I finally beat Pokopia last night. Really wonderful game and I got emotional during the ending. Now that the story's done I'll probably try and play with building more; I'd really like to try and make all the towns look nice. I don't think I really rushed during the game and I did take my time, and tried to place things in way that looked nice, but there was more I could have done and I can do that now.

I really liked the game's story and it had me keep wanting to push forward to see more of it, and the art style is really nice. And it's Pokémon, so the creature designs are great; I don't think Shinx is in the game, but I get to have Marill and Flaaffy and some other favorites. The game seems really generous with anti-frustration features and the design has a lot of thought put into it. Often when you need something, it can be found nearby and just have to look for a bit. I felt like the game had a lot of charm and I found myself really wanting to try and do what I could to help the characters as best as I could.

Even though the characters don't say as much as Animal Crossing characters do, the much wider variety in personalities and unique per-character dialog made them feel more real. Plus all of the actual planned out stories and story dialog, of course. Like involving Trubbish so much in the story got me to take a liking to them as a character, when I otherwise don't care for the design that much.

I do feel like the inventory management can become an issue, but maybe what I'm intended to do is build bigger storage boxes (I stuck with the basic size) because the resource used for them becomes plentiful later on, and also do a better job intentionally trying to sort things. I did have problems with getting lost, but that started to go away after I built more things and I had landmarks. I could have also used frames for signs to show where to go. I also ran into problems as a result of the limit on how many Pokémon can be out and active in an area at once, but I think I would have been fine if I didn't try to do three simultaneous building projects.

I'd really like to try out the Cloud Island feature and play with other people in a persistent world. I've had this longtime desire for a game where I'm making a cool 3D world with my friends and we've got a cute virtual neighborhood, and this is the closest I've seen to a game that's actually trying to be that.

I keep thinking about wanting to play on a Minecraft server with people because I like the potential for making a cool world with other people (Hermitcraft is really inspiring!) and having to gather and refine resources instead of just having infinite amounts of it, but I think it's actually not a great fit for that because it's not a cozy building game, it's a survival game where you just happen to be able to build things, with no real gameplay purpose for doing so.

Most people I meet only seem to care about the survival aspects, and a lot of the Minecraft inspired games I see go further in the survival game direction, but I don't think I actually like survival games and I make myself put up with them in Minecraft's case because it seems like the voxel building game, and it's popular enough that I might have a shot at getting to play it with people (though I'd probably have fun with a creative mode server, despite the loss of resource gathering). Hopefully I can get people to play Pokopia with me.

As an aside, I see Dragon Quest Builders 2 and Pokopia get compared a lot, and Koei Tecmo's Omega Force team did work on both, but after having played a bunch of both I think it's clear they're in very different genres. I would say that Dragon Quest Builders 2 is very firmly an action RPG that's thoroughly focused around building with blocks, but Pokopia is much more of a life sim game and is pretty much Animal Crossing New Horizons (but not held back by having to still play like an Animal Crossing game), where you can terraform but really the game is about fulfilling villager requests (which usually involve doing the equivalent of placing furniture outside.)

I really liked the strong emphasis on block building in Dragon Quest Builders and having to actually make rooms, and manually creating structures it wants instead of having it be a fully automated process with a timer (and you build with the NPCs and work together on the same structure together). Though I suppose Pokopia rewards block building too, because you can make custom houses for Pokémon to live in, and there's a lot of partially started ruins of houses that you can finish.