Feature: Reviving Kanto - My Mental Health Journey Through Pokémon Pokopia

May is Mental Health Awareness Month in the US. Continuing Pokémon's 30th-anniversary year and following on from the March release of Pokémon Pokopia, today Tim shares his personal journey with the Switch 2 spin-off...

If you consider yourself a Pokémon fan, I wager that what keeps you riding with the series is a deep affinity for the pocket monsters themselves. I further wager that the series near-exclusively framing them as battle-hardened gladiators puts limitations on those connections. Our roots with Pokémon run far more personal, and that’s been the true magic behind Pokémon Pokopia’s explosive success.

There’s never been a game on Pokopia’s scale that has let us live amongst the creatures, nurture them, befriend them, and create a world for them to inhabit. It’s an especially surreal joy for those of us who have been with the franchise for the long haul. The affection we showed these Pokémon for up to three decades was finally being directed back at us. It’s here that my tale about Pokopia being a means toward mental health mending begins.

However, before I can tell it, I need to take a borderline passé detour into my experience with Animal Crossing: New Horizons. As was true for most of its player base, the game was a huge boon in helping me get through COVID lockdowns, providing a friendly tropical escape and a sense of structure to endless solitary days.

Where it hit different for me is that the game was virtually exclusively a solo outing; the only multiplayer trips I made were to sell my turnips in the game’s early days. Every other moment was spent improving the lives of my virtual villagers who chose to put down roots on my island.

Only, the comfort of their presence wore thinner and thinner as the limitations of their internet-maligned archetypal personalities set in. Their demeanours began to feel cold. Robotically predictable. By the time I passed the one-year mark of daily play, the experience actually started to make me feel more alienated than any lockdown ever did.

It bred contempt that led me to not only quit the game but also avoid any others like it. It’s for this reason that I was quick to dismiss Pokopia the moment it was announced (and while I’m not as harsh on The Pokémon Company as some, I had little faith in it to create an experience that transcended my concerns).

Of course, that was all a front. If there’s one thing true of Pokémon fans, they’ll buy into almost anything with the franchise’s name plastered on it, and I’m no exception. Of course I was going to try Pokopia. What I hadn’t considered was that this brand loyalty would be the catalyst for its healing power.

Let’s get one thing clear: Pokopia is an improved façade on a familiar life-sim formula. The Pokémon that inhabit the ruins of Kanto are similarly pulling from boilerplate archetypes. They’re given voicey introductory dialogues and occasional unique flourishes, but in actuality, they’re not dissimilar from Animal Crossing villagers.

That’s where the X-factor of familiarity came into play. After a lifetime of Pokémon being battle tools first and foremost, I was now building pseudo-connections with them. That framing alone turned the game into a series of discovering latent friendships and finding harmony in the process.

After a lifetime of Pokémon being battle tools first and foremost, I was now building pseudo-connections with them.

The release couldn’t have been better timed either. Pokopia followed a ruthlessly cold, snowy winter in NYC that made hermits out of New Yorkers. This not only upended my social life but also halted filming on my documentary, something that currently brings a lot of meaning to my life. With this sense of purpose temporarily stripped from me, my mental health was in a determined freefall. It felt like I lived in an oppressive world that was in perpetual disassembly and destruction (did I mention the news?). That’s not so far off from how Pokopia’s Kanto starts off as unidentifiable ruins.

As you might imagine, my first steps into that world were hesitant. I was willingly walking into a world that resembled both the pitfalls of past experiences and my current reality. The warmth I was craving was nowhere to be found.

This quickly changed when I soon met Squirtle. My childhood favourite lay on the barren ground within an inch of existence before Ditto used Transform to revive him. His first response was to thank me for “saving [his] life.” This left an immediate impact. While in the real world I was crumbling, in Pokopia I could protect something dear to me. I was back in control.

From here, I was empowered to bring life back to the land one painstakingly watered block at a time. Watching as this place I held dear sprung back from its apocalyptic state — the newfound buddies of my past helping in tow — was nothing short of profound. I was overcoming my gaming past, my present reality, and creating a new future. When Slowpoke finally ushered in rainfall that brought colour back to Kanto en masse, it also signalled a joyous rebirth of my own mental health. Everyone and everything were healing, together.

And then, I reached the credits. This presented a crossroads: Do I continue to build out Kanto’s infrastructure and peacefully live alongside my Pokébuddies (something I was not keen to give up yet), or do I hold the experience of getting to this point dear and walk away?

As hard as it was, I ultimately chose the latter. I knew the limitations of the game’s façade would eventually fall into the same time-worn trappings that New Horizons did, and besides, my own world had healed. The snow had cleared, people were getting outside again, and documentary shooting had finally picked back up. Pokopia had served its purpose and, as corny as it may sound, would live on in my heart.

In past years, I’ve spoken with therapists about how they use games to engage with patients and recounted how the Nintendo Switch era mirrored my own mental health journey. But mental health healing need not always be so lofty or lengthy. Sometimes, it’s these smaller moments in time — the right game at the right time — that improves your quality of life in irreplaceable and immeasurable capacities.

What I want to know is: What was the right game at the right time for you? Is there a game that provided the exact release needed to conquer real-life mental health hurdles? Post your story in the comments.