Your thoughts on the Galar region?
Matthew Perez I kind of have mixed opinions of it myself. It's well-known that Galar is based on the UK, so I'm sure that's going to be great for all the British Pokémon fans out there, I know many of them have been clamoring for a UK Pokémon region for quite some time now. But if I'm looking at it from the perspective of the series as a whole, I gotta say: Not a big fan.
Obviously, I am waiting to see how well it is executed, maybe the story is really well-written and there's a lot of hidden gems and I end up really liking SwSh a lot...but I myself am not really a huge sports fan so the whole Premier League-inspired Pokemon League thing I'm not really digging. But I'll give GameFreak credit because it is a pretty new concept for a Pokémon region, we haven't really seen a region like Galar yet, the closest region to it would be Kalos and that is based more specifically on France even though it has castles and the like.
And a few other things that are being glossed over or excluded from the Galar region entirely - we haven't really seen any references to British Literature, or any hints of Shakespeare-style plays with Pokémon, or Blackpool Pleasure Beach amusement park (Blackpool is apparently the real-life counterpart for Nessa's city), or some other really intriguing elements of British culture & history - not really discussed. With the Galar region they seem to really be focusing on the Stadiums (inspired by Britains football culture) & the Wild Area (inspired by the Lake District), which I do not think would be my favorite parts of the UK. I mean obviously I've never been to a Manchester United game or gone camping in the Lake District so I don't really know for sure, but I would suspect that some of the aspects of the UK that are being glossed over with the Galar region, would end up being my favorite parts of a 2-week-long UK trip.
So in a way I think that is kind of unfortunate, because one of the biggest problems I had with the Unova region despite being an American myself was that it was based specifically on New York City, and it felt like it was kind of designed to check every single cliché box - hence we got stuff like Pokestar Studios, Iris being loud & brash in the anime unlike her game counterpart, a boss & employee relationship between Black & White in the manga, Rosa & Hilda being canonized in Pokemon Masters as both being very energetic A-type personalities. Galar seems like it has the potential to be similar, and I kind of feel like they're making it out to be a fairly anti-intellectual region in order to differentiate it from Kalos & Sinnoh, the two regions to which it seems to be the most similar to.
Kalos & Alola are definitely guilty of playing up to stereotypes too, don't get me wrong, but I feel like if I were a Pokémon Trainer, I would feel more at home in those two regions than I would in Unova.
One of my fears is that Gen VIII will end up being more or less a repeat of Gen VI, in which ORAS were widely considered to be far superior games to XY. And while I personally think that XY are definitely underrated games and that the Kalos region had a lot of potential, I would have to agree that it suffered from a lack of endgame activities & a feeling like Kalos was meant to be a very anime-oriented region, or that the games were rushed in order to get Sun & Moon ready for the 20th anniversary of the franchise. Sinnoh is probably my favorite region so far and while I am definitely keeping my fingers crossed that Diamond & Pearl remakes do come out on the Switch in 2020, I suspect that if that ends up being the case, we will get a lot of people who like those games far more than Sword & Shield.
Only this time, we won't even have a proper anime series to remember the Galar region by once Gen IX comes along, since the anime is getting a reboot that is confirmed to take place in every region so far, not just Galar.
Just my thoughts.
