With Pokemon Nintendo single handedly revived their somewhat forgotten Game Boy platform and created one of the biggest phenomenons across all of the video game world. This new franchise took Japan and the rest of the world by storm. Meanwhile Nintendo’s home console, the Nintendo 64, wasn’t faring nearly as well as their handheld. This led many to wonder when a full fledged Pokemon game would be released on the home console. Unfortunately, even fifteen years later, we still haven’t had a main entry in the series on any platform other than their handhelds. What Nintendo chose to do instead was release several spin-offs on their home consoles. Some of these were pretty decent, but others were horrible. Pokemon Snap on the Nintendo 64 falls somewhere in between. Despite the familiar art style and characters this spin-off was very disappointing when all fans wanted was a proper version of the main game for their home console.
The story here is very basic. You play as a photographer named Todd Snap (hardy har har, Nintendo) who is summoned by Professor Oak to a mysterious place called Pokemon Island. The kindly researcher needs quality pictures to assist in his research, and it’s up to you to snap photos through a series of six different stages (not including a secret bonus area). Back when the game was first released I was excited at the idea of exploring 3D environments to take pictures of hiding Pokemon. I was really disappointed to discover that you move through each area automatically as you ride on a futuristic raft. You can only control a cross hair, but the game allows you to turn 360 degrees. Each environment plays host to numerous species of Pokemon on the ground, in the water, and even flying through the air. Taking pictures is as easy as holding down the Z button which puts your viewpoint through the camera, and from here you simply press A to take photos. The gameplay is simple overall, but it does have a few quirks to make the experience interesting.
The stages are fairly short, and at the end you are scored based on the photos you’ve taken. What’s nice is the fact that you can choose which ones to have graded. This saves time, and you can even let Professor Oak himself select the best of the bunch if you don’t want to go through them yourself. Each picture is given a score based on a few different factors; the size of the creature in the photo, the Pokemon’s pose, and how centered it is within the shot. You can affect the behavior of each Pokemon with items (either by throwing food or pester bombs) in order to get them to move better in to view, and sometimes you can even activate hidden poses with these. They put a lot of work into making gameplay more dynamic, and my favorite part of Pokemon Snap was figuring out the most strategic use of these items.
The only real challenge in this game is in figuring out how to unlock the next stage. From the start you only have access to the Beach level, and your first objective is only to snap pictures of six different critters. The other stages are trickier to unlock. Objectives range from causing an electrode to explode by throwing either item at it to taking pictures of each hidden Pokemon Sign in all of the stages. Even with these goals (which can be difficult to figure out sometimes) the game just isn’t all that interesting. Snap moves at a very leisurely pace, and most adult gamers will soon find themselves bored with this casual approach. Unfortunately not even half of the Pokemon from the first generation made the cut, and with a few more stages Nintendo could have no doubt made them all fit. There just isn’t a lot of content here, and considering the fact that this game launched for around seventy dollars that’s really disappointing. Collecting them all was a lot of fun in the Game Boy titles, but collecting pictures of them just isn’t all that interesting. The linear approach is very disappointing even for a spin-off.
Fortunately Nintendo did a very good job designing this game engine because the graphics are really good even by system standards. The environments have a very clean look to them, and the Pokemon themselves are perfect 3D representations of your favorite pocket monsters. There’s very little slowdown thanks to the on-rails format here even when there’s several moving elements on screen at once. One thing I found disappointing in this title is the 2D elements. Professor Oak is rendered with sprites in his laboratory, and the island map screen is as well. While these aspects fit the art style of the television show pretty well 3D models would have been much more impressive. The soundtrack is also a little disappointing. The music is slow paced, generic, and ultimately forgettable. The signature Pokemon calls are missing from this title, and these would have gone a long way in livening up the experience. The music is nothing special; the composers should have just remixed the music from the Game Boy titles instead.
Pokemon Snap is pretty boring by franchise standards. This was a very disappointing release for most fans because a game based around photography, with on-rails gameplay, is hardly a substitute for a fully 3D Pokemon adventure. It still stings that we haven’t had a genuine mainline entry on consoles, and I can’t really recommend this slow paced boring adventure. The graphics are really nice, and Snap does have a pretty decent following, but this game just isn’t very fun.
