Chief director of Pokopia at Koei Tecmo, Takuto Edagawa, says that his team was "very focused" on writing dialogue for each of the game's individual Pokemon, with the game's producer at The Pokemon Company, Kanako Murata, calling the large amount of conversation between Pocket Monsters "top class". While Pokemon show their charms through their animations in most series games, there are a few where Pokemon hold full conversations. One of the major successes of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series is that they allow players to embody a Pokemon, and make friends with other 'mons as an equal. However, this is certainly an outlier in terms of the series Pokemon devs "wanted to create a different type of game that's not an RPG" with Pokopia, but that "was a challenge" Pokopia's new Pikachu form was dubbed "unfortunate Pikachu" by co-dev Koei Tecmo, but it comes from a place of love Pokopia lead wants to "scale" games "aside from battling," as "there are also lots of different ways to enjoy Pokemon" "Truthfully, I didn't think [the team] would be able to create so many unique lines of dialogue," says Ogawa. "It's all thanks to Koei Tecmo's deep understanding of Pokemon." Edagawa responds, "We decided that it was extremely important to represent every Pokemon's unique personality, so we really focused on [writing]." Ogawa goes on to discuss how Edagawa and his team's "labor-intensive" efforts have led to "a huge amount of dialogue" in Pokopia. This, in turn, led to challenges with the game's localization and the preservation of each Pokemon's personality. "Just in terms of the amount [of dialogue], I think it's top class compared to existing Pokemon games," says Murata. "In addition, when localizing we were extremely careful to ensure all of the various conversational tones were translated into every language." Turns out that saying 'my friend Malamar' could become a reality. Pokemon Pokopia's new Pikachu form was dubbed "unfortunate Pikachu" by co-dev Koei Tecmo, but it comes from a place of love: "We were surprised and thrilled"