You say goodbye to your mum and meet your friendly rival, heading past rolling fields of Wooloo and crumbly country lane cottages. You start at home, in the especially bijou hamlet of Postwick. Pokémon Sword and Shield's beginnings are much like any other in the series. Your initial selection of starters, always a great moment, is especially well done in Sword and Shield. But all that's new seems to have come at a cost - and the cost is almost everything else in the game. This is a new generation of Pokémon games that promises much, with brilliant new Pokémon, a raft of intricate system-tinkering for long-term fans and a series-first stab at an 'open-world' area. It's also, more troublingly, quite a fitting metaphor for Pokémon Sword and Shield themselves. But it does serve as quite a fitting, if on-the-nose, metaphor for a game set in Galar, a new region inspired by the long-waned superpower of Great Britain, with all its puffed-up-cheeks and empty bluster.

In practice, outside of being a neat detail for the lore nerds, that sleight of hand doesn't really matter. Availability: Out 15th November on Nintendo Switch.But the scale of those battles, the spectacle, is fake. A smart way to combine the AWOL, slightly unwieldy Z-Moves and Mega Evolutions of previous generations into a single, spectacular three-turn mechanic in battles, sure. Pokémon Sword and Shield add some brilliant new creatures, but like their gargantuan Dynamax forms, the games feel like a hollow projection.ĭid you know that Dynamax and Gigantamax Pokémon - the jumbo, Stay Puft forms your little creatures can rather endearingly assume during certain battles - are actually just projections? Your barely two-foot-tall Pikachu isn't actually growing to the height of a skyscraper - or the girth of the classic chunky design, for that matter.

Skyscraper pokemon