Bubbly Basin opens the three-part pass with an underwater town that plays to everything Pokopia does well, while the free 2.0 update quietly fixes what the base game did worst.
Five months as a Ditto
I did not expect Pokémon Pokopia to be the game that owned my Switch 2 this year. When Game Freak and Koei Tecmo’s Omega Force shipped it on March 5, a life sim starring a Ditto pretending to be human sounded like a curiosity, the kind of spin-off you admire for a weekend and then shelve. Instead it became the thing I open when I don’t know what I want to play, which is the highest compliment this genre can earn. I finished the story, raised every town’s environment level, and kept going anyway, because Pokopia’s loop of restoring a ruined world one habitat at a time never stopped being satisfying.
The first of its three parts, Bubbly Basin, arrived on August 5, and after taking it all the way to the bottom I can answer that. Mostly yes, with an asterisk about timing that I will get to.
What is it about?
Its content arrives in three waves. Part 1 is Bubbly Basin, an underwater town with its own story, its own Pokédex, new furniture, and new outfits for Ditto. Part 2 is due late in 2026, adds no new town, and instead introduces accessories that Pokémon can wear, along with new features still to be detailed. Part 3 lands somewhere in 2027 and brings a second new town. Buying the pass today also drops a recipe for dynamic Ditto print blocks and wallpaper into your game, plus an emailed code for 30 rare Pokémetal ingots.
None of this should surprise anyone who has followed the franchise lately. Paid expansions have become standard practice for Pokémon, from Scarlet and Violet‘s The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero to the Mega Dimension add-on for Legends: Z-A, and a game as openly endless as Pokopia was always going to get one. What I did not take for granted was the shape of it: a single purchase covering more than a year of releases, priced once, with the roadmap stated up front. I prefer that honesty to the drip of separately priced packs, even if it means paying today for content that will not exist until 2027.
And you should know the entry requirements before spending a cent: Bubbly Basin’s gate opens only after you have completed the “Raise the environment level!” request at Bleak Beach and learned Dive, which itself requires Surf. If you drifted away from Pokopia early, there is homework between you and the new content.
The 2.0 update changes the game for everyone
Here is the part that complicates the value question, and I want to be straight about it. The single best thing released on August 5 is free. The version 2.0.0 update gives every player the Dive move, full underwater movement, and the ability to build houses beneath the surface of any existing town. It adds the Portal Pod, which finally lets you reach your stored items from any location and goes a long way toward solving the storage mess that has irritated me since March. It adds a safe, bulk item moving, a toggle for the confirmation prompt that used to interrupt certain abilities, new emotes, and new hair colors. Roof pieces now block water, which matters more than it sounds once you start building below the waterline.
That is a serious list, and it lands whether you pay or not. It also means the Expansion Pass has to justify its price on the strength of Bubbly Basin itself, because the headline mechanic came free. Credit where it is due: this is the right way to structure DLC, and it signals a team planning to support Pokopia for years rather than milking it.
Diving is the best thing to happen to Pokopia
It clears the bar. Bubbly Basin is the most interesting space in the game, a drowned region of caves below the surface, caves above it, and dry land on top, all connected by water you move through with complete freedom. Swimming as Ditto feels immediately natural: you rise, sink, and accelerate without friction, and the moment I realized I could enter a half-built house through its open ceiling, roofs became optional in my builds. The Pokémon here swim at every depth too, so a home placed ten blocks off the seabed is as reachable to them as one on the ground, and the whole town develops a verticality that no surface region in Pokopia can match.
Building underwater is genuinely different rather than reskinned. Loose items drift, broken blocks bob upward, new floating block types let you anchor structures in open water, and entire houses can hover above the seabed. My one real complaint about the construction side is debris: smash through a wall of blocks down there and the fragments crowd around the camera in a way that never happens on land, and clearing your view becomes its own small chore. I also have to flag what free diving looks like outside the new town. The base game’s five regions gained oceans you can enter, but nothing was placed in them beyond whirlpools that behave like the sparkle spots on land. Swimming through that emptiness makes it very clear the water was built for Bubbly Basin, and everywhere else merely permits it.
Fifty new Pokémon and a separate Pokédex
Collecting works here the way it works everywhere in Pokopia, and it bears spelling out for anyone still on the fence about the game itself: species do not appear until you have built the habitat that suits them, habitats raise the comfort of the Pokémon living in them, and comfort is what keeps a town’s residents around. There is no brute-forcing it. You can swim the Basin for an evening and meet nothing new if the right patch of coral and furniture is not standing somewhere, which is exactly the pressure that makes the building half of the game matter.
The Basin keeps its own Pokédex, opened the first time you speak to Popplio, and it runs to 50 species across 36 new habitats. The spread is smart, reaching from Kanto to Paldea: Cloyster, Totodile, Mudkip, Popplio, Wugtrio, Lumineon, Dhelmise. Water types were the base game’s thinnest category, and this roster fixes that in one move. The mythical Manaphy arrives through the story and Phione fills a slot beside it, and an event built around Feebas and Milotic has already been announced. One quirk of Pokopia’s design helps completionists along: because every member of an evolution line features once one of them does, confirming a single stage tells you what else is coming, and the Basin Pokédex fills in faster than its raw count suggests.
Habitat construction is where the DLC quietly raises difficulty. The new underwater habitat assets don’t exist in the base game, several require materials you will have to hunt for, and at least one, the Mermaid’s Gym, demands genuinely rare items before it will trigger a spawn. I like that. Late-game Pokopia had become a routine of stamping out grass patches, and being forced back into scavenging gave the collection loop its tension back. What I don’t like is the ceiling: there is no new Legendary anywhere in this wave. For a pass sold partly on its Pokédex, closing Part 1 without a marquee catch feels like an obvious card left unplayed, presumably held for 2027.
The story beats you already know
The Basin’s narrative is the weakest part of the package, and I will be honest about why: you have done it before, five times, in the base game. Arrive in a ruined place, meet its residents, take requests, raise the environment level, watch the color return. It is warm and occasionally lovely, and the underwater setting dresses it well, but the structure is a photocopy, and anyone hoping the paid content would take a narrative risk will not find one here.
The pacing stumbles too. Pokopia insists on walking you through fundamentals again at the start of the Basin, explaining systems that anyone far enough into the game to have reached Bleak Beach mastered long ago. For a piece of content that is only reachable deep into the campaign, that caution is baffling, and the first hour drags because of it. Once the town opens up properly the old rhythm takes over and the hours disappear the way they always have. But the on-ramp deserved more respect for the player’s time.
An underwater town is a good look for the Switch 2
Visually, Bubbly Basin is the best argument Pokopia has made for itself. The base game’s soft, toy-box art style gains an entire extra dimension from water: light falls in columns through the surface, color reads differently at depth, and a finished district glowing at the bottom of a dark cave is the most striking image the game has produced. Small touches sell the physics, from items drifting when dropped to the way debris rises instead of falling. Legibility, my worry going in, turns out fine; even in the deepest sections I never lost track of where a habitat ended and open water began.
The new furniture and the Ditto outfits pull their weight too. The Basin’s kits lean nautical, they read instantly against all that blue, and having pieces designed to be seen from above and below changes how you compose a build in ways the surface sets never asked of me. Dressing Ditto for the depths is, of course, entirely pointless, and it is exactly the sort of pointless charm this game runs on. My wardrobe grew more in a week of the Basin than in the months before it.
The sound holds the same gentle register as the rest of Pokopia, muffled and rounded appropriately once you drop below the surface, and it stays out of the way, which in this genre is the correct choice. Nothing here will make anyone’s soundtrack of the year list, and nothing needs to.
Value, pacing, and what comes next
A full town to restore, 50 species to house, a build space unlike anything in the base game. Judged as a third of the pass, Part 1 is good value. Judged as the only thing you can touch until late 2026, it asks for patience, and the fact that Part 2 contains no town at all means the next comparable drop of content is over a year away, in 2027.
That shapes my recommendation more than any flaw in the Basin itself. Pokopia veterans with a maxed-out map will inhale this and be glad they paid. Anyone who stalled before Bleak Beach is buying a locked door plus homework, and the free 2.0 update already hands them the most transformative piece of the whole release.
Verdict
Bubbly Basin is Pokopia operating at its best: a beautiful, vertical, mechanically fresh town bolted onto a story template the game has now used six times. The free update alongside it fixes storage, streamlines building, and gives everyone the water, which makes the pass a purchase about content rather than features, and the content is strong. Buy it now if Pokopia is still in your rotation and you want the best region in the game. Wait for Part 3 if you fell off months ago, because the update will pull you back in for free, and the pass is not going anywhere.
