If you want to love Pokemon Pokopia, you have to respect that

The first hour or so of Pokemon Pokopia is something you just have to get through. Once you do, a potentially magical experience awaits. But this grueling first hour, when your city is dry and misshapen and the roads are in ruins, is central to the game's unsung audacity.

You're not building, as you so often find yourself in this type of game, from scratch, or even fixing up places that have fallen into disrepair. What lies ahead is a full-scale demolition job. It is in this tweak to the formula that many have found a litany of charms in the cozy world of Pokemon Pokopia. But it's also the main reason why I couldn't fall in love with it like the rest of the world did, and why I can't seriously return to Pokopia.

Cozy weekend banner with Animal Crossing Minecraft and Pokemon

Pokemon Pokopia is a great game I just don't like it

Vulpix in a field of flowers in Pokemon Pokopia.

I believe in the idea of an objective opinion. Mario is a great platformer. Pepperoni is a good pizza topping. Lavender is a good scent. You can't agree with these things – they remain opinions – but if you do, you'd be wrong. I was on the other side of this when it came to Pokemon Pokopia. In my opinion, the game is shallow, repetitive, frustratingly clunky, and over-reliant on the Pokémon mascots at the center. This is my opinion. Considering the amount of people sinking hundreds of hours into Pokopia and its surprisingly high Metacritic score, I have to admit that's an opinion that's objectively wrong.

But that remains my opinion. I've been dealing with Pokopia in several bursts since my 70 hours or so buried in it for my less than positive review. I've tried creating structures I've seen online, creating new territories on cliff edges, making better use of Pallet Town, looking for legendaries, digging up fossils… none of it allows me to glimpse the magic that others can see so clearly. And I think I'm starting to understand why.

I put 250 hours into Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and have already fallen in love with Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, as well as countless other smaller love affairs with this kind of cozy, creative game in the past. They're not my absolute favorite genre, but I like them enough and have been known to fall head over heels. Adding Pokemon should have been a slam dunk. But I think it's this bold stylistic (or perhaps more accurately thematic) choice to let you live in the ruins where Pokopia lost me.

Construction is slow in Pokopia, but development is fast

The first area of Pokemon Pokopia is a mess. You are clued to this even by its name: the Withered Wasteland. You spend this first hour making small changes that have a big impact – restoring lakes, clearing paths, planting flora that bring you the title Pokémon – and then you're eventually rewarded with rainfall, bringing a transformative sweeping glow across the region. It is at this point, I imagine, that many people got stuck. They had created Pokemon magic with their Pokemon friends. They didn't recreate this world so much as they were a part of it. But I think it was at this point that I was doomed to never really get this game.

My region was still a mess. The rain does not fall evenly, so the dry ground is patchy. Large areas east and west of your starting point are mostly optional, so they remained in need of attention that I didn't have time to give. The roads were still full of gaps – resources were either too valuable or simply not unlocked for me to do anything about. And, most terrifyingly, my Pokemon kind of set up camp anywhere.

Since every area is a mess and will remain a mess without your manual intervention, you have a couple of choices. You can spend your early hours in each new region cleaning a relatively empty map until you remove its character, which takes not only time but inventory space and food to ensure you can complete the task without exhaustion. Your reward for this is… nothing, really. Just a blank canvas to fill, and even then you have to balance progression through the main story with curated habitats.

Tellingly, most viral creations use Magnet Rise, meaning players have completed the game and are rebuilding on their second sweep.

Or you can do like I did, which is when you discover a new Pokémon environment, just throw it down anywhere. What I was left with pretty quickly were villages teeming with Pokemon that all looked like trash. It was fun discovering new mons at every turn, but when I was chasing that sugar high, I was left with landscapes that were hard to love.

They were messy, disjointed, without any of the usual design style that I try to achieve in other games that offer a wide surface to stamp your creativity on. It didn't help that Pokopia's crafting is overly complicated with poor resource management (I consider this a subjective opinion at least), but then so many others were able to build magnificent cityscapes even with this game loop that it feels like I tunneled down a rabbit hole, kept digging and now missing the necessary step. Maybe it's in some other storage box that I can't access right now.

Pokémon Pokopia seems to reward progress, handing out new Pokémon like candy every few minutes, but the countries themselves need the same amount of love and care. I can never really connect with Pokemon Pokopia the way so many others can because my village is too far away to be worth the time needed to save it. My Pokémon will continue to live in overcrowded ruins, trapped by rock and sand and ash, all of us locked out of Pokopia's cozy utopia.

This article is part of TheGamer's Cozy Weekend. Be sure to check out a number of other themed articles written by our team focusing on all things cozy!