It's Official. Pokemon Pokopeia is the highest rated Pokemon title / Highest rated game in 2026

I probably won't be getting this since this is basically Animal Crossing meets Pokémon and since I don't have Animal Crossing and probably never will, I just see the allure for getting something like this since the target audience is well below my age threshold. Having said that, it doesn't surprise me that this is highly rated, for now. Ratings change over time so this could very well end up being review bombed down below other Switch titles. Also considering the budget Pokémon can put towards any specific game they decide to make, the quality of recent games could definitely be better. Z-A from a base game perspective was not bad. I didn't like the story all that much but in terms of the live action combat, it wasn't too bad. Similar deal with Scarlet/Violet.

Yet porting FRLG to the Switch 2 with no glaring improvements from the game made over 20 years ago is nothing short of greed. Every Switch title has online trading but this one doesn't. That's a crime in my book. Local Trading doesn't benefit everyone and particularly with a region that has at minimum 4 Trade Evolutions + all the Johto Evolutions of Kanto Pokémon so I consider that a fundamental flaw that could have been easily avoided if they had simply spent the time(and money) to update the darn game like they did with Diamond&Pearl. BDSP is basically Generation 4 but with updated Chibi graphics and a few notable changes here and there but otherwise is the same game from when it came out ~20 years ago(April of next year… Arceus im old). While BDSP is not perfect(Eevee in the Grand underground for starters), that game has Online Trading so why couldn't they have done that with FRLG? That's the point I've been making the last week or so. For a Franchise built around Trading and PvP battling, Online functionality ought to be a priority given its commonplace compared to when FRLG came out back in 2002(almost 25 years old now…).

So you know I don't want to hear any critic even speak. If I was Metacritic I would take points away from Pokopia for being Animal Crossing perverted. Not for being an original Pokemon game.

It think it’s more Minecraft-y then animal crossing-y

So, Pokopia looks really good from what I've heard and seen. I genuinely didn't want to support game key cards, but it just looks too good and I think I might give up and buy a Switch 2 and Pokopia soon. It's a hard decision because I do not want to encourage the departure of focus from physical to digital games, especially if they're normal games that should get actual physical copies and not exclusively glorified download codes, but it just looks too good.