Hi readers — long time no see! We’ve both been a bit busy with our lives (and Overwatch, oops) at the moment, but rest assured that we’re thinking about what to write on this blog constantly.
To be honest, I completely forgot that Pokemon GO was a thing. The announcement of the release of Pokemon Sun/Moon earlier this year has pretty much overshadowed anything else Nintendo has in store, and so far what information we know about the new game in the franchise does not disappoint. Occasionally I’d hear about a leak for Pokemon GO or see a screenshot or two, but whatever I learned was never quite enough to pique my interest for this spinoff.
I’ll be frank here — I was cynical about Pokemon GO from the very beginning. When Nintendo announced that they would be working with Niantic to put out Pokemon GO, memories within me stirred from when I was a dedicated (to a point) player of the still-popular Ingress, developed by Niantic. I admit that I was enamoured with that game for a period of about four months, even going so far as to attending events and buying some cheap merchandise. While I don’t regret ever dabbling in the game, the fun quickly wore off and became almost a chore, and the somewhat messy UI annoyed me on multiple occasions. Of course, there is still a large dedicated playerbase for Ingress and I won’t deny that the game has a certain charm — but it wasn’t for me, in the end, and I feel like Pokemon GO might turn out the same way.
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Firstly, I’m pissed off that the beta is restricted to so few countries. Let’s get that out of the way. While I’m lucky to be living in Singapore and hence get access to at least some Pokemon and Nintendo-related events (very, very rarely), I can’t help but feel indignant that for a global company Nintendo is still so focused on North America, Japan and Europe on occasion. Of course, I’m just being somewhat nitpicky — considering the scale of the project, it would make sense to limit the beta to certain regions. Still, hardly any information about the availability of the game and its peripheral has been made available to prospective players outside of the beta regions, which gets me antsy. Like Ingress, Pokemon GO probably partly thrives on the input of players of each region or country — how can Niantic collect information regarding the landscapes and territories of locations outside NA and Japan without opening testing beyond those countries?
What I’ve seen of Pokemon GO so far is, personally, unsatisfactory. I feel that many people who are hyped up for this spin-off are expecting what they saw in the trailer, which most of the time is wholly unrepresentative of the game in question. In the end, Pokemon GO is confined to augmented reality on your smartphone screen, and while I can’t blame the developers for these obvious restrictions they have when it comes to developing something of this scale (holograms are not yet a thing), the gap between expectation and reality most people will have might lead to this being a flop.
The graphics and style of the game, from screenshots and short gameplay videos, feel… impersonal. While I recognize that GO is a spinoff and thus would not be strange having some differences from the main Pokemon games, GO doesn’t look like a Pokemon game at all, minus the 3D Pokemon sprites. The trainer on screen looks nothing like a trainer you’d see in a Pokemon game — and while I get that the target audience of GO has to be slightly older than that of Pokemon, considering a smartphone or similar device is needed to play the game, I feel that the inconsistencies in style are too large to ignore. The map is bland and hard to read, a problem I also had when playing Ingress. The battle screen, while calling to mind the way battling looks in the main games, looks messy for some reason, probably due to the obtrusive background. I can’t tell if the sprites are ripped directly from the main games; they seem to have lost their “solidity”, if that makes sense. Hopefully many of these assets are subject to change, but a part of me feels like in order to maintain the accessibility of the game to those with lower-end devices, the graphics might remain ugly and low-polygon. Also with the purported release date being late July, I doubt there’s really much time for such a large overhaul.
Gameplay-wise, Pokemon GO is just a reskinned Ingress with some added features. Having to first join a team, and then defend bases/gyms just seems out of place for the lore, and the battling feature is nowhere as in-depth as that of the main games. The trailer made the game seem like you would be re-enacting your Pokemon trainer journey in the main games in real life, but obviously this isn’t the case. I guess Ingress has enjoyed reasonable success — enough to entirely incorporate its mechanics into Pokemon GO.
The watch-like device that serves as an add-on to the game (Pokemon GO Plus) will be sold at around USD $35. I’m not particularly impressed by the way it looks.
It reminds me of those old $1 watch/tamagotchi ripoffs I would get from gachapon machines when I was a kid. Everything about it screams cheap plastic, though I have to admit that making the face resemble a Google location symbol/pindrop is rather clever. $35 is a steep price to pay for something that looks like this, in my opinion. I’m also concerned as to how these will be distributed and whether or not they will be easily available locally — having to fork out exorbitant shipping fees to buy this online is definitely not going to persuade me to spend my money. At the very least, they made this device optional. Phew.
I feel like I’ve complained enough about the game — these are all my major concerns at this point. I do feel kind of bad with so many preconceived ideas about the game having never actually played it, but in my defense, I can’t. Not until it’s out in July. Will I be downloading it? Absolutely, but I definitely can’t guarantee dropping $35 on it or even playing it for longer than a month. Pokemon GO will however feature connectivity features with the new Sun/Moon games, so I guess that’s enough reason to keep it around.
– Niki
PLAYER 1 AND 2 