[COLUMN] Pokémon Pokopia’s Music Is an Early Contender For Best Score of 2026 | by Marty Sliva (Patreon)

For the past two weeks, my life has been consumed by Pokémon Pokopia. When I’m not playing it, I’m talking about it. When I’m not talking about it, I’m scrolling through my feeds and looking at what other folks have created. And when I’m not doing that, I’m probably listening to its phenomenal soundtrack, which has quickly become my go-to choice to have playing throughout my house while I’m working, doing choices, or just needing to decompress.

I’ll have a full video essay up later in the week about my thoughts on the wider game, but for now, I just wanted to focus on that excellent score, and how it takes the chill ethos of Animal Crossing, mixes in some of the vintage motifs we’ve come to love from Pokémon, and then goes above and beyond by directly evolving as you progress through the game.

Given how similar the gameplay flow of Pokopia can be to the likes of Animal Crossing at any given time, it’s no surprise that the music has shades of Nintendo’s iconic franchise. With how much time I’ve spent running around my different biomes, completing various tasks, and checking in on the well-being of all my critter pals, the music is there to support this extremely chill ethos. And like Animal Crossing, the theme of a given area will change depending on the time of day, and will even be different if it starts raining.

The more active melody of Withered Wasteland during the daytime hours slows down at night, perfectly aligning with the wind down in activities that most of your non-nocturnal pals are experiencing. (Also, apparently the word for non-nocturnal is diurnal, but I don’t like the way that looks or sounds, so non-nocturnal it is.) Likewise, once rain starts to fall in the area at any given time of day, the harsher percussion of the song fades a bit into the background, replaced with a more central marimba. It’s probably my favorite use of “rain variants” of a musical theme since Persona 5’s “Beneath the Mask.” And it all feels like the kind of stuff that the Lofi Girl would be spinning on repeat.

If it had just stopped there, I’d still be incredibly happy with Pokopia’s soundtrack. But the game has an incredible trick up its sleeve, one that I genuinely feel will make it a strong contender for best music of 2026 once the year comes to a close.

One of your goals in each of the game’s biomes is to slowly raise the Environment Level of a given area. They start at Level 1, your story goal is to hit Level 5, and the cap for each zone is Level 10. This is accomplished by thoroughly exploring, discovering new Pokémon, aiding them in their requests, building plenty of houses, making it a better place to live, and just overall making your critters happy in any way possible.

And as you start to grow your biomes, and especially as you explore and find documents from the human beings who’ve mysteriously vanished, you start to piece together one of the early reveals of Pokopia. The areas you’re rebuilding are, in fact, the remnants of the towns in Kanto, first introduced in the original Gen 1 Pokémon games. Withered Wasteland is actually the ruins of Fuschia City, home of the Safari Zone and Koga’s poison-centric gym. And as you raise your Environment Level, bits and pieces of the Fuschia City musical theme start to weave into the music of the area, becoming more and more prominent until you suddenly have that “oh shit, I know this song” moment. 

Pokémon as a franchise just celebrated its 30th anniversary in Japan, and is closing in on 28 years here in the west. This is a world that I’ve had a relationship with for the better part of three decades. As a kid who felt the full brunt of Pokémania back in the late ‘90s, the original 151 will always be near and dear to my heart, and that includes each and every track of its music. So to hear those familiar motifs start to reemerge as I progressed through each area felt like a genuine magic trick on the part of the developers Omega Force and Game Freak.

But Pokopia’s emphasis on music doesn’t stop there. Among the various artifacts of the old world that you’re able to dig up, you’ll occasionally find CDs tied to a specific track in Pokémon history. This transcends Gen 1, and includes pieces from the entire franchise, all the way up to the Switch entries.

Side note, I’ve always loved the juxtaposition between Pokémon’s futuristic forms of technology – stuff like instant 3D printing, storing your critters via data in a PC, and time travel – alongside the more simplistic aspects of society – riding a basic bicycle to get around, needing to feed rubbish to power a furnace, and the fact that music primarily exists in CD form. And Pokopia even presents a reason for why CDs are the main source of music in this world – you can find a note in an abandoned Poké Mart in the first area that highlights how during humanity’s decline and the environmental collapse that occurred before the game, the cost of streaming data skyrocketed, leading to society falling back on the more "primitive' form of storage that compact discs provided.

While it’s fun to collect these as relics of the past, you’ll eventually find a use for them once you make it to the Rocky Ridges area of the game. There you’ll meet DJ Rotom, a new form of the familiar Pokémon, and in my headcanon, the cousin of DJ Roomba. Part of his questline involves feeding him five different CDs so he can build a playlist for the party that you’re trying to throw. From then on, he’ll be blasting your tunes as he wanders around town, cheering up all the other critters in his orbit.

You’ll also later be able to craft CD players and put them anywhere in the world, giving you a spot where you can choose which classic Pokémon tune to listen to. That said, it’s a bit frustrating that there’s no easy way to store your music collection outside of building a storage box dedicated to them, especially given the fact that you can literally find and craft CD racks that do not, in fact, rack any CDs.

Also, it would’ve been nice to be able to listen to all of your tunes on the go as you wander around the biomes, instead of being tethered to your CD player or needing to have DJ Rotom follow you around like your own personal hype man. Maybe an update down the line will give us the ability to craft a Walkman, or better yet, a Zune.

Minor gripes aside, I remain completely enamored with Pokémon Pokopia, and its soundtrack is a major component of that. Its chill vibes, reverence for the franchise’s past, and the way it evolves as you progress through the game all combine to form a work that will absolutely stand as one of the year’s very best.