New Pokemon Snap Review

A little over 22 years ago, a group of developers put a bunch of ideas on a board and blindly threw darts at it until their next project idea was formed. Before there were more Pokemon than I have remaining brain cells, HAL Laboratory was tasked with merging the least favourite mechanic next to escort missions with throwing fruit at unsuspecting Pokemon in a bid to impress Professor Oak who recently got a degree in photography. As it turns out, an on-rails shooter where you attempt to take pictures of Pokemon was a pretty great idea. It wasn’t, however, a good enough idea to bring back until now, despite the Wii-U being a perfect fit for properly snapping pictures. Luckily the Switch is basically the Wii-U with a better name, so despite the original being old enough to buy alcohol for its younger siblings, New Pokemon Snap has a lot of people excited about unleashing their inner National Geographic photography skills.

Not that I like to think about it, but it’s been so long since the original was released that there are a considerable number of younger gamers out there that never played it – even if they are a hardcore Pokemon fan. As such I can’t just simply say that if you enjoyed the original you’re likely to enjoy this iteration, although that’s certainly the case here. If you’re new to this whole Pokemon Paparazzi thing, let’s go over some of the basics – even if it might seem a bit painfully obvious what all this is about.

As a Pokemon Photographer, you arrive on an island in the Lental region to aid Professor Mirror and his assistant Rita in researching the mysterious happenings that seem to involve Illumina Pokemon. Going on nothing but some scant early findings and the tales of an explorer from an age long past, it’s your goal to help capture these Pokemon on film to aid in unravelling this great mystery of the Lental region. To keep you safe, the professor has borrowed some old tech in the ZERO-ONE (the vehicle from the original game) and spit-shined that bad boy until he got the NEO-ONE that will be escorting you around the various locations the professor has deemed hot spots for Illumina activity. The NEO-ONE will teleport you in, and guide you from beginning to end of each stage in an on-rails ride not unlike the Jurassic Park tour but with less death and dismemberment. It’s up to you, then, to get those pictures as best you can before you reach the end of the track.

You’ll start out close to home, but as you continue to rack up pictures of all the Pokemon you encounter, and some various anomalies along the way, you’ll slowly unlock new zones as the professor pieces together the clues. You’ll be meandering through forests, jungles, deserts, reefs, ocean floors, volcanic mountains, cave systems, snowy plains, and more. Each zone of course comes with a mostly unique set of Pokemon to photograph with there being somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 in total to discover. It’s a simple concept, but there is a method to follow here as you’ll have to choose one picture at most of each Pokemon you caught on film to show the professor so that he may use his superior photography knowledge to critique them all and give them a score. I don’t know what it is about these professors telling the photographer what is and isn’t good, but we’ll go along with it if we must, I suppose.

Pictures can be categorized as one, two, three, or four-star snaps depending on the rarity of the pose the subject Pokemon is striking. While a one-star is usually simply the Pokemon walking around like a small child lost in a Costco, a four-star might be finding a way to capture them using their special ability. While it isn’t imperative that you get a picture of each star category for every Pokemon, that is certainly one of the goals you could work toward as you progress since progressing through research ranks in each stage requires unique experience points – not just spamming the same pictures over and over.

To accomplish this, you’re given a few items which will work differently for each Pokemon – or not at all depending on the situation. The Snap classic apple is back, which you will wildly throw at and around Pokemon to try and illicit a response. Don’t worry though, it’s really a fluffruit which of course is lighter than a feather so don’t worry about throwing it directly into the face of an innocent little Bellossom – they’ll live. You’ll also unlock the ability to turn the NEO-ONE into an ice cream truck via a music box that attempts to make Pokemon perk up via its melody. Your scanner, which also allows you to discover alternate routes and items of interest, can also catch the attention of certain Pokemon to get a better shot. Lastly, you’ll unlock the ability to use an Illumina orb in each region which can interact with certain plants as well as Pokemon it hits for various effects. How do you know what will work and what the results will be? Well, that’s where you’ll just have to employ some science of your own and spam the ever-lasting crap out of each item every time you see a new Pokemon until you figure it out. Yeah, you might look like you have no idea what you’re doing as you frantically slam your face into every button in the NEO-ONE while you slowly roll past that Pikachu for the fifth time, but nobody said science was easy. If you can convince that Machamp to do its best Hulk Hogan impersonation, it’ll all be worth it in the end.

Of course, Professor Mirror has the final say as to whether or not your pictures are worthy of praise and research value, so really this is all about making him happy regardless of your great artistic vision. Your pictures will be graded based on pose, size, direction, placement, other Pokemon, and background. Pose is about capturing the Pokemon actually doing something, size is about how much of the Pokemon takes up the frame, the direction is how close the Pokemon is to looking directly into your camera and soul, placement is about getting your subject centred and within the focus box, other Pokemon is managing to get other Pokemon in the shot without them overlapping your subject, and background is about getting certain environmental elements in the shot with your subject. These aren’t really things you tend to think about individually when you’re in the throws of taking your many pictures, but it does provide valuable feedback to help you improve for your next time out…at least most of the time. The professor does a surprisingly good job at fairly and consistently grading your snaps, but it does become evident once in a while that he might make a better scientist than a photography critic. In fairness, this is more about science than art but even by that metric, he occasionally makes some confusing judgment calls.

For those of us who also want to make use of more than just whatever Professor Mirror deems worthy, New Pokemon Snap has pretty dramatically expanded your options to show off your artistic skills. From resnapping a picture to help better frame it to your liking to adding filters, stickers, and frames to spruce it up, you do have some great control over building up a photo album to be proud of. I do wish that all of these functions were possible in the same menu as it is currently split between two separate locations entirely, and it would also be great to be able to use more than one filter at a time, but really it’s hard to complain and you can get some great results. Personally, I had just as much fun if not more so altering my pictures as I did taking them. Making this all the more addicting is being able to upload up to six of your masterpieces at a time to your online profile for the world to see. Snaps you upload get randomly placed in front of other players via the LenTalk menu (which we’ll talk more about later) and recommended viewing on the aptly named Online Internet page. What’s more, if they really like it they can award it a sweet medal to show their appreciation. It’s basically Pokemon Instagram, for better or worse, and is incredibly on-brand for Nintendo’s general policy of keeping online functionality kid-friendly and heavily curated to suit that philosophy.

Beyond just barreling through the main story, New Pokemon Snap also provides you with requests from the professor and other characters to get specific shots of Pokemon. These requests sometimes have rewards like new filters, stickers, or frames for the photo editor, but otherwise serve as more of a puzzle to solve and complete. You can also of course go for the ultimate goals of getting diamond level scores on one through four-star snaps for each Pokemon and filling out the entire photodex with every Pokemon the Lental region has to offer. Legendary Pokemon are also available to discover, but you will have to figure out how to get them to appear in their various locations, of course. Those who are particularly competitive can also go for the highest photodex score and climb the available global and regional leaderboards as well as other leaderboards that are stage or route-specific. Or you can be like me and just try to figure out what will get me the sweetest medals on my best snaps. I have to say, however, that while I enjoyed my roughly 25 hours with the game I couldn’t shake the feeling that asking $79.99 CAD was being a bit cheeky. I understand that the perceived value of any game is very subjective, it is jarring coming from Hades which sells for half that, to pay just shy of $100 after tax for a 25 hour on rails photo gallery. They could have at least splurged for fully voiced dialogue, but even that was apparently too much to ask for in a full-priced game with less than 2000 words propping it up.

It’s not much of a looker, either, even by Switch standards. In docked mode, there’s still a substantial amount of aliasing on display, and most of the environments are devoid of much detail. Despite being entirely on rails and only a limited amount that can be seen at any given time, the frame rate is also inconsistent more often than it should be. The art style is at least up to the usual Pokemon standard and it does a lot of lifting here to be certain. Some of the environments are nicer than others, like stretches of the sea floor stage, or the nighttime jungle route, but most aren’t so lucky. I can’t say the characters are lifeless-looking, but they may have a drug habit they’re hiding given their soul-piercing gazes. As a package it’s not exactly an ugly game it’s just hard not to expect more given the simplicity of what’s on display here. When you consider that this is an almost exact replica of the original game from 22 years ago with scant additions, it gives the impression that its development had an air of “Fine, we’ll make the thing” instead of having some drive behind it.

I can still remember thinking about how awesome it would have been to have a Pokemon Snap game on the WII U specifically for the motion controls and the ability to use the controller’s screen as the camera’s viewfinder. Thankfully they’ve more or less made that a reality with the option of using motion controls along with the Switch’s ability to operate in handheld mode. You can also opt to use the controller as is, as I did with the pro controller. Rotating the camera can be painfully slow, but of course, it’s a balance between camera accuracy and camera movement. Throwing the fluffruit and Illumina orbs can also take some getting used to, especially underwater where leading your target is more necessary and the difficult-to-judge depth distances play a bigger part. Ultimately, it’s an on-rails experience so whichever input method you choose it’ll be fine.

There’s no doubt that Pokemon has proven that it’s got enormous staying power, and it’s seemingly hit a renaissance in the last year or so specifically. It’s not surprising to see something like Snap make its way back to store shelves at this time, and it has frequently been one of the more talked about spinoff titles players have wanted for a long while now. While it does bring modern touches to a now very old formula in its photo editing and sharing capabilities, as well as motion controls making the cut, New Pokemon Snap still feels like much the same game we played 22 years ago. That’s not necessarily a knock on this latest installment but it does make it a harder pill to swallow at full price. Players who are new to the Snap spinoffs may then find more value here than those who have experienced the series’ origins, but when it comes down to it New Pokemon Snap is a unique and often entertaining experience most Pokemon fans will enjoy.