Pokémon Sword & Shield Trailer Impressions (A Johnny Rootbeer Guest Blog)

Well friends, its time to grab our Pokeballs and jet off to merry old England—-I MEAN the Galar Region! The long awaited next step of the Pokemon franchise has been revealed, Pokemon: Sword & Shield, and damn does it look great.

In a quick trailer presented this morning at 9 AM Eastern, Nintendo revealed a good amount of new information, without blowing the load completely. What we know for sure is, we’re headed to the Galar region, which is based on the United Kingdom. Ancient castles, rolling fields, old cities and dark forests, its all here and I can’t wait to explore it. The overworld seems to be a lot more open than in previous games, with many branching paths and places to go. The trailer seems to convey a “if you can see it you can get to it” kind of vibe but only time will tell. Curiously, the title of the trailers youtube video is “Forge a Path to Greatness”, maybe we’ll be getting off the beaten paths after all and into bigger, more open areas to explore.

Then of course, there are the new starters:

Grookey, a little grass monkey with a piece of wood in his hair, Dom thinks he’ll turn into a samurai and I hope he’s right because I’d be all over that. A solid design with a lot of potential for sure.

Scorbunny, a zippy rabbit guy with fire powers, he definitely won’t burn your house down. Seems like a scrappy dude who likes to run and fight. Probably another Fire/Fighting so get your pitchforks ready.

Sobble, a squishy little water salamander who can camouflage to blend in with water, he seems like kind of a lightweight pushover, which if I know my Pokemon, means his final form is going to be a brick shithouse that nobody will want to mess with.

My only real wish was for this game to not look like an up scaled 3DS game, and I honestly don’t think it does, we’ve never seen environments like this in a Pokemon game, lush, moody and beautiful. The only other thing that I’d really like to see is for your Pokemon to follow you, they just had that feature in Lets Go Pikachu/Eevee and it was awesome, so I can’t imagine them removing it for their biggest and baddest game yet.

We weren’t given an exact release date, but they did say “late 2019”. Its going to be a long wait but I think its going to be well worth it. I’m going to be chomping at the bit for the rest of the year until we get to finally jump in, so please excuse me while I go watch that trailer 72 more times.

See you in Galar, friends.

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