fast travel points. Multiple teleporters in each biome would make it easier to get around.

Giving them names could be tricky, of course, since you can vastly terraform most of the environments in Pokopia. Naming a fast travel point after a waterfall, for example, would no longer make sense if you block the waterfall and turn that area into something completely different. Instead, the easiest way is probably to divide them by quadrants or cardinal points.

Locate A Pokemon

A big part of Pokopia is checking in on your Pokemon pals, but as your roster increases, it can be difficult to find them, especially since they might be nestled behind a land mass. There are ways to overcome this problem, like using the Fly ability, but it's sort of a sideways solution to simply figuring out where your Pokemon actually are. Some kind of ping system to let you quickly locate them would make a big difference without breaking the flow of the game.

Check Pokemon Comfort Levels

Similarly, lots of your time in Pokopia is spent increasing the comfort levels of all your Pokemon pals. You can go up to them individually to check on their comfort levels and ask what they'd like, or you can check on them using a nearby PC. But why not allow you to see all of their comfort levels at once right from your Pokedex menu? It would help to mentally sort which ones are perfectly fine and which ones still need some more creature comforts, as well as allow you to prioritize the ones who are least comfortable at a quick glance.

Bigger And More Flexible Tools

Lots of Pokopia is rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure of the once-great human civilization. That means plenty of laying down roads and patching holes, but you're mostly just doing it one block at a time. That's fine most of the time, but for more ambitious city planning, it could get tiresome fast. With a little added flexibility, you could lay down rows of the same-type blocks at a time, or more easily fill in gaps in the road with whatever block from your inventory matches the surrounding ones.

Summon Pokemon to Build Site

A cousin of the difficulty in locating your Pokemon presents itself when it comes time to build a large structure like a Pokemon Center. You have to physically go find the Pokemon and ask them to follow you to the build site, at which point you can tell them to start the project. Even though you can have multiple Pokemon tag along with you at a time, this is an extra busywork step that isn't terribly fun. Why not simply let you summon all the required Pokemon that you've already found at once?