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Never played a Pokémon game in my life, where do I start?
I've loved Pokémon since I was a kid, I loved collecting cards and buying merch but I've never actually played a Pokémon game. I recently decided I wanted to try one out but I don't know where to start so does anyone have any recommendations?
I have a Nintendo Switch, if that's any help to narrow down options.
I heard Pokémon: Let's go, Eevee! and Let's go, Pikachu! are good starter games along with Pokémon Sword and Shield but I just wanted more opinions before I actually buy something. Which of the games I listed are better for a starter as well?
Any response is appreciated, please and thank you!
Answers
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lets go is a mechanically simple game for kids but kanto is a classic. if you think pikachu and eevee are cute then you will like it.
legends arceus and scarlet/violet are more open world types if you like those. legends arceus is more mission/task based about catching pokemon while scarlet/violet has more direct campaigns and is about battling
if you only plan to play one i would at least give scarlet/violet a try as the latest with active online support. but if you want to play them all then starting from sword/shield might be better since it came earlier.
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Unfortunately, if you are strictly limiting yourself to a Switch, I would say you are doing the franchise a grave disservice. The recent entries haven't been stellar.
The Let's Go games do not play like regular Pokémon games, and primarily existed to cash in on the Pokémon Go trend almost a decade ago.
Pokémon Legends Arceus is a very interesting take on the series, but probably not good for your first game. It also feels like a very promising alpha or beta build, rather than a finished product. Worth playing, but not as your first game.
Scarlet and Violet are probably the best of the worst as far as your options for traditional Pokémon games on the Switch go. Sword and Shield are the worst in the franchise. If you have to play a Switch game first, Scarlet and Violet are the least terrible.
If you can at least get access to a 3DS, your options would look a lot better. Along with the Switch, you could play a version of every generation (though the virtual console releases of the gen 1 and 2 games are now inaccessible and second hand cartridge prices are prohibitive, to say the least).
Far be it from me to recommend unofficial methods of playing the games on the official Pokémon forums, so I will definitely not recommend that you look into that. Nope. Not an option.
But assuming you do find a way to access and play every game in the series, I would recommend at least trying Red or Blue first.
Yes, they are dated, but they are also the genesis of the franchise, and so much of the rest of the series was defined in those games. Give them a go.
If you really find you cannot handle Game Boy era Kanto, FireRed and LeafGreen are a serviceable compromise. They do introduce a lot of quality of life improvements, but they also introduce a lot of gameplay changes from gens 2 and 3 that fundamentally change the balance of the game.
From there, I would recommend that you play through a version of each generation in release order. If you could cope with Red and Blue, try Crystal. If not, Heart Gold or Soul Silver are phenomenal remakes, as well as some of the best and most feature rich games in the franchise in their own right.
Personally I dislike gen 3, but Emerald is probably the best version of it. Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire are fine and much more modern, but they remove some Emerald content.
Gen 4 is easy. Play Platinum. Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl might sound like the obvious choice if you only have a Switch, but trust me. You are better off not playing them at all if you cannot get access to Platinum.
Gen 5 is my personal favourite, and unique in the franchise for having direct sequels. Play Black or White, and then the same colour for BW2.
Gen 6, XY. Simple. I recommend turning off the exp. share for a remotely challenging experience.
Gen 7, I personally recommend playing either Sun or Moon. Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon add sone features, but also fundamentally change the story, I think for the worse. This was the last game that let you access every Pokémon (though not every Pokémon could be registered in the Pokédex) and turn off the exp. share.
In summary, my recommended play order is RB>HGSS>E>Pl>BW>BW2>XY>SM>SwSh>SV
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What was so bad about Sword and Shield? They're my favorite game on the switch!
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If you personally enjoy them, then that is all well and good. The games are not without redeeming qualities. Some of the towns look very nice, and the music and character designs are some of the best in the series.
The issues with the games have been discussed at length within the community, and though I do not think the Pokémon series' problems started with SwSh, I think they represent some of its worst excesses.
For starters, there is dexit. A series all about catching all the Pokémon and completing the Pokédex now made that impossible. I don't think anyone expected them to make every single Pokémon catchable in-game, but transferring older Pokémon from earlier games has been a series staple since Gold and Silver. They even bragged about developing HD models of all the existing Pokémon of the time during the 3DS era for the purposes of streamlining their implementing them in future games, only to cut the Pokédex in half in the very next release.
Some argue that streamlining the Pokédex makes the games better, but then why do they sell multiple DLC packs that bring back 100-200 odd Pokémon each time and promote it as a feature?
These are also the games that made the exp. share mandatory. It was controversial during the 3DS era, but at least it was optional. Now though, you have no choice. Where as before training and evolving your Pokémon took time and effort, and gave you time to experience using your Pokémon and form a bond with them, now just have a full team of whatever and you will passively develop a fully trained team without having even used some of them.
The wild area was a much touted feature, the precursor to PLA's open areas and eventually SV's full open world (which brought their own issues) but in practice was poorly realised and buggy, with low resolution textures, low framerates and glitchy gameplay, especially when connected to NSO.
Pokémon stories are largely maligned as simplistic and repetitive, which is a criticism that I do partially agree with, though some entries do take more risks and achieve more than others. SwSh, however, has to be the worst. The experience is almost entirely focused on the gym challenge, which is a nice spectacle but narratively shallow, until the final minutes of the game, when the obvious villain from the very first cutscene finally remembers the game needs a villain and dutifully provides a region threatening legendary and final boss fight.
These games were also embarrassing as the first home console releases of main series Pokémon games, because despite having fully rendered and animated cutscenes, complete with mouth movements, they do not feature voice acting. In an era when even Zelda, a series with a famously mute protagonist, received voice acting.
It might not have been so bad had Game Freak not gone to the effort of including lip flapping to draw attention to precisely how absent the voice acting was. It would almost be better if they spent less time animating their characters so that it wasn't so jarring in its absence. Sadly, SV have continued this trend.
Then there is the linearity of the whole thing. Most Pokémon games have a linear intended route, though some games do allow you to visit certain areas or beat certain gym badges out of sequence (notably Red and Blue, the very first ones). However virtually every route might as well be a straight corridor in SwSh. Even the towns offer minimal to zero exploration. At least you could still enter buildings, which SV have now taken away, too.
There are a host of other issues and criticisms I could levy towards SwSh, but that is an overview of my larger complaints. I could go deeper, but this post would probably be three times as long.
Again, if you personally like and derive enjoyment from these games, then that is wonderful and I am sincerely happy for you. But I cannot ignore these issues and I feel the game and series would be better for everyone, including the fans of these particular games, if they were addressed.
I do not think it is a matter of capability or talent available at Game Freak. I think it is greed and laziness. Rushed development schedules and complacency brought about from the knowledge that their game will sell in numbers the envy of any developer in the world, so long as they slap the Pokémon name on it.
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I’d say Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee is probably the easiest place to start, especially if you already like the cards and the Pokémon world. It’s simple, relaxing, and introduces the basics without overwhelming you. Sword and Shield are also good choices if you want a more traditional Pokémon experience with gyms and a bigger adventure. After that you can try the newer games
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If you are on a switch yeah go with legends arceus personally, but what @TheJeffers says is pretty correct about the state of the series at the moment.
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I'd say Sword/Shield or Scarlet/Violet are good games to start with, as they're pretty normal Pokémon games, even though Scarlet/Violet is open world (honestly though, I don't think they did the open world feature well in SV, so don't raise your expectations. It's very empty and lifeless, but the story and DLCs are fun).
Let's Go was made for people whose first/only Pokémon game was Pokémon GO to get them into the mainline games, so the way catching or battling Pokémon works is just like in GO instead of normal Pokémon games. In Let's Go, you can't fight wild Pokémon, and intstead only aim a Pokéball and throw it at the wild Pokémon, and battles are only against other Pokémon trainers. I'd only recommend them if you played Pokémon GO and want to start with something similar before playing the others.
Legends: Arceus is an awesome game (and despite not being fully open world, pulls off the concept much better than S/V does), but I wouldn't recommend it as a first game since it's very different from the other games. Also, it's not as good if you haven't played Diamond/Pearl, or the better version of those games, Platinum, since it's kind of a prequel to those three.
If you really want to play Legends: Arceus but don't want to buy a Nintendo DS and some 15 year old games, you could play the remakes on the Switch, Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl. Personally, though, as someone who's played the originals, the remakes are my least favourite Pokémon games ever and I can't make myself recommend them to someone. I'd call them absolute garbage, but that's rude to garbage.
I don't like the originals a lot, I just think they're OK, but Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are horrible. They remove a lot of the funnest parts of the originals, don't incorporate anything from the third version (in this case, Platinum), and added basically nothing to the games. When you compare them to any previous remake, you can immediately notice just how rushed this game probably was. And words cannot describe how full of glitches these games were when they were first released. The people who make the Pokémon games, Game Freak, weren't even the people who made the game. They probably only wanted to make Legends: Arceus, realised people will constantly cry about how there isn't a remake, and made another company create the remakes.
If you could get a 3DS, then I'd recommend X/Y or Omega Ruby / Alpha Sapphire since they have the easiness of the newer games while still feeling very similar to the older games, and they have the two most fun to explore regions and a lot of non-battle content.
Sun/Moon have one of the best stories in Pokémon and a fun region with memorable characters. It's the first in the series to try doing something different. Ultra Sun / Ultra Moon are games I wouldn't recommend as a first game because their story is a much worse version of Sun/Moon's, but they're more challenging and have more fun non-battle content than Sun/Moon.
The 2D games take some strategy so that your team doesn't end up extremely underleveled. For the 2D games, Black/White has arguably the best story in Pokémon with some of the series' best music and art, and it's easier than the others (though still not as easy as the 3D ones). The sequels have great non-battle content and fun battles, with music and art just as good as Black/White 1, and while you can play them as your first game, I wouldn't recommend it because they're sequels. The rest of the 2D games are harder and need a lot of grinding to make sure your team is OK. Heart Gold / Soul Silver are brilliant remakes of the original Gold/Silver games. Platinum is a much better than Diamond/Pearl and fixes a lot of the issues they had. Emerald is the best game on GBA and a great introduction to the series, and Fire Red / Leaf Green, while good, are not worth 30$. Ruby/Sapphire aren't as good as Emerald, but they're pretty good.
(I found a very old draft when I opened the discussion and decided to finish it. Also, I didn't mention Z-A because this is older than its release, but it is absolutely not worth 60$ and the DLC is literally the post-game which they removed from the normal game and locked behind a paywall so we'd buy a 90$ game)
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Hm March 2025 → today. Holy Necro Batman 🤣🙅. Won't hold it against them though.
To answer the question, there really isn't a right answer to this. Pokémon has evolved over its 30 years of existence, taking the unrefined Generation 1 of the Kanto region and expanding it from the Original 15 Types to 18, overhaul of EV/IV system, adding more XP groups, splitting the Special Stat, Splitting moves into Physical or Special, adding Abilities(some of which are rare or Hidden), new status condition(Infatuation), adding Breeding, adding Weather, Terrain and Hazards, Shiny or Pokémon with an aesthetic difference, gender differences(for some Pokémon), additional Types of PokéBalls, adding held items(including Berries), additional Evolution methods(Malamar evolution is truly unique), post-game or side-game content(Performances, Battle Towers, etc. kind of gotten away from it in recent entries) and generational gimmicks(ex: Mega Evolution). Generation 2 is really what Generation 1 could have been. Gen 2 Pokémon are in Gen 1 memory such that you could trade them from Gen 1 to 2 and they'd appear as they would be on Generation 2 as opposed to Missingno(Missing number) on Generation 1.
For me personally, if I was brand spanking new to Pokémon, I think Scarlet and Violet do a decent job. It's not perfect by any stretch because the Open World nature means a player can go into an area with high level Pokémon that could wipe them with ease but permits the player to largely go wherever they want compared to older generations where your path is predetermined. There are unavoidable cutscenes but is otherwise a free to roam game. Freedom comes at a cost though since exploring in older games was rewarded with being able to enter buildings and interacting with NPC's. Now that's been replaced with mindless NPC zombies that you can't interact with and Exploring is not as vibrant as it was in previous Generations.
Trainers also don't Auto-battle you on sight, which is a positive imo. The regional Dex is solid with plenty of old and new Pokémon to use and the DLC adds new content, including old Pokémon for players to use(further expanding the options available for a team). In older games you often had to allocate a team slot or two purely for HM's or Hidden Moves that permit you to access certain areas or progress through the game(that's how older generations gated or kept you from progressing). They did away with that in Gen 7 onward, further giving the player more control over their team as opposed to having to use an HM slave like Bidoof in Sinnoh's Gen 4.
I can't say for certain how strong Gen 10 will be but if I had to recommend a starting spot for truly new players, Gen 9 is probably my recommendation. It's a bit of a learning curve as it was for me coming all the way from Gen 2 but if I can do it, anyone can.
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