The Whole Plate: How Nintendo's Sandboxes Are Different

On the holistic game design of the surprise smash-hit Pokémon Pokopia.

March 20, 2026

As my Mastodon followers can attest, I have been playing a lot of Pokémon Pokopia since its release earlier this month. Pokémon is probably my single favourite game series ever, and despite being wholly unlike any other Pokémon game, Pokopia has me firmly in its grasp to the point where I have accepted the inevitability that I will pay an extra CA$40 or so for DLC expansions whenever they are released.

I also really enjoyed Pokopia’s direct predecessor, Dragon Quest Builders 2. The relation between these games is no secret; Koei Tecmo’s Omega Force developed both games. Each game shares many underlying mechanics: DQB2 had procedurally-generated islands called “Explorer’s Shores” where the player can gather resources without destroying their main islands, and Pokopia has “Dream Islands” to do the same. DQB2 has “Sets” of adjacent furniture which affect the behaviour of residents when assembled, and Pokopia has “Habitats” which cause new Pokémon residents to appear. Both are block games with crafting, where metals are smelted in forges and residents sometimes drop resources useful to the player.

That said, Pokémon Pokopia is also quite different from Dragon Quest Builders 2. Where in DQB2 it was possible to obtain a literal infinite supply of certain basic crafting materials (eventually allowing the game to become a fully creative sandbox with no restraints on player time), Pokopia requires the player to constantly go out and collect more resources from Dream Islands, of which only one can be visited per real-world day. Both games allow the player to upgrade their abilities to be able to better modify their environment, but Pokopia requires the player character to constantly eat specific cooked meals to maintain upgraded abilities while DQB2’s upgrades are permanent after acquiring them.

Dragon Quest Builders 2—which did not involve Nintendo—has the player’s capabilities slowly expand as they progress through its content. Pokémon Pokopia requires the player to continually reengage with certain mechanics like exploration and cooking to maintain their capabilities. In Pokopia, players need to farm crops to get ingredients, actually cook those ingredients to get the foods necessary to power themselves up, then eat again and again as their powered-up moves' power points dwindle to nothing and they revert to their original form. The same applies elsewhere as well; To continue crafting items one will need to venture into 5 different kinds of Dream Islands to obtain materials (many exclusive to specific island types) that can then be processed and crafted into the final products which will be used to construct new Habitats, build new housing, and decorate existing living spaces. The latter task contributes to comfort levels, which themselves unlock new crafting recipes.

Pokémon Pokopia’s gameplay loop requires players to continually and indefinitely engage with every part of the game’s design. Nothing in Pokopia is one-and-done; The game’s upgrades aren’t permanent, materials need to be procured again and again, the player occasionally needs to cook to stay powered up, the player always needs to talk to the game’s residents to obtain certain intermediate materials, players need to explore all of the game’s locales every day to continue finding new treasure and crafting recipes, etc. The game feels more cohesive as a whole because it feels like nothing is wasted. Everything the player learns to do during the course of the game’s story remains relevant afterwards as the player tasks themselves with building the game world into whatever they want.

The flip side of Pokémon Pokopia’s design decisions is that the player can’t simply focus on building. Raw materials, decorations, furniture, food—eventually, item stocks begin to decline and must be replenished. By the very specific way the game is designed, the player must take frequent breaks from their active task to focus on something else. These breaks aren’t mandated by arbitrary restrictions, instead come up organically through the game’s mechanics. The benefit of these decisions is that players are much less likely to burn themselves out spending hours completely fixated on a specific task. This is especially valuable in a building game, where players might undertake large projects and could later wind up becoming discouraged from finishing due to how much time it would take to complete.

The idea that frequent breaks from building can help the player stay focused might be surprising, but it seems to be an explicitly intended aspect of Pokémon Pokopia. The game’s Japanese title is Poco a Pokémon, in reference to the Spanish and Italian phrase poco a poco which means “little by little”. The game expects players to approach the task of building their world little by little, gradually, over a lengthy time horizon.

Having played other Nintendo games in the past decade, it is unsurprising that the transition from Dragon Quest Builders 2 to Pokémon Pokopia brought about these changes in the overall game design because this philosophy has been used in many of Nintendo’s biggest hits in the past decade.

In 2017, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild brought weapon durability to the series. The game’s myriad weapons break after enough use, requiring the player to constantly seek out replacements. Enemies no longer drop hearts that heal the player, instead dropping various crafting materials for meals which heal the player character and bolster their capabilities.

In 2019, Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield reversed a decade-old shift in the series design, making it so items that teach valuable moves to Pokémon can no longer be used indefinitely after being changed to do so in 2009. Instead, the player needs to participate in that game’s new raid battles to obtain Technical Records (TRs). The previous Technical Machines (TMs) continue to exist and can still be used indefinitely, but the moves they teach are generally inferior and largely irrelevant to end-stage gameplay.

In 2020, Animal Crossing: New Horizons borrowed from Breath of the Wild by making its tools fragile. Players now need to craft replacements for their tools using materials found on their home island. These materials are also in limited supply per real-world day, requiring visits to extra “Nook Miles Islands” to obtain more during especially lengthy gameplay sessions.

In 2022, Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet continued the trend started by Sword and Shield by making all TMs single-use. This time, TMs are crafted using materials dropped from wild Pokémon that are defeated in battle. New-ish to this entry are a dozen-or-so daily “mass outbreaks” of specific Pokémon. As each outbreak usually holds over 60 of a specific monster, they present an excellent opportunity to obtain specific desirable crafting components for the TMs necessary to train up Pokémon for use in raids and in player-versus-player competitive battles. A fully trained Pokémon won’t need maintenance, training new ones or retraining existing ones will still require engagement with various mechanics.

Each of these games is a sandbox. After an initial tutorial (except for Zelda, this would be the game’s main story until credits are rolled), the player is left largely to their own devices to pursue their own goals however they see fit. Players explore, construct, train monsters, to their heart’s content because those tasks themselves are the fun. The game’s own arbitrary story goals exist simply to teach the player how to interact with the sandbox, to prepare the player for when the training wheels are taken away.

In 2026, Pokémon Pokopia became the apotheosis of what I call the “holistic game design” pushed by Nintendo. If designers implement a game mechanic they think is fun or interesting, then it will be incorporated tightly into the final product’s gameplay loop wherever possible. Collect materials, craft useful items, build facilities that make it easier to collect more materials, and actively maintain this heightened power level through what’s been built, pushing ever greater heights, leaving no aspect of the game untouched while continuing to reengage. Everything in these games exists to guide players into interacting with everything else these games have to offer. Nothing feels superfluous or accidental, and nothing is likely to be forgotten. You’ll finish the whole plate, savouring each aspect of the meal carefully crafted by the chef—and you’ll come back again and again for more.

This result is especially impressive coming from Omega Force, which are not owned by Nintendo. I’ll note however that Game Freak—partial owners of the Pokémon series and close partners with Nintendo’s designers—were heavily involved with Pokopia’s direction, and Omega Force themselves have worked with Nintendo in the past. The guiding hand of Nintendo’s game design is felt very heavily in this particular game and it makes me curious as to whether Omega Force’s future projects will incorporate lessons learned from this game’s incredible success. Given how readily the game industry simply copies other games on a superficial level instead of diving deep into design, I’ll assume not until happily proven otherwise.

Pokémon Pokopia’s success speaks for itself. As of writing this post, it is already one of the best-selling games of the year, it is the single highest reviewed game of 2026 (ever so slightly better than Resident Evil: Requiem, released a week earlier) and the highest reviewed Pokémon game ever. To be so successful, a game needs to deliver a great experience and I believe that the holistic approach to game design—each system and mechanic has its place and supports the rest of the game—is a large part of why so many players are so tightly gripped by this game.