Revoke my trainer card if you must, but I’ve put off playing Sword & Shield until just this week. I play Pokemon Unite almost every day, I’ve seen every episode of the anime, and I’ve spent thousands on Pokemon cards in 2021 alone (don’t tell my partner), but I’ve just never found the time to dig into Sword & Shield until now. It’s been sitting in a box on my shelf for two years, but I just never got around to it. Please don’t judge me.
But one day last week, I found the sudden urge to finally start. I got a funny feeling starting Shield for the first time after watching Pokemon Journeys and collecting Sword & Shield cards over the last two years because everything was so familiar. From the moment it started I was being introduced to characters and places I was already intimately familiar with. There’s my boy Leon, now we’re hopping on the train and heading to the Wild Area. The word “anemoia” is used to describe the feeling of nostalgia for something you’ve never experienced. As a Pokemon mega-fan who has been circling Sword & Shield for years, finally getting to play it feels a bit like that.
I was excited to visit the Wild Area, to put it lightly. Between Ash and Goh’s adventures there and the word of mouth around the TG office, the Wild Area had been built up in my mind to be the Disney World of Pokemon. I’ve always wanted to see Pokemon running around in the wild, so the Wild Area sounded like a dream come true. I guess I let myself get too hyped for the experience, unfortunately, because what I found was less like Disney World and more like Disappointment World (nailed it).
First of all, the pacing of your initial introduction into the Wild Area is a disaster. It’s incredibly overwhelming to be exposed to that many Pokemon before you even visit your first gym, especially because most of them are too high level for you or otherwise uncatchable.
If I get a Pokemon down to red health, why can’t I try to catch it? I don’t know what it means when a Pokemon “has their guard up” and I wasted a lot of time wearing down strong ‘mons who turned out not to be catchable. There’s probably a badge-level to catchable-level ratio, but at this point in the game, it doesn’t tell you that.
Over a 20-year career of Pokemon collecting, I’ve developed a comfortable and familiar rhythm. I catch everything I can on each route as I progress from gym to gym until I have them all, then I work my way backward to find the ones I missed. But in Shield, I showed up to the first gym with more than 30 registered Pokemon. That’s simply way too many. I don’t know who any of them are or what they can do, and I can’t stop thinking about the ones I missed.
I’m not saying Pokemon games should never change. In fact, I’m incredibly excited for Legends: Arceus because I can’t wait to see a totally new kind of Pokemon RPG, but the way the Wild Area is introduced is not a healthy change for Pokemon. I’ve made no progress in my journey as a trainer because I’ve been stuck in the Wild Area trying to collect every single thing there without any sense of how many there are or which ones I can actually have.
Now for my extremely hot take about a two-year-old game: the Wild Area is extremely dull. I don’t expect every zone to be as beautiful and dense as Monster Hunter World’s Ancient Forest, but I find the Wild Area - at least the first part - to be incredibly uninspired. Groups of Pokemon just appear in patches of grass - all the same types, all the same level - with seemingly no rhyme or reason. The whole zone is just a big wide open area with a lake in the center and patches of grass here and there. I appreciate that weather changes cause different Pokemon to spawn as I walk around, but I can't get over how artificial the whole thing feels. This isn’t Pokemon in their natural environment at all. They somehow feel even less real in the Wild Area than they do in normal random encounters. The entire experience is overwhelming, directionless, and painfully contrived.
I’m pushing through because A. I’m going to be the best like no one ever was and B. I’ve heard the DLC Wild Areas are a lot better. Unfortunately, my first impression has been extraordinarily sour. The introduction of the Wild Area so early puts way too much emphasis on the collecting aspect of Pokemon, when there needs to be a lot more energy behind the actual RPG early on. Right now, I would’ve preferred to not even have seen the Wild Area until post-game. No one needs 35 Pokemon before they face their first gym leader. That kind of hubris can only lead to ruin.