I’m not a fan of pinball. I do however love Pokemon. So how did I feel when Nintendo combined the two? Lukewarm, to say the least. Actually I completely passed on Pokemon Pinball when it hit the Game Boy Color in the late 90s. No matter how much I love a franchise pinball is still a hard sell. It wasn’t until well over two decades later that I finally decided to add this one to my collection. I’m nostalgic for all things Pokemon and so I figured this would be a trip down memory lane. What could go wrong, am I right? Unfortunately this didn’t make me a big fan of the genre. With that said I did find Pokemon Pinball mildly enjoyable. Let’s dive right in to this review!
Pokemon Pinball was disappointing immediately because it only has two tables. They’re called tables, right? That’s how little I know about pinball. Pokemon Pinball however stays true to it’s ‘two version’ roots by offering you two fields to play on; red and blue. I like that this aspect harkens to the mainline games. These feature two very different layouts, but in my opinion they’re both a bit claustrophobic. The terrain is too rounded on both, and the actual obstacles you can interact with are far and few between. Pokemon Pinball makes up for this a bit by offering different effects for these, but I’ll get to that later. In the meantime just know that the tables are kind of weird. Their worst offense is the fact that they consist of two screens apiece, and the view shifts between them based on where the ball is.
This makes gameplay not nearly as smooth as it should have been. When the ball is on the upper screen you can’t see your flippers. The ball moves fast at times so the viewpoint suddenly skews below and you can’t plan ahead as much as in other similar titles. I would have preferred less graphical details and a zoomed out view to what we have here. I realize that pinball is based on reflexes but this feels weird even by genre standards. I’ll try to ignore this fact for the sake of this review, but that is a huge oversight in my opinion. What’s more is that almost all of the bumpers you can interact with are on the top portion of the table. This makes aiming the ball more difficult than it should be.
Pokemon Pinball has all the typical control options that you’ll find in traditional pinball video games. Up on the directional pad moves the left paddle, and A the right. B bumps the table to the left but I was disappointed to discover the physics don’t care much about this. It simply isn’t a significant feature here. I don’t know how true this is to a physical pinball machine, but as far as video games go it’s a bit lacking. There’s also a rumble feature built into the cartridge but it’s not particularly impressive. Besides this you can only pause the game and save your progress to end it which is nice for a portable title. Why would you need to save your progress in a pinball title? Well, that’s where the Pokemon part of this title comes in to play.
This isn’t just a Pokemon game in spirit. No, the developers took things a step further. You have to ‘catch em all’ here, and this is Pokemon Pinball’s strong suite. The ball you use on these two tables is a poke ball, and it’s not just there for looks. At the start of each game the board is assigned a terrain (which differs between them) and this determines what type of Pokemon will appear for capture. Yep, you catch Pokemon here. It’s a bit strange, but functions as a great way to measure your progress. Your overall goal is to fill the pokedex by catching all 151 of the original creatures. How do you do this? Well strap in because it’s a little strange.
Both the red and blue boards feature a pokemon themed bumper that throws a Pokemon into the play field. For the red we have a bellsprout, and on the blue it’s a cloyster. When you hit these your ball is consumed and then a box on the bottom portion of the screen is filled with the silhouette of a Pokemon. You have to gain points to completely reveal it by getting points. When it’s completely filled in you have to bounce the ball off of the pokemon in question a set number of times and then you can capture it. Catching these creatures has a few different effects but the primary one is that it fills out their pokedex entry with information and an animated picture. This is your means of monitoring your progress through the game.
What’s also neat is the fact that after you’ve captured a pokemon you can earn experience points for it by selecting them when you’ve triggered a bonus. From here the points you gather stick to them, and when you reach a certain point they evolve. This very much fits within the Pokemon theme and I found this to be the most addictive part of gameplay. The information blurbs you get from the pokedex are unique from the mainline titles and filling this out is surprisingly rewarding. This aspect of the game managed to hold my interest despite the less than stellar gameplay. The only thing I wish is that you could transfer captured Pokemon to either Red/Blue versions but alas, everything here is self enclosed.
The graphics of Pokemon Pinball really show off the extra horsepower of the Game Boy Color. The poke ball you’re knocking around the table animates with surprisingly good rotational effects. The boards themselves look great too. The pokemon you’ll see here look even better than they did in the mainline games which is quite the achievement. Also it’s worth noting that the use of color is amazing here. Typically GBC titles are pretty poor in this regard due to the low color palette, but everything looks just as you would expect. I do like the fact that tables are based on the red/blue versions of the original title and graphically they are very distinct from one another.
Pokemon Pinball has a really poor soundtrack though. There are some renditions of classic Pokemon music that you’ll recognize, but they utterly fail to match the splendor of the original titles. The most impressive part of the audio is the fact that there are limited voice samples here as well. Still, considering the hardware it sound really good despite the static. Overall the audio is kind of poor but it’s forgiveable.
