10 Most Depressing Details in Pokémon Pokopia

Pokémon, as an IP, has always been pretty bright and colorful, both literally and in terms of tone. It’s primarily marketed to kids, after all. However, even back in the earliest days, there’s always been a pinch of darkness and sadness scattered here and there, like the eerie vibes of Lavender Town or the tragic origin of Mewtwo. Despite being a cozy crafting and village-building game, Pokémon Pokopia still has that kernel of darkness in it, and compared to most of the games in the franchise, it’s a little starker than usual.

Pokémon Pokopia is an incredible experience that’s hard to put down.

The basic premise of the game, that being a Ditto missing its trainer rebuilding ruined towns in hopes of bringing both them and other Pokémon back, is already pretty sad, but as you visit more locales and uncover the full scope of the world’s situation, you come to realize the full scope of what has actually happened here, and how it has affected both humans and Pokémon. As someone who’s been with Pokémon since Gen 1, these details don’t just hit me in the feels, they hit my inner child’s feels. That’s two layers of feels, right there.

Major spoilers for Pokémon Pokopia ahead!

10

Professor Tangrowth

How Long Was He Alone For?

When you first start the game, the very first Pokémon you meet is an elderly Tangrowth, nicknamed Professor by the other Pokémon you meet. Tangrowth is old and wise, not to mention eager to fix things up and find out what happened to humanity, but this isn’t just a matter of scientific curiosity.

Based on the various Professor’s Notes, Tangrowth was originally the partner Tangela of a local Pokémon professor, who ran off before the professor and their family evacuated the planet. By the time you meet him, he’s clearly been living and exploring in the wastes for a good while. He even outright says that he hadn’t seen any Pokémon or humans nearby for as long as he could recall.

This implies that the Tangela either didn’t make it into the Pokémon storage system in time, or ended up getting released from it far earlier than everyone else. Either way, Tangrowth has likely been all alone for a very long time. It’s no wonder he’s so attached to Ditto, it’s the first lifeform he’s had any contact with in who knows how long.

9

Sparkling Skylands and Mewtwo

Uprooted, Abandoned

The game’s last major location, Sparkling Skylands, is a bit of an outlier amongst the others, as it’s suspended high above the land by massive crystalline pillars. It took me a minute to figure out what this place was supposed to be, as the only locale that comes to mind when I think of mountains is the Indigo Plateau. As it turns out, the reason I couldn’t figure it out was that it wasn’t supposed to be up there.

Sparkling Skylands is the remnants of both Celadon and Saffron City, with the former’s department store and the latter’s Psychic Gym apparently having been lifted high into the air by intense tectonic activity. The crystalline pillars are likely hardened volcanic glass. If that’s the case, it’s frankly a miracle that any of either city managed to survive, though they’re barely in a habitable state without Tinkmaster’s rope lifts.

After rebuilding the department store, Ditto finds a Master Ball on the roof, out of which pops none other than Mewtwo. Since it was in a Master Ball, I have to make a particular assumption: this is probably Red’s Mewtwo. Red is the only human Mewtwo respects, possibly even likes, and now there’s a good chance it’ll never see him again. For Mewtwo especially, this is downright tragic.

8

Rocky Ridges

History Literally Buried

After finishing up in the game’s first area, the two area gates lead you to one of two other locales. One of these locales is Rocky Ridges, an abandoned mine next to a dormant volcano, centered around the remains of an old restaurant and social space. Unlike Withered Wasteland, Rocky Ridges barely even looks like a place where people lived, a testament to the damage it endured.

Rocky Ridges is the remains of both Pewter City and Mt. Moon, both having been completely subsumed by a volcanic eruption and covered in ash and dirt. Besides the remains of the restaurant and the mine entrance, there’s maybe one other building in the entire area, and it’s completely choked with ash. Nothing wipes out all signs of civilization like a pyroclastic flow.

If you venture deep into the mines, you can actually find the remains of the Pewter Museum of Science, still surprisingly intact despite the canopy of volcanic rock covering it. It’s actually kind of hopeful that all of those artifacts survived, but also pretty somber when you realize that a lot more stuff was destroyed, including a lot of Pokémon fossils that can’t be revived anymore.

7

Peakychu

It Gave Until It Could Give No More

While exploring Bleak Beach and looking for ways to wake up Mosslax, Ditto and company encounter a Pikachu with a distinctly pale-looking body, prompting them to nickname her “Peakychu.” Peakychu is a friendly little mouse, eager to help with efforts to light up the town and wake up Mosslax, but when asked if she could provide some electricity herself, she unfortunately can’t.

According to both Peakychu herself and her PokéDex entry, apparently she’s discharged so much electricity, that her body’s completely lost its natural electrical generation abilities. She can receive and store power from an outside source like a generator, but she can’t so much as make a spark herself.

Besides the fact that this is a generally sad state of being for a Pikachu, what’s even sadder is how she got this way. According to the Dex, Peakychu was discharging all that electricity because she was sharing it with her friends. I have to assume that said sharing took place prior to the evacuation of humanity, which means she was quite literally giving everything she had to keep her fellow Pokémon safe while the world was effectively crumbling around her.

6

Withered Wasteland and Kyogre

Compounding Problems

The game’s first locale, and the one Ditto initially wakes up in, is known as Withered Wasteland. It’s an extremely dry, arid patch of land covered in hard stones. It’s fairly close to the ocean, but those paths can’t be cleared without Rock Smash, so due to that and the complete lack of rain, it’s borderline inhospitable.

Based on context clues and some notes found lying around, we can infer that the Withered Wasteland is actually the remains of Fuchsia City. Given its proximity to the original Safari Zone, Fuchsia City is supposed to be one of the wettest non-coastal towns in Kanto, so seeing it in this dried-up state is a pretty big downer.

As it turns out, part of the cause of this state of being is the Legendary Pokémon Kyogre, or rather, the lack of it. When the disasters started intensifying, Kyogre apparently retreated to the bottom of a trench to sleep through it all. Without the avatar of the oceans nearby, the rain dried up completely, which likely exacerbated Fuchsia’s already worsening state.

5

Bleak Beach and the S.S. Anne

A Darkened Husk

Besides Rocky Ridges, the other locale you can visit after finishing up at Withered Wasteland is Bleak Beach, the remnants of a coastal town covered in displaced sand, flooding waters, and a perpetual blanket of dark clouds. If you’ve ever had any concerns about rising sea levels, this is a good illustration of what will happen.

Bleak Beach is what’s left of Vermilion City, hence its larger emphasis on electrical infrastructure like the abandoned furnace and the generator platform used by Peakychu (which I think is actually Lt. Surge’s Gym platform, but I’m not certain). Nearly all the coastal houses and amenities are ruined, while the buildings further inland have completely dried out due to collapsed rocks.

Pokemon Pokopia Ditto Carried by Drifloon and Substitute Doll

These islands are dreamy.

The most distinctive part of this locale is the gigantic, beached husk of the formerly-grand S.S. Anne. The S.S. Anne is one of the most notable setpieces in Gen 1 Pokémon, both the games and the anime, so seeing it this way is rather disheartening. Such a glorious vessel, forever moored and abandoned by its crew; I guess it’s a small blessing that it didn’t sink completely.

4

The Natural Disasters and Shortages

Everything Fell Apart

As you explore the game’s locales, there’s plenty to fuel speculation about the current state of the world and humanity’s absence. As you discover notes and diary entries and talk to the Legendaries, though, the precise situation becomes pretty clear: humanity was forced to evacuate the planet due to intensifying natural disasters.

The notes detail world-spanning instances of torrential rain and floods, volcanic eruptions, and other terrible disasters intense enough to warrant scientific gatherings to search for a solution. Interestingly, at least as far as I can discern, none of this was the result of a particular Pokémon’s actions, just good old-fashioned planetary mistreatment. I guess we should’ve taken the emergence of Galarian Corsola back in Gen 8 as a warning sign.

Besides the scope of the disasters, the notes also reveal the toll all of this took on the planet’s populace. Infrastructure was destroyed, food became scarce and expensive, and many lost access to global networks. The whole reason there are so many CDs lying around is because people literally couldn’t afford to stream music anymore.

3

The Pokémon Preservation Project

They Tried So Hard to Keep the Pokémon Safe

In addition to information about the natural disasters and humanity’s subsequent escape to space, notes from a certain app developer detail efforts on their part to help the world’s Pokémon through the turbulent times. Their initial plan was the PokéLife app you interact with on the Pokémon Center PCs to improve the state of the nearby environment, but this was only a stopgap measure.

As both the professor’s and hacker’s diary entries explain, the plan was to store as many Pokémon as possible in the storage system, keeping them safely in stasis to wait out the environmental disasters. Humanity at large couldn’t know about this due to the panic it would cause, so everyone simply had to leave their partners behind, uncertain what would happen to them.

The original system was supposed to remain running until humanity returned, but fearing the worst, the hacker added a last-minute failsafe: in the event humanity doesn’t return to maintain the system, it would automatically release the stored Pokémon, prioritizing those who could survive and adapt in the altered landscape. The hacker sincerely hoped the failsafe would never have to be used, as it would mean humanity would never return, but, well, here we are.

2

Palette Town

It’s Gone… It’s All Gone

Off to the side of the Withered Wasteland is a long, paved road, at the end of which is a small cluster of islands. Unlike the other locales, it doesn’t particularly resemble any major Kanto location. It’s only upon interacting with the ruined Pokémon Center that you learn the truth: it’s Palette Town. It’s supposed to be your personal sandbox area to do with what you like, though it’s kind of hard to focus on that.

Anyone who has been with Pokémon since the beginning knows Palette Town: it’s where Red is from, where Ash Ketchum is from, the beginning point for millions of adventures. And now it’s gone. It’s so completely and utterly gone that it’s utterly unrecognizable, not a single building left, nor a trace of Professor Oak’s lab. A focal point of our collective childhood has been wiped off the map.

Some have speculated that this cluster of land isn’t actually the town we know, citing the obvious geographical differences and the fact that, in the original games, it was spelled “Pallet Town.” I can’t explain the name, but given what happened to Celadon, it’s not out of the question for the town to have experienced some intense tectonic shifting. Even if this isn’t the town we know, I can’t imagine the real one fared much better.

1

The Ending

How Long Will it Take?

At the very end of the game, after completing all the major story quests and the Team Initiation at the lighthouse in Withered Wasteland, the lighthouse reveals itself as an emergency escape rocket constructed by Team Rocket. It takes off into the sky, much to Ditto and Tangrowth’s confusion, and during the credits, we see it fly through the stars before ultimately delivering its cargo to a distinctly human spacefarer.

This is definitely an optimistic ending, a sliver of hope that humanity is finally on its way back home to reunite with its beloved Pokémon. However, it’s not all sunshine and roses if you stop and think about it. Given all the massive environmental changes, humanity has definitely been offworld for a good while, which means it would take a comparable period of time for them to return, assuming they’re even capable of doing so.

Now, I’m no expert in space travel or the lifespans of Pokémon, but I do know that the former takes a very long time, and the latter is definitively finite. Even if Ditto’s trainer were somehow still alive due to some relativity shenanigans, there’s no guarantee they’ll make it back home before the end of Ditto’s natural lifespan.