In Pokopia, you play as a Ditto, an amorphous Pokemon that can take on any shape and mimic the special moves of other Pokemon. You begin the game with memories of your trainer (whose form you initially take) and accompanied by Professor Tangrowth, a lone Pokemon who was abandoned by his trainer long ago. There are no humans, and no other Pokemon, and the world is in shambles.
As Pokemon reappear, they have questions. Where are the humans? How long have they been asleep? Will the humans return? What happened to the world?
These are the same questions familiar to players of Horizon Zero Dawn. You play as Aloy, a woman in a future Earth without parents, but with a strange connection to a past where humanity had conquered aging and space. They all disappeared, leaving only ruins behind them — ruins and monstrous machines in the forms of animals and dinosaurs.
Documents and records left behind in HZD tell the tale of a mad scientist who unleashed self-replicating war machines on the world, that used biomass for energy and transmutation into weaponry. The Zero Dawn project was a multipronged effort to preserve humanity past a time where there would be absolutely no life left on the planet. Aloy herself was a machine-created clone intended to finish the work started a thousand years ago by her original (and was she the only clone? The surprising answer was revealed in the sequel!)
The Pokemon World doesn’t assign the blame so cleanly. On the Pokemon World, global disasters struck the planets; volcanos, droughts, clouds that never let the sun through leading to widespread crop failure and starvation. A world-shattering final cataclysm would soon sweep all life from the planet. Humans would have to flee to space; but they couldn’t take their Pokemon with them.
Records tell of a secret project to build spaceships capable of taking everyone into a giant space station. (Shades of 100 Day Last Defense Academy). Humans and Pokemon worked together to try and gather everyone into one final town that was lifted into the sky with mysterious Skymetal.
Running in parallel was the Pokemon Conservation Project. Instead of letting their Pokemon friends die, people were asked to store their Pokemon in a giant PC. Sometimes parents would give their children dolls that resembled their Pokemon to keep them company while they were away. If everything went well, the humans would return once the planet was habitable again, and they would reunite with their Pokemon. But one hacker installed a fail-safe. If humans did not return, for whatever reason, the PC would run a scan looking for habitats that could support Pokemon, and release those Pokemon into the wild.
Running in parallel to that was an audacious plan by the gang known only as “Team R” to make a space rocket of their own in order to be able to stay together. A particularly resourceful grunt recorded messages on their personal rocket that would urge people to perform tasks (loading food and power and entertainment) in exchange for ersatz Kanto gym badges. Once all the hard work had been done by patsies, they could just blast off to safety.
Unfortunately, the grunt and the rest of Team R were rounded up, arrested, and distributed among the other spaceships.
The game of Pokopia is simply making Pokemon habitats so that the PC will know to release appropriate Pokemon. Along the way, legendary Pokemon that survived the cataclysms will show up, wondering if the activity they’re seeing portends the return of humanity. But, no, it’s just you, Ditto, making the world safe for Pokemon again on your lonesome.
The story is unexpectedly dark, for a kid’s game. And the horror just increases as you work your way through the various ruined cities. The worst: a city covered entirely in lava ash, Pompei-like, with a birthday party frozen in progress buried deep inside.
We know where the humans went — into space. We know why they went — their world was about to be destroyed, and I guess Arceus was busy elsewhere. We know who — all humans, but no Pokemon. Do we know when?
How long humans have been gone is kept deliberately vague, but we do have some clues. Professor Tangrowth has been alive the entire time, and there’s no evidence that Pokemon are immortal. There’s furniture and tech all over the place, and most of it is still functional. There’s a lot of ruined buildings, evidence of a real catastrophe, but there are also working vending machines, so there’s that.
Significantly, the credits end with the Team R ship meeting up with a space station and greeted by a human with a Ditto doll, who receives the photograph you sent with the ship. It seems likely humans have only been away for decades, not hundreds or thousands of years. The hacker thought that there was a chance humanity would not have enough fuel to return; the Team R rocket brought extra fuel just in case.
Pokopia is a story of catastrophe, rebuilding and hope. I’d been expecting a Stardew Valley with Pokemon, but there’s quite a lot more to the story than just that. But, this being a Pokemon game, you still gotta catch ’em all… by giving them nice homes and helping them move in.
