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It’s the circle of life. One live-service game dies — the developers of the briefly hyped Highguard announced they would throw in the towel this week — and another hopeful rises to take its place: Bungie’s Marathon is out and it’s good, actually. One Microsoft Gaming CEO gives up trying to sell any Xboxes and retires; another replaces him and slaps a code name on the next one. There’s always someone willing to take another roll of the dice.
Through all of this cyclical entropy, though, some things persist. One of them is Pokémon. The supposed highest-grossing media franchise of all time was a fad once, a craze that everyone assumed would fizzle out. Now it’s a comforting constant, nostalgic to adults, eternally fresh to children, a self-sustaining ritual everyone can take part in. It’s a giant Snorlax rug we can all sit on. Pokémon is 30 years old, but it feels like it’s always been with us and always will.
So why are we surprised the new Pokémon game is good? Pokémon Pokopia, a cozy life-sim spinoff about building a new Pokémon society in a post-human world, launched on Nintendo Switch 2 this week to much better than expected reviews. The game is just very charming, but it’s probably worth examining why the expectations weren’t higher to begin with.
