A review of Pokémon Shield — by someone who isn’t a fucking nerd
Nintendo
Caution: There are story spoilers in this review because yes, Pokémon Shield has a story that can be spoiled.
Pokémon has a lot of personal significance to me. The first game — and I mean first game ever — that I played was Pokémon Pearl, which my uncle gave to me in 2010 along with a Nintendo DS (without consulting my parents, which I’m sure annoyed them, because they no doubt saw my potential to become a gamer and had been trying their best to keep me from such a wretched fate). Since then my brother and I have bought and played at least one game from every release. Pokémon Shield marked my 11th foray into the franchise.
I played Pokémon Let’s Go Eevee last year, and Ultra Sun the year before that, and Moon the year before that… and I enjoyed them, because it’s pretty hard not to enjoy a Pokémon game. But still, it had really started to feel like I was just going through the motions. Playing Pokémon was like an obligation — something I had to do because I still loved the franchise, but not the games. The last time I had ever felt genuine wonderment at a Pokémon game was in 2013, when my brother and I got our hands on Black 2 and found ourselves blown away by the updated graphics and locations. Since then it felt like I’d just been trying to recapture that same magic, to no avail.
This year, I finally found it again with Pokémon Shield.
Hulbury, one of my favorite locations in Galar
Now, as the title suggests, I’m not a fucking nerd. I don’t care about graphic optimization or anti-aliasing or whatever the hell the geeks on Twitter whined about for a month leading up to this game’s release. I’ve never caught more than 30 Pokémon in a single run. I’m also not very good at Pokémon, despite having played so many games. My brain is like a sieve for type matchups outside the core triangle of grass-water-fire. I often skip trainers and never battle wild Pokémon, meaning that I always end up fairly underlevelled for the Elite Four and the Champion. (My brother, who is good at Pokémon, is always super mean to me about it.)
So, no, I don’t care about the more “technical” side of the game. My favorite part of Pokémon has always been the exploration and the satisfaction of pummeling Grass-types into the ground with my Fire-type starter. I went into the game fully prepared for the same formulaic narrative and gameplay as before, the same old structure papered over with a shiny new region and shiny new characters. Pokémon Shield exceeded my expectations on nearly every count.
The start of a new adventure!
First of all, the game is beautiful. That’s no secret. I fell in love with the Galar region the second I entered the game to see my mom’s house in Postwick, the starting town. Galar is bursting at the seams with life and movement, with NPCs strolling around the towns and wild Pokémon visible in the overworld view, trotting around and occasionally jumpscaring you by sprinting after you. It was extremely easy to become enchanted with the world, but Pokémon’s always been good at that. That wasn’t the part that surprised me the most.
Shield has been an incredibly refreshing departure from the kind of Pokémon game that I’ve gotten accustomed to. Sure, the basic plot of going through a bunch of gyms and then ultimately a final challenge to become Champion hasn’t changed, but the way you go about it has been reworked drastically. Shield presents a complete restructuring of the gym system, which I never even realized was flawed until Shield showed me how much better it could be.
Me and the squad rolling up to McDonald’s
In the past, the gyms have just been stops that anyone is able to hit on their way to challenge the Pokémon League, with gym leaders who are all generally archetypal and have no relation to each other, and who you typically only see the one time before you continue on your quest through the region. Then they’re never seen again, and have absolutely no significance to the narrative anymore. It makes it hard to really connect to any of the gym leaders, past thinking their design is cool. Sure, Pokémon has never been a character-driven game, but the weird, fractured gym system has always been something that we’ve just accepted and never challenged the notion of.
In Shield, the Gym Challenge is a centralized championship circuit, where trainers must be endorsed and registered in order to compete as Gym Challengers. There’s an opening ceremony, where all the gym leaders walk out together and have their own little introductions. In this scene alone, it feels like all the leaders are given so much more personality and relevance than in any previous game.
Shield doesn’t stop there, though. They’ve done away with the concept of the Elite Four entirely, instead implementing a qualifier system where, after completing the gyms, you must battle against other Gym Challengers Hop and Marnie to qualify for the final stage. There, you go through a bracket system— consisting of you and seven of the Gym Leaders. It’s only seven because Opal, the Fairy-type Leader, has been training Bede, one of your rivals, to take over for her. I truly love this narrative choice, for reasons I will explain later.
The eight of you fight it out in a single-elimination bracket for the chance to challenge the Champion, Leon, whom you defeat, of course, with ease (after getting pounded on by his ridiculous Haxorus for a bit).
GYM LEADERS IN DA TRAINING ROOM, WHAT WILL THEY BENCH PRESS
By making the Gym Challenge a system and an institution instead of a series of otherwise unrelated stops, and presenting the gym leaders as colleagues who are working alongside you towards the coveted title of Champion, the game opens the doors for the gym leaders to actually be coherent characters who have pre-existing relationships with one another and can build relationships with you outside of their little starring moments, which makes a ton of sense and enriches the world a lot more to me.
One of my favorite scenes in the game takes place after you defeat the first three gyms — Grass, Water, and Fire — and the three gym leaders come to see you off before you head to the next area. It’s a small touch that gives character to these three gym leaders, establishes a relationship between them, and makes me go “aww” because… I mean, come on. How cute is this?
screenshot: Haydunn
I think the main thing I’m getting at here is that in Shield, the gym leaders don’t seem like characters they dropped into the game just to help you fulfill your storyline. I’m realizing now how much Pokémon has traditionally been designed to entirely serve the player — which, of course, isn’t a bad thing, and has never really been a problem. But it’s started to feel stale, and Shield comes at the perfect time with changes in the right direction. By giving the gym leaders lives, personalities, and relationships, it feels like the world is still moving outside of you, the player character.
Pokémon games have always felt extremely self-contained, like the whole region was just sitting there, waiting for you to come along and fulfill your story. Then, after your story ends, so does the region. The game then makes you go through a series of battles against old characters or whatever if you want post-game gameplay because it’s out of story content.
Shield feels wildly different. Galar has been happening before you arrived, and will continue to go on after you put the game down for the last time. It’s amazing how alive Pokémon can feel just by putting a little more emphasis on character. The gym leaders aren’t all very well-developed, of course, with many of them still being fairly one-note, but by involving them in your story, the game feels a lot richer and more complete.
Some more light is shed on the gym system too through this game, with Opal choosing one of your rivals, Bede, to train as her replacement as Fairy-type gym leader. Bede’s just been disqualified from the Gym Challenge and is moping around in front of Hammerlocke gym when Opal shows up and goes absolutely feral over the pinkness of his outfit. It’s funny, yes, but it’s also a glimpse into how gym leaders actually become gym leaders, another look into the system that is so monumentally important to the franchise but has thus far been basic and unexplained.
Bede’s not the only character you get to know who ultimately becomes a gym leader — Marnie, your rival who is constantly followed around by her stans, Team Yell, takes over as Dark-type gym leader from her brother, Piers. Again, Galar is moving and changing around you, even if you’re not there to see it — which is great! And it shows that characters can take a different path to being Champion, as Bede and Marnie will no doubt take a stab at your title during the next Gym Challenge season. Simply by addressing something that has never really been touched upon before, Shield gives us a deeper understanding of the Pokémon world.
Speaking of Team Yell, the typical story is that Team [something] in a Pokémon game is the Bad Guy. I’ve stopped really paying attention to that storyline across the years because it’s always the same: some guy wants a legendary Pokémon or whatever, and you have to stop them and their team of faceless goons. That’s it. But in Shield, the faceless goons aren’t the enemy. In fact, they’re pretty likable — for example, at one point, they battle you because a Silicobra is sleeping and they don’t want you to wake them up with your loudness. (What a dick move on our part, by the way. Just wait for the Silicobra to wake up!)
Team Yell just wants Marnie to succeed for the sake of Spikemuth, the city where the Dark-type gym is and where Marnie is from. The true villain in the game is Rose, chairman of Galar’s Pokémon League and president of the company that provides power to all of Galar. So, basically, a corporate asshole who, in an unhinged bid for more power, almost destroys the entire region. Go figure, right?
So, yeah, the big, power-hungry corporation (which is also probably responsible for the canon climate change that Galar faces) is the villain of the game, rather than the team with weird, ill-defined motives that you don’t really pay attention to because they don’t make a whole lot of sense. If this is how the games are going to be from now on, I could get used to that.
Pokémon Shield isn’t a perfect game, of course. The main storyline is a little sparse (I love that Sonia and Leon repeatedly tell you to focus on the Gym Challenge and leave the saving of the world to the adults, it really highlights how funny it is that little kids usually go and save the region as a side gig) and it can definitely be felt that the developers were working through the brutal crunch that we know and love from the games industry. I wish they’d been given more time to work on it, because the storyline could have been much more fleshed out and a better balance could have been struck between narrative and Gym Challenge.
Still, for someone whose interest in games started with Pokémon in 2010 and now can’t imagine their life without the tradition of playing every new release, Pokémon Shield is an amazing breath of fresh air. I’ve been playing Pokémon for nearly 10 years, and this game has made me feel like I’m discovering it for the first time again, which I never thought would happen. I hope that Sword and Shield marks the start of Pokémon games finally changing, for the better.
