Nintendo Just Reminded Fans of a Horrific Pokemon Fact

For years, Pokemon has brushed over some of the scary connotations of its adorable magical creatures. However, as seen with recent media, the Pokemon Company is starting to lean more into the weirdness and break free of its previous constraints. We see this with the new Mega Malamar, in the announcement trailer, which used its hypnotic powers to exploit its trainer in a sinister way that was played for laughs. Now, we are getting an entire game that seems set on exploring a strange liminal undercurrent present in the Pokémon series.

That game is, of course, the newly revealed Pokemon Pokopia, which seems inspired by games like Minecraft and Animal Crossing with a creepy catch: the player controls a Ditto that has turned human. Ditto’s transformation powers have always had unsettling implications in the series, but they were never before explored with such direct focus in the setting. Now that Pokémon fans can control a human-like Ditto directly, we seem to be officially entering a new era of series weirdness that has reminded fans of strange Pokémon facts like a Ditto’s affinity for human transformation.

Further Blurring the Line Between Humans and Pokemon

Although the preview trailer seems to be going for a relaxed, cozy game vibe, many Pokemon fans immediately raised eyebrows at the introduction of a playable human Ditto. Originally, the Pokemon games were about friendship and taking loyal and loveable magical pets out on adventures. However, over the years, there has been an inevitable blurring of the lines between Pokemon and humans.

The Pokemon games always had an awkward theme of forced slavery bubbling underneath their kid-friendly exterior, which was made harder to ignore as more intelligent and even sentient Pokemon were introduced to the series. Now, Pokemon fans are forced to confront a Ditto that, by all intents and purposes, is a human being. More than just looking like one, the Ditto is transforming the landscape, recruiting other Pokemon like a trainer, and constructing its own Animal Crossing-esque human village. 

While games like the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series have done their part to anthropomorphize the creatures in the past, the human-like Pokemon protagonist in Pokemon Pokopia feels like a big series step toward confronting something at the heart of its own conceit: if Pokemon can have the emotions and intelligence of humans, then why are they forced to obey them and live in Pokeballs? Does this seemingly innocuous cozy game about a Ditto becoming human in the wilderness foreshadow an eventual Poke revolution?

Although Pokemon Has Always Been Weird, It Might Be Getting Weirder

This isn’t the first time the concept of Dittos turning into humans has been shown in the series, but it definitely feels like the creepiest iteration so far. Pokemon Ultra Sun and Pokemon Ultra Moon tasked players with searching for five Dittos that were hiding out as humans, with a scary implication that they might eventually be able to learn human language and start replacing people in society. In the preview materials for Pokemon Pokopia so far, we have not seen evidence of real humans presently existing in the game’s world. The trailer’s opening scene features a Ditto exploring what appears to be a cave’s ruins and encountering an extremely weathered, possibly ancient Pokedex, where it learns to copy the human form. This poses an interesting question: are humans still alive in the world? 

Could the game possibly take place in a sort of post-apocalyptic Pokémon universe where Dittos have replaced human beings and Pokémon have rebelled against their masters? The official Nintendo X account described the setting as an “empty land” that needs to be reshaped. The only signs of civilization that we see, such as Pokecenters and structures, are built by the Ditto itself.

Other Games Helped Open the Door

It’s hard to contextualize a seeming embrace of always existing weirdness without bringing up games like Palworld, which has taken the Pokemon premise to what some see as its natural conclusion. While some of Palworld’s designs have been criticized for being Pokemon ripoffs, it is this similarity that appealed to Pokemon fans who, for years, have wanted to explore the more sinister implications of the series. Palworld gives players the ability to make their Pals perform literal assembly-line slave labor and winks hard at the concept of interspecies relationships. Palworld developer Pocketpair has even begun work on a dating simulator spin-off that will give players the option to romance their favorite Pals and trainers in a Japanese school setting. Originally announced as an April Fool’s joke, when the potential dating sim received a huge positive response from its fans, plans eventually solidified to make it a thing.

For years, Pokémon enjoyed complete dominance over the creature-catching genre and had little motivation to change things up. Now that alternatives like Palworld exist, it makes sense that Pokemon is getting more creative—and weird—to keep fans engaged. Luckily for Pokemon, but unlucky for innocent fans, the series has years of underutilized and unsettling ideas just sitting there waiting to be inspiration for the next unsettling game premise.

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