Pokémon Sword and Shield’s opening is a mix of nostalgia and innovation

Image: Game Freak / Nintendo

If you’ve never played a Pokémon game before, you’d be forgiven for thinking the opening 30 minutes or so of the series’ latest installments, Sword and Shield, were those of a standard Japanese role-playing game.

There’s a flashy cutscene that introduces the games’ most powerful pokémon trainer, Leon, alongside a gigantic stadium in the new Galar region, where pokémon battling is paramount to the culture and trainers are treated like a cross between pop stars and athletes. And there’s also a new transformation on display early on, called Dynamax, that renders the once-cute pocket monsters as enormous, skyscraper-sized fighters. It’s a sense of scale we’ve never seen in Pokémon games before, and it helps really drive home that the...

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