The Struggle of Pokémon Pokopia

Graphic by Téa Sklar

Anyone that’s been gaming for a while remembers the struggle of wanting to play The Last of Us or the new God of War game when your younger sister just traded in your PS3 for an Xbox One. No? Just me? Well either way, the console war has ravaged the gaming world for the past several decades with PlayStation and Xbox fighting tooth and nail for the top spot. Because of the console war, both companies have been consistently improving themselves and fighting for platform exclusives that have made both consoles a good option. They’ve even implemented features like backward compatibility that let users with newer systems play games that were designed for older systems. Unfortunately, that same care is rarely given to the older systems. 

This lack of care is unfortunately what prevents certain games from becoming the staples that they were meant to be. If you’re not into video games, you might not realize it, but video games are expensive. Not only that, but the prices have only been getting higher. First the average price for a game was fifty dollars, then it was sixty, and now it’s up to seventy dollars for a single game! This type of price inflation is to be expected with the price of living skyrocketing and all, but it doesn’t make the increase any more appealing to gamers. On top of all of this, gamers are expected to buy the new console basically as soon as it releases even though the old console works perfectly fine, kind of like how Apple wants you to waste $1000 every time a new iPhone drops. And as you can expect, the price of consoles are also rising little by little. This problem is especially evident with Nintendo, a company that’s gone largely without competition in handheld gaming devices for the past several years.

It seems that Nintendo has decided that it’s time for users to move to the Switch 2, with new releases for the original Switch becoming fewer and far between. Their newest success, Pokémon Pokopia is a Switch 2 exclusive, and that pisses me off. It pisses me off because I, a broke college student, don’t have a Switch 2 and I’m stuck with the boring old regular Switch. Luckily, I got my hands on a copy and began to play around with it. Unfortunately for all us normies out there, I couldn’t recommend it enough. The game is well-made, well-written, and it’s engaging enough that I will be going back to playing it as soon as I’m done writing this article. 

But, the quality of the game doesn’t make up for Nintendo giving its users less than a year to get the new Switch 2 (which is $450) and then coughing up an additional $70 for the game itself. And as much as I want to say, “Go! Be reckless! Spend all of your paycheck on the best game ever!” I can’t in good conscience support the environment that Nintendo has set up. Because who the hell has $500 to waste on Pokémon?