Nintendo’s mobile efforts won’t get underway until later this year, but that’s not stopping The Pokemon Company, which operates independently, from continuing to experiment.
It’s headed to iOS and Google Play sometime this year, but there’s not much to look forward to. Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku‘s resident Pokemon expert, hated the game.
The question then became: would I be willing to a) wait a little while to be able to play a little more or b) spend some money so I could play for a longer chunk of time? Right now, for me, the answer seems to be neither. I’m not super keen on Pokémon Shuffle, even though it’s free, and it’s a perfectly competent match-3 game with some neat mechanics. But when you consider that you can purchase Pokémon Battle Trozei for $US7.99 on the eShop, and get the same experiencewithout the hassles that come with a free-to-play game, why would you bother with Pokémon Shuffle? Those seven bucks in Shuffle wouldn’t give you nearly as much mileage as Trozei could.
It is possible to earn jewels via StreetPass — so the option to play the game without spending money does exist. I haven’t been able to get any of those yet, admittedly. But, these options aren’t really a solution to the problem here: while the game is meaty, you can’t play much of it on any single playthrough. From a business standpoint, this design makes sense, sure. Strangely, it even feels like a very Nintendo-like design, given how much they like to remind players that they should take breaks while playing games. Regardless, microtransactions are still really annoying in practice, and they manage to ruin the coolest things that Shuffle has to offer. I just hope that games like Pokémon Shuffle are just the result of Nintendo’s early experiments with microtransactions, and not a sign of things to come.
Comments
7 responses to “Annoying Free-To-Play Pokemon Game Is Coming To Mobile”
They make this but won’t make a pokemon mmo? It’s like they hate money.
Exactly. I’d love a Pokemon MMO, or even just an up resed, up animated wiiU true Pokemon RPG (doesnt have to be more complex than the handheld version, though I wouldn’t mind it).
If they just ported any/all of the older Pokemon games to ios and droid, I’d happily pay $5-$15 for them each. I mean, I emulate some of them already on my Galaxy s4 without any dramas.
Uhm. Is it too much to ask for just a straight port?
Just because you put something on mobile doesn’t mean you HAVE to put in paywalls, energy timers, and microtransactions to bypass them. Someone should probably explain to these companies that it’s not a requirement, y’know?
If XCOM or the Telltale games can run on iOS, then bloody Pokemon can.
But this is a straight port, the 3DS version has paywalls, energy timers and microtransactions, hell I would argue the 3DS game exhibits the worst elements of the free 2 play genre, including broken ‘boss’ characters seemingly designed to force you to spend real world money to beat them.
To be honest, it seems more fitting for this game to be on a mobile platform than the 3DS
Sorry, I should have reworded to be clear. Is it too much to ask for a straight port of Pokemon. Not Pokemon Shuffle. The pure version.
Ultimately I think this is just to keep Pokemon in our minds.
Nintendo don’t seem too keen to give the Pokemon experience to other hardware platforms for fear of the experience being ruined. The games are “guaranteed” (of course there will be exceptions) to work on their hardware and they don’t want someone with an old phone trying to boot up the Pokemon game they remember only to have it crash every 10 minutes, therefore ruining Pokemon in their mind forever and potentially losing sales for the rest of their life.
Putting a game like this out onto mobile is enough to keep our minds on Pokemon, wishing they’d bring back the old games, while they work on the next installment. If they make some money with the paywalls, which are becoming more acceptable on mobile, then even better. Even me typing this comment is me thinking about Pokemon more than I was 10 minutes ago and that little bit more likely to have the itch for that pure experience when the next Pokemon comes out.
I don’t think we’ll ever see an official port of the Pokemon games outside the Nintendo hardware because of this. We also won’t see a home console version of the actual game since Nintendo wants to keep it about socialising.
Overall I’d like to see a Pokemon MMO on PC that can connect with players all over the world and allow me to socialise with them. But I remember being that guy with the PC that was just a little too slow to run any games and missing out, it’s not a great experience. Or the original games on mobile devices since I spend more time with my phone than my 3DS but when you don’t control the hardware there’s a small percentage of failures that grows and grows, Nintendo don’t want that
I think it still comes down to licensing issues. While the Pokemon Company does act mostly independently from Nintendo, their main games are probably still tied to Nintendo and it’s devices.
As for people hating it due to microtransactions; while it seems weird on the 3DS, that design choice fits in quite well on the mobile platform. It’s only one of thousands of other apps that do the same. I feel that porting it to iOS and Android is a good idea in all honesty.
Play it like strategically, 2x 10min sessions a day. Gives enough time to progress or level up pokemen to get the legendaries by event.
Pika pika