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Graphically, the Wild Area looks extremely bland, offering a flat, fairly homogenous landscape. On first impressions it seemed strangely empty with plenty of fairly static wild pokémon but not really much else. Not quite the pokémon open world of my dreams. I honestly thought it was going to be an integral part of the game’s design but really it turned out to be little more than an optional extra with the main story taking place along the traditional linear routes.
It was so disappointing it actually made me question the worth of an open world Pokémon game at all. The games have always been fairly linear and the Wild Area was not convincing me it should be otherwise.
Once I finished the main story, I gave the Wild Area another try and started online trading and catching more new pokémon. At this point the open world gameplay did start to click more and I could finally begin to see the benefit of the more freeform gameplay it offered. Unfortunately, just as my interest was piqued I realised how small the Wild Area really is and swiftly exhausted all the areas I could explore.
Once the pokémon started to repeat, the gameplay of this tiny open world quickly ran out of steam. It disappointed me all over again. Now obviously Game Freak saw the whole thing as an experiment, but I have to say as such it is a complete failure.
It just feels like there was a lack of true commitment to the idea. The Wild Area needed to be much, much bigger, with more varied landscapes and a wealth of content to discover. There’s no point in doing half a job, if you’re going try something different you really need to go all in on it. At the end of the day I can’t help but feel that the Wild Area, and indeed the entire game, needed another year or so of development to really put out something worthy of the Pokémon heritage.
