I haven’t played a Pokémon game since giving up on Blue at least twenty years ago, but last year my kids got into the TV shows. I thought they might like one of the games and the Let’s Go pair looked pretty kid-friendly, so I suggested they might like to get it for me for my birthday. That didn’t happen, but come Christmas it was waiting for me under the tree. I’ve been slowly playing it with them since.
We started out picking the upper left trainer on the selection screen and naming him “Ash”, since that’s his name according to my kids. I was disappointed to realise that you don’t get to define the second character, they just appear as a “support trainer”, but in retrospect it might not be the worst thing since it means no fight over which of my two kids they’re named after. I did offer to restart and name the main character after the kids, but they wanted Ash.
Another surprise was that you don’t need to fight wild Pokémon to capture them. Maybe that’s normal, as mentioned I haven’t played one of these games in many years, but I thought I’d have to weaken them first. Instead it’s just a matter of timing and RNG. It seems like the main way to level up is by capturing wild Pokémon, but my kids aren’t really going in for that. If they spot a new one, they go straight for it, but they have no interest in getting more than one of the same type. I thought at first there would be no battles at all, but it turns out you fight the trainers who are standing around outside. The fights are mostly pretty easy, which is not a bad thing for us. I’m aware that Pokémon games can be heavily min/maxed and I have a vague idea all the things about a Pokémon’s nature or temperament of whatever do something, but I have no interest in going down that rabbit hole and neither do my kids. And I don’t really get why you would - the game is not challenging, at least so far. I guess it’s for multiplayer.
The one aspect of customisation we have engaged with, because how could you not, is move selection. It really reminds me of playing an SMT game, though there you get eight moves instead of four. We are basically throwing away all buff/debuff moves and keeping the attacks. Probably not optimal, but it’s working fine so far. Our party composition is pretty static: Pikachu, Ivysaur, Ratata, Magikarp, and Clefairy have been in there more or less the whole time (though Magikarp and Ratata just evolved into different things). The last space was Onix, who we were riding, but it got swapped out for some kind of cat, and swapped again for a rhino looking thing that we thought we might be able to ride but couldn’t. Again, probably not the most effective team, but that’s not been a problem.
I’ve been making occasional attempts to play console games with my kids for a while now, but it’s always ended in frustration. They could not get used to holding a controller the right way around, or pressing buttons while looking at the screen. Somehow, we seem to have crossed the bridge with Pokémon. Maybe a mistake, as now they want to play it all the time. It’s also kind of an eye-opener for me in terms of how to go about playing games: I’m usually pretty completionist, talking to everyone, doing every quest, exploring every passage. When we started playing this, I was looking at the desk and the shelves and stuff in Ash’s bedroom, and the kids were like “stop looking at things! Go downstairs!”, and that’s continued. Mostly the kids hold the controllers now, and if they want to ignore every building in a town then that’s what we do. I wonder if there was someone somewhere who might have told us which types were strong against which? I may never know. But it turns out the kids have watched a lot of the TV show - “that’s a fighting type!”, etc.
Fortunately the kids did talk to the guy who teaches Pikachu Zippy Zap, which has proven to be a win button in about two thirds of fights since we got it. I’d say the only really challenging scene so far was the third gym, where the enemies were all rock and electricity types. Our team was not built for that. Still won, though.
We started out picking the upper left trainer on the selection screen and naming him “Ash”, since that’s his name according to my kids. I was disappointed to realise that you don’t get to define the second character, they just appear as a “support trainer”, but in retrospect it might not be the worst thing since it means no fight over which of my two kids they’re named after. I did offer to restart and name the main character after the kids, but they wanted Ash.
Another surprise was that you don’t need to fight wild Pokémon to capture them. Maybe that’s normal, as mentioned I haven’t played one of these games in many years, but I thought I’d have to weaken them first. Instead it’s just a matter of timing and RNG. It seems like the main way to level up is by capturing wild Pokémon, but my kids aren’t really going in for that. If they spot a new one, they go straight for it, but they have no interest in getting more than one of the same type. I thought at first there would be no battles at all, but it turns out you fight the trainers who are standing around outside. The fights are mostly pretty easy, which is not a bad thing for us. I’m aware that Pokémon games can be heavily min/maxed and I have a vague idea all the things about a Pokémon’s nature or temperament of whatever do something, but I have no interest in going down that rabbit hole and neither do my kids. And I don’t really get why you would - the game is not challenging, at least so far. I guess it’s for multiplayer.
The one aspect of customisation we have engaged with, because how could you not, is move selection. It really reminds me of playing an SMT game, though there you get eight moves instead of four. We are basically throwing away all buff/debuff moves and keeping the attacks. Probably not optimal, but it’s working fine so far. Our party composition is pretty static: Pikachu, Ivysaur, Ratata, Magikarp, and Clefairy have been in there more or less the whole time (though Magikarp and Ratata just evolved into different things). The last space was Onix, who we were riding, but it got swapped out for some kind of cat, and swapped again for a rhino looking thing that we thought we might be able to ride but couldn’t. Again, probably not the most effective team, but that’s not been a problem.
I’ve been making occasional attempts to play console games with my kids for a while now, but it’s always ended in frustration. They could not get used to holding a controller the right way around, or pressing buttons while looking at the screen. Somehow, we seem to have crossed the bridge with Pokémon. Maybe a mistake, as now they want to play it all the time. It’s also kind of an eye-opener for me in terms of how to go about playing games: I’m usually pretty completionist, talking to everyone, doing every quest, exploring every passage. When we started playing this, I was looking at the desk and the shelves and stuff in Ash’s bedroom, and the kids were like “stop looking at things! Go downstairs!”, and that’s continued. Mostly the kids hold the controllers now, and if they want to ignore every building in a town then that’s what we do. I wonder if there was someone somewhere who might have told us which types were strong against which? I may never know. But it turns out the kids have watched a lot of the TV show - “that’s a fighting type!”, etc.
Fortunately the kids did talk to the guy who teaches Pikachu Zippy Zap, which has proven to be a win button in about two thirds of fights since we got it. I’d say the only really challenging scene so far was the third gym, where the enemies were all rock and electricity types. Our team was not built for that. Still won, though.
