Pokémon’s 30th anniversary is here and Nintendo (and The Pokémon Company, Game Freak, and Omega Force) are kicking things off with a surprisingly excellent life simulation spinoff game. Pokémon Pokopia arrives on March 5th, and it’s one of the first Pokémon titles that will debut exclusively on the Nintendo Switch 2. Equal parts Animal Crossing, Minecraft, and Dragon Quest Builders, Pokopia reimagines the Pokémon world as a massive, human-free paradise that you can rebuild however you want. Pokopia easily could have been a straightforward game about making friends and crafting neighborhoods. But as our review discusses, Pokopia’s a much bigger adventure than it initially seems, and we want to talk to you about it.

For the past week, my colleague Kallie Plagge and I have been playing the game, and we’re going to be answering questions from Verge subscribers this afternoon. If you’ve been wondering what kinds of things there are to build, how in-game friendships work, or whether there are more character customization options, we’ve got you covered. We won’t be spoiling anything juicy you should discover for yourselves, but we’re here to share some personal insights.

So, start thinking about what you might want to ask, and we’ll be back this afternoon at 2PM ET with some answers.

Animal Crossing has always been anti-instant gratification. By design, you have to take your time, wait for days to pass in real time, and complete a seemingly endless list of chores to build a meaningful life with your animal friends. The slowness is part of its appeal. But with New Horizons, some of that slowness became tedious: crafting its many items one at a time, painstakingly building cliffs and rivers by hand, picking up and placing objects one by one. 

As I gathered when I previewed it last month, the newly released, free 3.0 update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons addresses those issues with quality-of-life fixes that still fit the spirit of Animal Crossing. It’s a small update in terms of content — there’s just enough here to give you a reason to revisit the game if you’ve been looking for one, and not much more than that — but major in reducing friction where there wasn’t meant to be any. 

Separately, there’s also the new Switch 2 Edition, which noticeably improves New Horizons’ performance and ups its resolution. Otherwise, it doesn’t add anything that important — but for $4.99, it doesn’t really have to.

Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

The main appeal of the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition is the performance upgrade. On the original Switch, New Horizons would start to struggle as you placed more and more decorations around your island, sometimes to the point of severe frame rate drops. It meant that building out your island could also make it progressively less playable. My island is a pretty bare construction zone, so when I downloaded the Switch 2 upgrade, I visited several highly decorated Dream Addresses to test it out. 

Anecdotally, I can say that there’s a significant improvement in how New Horizons runs, at least to my eye. All the Dream Addresses I visited were so busy with decor, from thickets of trees to loads of furniture covered in custom designs, that there were completely inaccessible areas — and I didn’t see any significant lag or choppiness like I’d expect on the original Switch version. It’s a boon for maximalist decorators, especially those of us who still want our islands to be functional amid chaotic and cluttered builds. 

For me, that alone is worth the $5 upgrade. (If you don’t own the game already, the Switch 2 version is $65 to the original Switch’s $60.) Otherwise, the Switch 2 Edition doesn’t add anything you need to have. Nintendo did show a side-by-side comparison of the game’s improved resolution in the trailer for the upgrade, but I didn’t really notice the difference (with the caveat that simple visual fidelity is not particularly important to me in most games). The new megaphone, which lets you use the Switch 2’s microphone to call the names of villagers and  locate them, didn’t work well for me; I saw Fuchsia, walked a short distance away so she was out of frame, and called her name, but got no reply.  

And then there are the Joy-Con mouse controls, which are available when decorating interiors, creating custom designs, and writing messages on the bulletin board. I’m sure there’s someone out there who will find the mouse controls useful or intuitive, but I am not that person. First of all, I originally played this game on a tiny Switch Lite screen and I’m really enjoying this new world of playing it on a TV, so forgoing my Pro Controller to slide the right Joy-Con around on my couch cushions is not a compelling proposition. But I also found that the sensitivity of the mouse controls actually made it harder for me to be precise about item placement.

3.0 update

The free 3.0 update, which is available on both the Switch and the Switch 2, feels like the bigger upgrade on the merits of the quality-of-life tweaks alone. I wrote last month that this update might actually get me to finish decorating my island, and I’ve already spent hours doing exactly that.

The most impactful change is one so minor, it wasn’t even called out in the update’s announcement trailer: You can strafe.

Before, when you were decorating or terraforming or even gardening, you’d have to constantly reorient yourself. If you were building a cliff while facing north, for example, you’d have to build one block of the cliff, move a little bit to the right, then turn to face north again without accidentally walking too far north and missing your mark. I would usually do a little circle to position myself and make sure I was aiming the tool in the right place, and even then, I’d frequently be a little bit off and accidentally destroy the bit of cliffside I’d just built. It was so awkward and clunky that I cleared out my entire island in order to redesign it and then… stopped playing the game for four years.

Now, you can press L and your character will hop into place in the grid, and while holding L, you can move in any direction without changing the direction you’re facing. You still have to do all your terraforming by hand, but the process has been completely streamlined. Press L to line yourself up, build the cliff, move one space over to build the next piece. That’s it. I’ve used it to build and destroy cliffs and rivers, dig up rows of plants, lay down new paths, and even count how many spaces in the invisible grid I would need for a particular project. I’m actually having fun with construction now that the act of doing it isn’t a massive pain. 

On top of that, Resetti is here to help you clean up your island in what’s possibly the only process in this game that can be described as instantaneous. He can “reset” the entire island, just the beaches, or individual areas you walk to and designate for him, sending the furniture to your storage so long as you have room. (And you will have room, since there are two new storage upgrades to unlock with a new max of 9,000 items.) I used his services to instantly pick up and put away the dozens of copies of the “wheat field” furniture item I’d used to decorate a rural area of my island, which I’d wanted to change but didn’t have the willpower to do manually. 

Plants can now be stored, which allowed me to finally dig up and put away a bunch of bushes that were in my way. And while Resetti doesn’t clean up trees, bushes, or planted crops, he does pick up and put away flowers (or he’ll throw them away if you ask), which in my case saved me from what would’ve been an hour or more of digging up and moving flowers around. Resetti is now my best friend. 

The 3.0 update is a designer’s dream, really. And it’s mostly thanks to those small changes and additions; the new Slumber Island feature, with which you can create up to three separate islands in a dream world, is a sandbox for hardcore decorators to play around in without having to demolish their main islands after all this time. 

Outside of that, the new content is mostly just an excuse to revisit the game, rather than anything as groundbreaking as, you know, strafing. The main addition is a hotel on the pier. It isn’t novel; you’re tasked with decorating some hotel rooms, it introduces a handful of new furniture and clothing items to collect, and the hotel itself attracts tourists to your island to provide a bit of variety. It feels like an extension of the 2021 Happy Home Paradise DLC, which I really enjoyed.

A few days ago, some of my islanders informed me it had been three years and 11 months since I’d spoken to them. At that time, I really didn’t think I’d be back. But with the hotel, 3.0 gave me just enough of an excuse to return to New Horizons, and the quality-of-life updates are giving me a reason to stay a while.

As first noted by Games Fray last week, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company were granted a US patent earlier this month involving summoning characters and making them battle. Headlines popped up with similarly vague language as concern spread on social media: That’s a thing in tons of games! Can they do that? Is that even allowed?

Well, no, because that’s not exactly what they patented. And what they did patent might not stand up to any hypothetical challenges in court.

The patent in question, US Patent No. 12,403,397, was filed in March 2023. It does involve summoning and battle mechanics, but it’s more specific than that: The claims describe a system that sounds a lot like auto-battling from Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, in which the player can send a pokémon into the overworld to automatically fight wild pokémon rather than initiating a typical turn-based battle that the player controls. 

The patent outlines the process by which, after the player has summoned a “sub character,” a game’s software would determine whether to initiate a player-controlled battle, an automatic battle with the sub character, or automatic movement by that same sub character. In general Pokémon terms: Say you’re out in the world and you summon your pokémon by throwing its ball. Did you throw it at a wild pokémon? That’s a regular battle. Did you throw it near a wild pokémon? Your pokémon will come out of its ball and start an auto battle. Did you throw it far away from wild pokémon? Your pokémon will come out of its ball and walk around.

It’s not a patent solely on summoning characters to fight enemies, or on automatically resolving battles — it’s the whole web of options as described in the claim. But that by itself doesn’t mean the patent isn’t concerning for other game developers. Whether this particular patent could unreasonably restrict the mechanics of other games is in part determined by any given court’s interpretation of the patent and the law.

Charles Duan, an assistant professor at American University Washington College of Law whose research has included software copyrights and patent eligibility, told The Verge over email that there are two main ways one could potentially invalidate this specific patent: by anticipation or obviousness, and by subject matter eligibility.

To illustrate the first point, Duan said the process outlined in Nintendo and The Pokémon Company’s patent reminded him of StarCraft, in which the player can give units an “attack-move” order to automatically battle enemies or, alternatively, micromanage a battle themself. “If an old game like Starcraft, which obviously predates the 2022 earliest filing date of this patent, had all the features that this patent claims, then that invalidates the patent under the patent law rules of ‘anticipation’ or ‘obviousness,’” Duan said.

However, he added, the arguments in cases like these can “get really technical,” and it tends to be easier to argue that a patent is invalid on the basis of subject matter eligibility instead. 

Subject matter eligibility “focuses on whether the patent’s claims are (1) directed to an abstract idea and (2) contain no inventive step beyond that idea,” Duan explained. In short, you can patent a specific process that’s unique, but you can’t patent an abstract idea.

“As for (1), basic human business practices and organizations are typically treated as abstract ideas,” Duan added. “Here, the various types of automatic and directed combat sound a lot like ordinary military hierarchies: Generals tell soldiers where to go, and depending on orders the soldiers might follow orders to fight enemies near them, move toward enemies on their own initiative, or receive a destination and automatically fight enemies along the way—all the key parts of [the patent’s claims]. So there would be a pretty good argument that the patent claims are directed to an abstract idea.”

The concerns about this patent aren’t totally unfounded: Nintendo is definitely willing to use patents to defend its turf in court. In September 2024, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company filed a patent infringement lawsuit in Japan against Palworld developer Pocketpair. That lawsuit, which is ongoing, involves a few different Japanese patents filed in 2024 related to throwing a ball at characters in a field, as well as riding characters. US Patent No. 12,403,397, by comparison, was filed in the US in March 2023, before Pocketpair had shown any gameplay footage from Palworld. (Palworld was released in early access in January 2024.) Nintendo of America is also behind an infamous patent filed in 2000 on the “sanity system” from Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, in which the player character’s decreasing “sanity” level can result in trippy visual effects and gameplay-related consequences meant to evoke a sort of mental breakdown. That patent expired in 2021.

Duan noted that it’s hard to predict how a court will read and interpret a patent, so we can’t say for certain just from reading it whether it’ll stand up to any hypothetical challenges in court. But it does seem like this patent might not be quite as threatening to other game developers and publishers as it sounds in a headline-length description.

Even if you’ve never played a Pokémon game before, you can probably figure out how the type chart works. Fire types are weak to water types, water is weak to grass, and grass is weak to fire. Type matchups are foundational to Pokémon battles, far before you get into the weeds of stats and strats. I’ve had the Pokémon type chart memorized for around 25 years. 

That still didn’t stop me from making a rookie error in Pokémon Legends: Z-A. I panicked and sent out my Weedle against an NPC’s Pidgeotto, which it is very much weak to. It got one-shot, obviously. 

It’s not that I forgot how type matchups worked. But the battle system in Legends: Z-A is very, very different from what I’m used to, at least with Pokémon. It’s the second entry in the Legends spinoff series, which began with 2022’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and while the Legends games are still RPGs like the main Pokémon games, they mechanically and structurally diverge a bit from the typical Pokémon formula. And Z-A takes it further than Arceus did: it’s the first Pokémon RPG to feature real-time battles instead of turn-based ones.

In the main series, you choose your actions turn by turn, taking time to think through the options — the right attack to use, whether to switch out for another pokémon, what the opponent might be planning — before locking something in and seeing how it plays out. In Legends: Z-A, on the other hand, you’re facing your opponent more directly. There’s no waiting for both opponents to lock in their actions for the turn; you just pick your pokémon’s move using one of the face buttons, and the move goes out. 

It’s a big departure from nearly 30 years of Pokémon games. I’m used to thinking about Pokémon like a chess match, slowly and several steps ahead; in Z-A, I had to think about the same type matchups and stats and everything else, but quickly and on my feet. It took me some time to adjust.

The demo, which I played ahead of the 2025 Pokémon World Championships in Anaheim, California, was split into two parts lasting around 10 minutes each, both seemingly early in the game and heavily focused on the new battle system. In the first part, I tried my hand at the Z-A Royale, which had me battling NPC trainers around Lumiose City at night. In the second, I battled a Rogue Mega Absol, which felt like the Pokémon version of a classic 3D Zelda boss. In the second part of the demo, I started to get the hang of this style of battling, and what was at first a little overwhelming quickly became an alluring kind of challenge: rewiring the Pokémon part of my brain.

The first big change I had to contend with: since battle in Z-A is in real time, moves are on cooldown timers. You can’t just spam the one super-effective move you have over and over; you have to figure out what else you can do while you wait to use that attack again. Even against very low-level opponents, I found myself relying on status moves like Growl, which lowers the opposing pokémon’s attack stat, as a buffer while my other moves were on cooldown. This had the added bonus of allowing my pokémon to take more hits, buying me some time both for the cooldown and to think.

Using status moves like this isn’t unusual when playing the core Pokémon games at a high level, but it is very unusual against a run-of-the-mill Bellsprout early in the game. I didn’t have enough time in the demo to really play around with it, but I can see myself carefully selecting each pokémon’s moves to account for the cooldown, like ensuring I have Protect on more of my pokémon to block incoming attacks. In other Pokémon games, I’d absolutely teach my pokémon Protect if I was building a competitive team, but I would almost never do it just to play the main story.

It’s not that battles in Legends: Z-A are unforgiving. (I did get smoked by the Pidgeotto, but in my defense, it was also at least 10 levels higher than the pokémon on my team.) But after years and years of approaching every mainline Pokémon game the same way, operating at least a little bit on autopilot and muscle memory in the early game, it’s kind of an exciting challenge to have to look at Pokémon differently.

The battle against Rogue Mega Absol — a wild, rampaging Absol that can Mega Evolve on its own — was similar to the NPC battles in that way, but far more hands-on. Unlike in battles against other trainers, wild pokémon can damage both your pokémon and your character, so you have to physically dodge and move around the arena while selecting your pokémon’s moves, keeping an eye on everyone’s health, and juggling cooldowns. (Using items like Potions is also on a cooldown.) Landing hits on the Rogue Mega causes it to drop orbs of “Mega Energy,” which you have to run and pick up in order to charge up a gauge to Mega Evolve your own pokémon and deal more damage.

It’s even more to balance, but I didn’t find it overwhelming, somehow. In this case, I had a Lucario at my disposal, and it had super-effective moves while also resisting Absol’s attacks, which helped. Lucario already knew Protect, too, so I got to take advantage of the strategy I had just developed in the Z-A Royale. And it’s also a familiar style of boss battle in games more generally, even if it’s different for Pokémon. It was more involved and felt more dangerous than the trainer battles, but I felt competent at it relatively quickly (especially compared to the Pidgeotto incident).

Maybe it’s just a typical learning curve, and I’ll very quickly develop an updated kind of autopilot for the easier parts of Z-A. But I really did like having to think actively about Pokémon in a way that I usually save for competitive play. I hope the game can sustain that for longer than a demo, and that I’ll get to build on the Pokémon knowledge I’ve been amassing for years, rather than just passively flexing it.

_{Pokémon Legends: Z-A will be released for Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 on October 16th.}