Pokémon Pokopia is a strange little concept. It's a life sim set in the Pokémon world where you, a humanoid Ditto, set out to rebuild a fallen civilisation with the help of your pocket monster pals. Weird, right? Where could the inspiration for that possibly have stemmed from? Uhhh, the GBA's Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire, it seems.
Game Freak's Shigeru Ohmori sat down with VGC at a recent Pokopia preview event in Tokyo and spilled the beans about how the project started. “When I was working on Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, I was continuously looking for new possibilities for Pokémon,” he said. “It brought me back to when I started on Ruby and Sapphire, creating those habitats and meeting the Pokémon for the first time. That led me to create the prototype for this game.”
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Ohmori's first work on the series came in the early 2000s, when he was tasked with designing maps for the flagship Gen III titles. "When I was creating the map, which was 2D at the time, I was putting grass onto it where Pokémon would appear,” he told VGC, “that feeling of Pokémon appearing when I was creating the habitat was very interesting to me, and that feeling is something I cherish.”
You can see how such a feeling went on to inform Pokopia. This is, on a basic level, a game all about making habitats and watching Pokémon rock up to make the most of them. Later in the VGC discussion, Ohmori brought up Ruby and Sapphire's Secret Base building as a personal favourite non-battling series mechanic: "I would like to scale the Pokémon games in general, aside from battling. I will seek new possibilities to scale them.” It's a game inspired by the joys of that early game development — how sweet is that!
"Anything that the Pokémon does was carefully curated on the lore that already existed," game director Takuto Edagawa said in the same interview, "to ensure we didn’t break any of the past Pokémon canon.” It's the reason why we've seen Ditto dropping a punch bag to attract a Hitmonchan or a fishing rod to attract a Magikarp in the Pokopia trailers, so it might be worth getting clued up on your favourite Pokémon's likes/dislikes before diving in next month.
And it sounds like you'll want to dive in as soon as possible, if our early preview is anything to go by. "It's absolutely stuffed with charm and personality, and I get the feeling that it's going to scratch an itch for anyone disappointed that we probably won't be getting a brand new Animal Crossing anytime soon," our Ollie Reynolds wrote, claiming that this could be the perfect antidote to the jaded Pokémon fan.
Pokémon Pokopia arrives on Switch 2 on 5th March.