Pokémon Pokopia is more fun than Animal Crossing: New Horizons

May 19, 2026 5 min read

Pokémon Pokopia is more fun than Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Over the horizon

If you love a life sim, the Switch 2’s library makes a great case for system ownership. The recently-released Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is selling like crazy, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the darling of the 2020 pandemic, recently got a beefy Switch 2 update that includes tons of reasons to hop back in and explain your long absence to Isabelle's sweet, smiling face. And that's on top of the reams of third-party life and farming sims you can already nab on the eShop, like the Rune Factory games, the Harvest Moon series, and Stardew Valley, the genre's long-reigning Lord King.

But wind back the hands of time a couple of months to March and you'll witness the birth of a whole new life sim: Pokémon Pokopia from Koei Tecmo and The Pokémon Company. Pokémon Pokopia puts you in the gooey body of a Ditto who awakens in a wilted world whose entire human population has gone missing. You have to figure out what happened to humanity, but you also have to stretch, morph, and clone yourself (because that's what a Ditto does) to work the earth and build homes for other displaced pokémon. And these pokémon are picky. Don't go sticking no Froakie in no dry desert environment. Not that said mismatched pokémon will get angry with you. They might just get a little cross. I don't know about you, but the thought of Sylveon being cross with me is still a little frightening.

©Nintendo / The Pokémon Company

Pokémon Pokopia shares a lot of DNA with Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but it's the beefier and more engaging game by far. You are now entering the Opinion Zone: When Pokémon Pokopia was revealed, most Pokémon fans initially weren't sure what they were looking at. Fans of Dragon Quest Builders 2, however, started hooting and hollering the second they saw Koei Tecmo's name attached to what is essentially Pokémon mixed with the Builders 2. And Dragon Quest Builders 2, which in turn borrowed heavily from Mojang's infinite adventure game Minecraft, gives players a lot to do. A lot.

Pokémon Pokopia's story quest is one big tutorial for your final mission: to build a paradise island for all your PokéPals to hang out in, safe and happy. How you go about doing this is completely up to you. A pokémon might arrive in your town if you build the right habitat (borrowing a schmear from 2006's Viva Pinata), but they won't necessarily want to live there permanently. There are different ways to build in Pokémon Pokopia, from merely erecting a house from a kit to ripping up the earth itself and re-arranging the blocks of dirt, stone, and brick to make houses. Doing the former lets your pokémon slip into dwellings that strongly resemble Animal Crossing houses that are ready to be decorated. Doing the latter is a much more familiar experience for lovers of Minecraft and Dragon Quest Builders. If you're indecisive, you can do both. Merely having the choice alone elevates Pokémon Pokopia over Animal Crossing—and maybe over Dragon Quest Builders 2 itself, though that amounts to a controversial discussion that might come to blows.

Also, the pokémon in your Pokopia paradise generally leave you alone, unlike the Animal Crossing folk who want to come over to your house at the most inconvenient times, like that one annoying kid who only wanted to come over to play your Super Nintendo and you knew it. Pokopia's denizens mostly stay out of your way, but they interact with each other in ways that make you feel like you're maintaining a pokémon garden. The pokémon play tag, they converse with each other, they take naps in the sun, and if you're lucky, you might catch two pokémon conversing about a topic that relates to their species. For example, if the puffed-up corvid pokémon Honchkrow crosses paths with the smaller, scrawnier Murkrow, the former will order the latter to gather up shiny objects. Murkrow says it'll try its best, but admits it's hard to find shiny things with all the humans gone.

This boss-underling relationship between Honchkrow and Murkrow is mentioned in most Pokémon games' PokéDexes, and it's a lot of fun to stumble upon similar specially-scripted events in the game. Animal Crossing's entries have some amazing villagers—nothing but respect for people would have done wetwork to get Raymond the Cat to visit their town—but there's something special about being a Pokémon fan your entire life and then getting to hang out with them in a habitat of your own creation. Chill stuff.

We love you, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. You're a plaguetime miracle. It's just more fun to build a cool neon gamer house for the pale, soft-spoken "Peakychu" and the tiny l'il baby pokémon it protected during the PokéPocalypse. And by the way, you know how much mortgage Ditto charges for its houses? Zero. Zero, Tom Nook. Think about it.