An hour with Pokopia suggests it might be the best Pokémon spin-off ever – and it’s more Viva Pinata than Minecraft or Animal Crossing

When Pokopia was announced, most people drew a couple of quick comparative conclusions from its first cutesy trailer. There was much to be said in reaction, but the broad deduction can be efficiently summarised as this: Pokopia is Pokémon’s take on Animal Crossing. It quickly transpired, also, that the game shares development staff with Dragon Quest Builders, a Minecraft-inspired spin-off of another major turn-based Japanese role-playing franchise.

Simple enough, then. Pokopia is Pokémon, plus Minecraft, plus Animal Crossing. Except it isn’t. Except it is. Except it isn’t. After a hands-on, I suppose I can happily conclude that it is indeed those things – and more. And that more? Oh, it’s only one of the best, most criminally underrated games about raising critters ever made. Step forward, Xbox 360 gem Viva Pinata.

As someone who absolutely adores Viva Pinata, I actually feel like a bit of an idiot for not clocking the similarity sooner. In hindsight, the extended trailer for Pokopia makes it more obvious – but it was only sitting down and playing around an hour of the game that it really clicked.

It’s in game flow that the two are most similar. In Pokopia, Pokémon aren’t caught in Poke Balls and carried around with you – and nor should they be, given you play a Ditto that has haphazardly attempted to transform into its former owner. Instead, it’s all about the habitat of the area around you. Each Pokémon in the Pokopia Pokédex will be attracted to appear if certain conditions are met.

You’ll start off slow, simply creating patches of long grass. Any Pokémon head of any age knows that Pokémon love a bit of long grass. That’ll attract your most basic critters – but then as you want to attract more, the requirements will gradually increase. Some Pokémon might want to be near bodies of water, or in long grass that is shaded at the base of a tree. Others aren’t even after the natural world – fighting-type Hitmonchan needs a would-be Gym, meaning a punching bag or similar plus a bench to sit at and rest,no grass required.

When Pokémon join the island, a handful of them will also provide you new abilities. Initially Bulbasaur will teach you Leafage, a move that Ditto can then use to create long grass. Squirtle will teach you Water Gun, which can then be used to revive dried-out areas. You can imagine how these abilities will grow – and these are your Minecraft-esque abilities for shaping the world, be that adding, removing, or shaping terrain. There are a handful of these in the early stages I played, though it’s clear the game will feature many more – though not as many as there are Pokémon; only some have a new move to bequeath.

As well as building up habitats that Pokémon will want to come and live in, the secondary thread is the ruined areas in which you’re operating. While the demo gave away no actual detailed answer as to their nature, to my eye these areas are clearly locations from across the Kanto map of the first generation of Pokémon RPGs – but they’re in a ruined, almost post-apocalyptic state. How that happened isn’t clear, but all the humans are gone and the Pokémon are clearly in hiding – so it’s up to you to rebuild.

Splashing some water around to turn dead grass into verdant green and to revive ruined trees is one thing, but beyond that there are also the buildings. In the demo, I have the opportunity to collect the resources to rebuild a Pokémon Center. Rather than directly ‘rebuilding’ it out of blocks in a Minecraft way, I have to deposit the resources into a chest in front of the ruined building and then assign Pokémon from the friends I have attracted to the nearby area to assist in building. Because all Pokémon are different, some Pokémon are going to be more suited for building certain structures than others. On top of this you can place individual blocks – but it seems the buildings will be a more prefab affair.

With this, the delightful and instantly sticky loop of Pokopia is revealed. You’ll need to recruit more Pokémon in order to help you to restore more of the areas, which in turn is required to progress to unlock the skills or items you’ll need in order to attract even more types of Pokémon. Round and round it goes.

It’s delightfully simple, and it is also immediately satisfying and addictive. Although the core story looks as though it’ll hand-hold you through objectives with helpful chatty Pokémon advising you on what to do next – kid friendly, in other words – going beyond that feels quite intuitive. You can find little hints in the environment that add Pokédex entries that give you clues as to what environmental cues are going to be required to get somebody new to spawn, and you can then figure out how to achieve that. You’ll also want to work at keeping the friends who’ve already arrived happy – so one Pokémon might want a toy or some other sort of environmental upgrade near their habitat, which in turn improves their happiness, a measured stat that details just how nice of a home you’re maintaining.

These things crop up and so off I go, trotting about this limited starting area – finding resources to use the rudimentary crafting table mechanic, completing challenges listed in the Pokedéx to get currency to buy useful items for improving happiness or creating new habitats. Attracting new Pokémon, discovering a new habitat hint and getting excited about it… the time then just disappears. The conditions of my hands-on stipulates some things I can’t talk about, as is normal – but the funny thing is I didn’t see a lot of those things anyway, because my own curiosity dragged me off the main path and away from any of the revelations – the sign, I think, of a winner.

There are those more contemporary Minecraft-esque elements too, of course, clearly using technology and skills honed when much of this team worked on Dragon Quest Builders. In a multiplayer session, we needed to get one particular Pokémon from one landmass to another, over water. This is not a Pokémon that can safely swim, nor can it fly. In the end, our team of four players worked together to smash a bunch of blocks out of the side of a mountain, using it to create a bridge the creature could gingerly cross.

My point being that building block stuff is absolutely there, and perhaps as the game progresses such strategy and building will become a more core part of the flow. There’s also the Animal Crossing esque stuff, which I didn’t reach in this build – having a house, decorating the interior, etcetera. There is clearly more than the loop I describe – but my hands-on gave me the impression that of all the games this shares a similarity to, it’s that Viva Pinata loop which is at Pokopia’s heart – and goodness, it really rather works.

I’ve been doing this job for a long time, and I’ve done a lot of pre-launch hands-ons. I also think my radar is pretty good; I don’t have to play a game for too long, most of the time, to get a broad idea of what it is about. But in this hands-on I wasn’t checking how much time I had left, or looking over my shoulder to see what PR was up to. I just slipped into the zone. In my experience this is almost always a hallmark of a properly brilliant game.

Mechanics I love mashed up with characters and a world I also have a great affinity for. I haven’t felt this way about a Pokémon game since Conquest, the 2012 strategy crossover with Nobunaga’s Ambition. That was a serviceable tactical RPG that I loved a little extra because of the way it used Pokémon’s world, characters, and mechanics. My hope now is that Pokopia isn’t like that – I suspect it might be more. An excellent spin-off… that also has that Pokémon secret sauce. Next month, we’ll know if my suspicions are correct.