For Animal Crossing and Pokemon fans, Pokemon Pokopia is like a dream come true, blending many of the best elements of both series. Not only does Pokemon Pokopia give Animal Crossing a run for its money in terms of creative freedom, but it also largely fixes several complaints Animal Crossing fans have had about New Horizons, even six years after its launch. One of the most frustrating parts of Animal Crossing: New Horizons is finding the exact right villager and convincing them to move onto the player’s island, but Pokopia offers a major improvement in this regard.
Despite the Pokemon series having over 1,000 creatures as of Gen 9, Pokopia only contains around 300 species for players to find. Comparatively, Animal Crossing: New Horizons has over 400 villagers on its roster, making it far more difficult to find a needle in a haystack, so to speak. New Horizons only allows players to have 10 villagers living on their island at a time, whereas Pokopia players can have any number of Pokemon residents as long as they have built a habitat for them to live in. Coupled with the method for recruiting Pokemon from a friend’s island, Pokopia has created the ideal blueprint for villager collecting that the next Animal Crossing should follow.
Pokemon Pokopia Player Discovers Horrifying In-Game Conversation
For being a cozy life-sim game, Pokemon Pokopia has some pretty dark interactions, including one found in a conversation between two Gen 1 critters.
Getting a Specific Villager in Animal Crossing: New Horizons Can Be a Chore
Other than just waiting for a random villager to move to their island, Animal Crossing: New Horizons players really only have two options for villager hunting: Mystery Island Tours and inviting one from a friend’s island. Both of these methods come with major drawbacks that prevent them from being perfect methods. However, with some tuning based on the foundation Pokemon Pokopia has created, future Animal Crossing games have a clear path toward improving villager hunting.
Balance the critic averages
Balance the critic averages
Easy (6)Medium (8)Hard (10)
Mystery Island Villager Hunting is Inconsistent
Whenever players embark on a Mystery Island Tour, they have the chance to encounter a random villager also visiting the same island. If they have a free plot on their home island, players can invite that villager back to live there. However, the main problem with villager hunting in Animal Crossing: New Horizons using this method is its pure randomness, which essentially gives players around a 1 in 400 chance of finding their desired villager, almost like shiny hunting in a mainline Pokemon game.
Each Mystery Island Tour also requires a Nook Miles Ticket, which costs 2,000 Nook Miles each and can become very expensive very quickly if players get unlucky in their hunt.
Trading for a Villager Can Be Costly
For a more targeted approach to recruiting a specific Animal Crossing: New Horizons villager, players can visit another player’s island and ask a villager to move to their town. This method only works if that villager is already in the process of moving out (their house is in boxes), and results in the original island’s owner losing that villager to the visitor. Often, players will have to pay for the more desirable New Horizons villagers through third-party apps like Nookazon, requiring them to shell out a hefty sum of Bells to acquire them.
How Pokemon Pokopia Fixes New Horizons’ Villager Trading Problem
Unlike Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Pokemon Pokopia places a greater emphasis on filling out the Pokedex and recruiting each available critter to the player’s world. To this end, more quality-of-life features make accomplishing the task of hunting for specific Pokemon far easier than villager hunting in Animal Crossing. The biggest factor in improving this grind is the use of Star Pieces to recruit Pokemon from other players’ worlds.
Animal Crossing Should Take Note of Pokopia’s Pokemon Recruiting Feature
Differing from the mainline Pokemon games, Star Pieces in Pokopia aren’t sold for money, but are instead used to recruit Pokemon from a friend’s world to the player’s own. Players simply need to gift a Star Piece to a Pokemon they don’t have while visiting another world, and that Pokemon will give them a gift. If players bring that gift back home and place it in their world, that Pokemon will spawn and join their village.
The best part about this method of villager hunting is that it doesn’t remove the Pokemon from the original player’s world like recruiting Animal Crossing villagers from a friend’s island does. Instead, a Star Piece essentially allows players to copy a Pokemon from another player’s world to their own. The only real drawback is that Star Pieces can be quite resource-intensive, requiring 99 Stardust to craft. However, Stardust is a fairly abundant resource on Dream Islands, so as long as Pokopia players visit a Dream Island daily and collect all of its Stardust, they shouldn’t have a problem crafting Star Pieces.
- Released
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March 5, 2026
- ESRB
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Everyone / Users Interact, In-Game Purchases
