Pokémon Sword and Shield’s opening is a mix of nostalgia and innovation www.theverge.com

It’s a sense of scale we’ve never seen in Pokémon games before, and it helps really drive home that the top-down, pixel art days are long gone.
There’s no professor to meet, and no grumpy rival that you face off with from the get go, as in classic Pokémon games.
Game Freak knows it has a diehard fan base; just look at the national dex controversy that erupted earlier this year.
Outside the aesthetics and narrative, I can confidently report that Sword and Shield play much like Pokémon games when you really dig into the minute-by-minute gameplay.
But as a pure experience, Sword and Shield seems fresh and new enough to have me interested as a lapsed Pokémon fan.