One of the most beloved and revered spinoffs of Pokemon is Pokemon Snap for Nintendo 64. The idea of roaming around in a land while wild Pokemon "naturally" interact with each other and the environment has always given reality to people's imagination of how the real world of Pokemon could be.
For years, people have always said that they should make a modern update to Pokemon Snap and they finally did. Release on April 30th, New Pokemon Snap is the modern update every one had been asking for.
Back on the Nintendo 64, only 151 Pokemon were available, but 20 years later, there are now over 900 Pokemon. This game doesn't have all 900, but it has an incredibly balanced variety of Pokemon from all the different generations. It's pretty amazing how much New Pokemon Snap doesn't focus on just one generation.
New Pokemon Snap plays almost identically to the original. You character hops into a pod and is pulled through the world on a mostly linear track. Your job is to take photos of Pokemon that appear in the environment.
Through the game, you unlock some ways to interact with the Pokemon. In New Pokemon Snap, you can throw out food for them to eat, throw orbs to light up pokemon, and play music. These interactions can change the course of your pod, or unlock other things.
Expanded from the original is the possibility of different tiered photographs. Depending on the interactions you before with Pokemon, they could perform a unique pose or even a special pose. Every Pokemon now has 4 level of photographs to be taken. Tier 1 is a stand photo and Tier 2 is typically the Pokemon eating food. Tier 3 and Tier 4 are reserved for unique poses
With 200 total Pokemon in the game and each Pokemon having 2 unique poses, that's 400 unique photographs you need to take. It is a bit overwhelming, especially towards the end of the game when you're missing many of these photos. When you only get 1 or 2 new photos in a single run, it gets VERY repetitive and VERY boring quickly.
All photos in the game give you a score. If you get a "perfect" photo, it'll be worth 4000 or more points. All of these points add up to the total score of your Photodex. Pokemon Snap came out right at the beginning of Golden Week, so I had an entire week off from work to devote to this game. I was playing this game almost every day for HOURS after its release, so I was flying through the game.
Additionally, you can connect online and compare your Photodex score to everyone in the world. At my peak, I was able to become nearly 800th place in the world.
Unfortunately, I could not keep up this pace forever. Vacation had finished, and I had to get back to work. Everyone else in the world who played video game for a living continue on without me.
As mentioned above, once you do the broad strokes of everything in the game, all that is left is grinding. Finding all of the remaining photos, one by one. Slowly increasing the scores of your photos, one by one. Doing the same tracks, again and again and again.
There's not really much skill involved with the game. You wait 5 minutes to get the perfect photo, and if you miss it by a fraction of a second, you gotta do it again. You try to get Pokemon to do what you want, but it occasionally goes wrong, and gets frustrating.
Eh, there's really no reason to push myself too hard in this game just to build my hatred for it. It's a good game and I like it, otherwise.
So, I put the game down. Here are my final stats in the game.
Overall, it's a fun game with a lot of stuff to do. The Pokemon interactions are fun and interesting. Plenty of Easter eggs and hidden interactions to find that are really satisfying when you naturally find them. Definitely worthy of the Pokemon Snap name. :)