A Rough Transition to 3D | Pokémon Sword and Shield

Pokémon Sword and Shield have been out for over four years now, so I wanted to go back and see if the game is still as bad as it was said to be at launch.

At the time of launch back in November of 2019, this first mainline Pokémon game on Switch was not well received. Sword and Shield are the first generation to make the jump to full 3D graphics and to say it was a rough jump would be… appropriate. With all games before having the classic pixel art sprites and environments, the 3D models lost a lot of what fans loved (and created gaming’s most hated tree). The new games appear to be a lot more lifeless. The pixels were highly saturated, but now the new models seem washed out. The main immersion breaker for me was the lack of action animations for Pokémon in battle. 3D models really show off the fact that most of the moves involve the Pokémon model just being moved up and down.

The models not looking great only added fuel to the fire. Before the release of the games, Game Freak announced that they would be cutting Pokémon from the national dex to make sure the included ones would look their best, only for fans to find the models used were pulled from other games. The only positive for the Pokémon was the introduction of the Wild Area. This was the first time Pokémon would be able to roam the overworld, no longer would players be plagued with random encounters in tall grass, now they could pick and choose their battles.

The Wild Area also included the first attempt at multi-player in a Pokémon game. Not where you take on gyms together, but rather roam around the Wild Area and see a bunch of other players adventuring. Now you can join your friends when raiding dens to fight stronger versions of Pokémon. This is the only real thing that you can do with friends.

Moving aside from the Pokémon, the storyline was extremely linear. The straightforward path was to travel to towns and take on gym leaders to try to become the next champion. None of these fights were difficult due to the EXP share that is automatically on (and can’t be turned off). Even without going out of my way to fight a bunch of random Pokémon, just going through the trainer battles along the routes gave me enough levels to breeze through the gym fights.

With the battles not being overly challenging, I was hoping for a good story. You know, one that has you hunting down an evil team that wants to do wrong for a morally grey reason that they think is right. But, I was yet again disappointed by having the enemy team being a support squad for a girl going through the league challenge…

Well, at least we have a psycho who wants to destroy the region with oversized Pokémon. This plotline was super left-field for me. It was almost annoying to have the fill-in for the elite four battle be split into two parts due to the dramatic breaking news style announcement that we would need to stop the downfall of the region.

Nothing in this game jumped out at me as being a good Pokémon game. This was a major disappointment since this game acted as my return to the franchise after being away since Generation Five’s Black and White. Game Freak geared this entry as one to help bring new, younger players into the wonderful world of Pokémon, and that was not something that I had in mind when starting my journey. At the core, the game was okay. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who wants a good story or a super fun monster-catching game. There are more and more companies trying out the monster-catching style of game and they seem to fill in the gap between what Pokémon puts out and what players want.

I do think that this game was a good stepping stone to what became Scarlet and Violet (even though they are buggy messes). Moving from 2D to 3D is challenging, and having some bumps in the road can be forgiven, the main issue was the lack of content that made the game feel like a full-fleshed game like the previous entries. The bare-bones structure of Pokémon games is quickly becoming stale and I hope we do not get another Sword and Shield copy in the future.