Wailord highlights huge flaw in Pokemon Sword and Shield

Paul Cot

Even months after its release, trainers are still loving Pokemon Sword and Shield. The game does have one huge flaw though, which is highlighted every time Wailord gets into battle.

That issue is the game doesn’t show just how large Wailord is. A lot of you will know the that the word massive doesn’t do the Float Whale Pokemon’s size justice.

Not only is it the biggest in terms of overall size, but it is actually the second tallest. It would have been the tallest too, if it weren’t for Eternatus’ introduction in Gen 8.

Wailord Gyarados Size Pokemon Sword Shield
Unless that is one tiny Wailord, its size has been drastically underestimated.

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Scaling isn’t working

So, it would have been reasonable to expect quite the spectacle when it comes out to battle. Well, that is from the case as it doesn’t look much bigger than many of its opponents.

In fact a fairly small Pokemon trainer is actually taller than it! In the image above, if its billed 14.5 meter height is accurate, then it should be around ten times taller.

Meanwhile, Gyarados is also one of the taller Pokemon at 6.5 meters. Again, its appearance in this battle only highlights the problem further.

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That isn’t all though as other smaller Pokemon don’t look far off it either. Charizard, who is officially 1.7 meters, would look similar in size as well.

Genius Sonority show them how’s it done

The size issue could probably be overlooked if it wasn’t for the fact that a Pokemon game from 16 years ago managed to scale species properly! These were both built for the Gamecube by developers Genius Sonority and to this day hold up pretty well.

Even though they were released 17 and 15 years ago respectively, they are still often used to highlight how Pokemon games should be made – especially with the relatively poor hardware they had to work with. This is exactly what DistantKingdom decided to do.

This is despite some of the newer trainers never getting the chance to play Pokemon Colosseum or Gale of Darkness. They were both built for the Gamecube by developers Genius Sonority and to this day hold up pretty well.

Wailord Corphish Scaling
Wailord in comparison to Corphish shows how Pokemon XD Gale of Darkness scaled species properly.

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Whether scaling was simply an oversight from Game Freak or it was something they were unable to do on the Nintendo Switch, there hasn’t been any official comment on it. It’s very unlikely we will see Pokemon Sword and Shield updated to fix it.

Hopefully they’ll be able to show just how big (and small) some Pokemon are when the next game gets released. We’ll have to wait and see whether that will be in 2020 or the following year, though.