New Pokémon Snap gracefully avoids Pokémon Snap's problem of repeating the exact same courses ad infinitum in several ways. It's easy to view being on-rails as a limitation, but in New Pokémon Snap it's apparent that keeping your own interactions with the world a bit more limited than in something like a typical Pokémon RPG has freed Bandai Namco up to make the many different things the Pokémon themselves do far more varied, detailed, and enjoyable to watch. Most of the Pokémon manage to look very good without melting your Switch in your hands though, and for the most part will react in interesting ways to just about anything you (literally or figuratively) throw at them, be it fruit, glowing Illumina Orbs, or a catchy tune. Try one on the Tangrowth at the start of the Park course at night for one of my favorite examples, and have your camera ready the second it hits. A handful of Pokémon will have huge, surprising reactions to being hit. A lot of Pokémon won't really react to being hit with these orbs beyond glowing, but don't get discouraged. Their most obvious use is to activate crystabloom flowers that can attract Pokémon or even trigger changes in a course, you can also just throw them right at Pokémon to make them glow. You'll find plenty of use for all of these, but of the entire toolkit the illumina orbs are perhaps the most surprising. You'll start your photo expedition with nothing but your camera, but you'll quickly unlock a set of tools that will enable you to take better photos: edible fluffruit, glowing illumina orbs, a music player, a scanning feature that will sometimes spark unique reactions, and an accelerator that you can use to catch up with fast Pokémon.
These are most noticeable in one stage in particular, when an absolutely massive Wailord slowly breaches the ocean surface and briefly slows everything to a crawl. You'll visit a sparkling beach, a dense jungle, a desert, underwater caverns, and several more locations, all of which look better than I've seen any Pokémon game look yet – beauty which comes at the cost of some occasional frustrating framerate dips when it pushes the Switch beyond its comfort zone. New Pokémon Snap also has far more story to drive it along, with a Pokémon professor named Mirror and his crew of research assistants trying to solve yet another Pokémon mystery, though overall it’s a fairly forgettable progression tool. It even has more (in a sense) of what made old-school Pokémon Snap's final course, Rainbow Cloud, so special – though I can't say more about it here due to Nintendo being overly precious about that part. But I am happy to report this was a non-issue: If "Pokémon Snap, but more" were the baseline for New Pokémon Snap being any good, it would handily clear that simple bar with far more courses, available Pokémon, and possible photos than its decades-old parent managed.
If "Pokémon Snap, but more" were the baseline for New Pokémon Snap being any good, it would handily clear that simple bar.22 years later, I had a real fear that New Pokémon Snap would end up similarly repetitive or limited in either sheer Pokémon numbers or in course availability. Even with the meat of trying to solve a few puzzles to line up some rarer shots, 1999's Pokémon Snap inevitably left me wishing for so much more. Though the idea was sound and many of Pokémon Snap's best moments are still memorable to this day (the Jigglypuff concert! Charizard popping out of the lava pool! Surfing Pikachu!), it was painfully short, with only just over 60 Pokémon available across seven courses that were precisely the same every single time. The classic on-rails photography game had a very fun premise, sending you on a nature safari to try and get the best photos possible of Pokémon living and interacting in their natural habitats. Despite its flaws, I was a big fan of the original Pokémon Snap on Nintendo 64 back in 1999.
0 kommentar(er)
