LET’S GO, PIKACHU & EEVEE

That the best thing about Let’s Go is an optional (and expensive) peripheral says a lot

Developer Game Freak Publisher Nintendo, The Pokémon Company Format Switch Release November 16

Pitched as “a Pokémon for everyone” – as if previous entries were somehow off-puttingly arcane – this isn’t the home-console RPG many were hoping for. Rather, it’s a hybrid of the handheld games and Pokémon Go, no doubt intended as a kind of gateway drug to full-fat

Pokémon for those who’ve only played the mobile game. It’s a sound concept, and no doubt the sales figures will be absurd, but after a brief stroll through Viridian Forest we’re left with the uneasy feeling that Let’s Go is a dilution of both games.

The place is certainly busier than before, that’s for sure. The layout will be familiar to those who played

Pokémon Yellow (or Red/Blue for that matter) but the patches of long grass are swarming with beasts and bugs: wriggling Caterpies and Weedles, hopping Metapods and Kakunas, and the odd wandering Pikachu. Pidgeys, meanwhile, flap around overhead, bumping into you and prompting a battle – except it’s not actually a battle, but a capture opportunity. As in Pokémon Go, your aim is to try to land a Pokéball inside a narrowing circle to increase your chances of a catch; like Niantic’s game, you can also feed berries to a target. Any experience gained is shared between your current party.

Yet if anything, the process is even less involved, the Joy-Con gestures lacking the nuance of Go’s touchscreen controls (undocked mode uses gyro controls in a slightly different way). It feels a little more natural while using the Poké Ball Plus controller, which sits snugly in the hand, although it’s smaller than we’d anticipated. We had some issues getting button-presses to register, too – this was, in fairness, a prototype unit – but the way it uses lights, sounds and HD rumble to convey the idea that a living thing is inside is quietly ingenious, and sure to delight younger players especially.

That the best thing about Let’s Go is an optional (and expensive) peripheral says a lot. It all looks oddly sterile, increasing the resolution of the 3DS games but losing some of their character. If the fauna is lively, the trainers you’ll encounter stand as still as they always did, waiting for you to cross their line of sight before strolling up to challenge you to a battle. A co-op mode lets a second player join in by simply shaking a Joy-Con, with experience bonuses for coordinated captures, but this hardly recaptures the social elements that helped Go blow up. That producer Junichi Masuda felt moved to announce that we’d be getting a more traditional Pokémon RPG late next year seems instructive: perhaps even Game Freak isn’t convinced that this worryingly simplistic game really is a Pokémon for everyone.