If Pokémon Pokopia isn’t in my top five games of 2026 come December, we will have had an astonishing four months. At launch, this game had me in a chokehold and refused to let me go until I found myself weeping at its finale. It’s heartwarming and creative and immensely popular, so much so that a sequel feels inevitable. But I don’t know that I really want a ‘Pokopia 2’.
This is a thought that sprang to mind as I dove into the Bubbly Basin DLC last week. The expansion is excellent, tweaking some small niggles I had with the gameplay (storage doesn’t entirely drive me up the wall anymore) and throwing in an entirely new biome for me to enter with big dreams before inevitably abandoning my aspirations down the line after three hours of laying paths.
The DLC’s upcoming ‘Part 2’ feels far less ambitious at the time of writing, with the bonus accessories maybe only holding my attention for a day or two, but ‘Part 3’ promises to go large again with yet another new town to explore.
What started as a game that I could already play forever has somehow taken on even more content, and I couldn’t be happier with it — expanding the base game by 40% within a year is no mean feat. The big question is, what comes next?
The answer seems pretty obvious to me: It’s a sequel, isn’t it?
I’d like to see Ditto go and fix up a different Pokémon region as much as the next fan, but the central theme of regrowth and development just wouldn’t hit the same.
Pokopia has been everywhere since launch, pulling in five million sales in “just over four months” (making it the second most-popular Switch 2 game, with roughly a 21% install base), sitting in fourth place on Metacritic’s best-rated games of 2026 list, and becoming the best-selling Pokémon spin-off of all time. There’s no way that The Pokémon Company is going to ignore money on the table like that.
Though the DLC has got me thinking about whether we really need a ‘Pokopia 2’ in the first place. Imagine with me, for a moment, what a sequel would even look like. A game almost identical to its predecessor, mechanically, but with some new biomes and Pokémon thrown in for good measure, right? Doesn’t that sound… a lot like the DLC?
And what would ‘the same again’ do to Pokopia’s story? I don’t want to get bogged down in the ‘lore’ of a cosy crafting game, but Pokopia’s narrative felt so very self-contained, and intricately tied to the gameplay, that it’d feel wrong to do it all over again. I’d like to see Ditto go and fix up a different Pokémon region as much as the next fan, but the central theme of regrowth and development just wouldn’t hit the same.
There are definitely parts of Pokopia that I’d still like to see improved — a better map sits right at the top — but these feel like tweaks rather than game-changing additions to hang a sequel off of.
There’s a big part of me that thinks it might be better for Pokopia in the long run to embrace the Minecraft school of thought: avoiding a straight, iterative sequel and going down the expansion route instead. If Omega Force can keep churning out these DLC packages, with new towns, Pokémon and items to boot, then ‘Pokopia 1′ (as we will all one day inevitably call it) could last forever. Better that than plonking us right back at the beginning in five years’ time with another introduction to Water Gun.
Sure, it might not be quite as appealing from a business perspective. Why not charge everyone another 60 quid every few years for basically the same game again? Plenty of other series get away with it. But morally, in my heart of hearts, I can’t see what a sequel could bring to the table that wouldn’t be just as easily implemented in another expansion.
Of course, I’m no game developer, and there’s every chance that the geniuses over at Omega Force are already cooking up an idea for the sequel that’s far more imaginative than my pessimistic little brain can muster. It managed it with Dragon Quest Builders 2, after all. If the heart is still there without feeling like a money-grabbing retread, I’ll no doubt be there on day one to lap it up.
Heck, the Pokéfan in me is so strong that even if it is the same game again with a ‘2’ slapped on the end and featuring Bidoof this time, I’d likely still be there to sing its praises. Wait, am I the problem here..?
