IGN gave Pokémon Sword and Shield a 9.3. Fans had been building their teams since 2013.

Here's what the review doesn't mention in any meaningful way: six years of players carefully transferring their Pokémon collections from X and Y, through ORAS, through Sun and Moon, through Bank, through every hoop Nintendo built — all in service of the promise that your Pokémon travel with you. That promise died in November 2019 when Game Freak confirmed that over 400 species would not be accessible in Sword and Shield. The fanbase held memorial threads. People posted screenshots of their shiny Pokémon that couldn't make the trip. The review, which went live on embargo day from a build provided by Nintendo's PR team, spent more words on the Wild Area's cloud effects than on the single largest betrayal of continuity in the franchise's 23-year history. Easy to say from the press box.

Game Freak's official explanation for Dexit was that high-fidelity character models required too much development time. This explanation was debunked within 48 hours when dataminers found that most Pokémon models were ported directly from the 3DS games with minimal changes. The review does not engage with this. It acknowledges 'some familiar faces won't make the trip' and then pivots immediately to praising the Pokémon Camp cooking mini-game, where you can make curry. The reviewer had access to the internet. The debunking was public. The choice to write four sentences about curry instead of one honest paragraph about what was stripped is not a coincidence. It is a choice, and choices tell you something about priorities.

What makes a 9.3 hurt specifically is the math it implies. A 9.3 means this game is meaningfully better than Pokémon Sun and Moon, which got an 8.0. Sun and Moon had a full National Dex, a deeper story, a more realized post-game, and shipped every Pokémon you'd ever caught. Sword and Shield shipped with fewer Pokémon, a shorter story, and a post-game that fits in your jacket pocket. The reviewer decided the Wild Area — a medium-sized zone with dynamic weather — more than compensated for all of that. The fans who spent six years building those teams and watching them disappear behind a firewall would like a word. Easy to say from the press box when none of those Pokémon were yours.

The 9.3 was not the worst thing about this review. The worst thing was the implicit message it sent: that removing content is fine, that breaking six years of continuity carries no score penalty, and that the correct response to the most controversial design decision in franchise history is four paragraphs of warm weather and charming towns. Game Freak received that message clearly. Scarlet and Violet launched three years later in a technical state so broken it became a meme, and the lesson they learned from Sword and Shield's 9.3 was apparently that reviewers will write about the curry.