First, a programming note: I'm going to be releasing a new series at some point in the future titled What I'm Replaying. This will allow me to review some games that I've completed before, but have a desire to replay for whatever reason. It feels like this will allow me to contribute more to this blog, specifically during a time in which I am replaying a bunch of old titles. I'm not going to reach into the past for games I've recently beaten again (specifically Donkey Kong Country and Donkey Kong Country 2), but I am going to start from the moment I hit publish on this particular blog post, so keep an eye out for volume 1 of this series coming soon!
Gosh, this is a super tough review for me to write. In my pantheon of beloved retro games that haven't aged terribly well, Pokemon Red is up there. I. Love. That. Game. I spent countless hours playing and replaying the game, finishing the Elite Four, catching Mewtwo, and repeating ad nauseum. I can still remember exactly the procedure to create 128 rare candies. I still remember where the ghost PC is. I still remember where each and every hidden rare candy in the game is located. I know where every Pokemon is located. I know all of the differences between Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue. I can quickly navigate using the portals through the Silph Co. Tower. I probably know more about the substance of Pokemon Red than any other game. But a lot of things about it have aged poorly. Some types, notably dragons, normal, and psychic, are completely overpowered in the game due to a lack of good counters to that type. There's a pretty shallow selection of usable Pokemon in the game, and each Pokemon can only have one type. Each type has only a handful of Pokemon in it. There are some game-warping mechanics like Wrap and Fire Spin that make the game a lot less fun now. Not having online battling and training feels particularly archaic now. It's by far the most poorly balanced Pokemon game released in America, and it bears mentioning that, news to many American fans of the series, Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue are actually revisions to the original Pokemon games in Japan, and those original games are even more poorly balanced than the ones we got! But with all of that said, Pokemania existed for a reason-the game is incredible, and is still incredible today. But modernizing the approach seems completely reasonable, given the flaws, and I think an update of those games makes more sense now.
So I have no opposition to updating these games in the form of Pokemon: Let's Go Eevee! and Pokemon: Let's Go Pikachu!, although they are really the most similar to Pokemon Yellow. And they actually nail a lot of the revisions here, making a more user friendly approach that successfully experiments with a lot of new mechanics, although there are plenty of misses to go around. But reviewing this game makes me feel awfully defensive about my beloved old friend, and this may be unfairly negative towards it, so just keep that in mind.
Substantially, the single biggest revision to the game is that unlike in Pokemon Yellow, you can now get two versions of the game, each with their own special starter Pokemon who can't evolve. I had Eevee! by default, as I borrowed the game from my sister-in-law who got it in a lot of Switch games along with a second hand Switch. I probably would have picked Pikachu! myself, as I'm more fond of Pikachu than Eevee, and I think thematically the idea of Pikachu not evolving makes more sense than Eevee not evolving. Literally the whole point of Eevee is its flexible evolutions, and I think there are plenty of fan favorite Pokemon they could have picked to start with instead of Eevee, or just allowed Eevee to evolve. Like Red and Blue, the games have a subset of Pokemon who are not catchable with either title, necessitating trading Pokemon to fill out your Pokedex. More on this later.
So how, you might ask, are you supposed to tackle the Elite Four with an Eevee, a notoriously basic Pokemon whose entire existence is justified by its multiple evolutions? Well, do the boys at Game Freak have a surprise for you! The first way in which Eevee is able to compete is through a generous dispersion of Eevee Candies, which, when fed to your Eevee, give it +1 in every stat category. You don't need too many of these to balance out your Eevee competitively, and you'll get plenty. Eevee also seems to have unusually high base stats. You'll also have access to some unique moves that pay a nice homage to Eevee's true destiny as a blank slate. There's one special move for each type into which Eevee can theoretically evolve (fire, water, electric, dark, psychic, ice, grass, and fairy *takes gasping breath*), and boy are they absurdly powerful. Each has a power of 90 (think Thunderbolt/Ice Beam levels of power), hits every time, and has some attached effects that are game breaking. I ended with Bouncy Bubble (leeches half of the damage away as health), Glitzy Glow (creates a barrier to reduce damage from special attacks), and Baddy Bad (creates a barrier to reduce damage from physical attacks), along with Double-Edge, which gets a STAB bonus from Eevee's normal typing on top of the ability to leach back the recoil through the judicious use of Bouncy Bubble. My Eevee was a BAD dude, and I didn't even focus on training him all that much.
When I said that the biggest revision is the existence of two starter Pokemon, I definitely lied. The biggest revision is the process of catching Pokemon, which is a wild departure from any Pokemon game that has come before. Now, instead of being randomly attacked in the tall grass, Pokemon now just roam in the open, and you can choose whether to initiate an attempt to catch them. This is based largely on the concept of catching from Pokemon GO and the inclusion of the word "go" in the title should suggest that there's more than a little overlap. After bumping into the Pokemon, however, things continue to change from the status quo. Rather than battling the Pokemon to low health and then capturing them, you now have to use motion controls to capture the Pokemon by "throwing" the Poke Balls at them. In handheld mode, you move the system around until the Pokemon is in the center of the screen and then press "A", but in docked mode, you actually mimic a throwing motion with the joycons.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to this kind of idea. I really enjoy Pokemon GO and still play it daily, and find the capture mechanics to be really fun and central to my enjoyment of the game. But the controls in docked mode simply suck, and there are no alternative control schemes short of buying another weird Poke Ball peripheral that I don't have and can't review. But the ball rarely goes where you think it will, and causes all kinds of frustrations that the excellent mechanics on mobile simply don't have. If they were really serious about incorporating the mobile mechanics here, they should have tried to give players the opportunity to use mobile phones as a control interface, which would have allowed the kind of deft controls that hyper sensitive mobile touch screens are geared towards. Other modern game consoles have used mobile phones as controllers, so I don't think it would be much of a technical challenge to do so. It also unlocks certain things that you just can't do with motion controls, like the curveballs that are so fun in GO.
Speaking of questionable controls, what was Nintendo thinking on this one? One of the big promotional deals with the game was that you could now play in coop mode, something that frankly breaks the game, but I guess it's geared towards younger players, which is alright. You don't have to use it if you don't want to, and I didn't. However, the concession they made when they unlocked multiplayer was that you could only play the game with one joycon, or in handheld mode with two. THIS IS SO DUMB, NOT THAT I'M MAD ABOUT IT OR ANYTHING!!!!! This is stupid because you can't even play the joycons in horizontal mode, meaning that you're basically restricted to playing with one hand, which is so unnatural it feels obscene. Just go try it for a bit and see if I'm not right. You can't even use wired or wireless pro controllers or similarly styled controllers either. Here are the rankings of control scheme options available.
1. 2 joycons coop/2 joycons one player/traditional controllers/handheld/mobile phones
2. Atari 5200 controls/handheld
99. 2 joycons coop/1joycons one player/handheld
The controls are the single most frustrating thing about this game. They had such rich opportunities to craft a new and unique Pokemon experience based around fun new control schemes, and totally missed the boat.
Eevee also has a radically different experience mechanism than the traditional games in that experience gained from trainers is very flat. You won't get nearly as much here as you expect, and part of the reason why is that you now automatically share half of your gained experience with your remaining Pokemon on your team. This results in a more egalitarian approach to experience, and also allows them to keep rival trainers' levels roughly equivalent to what they were in the original games. The other part of this is that now a huge chunk of your experience will, like in Pokemon GO, be derived from actually catching Pokemon. I didn't really like this change, as it forced me to catch Pokemon I didn't really care about purely for the sake of training, which doesn't make much thematic sense. The whole notion of Pokemon training is that fighting is practice at battling, and when we practice at things, we get better. Why should my Pokemon all get crazy strong because I caught 1000 huge Caterpie?
Another big disappointment in this game is the frankly dreadful online modes. The 3DS games have robust trading and battling options that allow you access to the general community of Pokemon players, which is particularly useful when filling out your Pokedex or looking for a quick battle. This game, however, takes more of the approach of GO, which is a big mistake. In order to trade or battle, you must first get a code to exchange with a friend, which makes trading extremely inconvenient, and feel much more like the classic games rather than the newer ones. This walling off of the community and focusing primarily on interpersonal interactions seems so modern Nintendo, and really only serves to take some of the sheen off of what is an otherwise polished product.
I was also a bit disappointed by the visuals. Having seen what the Switch can do in titles like Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I was hoping these titles would go all out in putting a home console polish on the existing Pokemon art style. It really was indistinguishable in many ways from the most recent 3DS games, to be honest with you, and that level of detail didn't always translate terribly well to my giant HDTV. There are a handful of great new animations (I'm pretty sure these weren't in Sun and Moon) like sleeping animations for all of the Pokemon, but for the most part it felt like more of the same.
I was a bit ambivalent about the music. There were many tracks that felt good as fully orchestrated tracks, rather than the original chiptune sounds of Red and Blue, but there were also some in which the orchestration or execution really lost some of the power of the songs. This was particularly true in situations that are supposed to be scary or creepy, such as the caves, Team Rocket HQ, and especially Lavender Town. The eerie chiptune tones put those songs completely over, and their renditions in Eevee!! really couldn't capture that at all.
It may seem like I am trashing this game, and I'm really trying not to do so. There were a ton of things about it that frustrated me, but there were also several fun new additions besides the wild Pokemon visibly roaming. The first is that you can also now encounter more powerful Pokemon earlier in the game, allowing for a more dynamic and interesting early game that doesn't revolve around sticking with your starter or a Nidoking/Nidoqueen to get you to the powerful Pokemon later.
They also added riding Pokemon, which positively delighted my children and even managed to make my stony heart feel something. You can ride on some of the larger Pokemon, including Kangaskahn (Eevee rides in its pouch!!!), Charizard, Onix, Arcanine, and many more. Unlike the riding Pokemon in Pokemon Sun/Pokemon Moon, however, these are mostly just aesthetic/mobility upgrades, rather than replacing HMs. More on HMs later.
They also changed a huge load of little things from the modern Pokemon titles to this one, and I hated most of them. Here are a few examples:
1. No held items (but they still have Mega Evolutions, weirdly)-bad
2. No Pokemon beyond the original 151-bad
3. No Pokemon abilities or hidden abilities-bad
4. No Pokemon breeding-incomprehensible
5. Changing the names of the HMs to bloodcurdlingly horribly named techniques for Eevee such as Chop Down and Sky Dash-good that you don't need move slots for HMs, but just call them Cut, Flash, Surf, Strength, Fly, and Rock Smash, for heavens sake. I did love Eevee piloting a mass of hot air balloons in lieu of Fly, however
6. You can catch Eevee, Charmander, Bulbasaur, and Squirtle in the wild-incredible
Again, evaluating a treatment of a beloved property is really difficult, and I feel like I could have made this twice as long, although it's my longest review to date, I think. On the whole, Eevee!! captures a great deal of the magic of the original Pokemon games, but somehow manages to flub a lot of the surrounding details that could have made this a truly exemplary remake in the tradition of the superb Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver. My kids all say it's their favorite video game of all time, and it's captured their attention in ways that nothing other than Minecraft has really ever managed to do. This suggests that the mission of Game Freak in making an accessible Pokemon game was achieved, but I still feel that some simple design choices could have made this an all-time classic. I think that this game was made for a few reasons:
1. Give the Switch a Pokemon game until a real one was ready to go
2. Give the team a chance to work on character models and a game engine to be used in Pokemon Sword and Shield
3. Ride the coattails of GO
That may not be the most flattering picture of the game, but if those were the aims, they accomplished them. I just wish that they had brought their typical level of polish to this game that they do with all of their other ones, but also have to confess that I enjoyed exploring Kanto again a great deal, and was charmed by some of the new additions. I'll give it an 8.2/10.
Up next on What I'm Playing is one of my all-time favorite games that stonewalled me in high school. I'm moving a bit slowly through it, but I feel like I'll be able to finish it this time. See below for a teaser...
-TRO
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