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The hardest trick in a long-running franchise is making the familiar feel new without simply replacing it, and Pokémon has spent thirty years struggling with a specific version of that problem. Kanto, the original region, has been revisited, remade, and remastered so many times that it should have nothing left to offer. So the surprise of Bubbly Basin, the first of three planned expansions for Pokémon Pokopia, is that it takes the most over-familiar setting in the entire series, floods it, and finds something there that feels genuinely fresh. It is not a flawless expansion, and its limitations are real, but at its best it does something the mainline games rarely manage, which is make you see a place you have visited a hundred times as if for the first time.
Bubbly Basin is the opening chapter of the three-part Expansion Pass for Pokémon Pokopia, the Switch 2 life-sim in which you play a Ditto rebuilding ruined corners of Kanto by terraforming the land and constructing habitats to coax wild Pokémon into settling there. This installment sends you underwater, into the drowned remains of what was once Cerulean City, accessed through a new Dive move that the base game hands to every player in a free update. Misty's gym survives, half-intact beneath the surface, while the rest of the town has become an aquatic ruin to explore and revive. Developed by Koei Tecmo's Omega Force with Game Freak, it arrived alongside its free update at the start of August, priced as part of a $34.99 pass that covers all three waves.
The strongest thing it does is refuse to be a reskin or just another underwater level in an existing game. Going in, my concern was that an underwater expansion just means the existing gameplay loop with a blue filter over it, the same tasks performed on an archipelago instead of dry land. That is not what this is. The area is almost entirely submerged, and the game adapts its core loop into that new context in a way that feels fresh rather than recycled, floating and building beneath the surface rather than simply walking through a themed backdrop. The swimming mechanics are the pleasant shock here, working far more smoothly than expected, and the Pokémon Center tucked into a pocket of trapped air is exactly the kind of thoughtful touch that sells the fantasy. Most striking is the look of the place, the bioluminescent plants throwing off neon light through the dark water, an aesthetic that feels distinct from anything the game has shown so far. That it manages that while building on a region players have known for three decades is the real accomplishment.
The deeper success is what the expansion does for the world itself. Pokopia has always leaned on environmental storytelling, letting you piece together what happened to this ruined Kanto through the human records, books, and magazines scattered across its landscape, and Bubbly Basin sharpens that into something the franchise has almost never achieved. The mainline Pokémon games tend to feel insulated, each region its own sealed unit that only nods at the others through the occasional line of dialogue. Even the recent entries that gesture at a wider connected world do it at arm's length. This is the first Pokémon experience that makes its region feel like a single thriving, cohesive place, a world with a history and a geography that hang together, rather than a set of discrete zones. Reviving a drowned Cerulean and reading its remains as part of a continuous story with the rest of the map is a small revelation, and it is the strongest argument for what this DLC is doing.
That said, the expansion's ambition is also weirdly narrow, and this is what keeps it from a higher score. You are given one spectacular new area and very little else. The new Dive move technically opens underwater exploration everywhere, but there is really only the one place built to use it meaningfully, the already partly submerged Vermilion City area aside, and the other regions of the map receive nothing new. Going back to Saffron or Pallet Town, you find the same content you already finished, with no expansion to reward the return. For a piece of DLC, that thinness is a disappointment, and it produces an odd effect: rather than pulling me deep into the new content, Bubbly Basin mostly reminded me how much I enjoyed the base game, sending me back to mess around in areas I had already completed rather than living in the expansion itself. The new music selection compounds the feeling of a light touch, offering a smaller and less memorable set of tracks than the area deserved. Neither is a dealbreaker, but together they make the expansion feel like a single strong idea rather than a full one.
Where it goes next is an open and interesting question, because the remaining Kanto landmarks that could get this treatment come loaded with baggage. Part 2 arrives later this year to add accessories rather than a new town, but Part 3, due in 2027, promises another location, and the obvious candidates each carry a problem the developers will have to solve. A drowned or rebuilt Lavender Town raises the question of which ghost Pokémon are even left to populate it, given how many have already appeared. There is also an issue of canon considering if this is future Kanto, Gold and Silver establish that the Pokemon Tower is replaced with Kanto's Radio Tower. Cinnabar Island is probably the most interesting option on the table, but the idea of an area destroyed by a volcanic eruption was already done in Pewter City (and also Cinnabar Island in Gold and Silver). The most intriguing swing would be to leave Kanto entirely for a Johto landmark, an Ecruteak or a Blackthorn, whose aesthetics are distinct enough to justify the trip, though whether the game can migrate those creatures without straining credulity is its own puzzle. Maybe just touch on it with a trip to Mt. Silver and the Indigo Plateau? The point is that Bubbly Basin has set a high bar for reinvention, and the real test is whether the finale can clear it somewhere less naturally suited to the trick than the bottom of the ocean.
Bubbly Basin is a strong, limited expansion that does one thing extremely well and not much beyond it. If you enjoyed Pokémon Pokopia, you will enjoy this, because it is more of that satisfying build-and-populate loop in a beautiful new setting, and the underwater reimagining of a drowned Kanto is a genuine creative success. Just go in understanding what it is: a single gorgeous area rather than a sprawling addition, an expansion that will likely send you back into the base game as much as forward into itself. It made me want to live in this world again, which is no small thing, even if it did not quite give me enough new world to live in. Play it on Switch 2, and here's hoping Part 3 is as inventive as the water made this one.
