Hey You, Pikachu is one of the most unusual games for the Nintendo 64. It’s based on Nintendo’s popular Pokemon series, and has the most popular of these critters at your disposal for friendship. What’s weird about it is that the game is that it’s the only title on the platform that’s based on voice recognition. It was even packaged with it’s own microphone that you plug directly into the console. The problem with Hey You Pikachu is that gamers were clamoring for a full blown 3D RPG adventure on the console. Not a voice recognition based puzzle game. Nonetheless I finally got my hands on it, and dove in. Unfortunately it’s one of the most frustrating games from Nintendo, ever.
Pokemon spin-offs (and even main installments for that matter) aren’t exactly known for having great stories. With that said, Hey You Pikachu is aimed at an even younger crowd than usual. This is after all a game focused around befriending a Pikachu and solving light puzzles with him. In Hey You Pikachu you play as a nameless child living with his mom who one day is contacted by the kind Professor Oak from the original Pokemon Red/Blue games. He asks the player to try out a new device which allows people to speak directly to Pokemon. From here the protagonist meets and befriends a wild Pikachu with whom he can speak and play with.
There are no plot twists or even story developments. Hey You Pikachu is entirely about spending time with and talking to the titular electric rodent. You view the action from a first person perspective. The camera is either fixed on Pikachu within a series of different environments, or in some instances you can freely move about. The environments are very small which means you’ll never have a chance to get lost, or even separated from Pikachu. To interact with pikachu you have to hold down the Z button and speak into the microphone. After doing so you’ll shoot a bubble at Pikachu and he will react to what you’ve just said.
Pikachu’s vocabulary in Hey You, Pikachu is very limited. This is after all a Nintendo 64 game, stored on a low capacity cartridge, and on a system that cannot connect to the internet. I’ve read that Pikachu can understand around 255 words and phrases which was no doubt impressive for its time. The game is structured into days which mostly begin with Pikachu showing up at your door waiting for a spoken greeting before the two of you run off to explore the surrounding environments. These ‘missions’ as I’ll call them consist of things like gathering items for a bulbasaur to cook a stew, take Pikachu fishing, guiding him blindfolded to a piñata, babysitting caterpies, etc. These are all very mundane tasks and there’s very little in the way of action. Hey You Pikachu was purposely designed as a non-threatening game. There’s not much to offer for older gamers.
Unfortunately Hey You Pikachu is an absolute chore to play. Interacting with Pikachu is cute at first, but the novelty soon wears off. To make matters worse he only seems to get about half of what you say to him. It doesn’t matter how clearly you speak. The whole system is entirely too inaccurate. To make matters worse just about everything you do in the game requires Pikachu to perform an action that you’ve told him over the microphone to do. You’ll find yourself being forced to repeat requests frequently. Hey You Pikachu does try to take the guesswork out of gameplay by highlighting phrases Pikachu will recognize with red text. This is a thankful addition, but as I’ve already said, the recognition software could have used some serious polish.
The salt in the wound is that even when Pikachu is on his best behavior the game just isn’t very fun. You and Pikachu don’t so much go on an adventure as you just hang out and do everyday tasks. Identifying fruits and vegetables Pikachu picks up is only entertaining for so long. Asking him to throw a beach ball around is mildly entertaining at best, and the only time I had any actual fun was while directing him to fish. Greeting Pikachu every morning, and telling him good bye at the end of the day is cute, but it’s hardly fun. Hey You Pikachu is only particularly entertaining when Pikachu misinterprets your commands and does something unexpected in response. This is at least worth a laugh. At least the game is short. Hey You Pikachu can be completed in just a few hours.
Man… Hey You Pikachu is an outright mess visually. The character models such as Pikachu himself as well as the other Pokemon look pretty good by console standards, but the environments are really bad. Trees and foliage are two dimensional and look awful. The textures are also a muddy mess. You’d think that with the small environments Nintendo would have been able to push the console more, but that’s not the case. Even the draw distance suffers with fog and pop-in, and the framerate is pretty low overall. The music consists of a bunch of short loop midi tracks which sound okay. At least they, for the most part, sound like something you’d hear in a Pokemon game. The best part of audio is the fact that Pokemon say their names like in the show.
Hey You Pikachu was a pretty decent showcase at the time of release, and benefited from the fledgling Pokemon series and its popularity. These advantages are long gone, and what we’re left with is a barebones voice controlled title that’s entirely based on gimmicks. It’s tough to care about taking Pikachu fishing, or mushroom picking. It just isn’t that fun. Then there are activities like hide and seek that you would expect to be fun. In the end they just aren’t because everything is too simplistic. Hey You Pikachu isn’t worth playing now. An updated version on modern consoles or smart devices would be an absolute joke in the marketplace now.
