Pokémon Sword and Shield for Nintendo Switch: 10 things we want

A bigger story

Speaking of a more realized experience, while it is perfectly fine and dandy to want to be the best like no one ever was, we’ve been there. We’ve done that. We’ve been doing that more or less since 1998.

It’s not that we can’t be doing that again in 2019 either, but maybe aim a little bigger for Pokémon Sword and Shield? You can still be the wide-eyed amateur trainer setting off in the world to capture these creatures in a quest that involves traveling to different cities and defeating their gym leaders to obtain badges, but maybe it ties into a bigger story. A long-buried mystery about the region? A mythical Pokémon no one has ever seen before that you are determined to find evidence of? A plot by the British equivalent of Team Rocket that threatens the entire region and must be stopped?

The point is there is a lot of places you can go with this latest entry in the series that go beyond the incredibly basic setup it has had for the large majority of its entries. Again, you can still have that setup but tie it into something bigger, giving more of a reason to experience the game than just collecting monsters and beating gym leaders. There’s more to the world of Pokémon than that, and this could be the first game to really show it.