Reviews are flooding in for Pokémon Pokopia, the Animal Crossing-esque ‘Mon life sim co-developed by Koei Tecmo’s Omega Force and Game Freak, and according to almost every outlet, it’s kind of a banger. Reviews will likely keep popping up in the days ahead, including Kotaku’s yet-to-be-published appraisal, but, as of this writing, Pokémon Pokopia is sitting at a respectable 89 out of 100 on Metacritic.
While the high critic scores may come as a surprise to some, the true shocker here is that Pokémon Pokopia’s 89 score makes it Metacritic’s current highest-rated Pokémon game ever. That might sound somewhat unbelievable, but sorting Metacritic’s list of The Pokémon Company’s titles by Metascore confirms that Pokémon Pokopia is currently a single point above the highest-rated Pokémon entry on the site: Pokémon Y, which sports a Metascore of 88.
Personally, the most astonishing part of this news is that Pokémon Y is the highest-scoring Pokémon entry on Metacritic. However, that might have something to do with the fact that Metacritic was launched in 2001, which means that the scores for any Pokémon game pre-Ruby and Sapphire will likely be slightly inaccurate. While Metacritic does include historical data for games pre-2001, certain reviews that were exclusively published in older gaming magazines are considered lost media.
While individually searching for every Pokémon game on OpenCritic to 100-percent confirm this would be a hefty task, there’s a solid chance that Pokémon Pokopia is easily one of that site’s highest-rated Pokémon entries, too. That’s because Pokémon X and Y have a combined 84 percent Critics Recommend score on OpenCritic, versus Pokémon Pokopia’s 93 percent score. Just keep in mind that all of these scores are still subject to change at any point in the next few days, so there’s a solid chance that Pokémon Y might steal back its Metacritic rating crown soon.
Funnily enough, Kotaku’s Kenneth Shepard ranked Pokémon X and Y as the third-lowest Pokémon entry in our ranking of all the mainline Pokémon games. Check back soon to see how Pokopia fares in our review.