Pokemon Pokopia players have already figured out how to speedrun the cozy life sim, with the time to hit credits sitting at around three hours.
YouTube creator PulseEffects has shared a video detailing how its done, and while the point of the game obviously isn't to hit credits as fast as you can, it's certainly interesting to see how such a laid back game can be minmaxxed like this.
I won't go into all the details here for the sake of spoilers (that's what the video is for, if you wanna see 'em), but an early example includes not creating the biome for Slowpoke where I imagine almost everyone did (down near Magikarp), and instead building it near Hitmonchan, and thus making the act of escorting the slow Pokemon to the Pokemon Center way less tedious.
The most shocking aspect of the entire run is that the best ability in the game – Graveller's Rollout, which allows you to speed around as a ball and destroy terrain along the way – is completely skipped. A few powerups are skipped because most of them are "kinda unnecessary" or "take way too long to obtain to be worth it in a speedrun," with Rollout being an example of the latter.
If there's anything you would associate Pokemon Pokopia with, it's going fast and making sure you get to the ending, of course. Sure there's a Minecraft-inspired cozy game in there that has you rebuild nice communities with the power of Pokemon and friendship, but why would you do that when you can rush to the end as was obviously intended? At the very least, some have taken that approach, as the speedruns for Pokemon Pokopia are now down to three hours, which seems inconceivable to me who has put however many hours in and still not finished either of the second biomes or met the Snorlax or Pikachu variants.
Pokemon Pokopia sends monthly Switch 2 sales flying by 154% in the UK.
