Pokemon Pokopia is the creature-collecting series’ very first life sim, and its senior director says it came about because “we wanted to create a different type of game that’s not an RPG.”
Speaking to VGC, Shigeru Ohmori notes that Pokopia, which is being co-developed by Game Freak, Koei Tecmo, and The Pokemon Company, offered a pretty different experience for the dev team.
“For Game Freak, they had not created something directly for the spin-offs,” Ohmori says. “We wanted to create a different type of game that’s not an RPG. That whole thought of not making an RPG was a challenge. Even if it is a spinoff, because Game Freak is going to be in the co-development team, it was their responsibility to show off the uniqueness of Pokemon.”
Ohmori has served as the director of many mainline Pokemon games in the past, including Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, Sword and Shield, and Scarlet and Violet.
However, speaking in a separate interview with GamerBraves, he acknowledges wanting a bit of a change.
After Scarlet and Violet, he says, “I wanted to challenge myself to create a different type of game than usual.” In the thought process of creating “something different from the mainline title,” he says, it had him “thinking about how we can showcase the attractiveness of Pokemon in a different way.”
It sounds like Ohmori is going to be pushing for more slightly unconventional takes on Pokemon going forward, too. In the same interview with VGC, he notes that “there are also lots of different ways to enjoy Pokemon, not just by battling,” and he “would like to scale the Pokemon games in general, aside from battling. I will seek new possibilities to scale them.”
90 minutes with Pokemon Pokopia convinced me this could be the biggest cozy game since Animal Crossing, and I’m already eager to spend hundreds of hours in it.
