Click here to read the first part of this Pokémon retrospective, which focuses on Pokémon Black and White. Click here to read the second part, which focuses on Pokémon X and Y. Click here to read the third part, which focuses on Pokémon Sun and Moon.
Throughout the 2010s, the Pokémon franchise was consistently going downhill, but it wasn’t until 2019 that it reached the point of no return.
When Pokémon Sword and Shield were revealed for Nintendo Switch early in the year, fans were excited. This would be the first new Pokémon generation to ever be playable on the TV, meaning players would no longer be confined to the tiny screens of handheld platforms.
This should have been a momentous occasion for the franchise, but because of their penny-pinching and rush to release the game by the holiday season, The Pokémon Company and developer Game Freak would squander this special moment.
When the game’s reveal trailer dropped on Feb. 27, 2019, there was nothing blatantly wrong with it. In fact, the game looked pretty good. The graphical improvements since Sun and Moon looked worthy of a home console experience. There appeared to be interesting new locations to explore and the three new starter Pokémon – Grookey, Scorbunny and Sobble – looked cute and fun.
Despite all the issues that the franchise had faced over the last two generations, fans seemingly still had a good experience to look forward to given what was gleaned from the pre-release promotion.
But if things were that simple, you wouldn’t be reading this article, would you?
Things wouldn’t go terribly wrong until June 11, when Shigeru Ohmori and Junichi Masuda – the game’s director and producer, respectively – sat down for a livestream during Nintendo’s annual E3 conference in which they would show off live gameplay from the new titles.
During this presentation, an obviously nervous Masuda would announce a major change to the series: for the first time in series history, players would not be able to transfer every Pokémon species from previous entries into the new games.
In previous entries, every single Pokémon species was compatible and could be transferred in. Hypothetically, a player could have caught their favourite Pokémon in an old game a decade earlier and then transferred that Pokémon into every subsequent generation so it stays with them throughout every new journey. However, with Sword and Shield, only the Pokémon found naturally within the region were compatible to be transferred, meaning many fan-favourite species would simply have to be left out.
Instead, blacklisted Pokémon species could only be transferred into Pokémon Home, where they could not be played with or interacted with in any meaningful sense. The service is essentially a glorified Pokémon purgatory where you can stare at PNGs of your beloved creatures while they wait for a future title that they’re compatible with.
Masuda said that the Pokémon roster had gotten so big that it was no longer feasible to make every species compatible with new entries, but the damage was already done.
Sure, the franchise had over 800 unique monsters at this point, but it didn’t seem like much of an excuse when Pokémon is the highest grossing media franchise of all time. Many sources estimate that the franchise is worth nearly $100 billion USD, which puts it ahead of Mickey Mouse, Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
And Masuda’s trying to tell us that 800 characters, which often repeat animations and each only make a few unique sounds, is too much for the franchise to maintain? It seemed like a poor excuse for a franchise with mind-blowing amounts of money that they seemingly just weren’t willing to spend. This would be understandable for a smaller developer with fewer resources, but if you’re bigger than Star Wars, you don’t have much of an excuse.
Furthermore, it felt like The Pokémon Company was spitting upon the very motto that the franchise was built upon: “gotta catch ‘em all!” How could this be the franchise’s slogan – the main draw of the franchise that had become its claim to fame – when its newest game literally wouldn’t allow players to “catch ‘em all”?
The outrage was massive, and you could feel the fanbase’s collective hype for the game rapidly plummet. The same people who were excited by the reveal trailer in February had begun using Sword and Shield as a punching bag for anything they could find to make fun of – and boy, there was a lot to joke about.
First, and perhaps most obviously, is the infamous in-game tree shown off in the same livestream that Masuda delivered his terrible news in. It looked reminiscent of trees from 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a game that was released two decades prior on far less powerful hardware. If this tree was a part of Sword and Shield’s sprawling new “Wild Area,” an open world part of the game that was a heavy point of marketing for the games, what other ugly textures and models were they not showing yet?
The new Dynamax gimmick looked boring and uninspired, simply making Pokémon larger and more powerful for a few turns during battle. And worse yet, this mechanic fully replaced Mega Evolutions and Z-Moves from previous generations, meaning they were nowhere to be found in Sword and Shield. This worsened an issue present in Sun and Moon where Mega Evolutions were brushed to the side, but now, they were entirely removed.
One of Game Freak’s excuses for cutting over 400 Pokémon from the game at launch – 234 after the DLC released in 2020, adding back some Pokémon behind a paywall – was that they would be focusing on “higher quality animations” for existing creatures. This explanation would have held more merit if critics didn’t quickly discover that Game Freak was seemingly copying many animations from 3DS titles, leading fans to question if they were telling the truth at all.
Things only got uglier once the games were released.
Sword and Shield’s Galar region, which is based on the U.K., is designed in such a linear fashion that it often feels like you’re walking through an extended hallway rather than a dynamic, vast region. Previous regions in the franchise felt wide and open in design, even if their individual routes were fairly linear, but in Galar it felt like the entire region barely deviated from being a straight walkway.
The game’s animations were also lacking – if they even existed at all. Sword and Shield make a point of cutting to black during certain moments that would require animation and showing exciting events off-screen, presumably to save on cost and time spent animating. It’s incredibly clear when Game Freak cut corners during development.
The game’s story is simply dreadful. At many points, it feels as though the player is an observer on their friends’ journey, with the beloved Champion Leon sometimes tackling problems across the region on his own while the player is left to come check up afterward to see the result. It barely feels like you’re on an adventure – it feels like you’re along for the ride.
The villainous organization setup attempts to repeat what Sun and Moon did, but here, it’s not executed well at all. Team Yell is the “evil team” this time around, and they’re nothing but a gang of hooligans who function as occasional battle padding, or worse yet, literal roadblocks to prevent the player from progressing until they’ve finished up their tasks in a given location. They are undoubtedly a less funny, more annoying version of Sun and Moon’s Team Skull.
This time, the plot twist comes in the reveal that the rich chairman and the president of a major Galar conglomerate, Rose, is the true villain (who could have seen that coming?) and even his motivations are poorly executed.
Essentially, Chairman Rose plans to bring about the “Darkest Day,” a sort of apocalyptic scenario for the Galar region that will cause Pokémon to grow gigantic and go berserk, in order to prevent a future energy crisis that is seemingly still many years away. He interrupts the player’s championship match to announce his plan, causing the player to rush off to defeat him.
Why Rose is so intent on immediately bringing about an apocalypse that will prevent an energy crisis in the seemingly distant future is unclear and is a plot hole that can be chalked up to the game’s poor writing and lack of plot direction. It feels incredibly forced, almost as though the developers knew they needed a villain, so they threw one in at the last minute without providing any compelling motivations for the character.
It’s true: Pokémon Sword and Shield are blatantly bad games, and they destroyed what should have been a special moment for the franchise. While previous entries such as X and Y or Sun and Moon came with their fair share of issues, they each came with positives that made the experience worthwhile. It’s difficult to say the same thing about Sword and Shield. Simply put, the games are terrible in just about every way.
Let’s not forget the cherry on top of this absolutely disgusting cake: the computer mouse cursor that somehow made its way into the game’s final credits. While it’s seemingly a minor issue in the grand scheme of things, it somehow feels so representative of the entire Sword and Shield experience.
These games should be considered an embarrassment for the highest-grossing media franchise in the world, and if they had been given proper care, love, funding, time and attention, they could have truly been something special. There’s no doubt that many developers at Game Freak love this franchise and likely want to develop something wonderful, but as long as they’re under a strict annual release schedule and aren’t given the resources they need to succeed, they’ll never be able to do so.
Pokémon Sword and Shield are the most glaring examples of the downfall of the franchise, and it’s hard to imagine the franchise will ever return to the heights it once enjoyed.
At least things can’t get any worse… right?
This article is part of an ongoing retrospective on the downfall of the Pokémon mainline games. The final article in this series will cover the franchise’s ninth generation’s flagship titles, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. To remain updated on this series, stay tuned to The Brock Press.