New Dog, Same Tricks! (New Pokemon Snap: In review)

     As I wrote a few weeks ago, Pokemon Snap was a game for Nintendo 64 that came out in 1999 and quickly became a cult classic. People around the world fell in love with the simple, cute, but surprisingly fun concept of taking pictures of different Pokemon. While the concept was simple, it was full of little puzzles in order to get pictures of all the Pokemon around the different biomes of the island, or even just to get to the next area. Fans of that little game were hungry for more content similar to this game, but the years passed and it seemed less and less likely that we would ever get another entry in this beloved series. Of course, this is why fans everywhere went nuts last year whenever a new title was announced to be coming out for the Switch over 20 years after the original game. I recently was able to finish New Pokemon Snap (though I've certainly not completed it yet), and I'd like to spend a little time today talking about the long awaited sequel to a game that I loved growing up. I went into this game a little skeptical, considering this game was made by the team that made Pokken Tournament, which was a great game in its own right, but as it was a fighting game, I wasn't sure how that experience would assist in the creation of this game. I'll discuss later if I was wrong to doubt them, but for now, let's hop into the Neo-One and explore the new areas that comprise the Lental region!

Onward to where no one (not even Captain Vince) has gone before!

    You start out this game as the new assistant to Professor Mirror, a Pokemon Professor who's doing his research in the Lental Region, which is made up of several islands with various climates. He has the idea to do an ecological survey of the area, which is something that hasn't been done in over 100 years by a legendary explorer named Captain Vince. Vince was the first person to do anything like this, and by doing so, he discovered a new phenomena called the "Illumina state." In this state, Pokemon become even more powerful, which, in ancient times, helped them to stop an asteroid that was going to hit the earth somewhere in the vicinity of the Lental Region. Captain Vince only reported the presence of one such Pokemon, but he suspected there were more around somewhere, which was an assertion that Professor Mirror runs with for this entire game. Your character, the newbie of the team, joins up with the Professor, his assistant, Rita, the protagonist from the first game, Todd Snap, and Todd's apprentice, Phil, on this little quest to chart out all the islands. I don't know if I was alone in this, but when Todd Snap appeared on the screen in all of his High-Res glory, I cheered like crazy. There's just something so cool about his presence here, partially just to see a character who was originally rendered in the polygonal style of N64 now rendered in much higher definition here, but also it's really nice to see how he went on to become a master photographer after helping Professor Oak in the original game. Anyways, your character has to travel across the different landscapes to take as many pictures as he or she can, going through grasslands, jungles, under the sea, and even inside a volcano during his or her journey. Of course, the story of this game doesn't really matter much, it's more just a vehicle to have fun and take pictures of the cool and often adorable world of Pokemon, which is genuinely a delight anytime you get to have a closer look into.

More of the same isn't always bad!

    The original Pokemon Snap was a fantastic premise, even though it wasn't very long. There were fewer than 100 Pokemon in that game, and this one is significantly longer than that, with a lot more Pokemon to take pictures of (214 to be exact, according to Eurogamer). All of these new areas have several different variations of the courses, which you can access as you progress through them all. Once you get enough points, your research level increases, meaning that different Pokemon will be around the next time that you go through the track. On top of that, there are day and night versions of most of the courses, which add to the areas that new Pokemon can be found in. It's always so exciting to find a new one hiding in a place that you couldn't get to before, either just because you didn't have the proper gadget or item that you needed to draw a Pokemon out of hiding, or because you just didn't find an alternate path before for some reason. These courses are beautiful by themselves, even without Pokemon hiding all around the world, which is again a different experience from the original game which was typically less than lovely, just due to the graphics not aging well. All this is just to say that the gameplay here is almost the same as the gameplay from the original title, with a few tweaks and exceptions to that gameplay formula. I feel like a lot of the "puzzle" aspect of the original game is gone from this one, or it may just be that it's much better hidden this time. Like I said, I haven't even come close to completing this game, due to all of the different requests that your various teammates issue for you to take pictures of certain things, which I assume will unlock more and more missions which will unlock new stickers and filters for the photo mode, allowing you to customize your pictures and make them a bit more silly.

    New Pokemon Snap is a lot of fun, and I look forward to spending a lot more time playing it, as there's still so much to do in the game even after beating it. The only real complaint that I have with this game is that there are no evolutions in this one, which isn't to say that there aren't evolved versions of Pokemon, but there are no puzzles where you actually cause the evolution of one Pokemon into another one. In the original game, the most famous example of this type of puzzle was in the volcano area. In this level, you saw a Charmander running by a bunch of Lava, but you could hit it with an apple or a Pester Ball and knock it into the lava river, causing it to evolve into a Charmeleon. The Charmeleon would then be waiting near the end of the area next to another lava pool, and this time when you hit the Pokemon into the pool, it would evolve into a Charizard. This was a really cool way to get full evolutionary lines into a single level in the original game, and while it's a bummer that they're not here in the sequel, they're also not truly necessary. 

    I really loved my experience with New Pokemon Snap, and I hope that others that were a fan of the original game are really enjoying it as well. It's not a perfect game, but it's always nice when there's something that looks this good on the Switch, although there are quite a few spots with frame rate dips, particularly during the cutscenes following levels and the loading screens from time to time. I'm just genuinely happy that we've finally gotten a sequel to the game, and I hope we won't have to wait another 20 years until we get another one, if that's ever in the works, that is!

    Thanks so much for reading my post, friends! I really appreciate you taking the time to take a look at this post. If you've played the new game, what's your favorite area overall? I think my favorite would have to be either the underwater area or the forest that changes between seasons as you go through it. I hope you're all doing well and have had a good week. I've been your Self-Proclaimed Pokemon Photographer, and I'll talk to you next week!