Earlier this year, Pokémon Legends: Arceus reinvigorated developer Game Freak’s iconic series by shaking up a formula that had gone largely unchanged for more than 25 years. But that recent bout of experimentation doesn’t diminish just how long the Poké-formula has remained mostly static. For two and a half decades, the developer essentially released the same game over and over, and fans like me ate it up like pulled Lechonk. Perhaps disappointingly, the series appears to be resuming its usual course with the more traditional Scarlet & Violet launch this November.

Whether Legends will form an enduring and fresh new branch on Pokémon’s franchise tree is the kind of philosophical quandary that could make Xatu spend all day staring at the sun.

But for those who look beyond Nintendo’s official releases, the Pokémon series is anything but stale. While Nintendo, the games’ publisher, hasn’t worked to make older Pokémon games accessible on modern hardware—or affordable on older gear—a certain demographic of dedicated fans has taken it upon themselves to not just preserve legacy Pokémon titles but to actively improve them. These volunteer ROM hackers and preservationists work to keep the passions of an aging generation of Pokémon masters alive, all while fighting occasionally brutal legal crackdowns from Nintendo.

A growing tradition

After falling in love with Pokémon, ROM hacker Spherical Ice spent hours designing custom sprites on forums when he was just seven years old. “That inevitably led to me discovering ROM hacks, but I was really scared about the law, so I remember hiding it from my brother and parents because I thought I would go to jail,” Spherical Ice told me.

ROM hacker Vytron, who made the hacks Pokémon Saiph and Pokémon Sors, has also had to consider the legal issues inherent in the hobby.

“From a certain point of view, I can understand [Nintendo’s] behavior toward fan creations,” Vytron said. “However, I do think it’s a bit over the top. The base games are titles Nintendo does not redistribute nowadays. [ROM hack] creators always point to Game Freak and Nintendo as the creators of not just the base game but Pokémon as a brand, and they don’t charge money for the games—they don’t harm the business of the company.”

Many other Pokémon ROM hackers feel similarly. Since these projects tend to rejuvenate interest in older games—most of which are only playable on the hardware they were originally developed for—they can increase the overall popularity of Pokémon without laying claim to any profits. Proof of this effect isn’t hard to come by; a cursory glance at YouTube or Twitch immediately demonstrates the immense draw ROM hacks have today. In many ways, it’s difficult to imagine contemporary Pokémon without them.

This is especially true when considering the vibrant history of Pokémon ROM hacks. While there has been a sharp increase in awareness of the space in the last few years, today’s ROM hackers were playing the hacking work of others as early as 2007—and some hacks date back even further than that.

ShockSlayer, the creator of ROM hack Crystal Clear, remembers encountering publisher Natsume’s Telefang games, an unrelated series of Japanese monster-catching titles that bootleggers famously translated as Pokémon Diamond and Pokémon Jade in an attempt to capture Western Poké-mania. One of those bootlegs would eventually lend its name to an official Pokémon game, while the other featured the Forest Spirit from the Hayao Miyazaki film Princess Mononoke on its box art (the Forest Spirit, obviously and unfortunately, wasn’t catchable).

While these projects weren’t necessarily ROM hacks in the conventional sense of the term, they were at least partially responsible for instigating the first wave of Pokémon fan games like Shiny Gold, Chaos Black, and Quartz—names that cropped up as often as Red & Blue in the conversations I had with nine different ROM hackers for this article.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1874389

Last year’s by-the-numbers Pokémon Diamond and Pearl remakes did even less than most Pokémon games to spruce up and modernize the series’ decades-old formula. That’s understandable for a remake of a 2006 Nintendo DS game, but the games were still disappointing follow-ups to the more adventurous Sword and Shield.

The good news is that if you’ve been waiting for Game Freak to really shake up Pokémon‘s gameplay without totally burning it to the ground and starting from scratch, Pokémon Legends: Arceus is the game you’ve been waiting for. Part Pokémon and part Breath of the Wild, Legends takes the free-roaming “Wild Area” concept from Sword and Shield and updates the series’ catching and battling mechanics to match.

That’s not to say it’s a perfect fusion of those disparate elements. Its mission-based structure gets pretty fetch quest-y, it leans heavily on an over-familiar roster of existing Pokémon, and the aging Switch hardware sometimes struggles to make it look good, especially when docked. But despite those problems, the whole package works together surprisingly well, and it makes the Pokémon feel fresher than it has in quite a while.

Ancient history

Legends is set up as a distant prequel to Diamond and Pearl that takes place in the Hisui region, which will someday become the modern Sinnoh region. The decision to set Legends not just in the past but way in the past gives it a distinct flavor from main-series Pokémon games. You aren’t just putting together a Pokédex—you’re assembling the first Pokédex. Item shops exist, but you’ll need to craft the vast majority of Pokéballs and other items you use with found materials. And there are few cities, no gyms, and no Pokémon League, which lets the series experiment with new modes of character progression.

Hisui is split up into five different biomes—you can’t walk from one end of Hisui to the other as you can in BotW‘s Hyrule, but each of the five areas has distinct topography that keeps things from getting too samey as you progress. Each biome is inhabited by a rampaging Noble Pokémon whom you must calm and befriend, which replaces gyms and badges as the main way the game marks your progress. There are also plenty of side quests to keep you distracted if you don’t want to rush right to the end.

Your character, a member of Galaxy Team, also has a rank within the organization. You rank up by filling out your Pokédex, and you won’t be allowed into the game’s later biomes if your rank isn’t high enough (your rank also affects the kinds of items you’ll be able to craft, among other things). In the main series, all you need to do to fill out a Pokédex is see and catch a single Pokémon of each species. But in Legends, filling out each entry is done by accomplishing a series of sub-tasks, involving everything from catching multiple Pokémon of a single species to seeing Pokémon use specific moves in battle.

Catching and battling Pokémon in Legends is refreshingly fast and satisfying compared to the usual formula. There are no more random battles and no swirly, time-consuming transitions between exploring and battling. All Pokémon are fully visible and walking around—if you want to catch one, the best way to do so is to sneak up on it and toss a Pokéball.

Some wild Pokémon will scamper away if they notice you getting near. Others will get mad and attack you directly. It’s possible to get totally knocked out by a wild Pokémon’s attacks, which will send you back to the nearest base camp with fewer items and a bruised ego. But you can defend yourself by tossing out one of your Pokémon, triggering an essentially traditional turn-based Pokémon battle.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1828366

The first and last time Nintendo collaborated with location-based AR company Niantic, the result was the worldwide mega-phenomenon Pokémon Go. Five years later, the companies are working together once again to see if they can recapture the magic with a new augmented reality game based on the much more niche Pikmin franchise.

After testing an early version of the Pikmin Bloom app over the last week, I can say that the game serves as an effective, super-cute pedometer, providing some nice, gentle motivation for reluctant walkers to get up and get their daily steps in. But while this gamified Fitbit requires less fuss and direct hassle than Pokémon Go, the game’s basic “watch the numbers go up” loops also don’t have the same compulsive collect-them-all appeal as Niantic’s previous hit.

Watching numbers go up

For the uninitiated, Pikmin are tiny, colorful, slightly humanoid creatures with blooming flowers on their heads. In the original console games, your character grows and manages an expanding team of Pikmin with varying abilities to help a marooned spaceman escape a planet. In Bloom, the Pikmin who follow you on your daily walks are more concerned with planting petals and growing normal flowers, which show up permanently on the game’s map.

What starts as a small stroll with a single Pikmin quickly grows into an ever-expanding loop of resource extraction and consumption. First, you throw colorful nectar to your Pikmin, causing it to bloom with color-coded petals that you can pluck with a satisfying tap. But each Pikmin can only grow a set number of petals each day, and those petals are actively consumed as you grow flowers during walks.

Thus, you need to grow more mouths to feed (and petals to pluck) by finding seedlings, which only grow into full Pikmin after a set number of steps (usually in the thousands). More Pikmin also means more pairs of arms and legs to send on timed expeditions for more fruit, which turns into nectar, which is fed through Pikmin for more petals to fuel more flowers along your walking path. Meanwhile, you stumble across more seedlings, which turn into more Pikmin, which fuel more frequent expeditions for more seedlings and fruit. And on and on and on…

The basic loop continues as you build up a squad of dozens of Pikmin and multicolored nectar. Along the way, you slowly see your regular walking paths fill up with a vibrant garden of AR flowers on your on-screen map (you also get to see flowers grown by other players in your area, but that hasn’t been a big draw during the limited pre-release period in my area).

Any gamer who has ever played Diablo knows the simple joy of seeing numbers go up as you play, and Pikmin Bloom provides this motivation in spades. Seeing steps turn directly into a growing squad of cute critters under your indirect control is a joy, and strong sound design and animation work on the Pikmin do wonders to sell the package.

Crucially, besides the walking itself, Pikmin Bloom demands very little attention to power this process. In a game like Pokémon Go, you constantly have to pay attention to the app as you walk, tapping to collect new monsters, spinning Pokéstops, or participating in multiplayer raids. Pikmin Bloom, on the other hand, passively registers your steps and applies them to your goals without requiring much babysitting. A quick five-minute check-in when you have a moment is enough to pluck new Pikmin, collect fruit and seedlings from your expeditions, and make some new petals to power your next walk.

“We tried to make the game fit into your life,” Niantic CEO John Hanke said in a recent Q&A attended by Ars. “[Pikmin Bloom] doesn’t demand your attention, but it’s there when you want to give it your attention.”

The game encourages these check-ins with regular notifications, of course. But it also encourages reflection with a special check-in at the end of the day, reviewing your daily steps and the key locations you visited with virtual postcards. The game even asks how you’re doing each day and can incorporate photos you took on your trips for a kind of digital “lifelog” scrapbook that builds over time, even incorporating any pictures you took that day. In this way, Pikmin Bloom could be seen less as a game and more as an excuse to keep a simple, semi-automated diary of your travels.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1808045

When you get down to it, “shooting” in a video game is really just a way of projecting a directed line of intent from your character to another visible point on the map. This basic fact is a large part of why shooting a gun has become such a natural means of interacting with games from a first-person perspective. If your character is looking at something, shooting a gun lets you instantly and easily engage with whatever you’re looking at.

There’s one other major real-life action where this simple point-and-shoot mechanic applies: photography. Nintendo was among the first game-makers to realize this over 20 years ago, creating Pokémon Snap for the Nintendo 64 as a new type of first-person “shooter” (it doesn’t hurt that cameras fit much better than guns with Pokémon’s family-friendly branding). In the years since, though, only a handful of games have taken Nintendo’s lead and replaced “shoot a gun” with “shoot a photo” as the main verb.

So it’s down to Nintendo to revive and expand its own good idea with the awkwardly titled New Pokémon Snap for the Switch. Though the update can get a bit repetitive and tedious at times, this secret-packed photo safari is a great mix of chill moments and competitive personal striving for the best shots.

Ride the rails

New Pokémon Snap [Switch]

(Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.)

If we’re comparing New Pokémon Snap to gun-based shooters, it bears less resemblance to a Call of Duty and more resemblance to an arcade light-gun shooter like House of the Dead or Time Crisis. That’s because the game, like its N64 predecessor, limits your movement to a preset path, automatically pushing you forward as you tilt and zoom your camera to try to get the best shots (the descriptor “rail shooter” is popular enough to have colonized Wikipedia).

To be fair, you do unlock a few subtle ways to change things up as New Pokémon Snap progresses. You can eventually revisit each course during the night, for instance, completely changing which pokémon are present and how they might act in front of you. You can also earn your way to higher “research levels” for each course, introducing further slight variations on the available fauna. Some courses also have branching paths, letting you see new parts of the level if you trigger a preset marker.

Still, the game’s strict on-rails design can be frustrating, especially if you’re accustomed to open-world shooters that let you explore every last nook and cranny. Pokémon will sometimes remain stubbornly far away or keep their backs turned to you, creating awkward shots that would be easy to fix if you could just take a few steps to the side. Being on rails is also frustrating if you miss a carefully planned shot, forcing you to restart the entire course from the beginning and wait to get back to that same position before trying again.

The slow-paced way the game unlocks new tools and areas seems designed to encourage these kinds of repetitive runs through its largely linear environments. This feeling is exacerbated by the limited methods for filling up your in-game Photodex of Pokémon (a photographic version of the usual Pokédex).

Getting a full Photodex requires finding at least four different photos of each monster that ranks at each level from one to four stars. This ranking process can be inscrutable, but photos of rarer poses and actions by the pokémon generally earn better star rankings. The star rankings are made even more confusing because each photo also gets a bronze-to-gold color rating as well as an individual score rating based on factors like size, centering, and the presence of other pokémon in the photo.

In any case, at the end of each run you can only choose one photo per monster to submit to the professor for final evaluation and addition to your Photodex. Even if you snap dozens of photos at every star ranking in a single run, in the end you’ll have to throw most of them out and give the course another go to capture another pose for the Photodex (you can save unused pictures in a more permanent photo album, though, just for posterity and in-game online sharing).

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1760572

Today’s online Pokémon Presents stream, which celebrated the series’ 25th anniversary, included at least one major surprise: the announcement of a new, more action-oriented Pokémon game set in a period resembling feudal Japan. Pokémon Legends: Arceus is in full development by Game Freak and is targeting an early 2022 release, according to the announcement.

While the new game will be set in the now-familiar Sinnoh region, it will move things back to “a long, long time ago, when the Sinnoh region was still only a vast wilderness.” Players will operate from a base in a feudal-style village, starting out with one of three familiar starter pokémon (Rowlett, Cyndaquil, or Oshawott) to explore that wilderness and fill in the region’s first pokédex.

A short trailer for the game showed a few changes from the series’ usual RPG format. Using a Sword and Shield-style over-the-shoulder camera, players can “study the pokémon’s behaviors, sneak up to them, then throw pokéballs” to catch them directly, as the game’s official description puts it.

The announcement trailer shows the protagonist sneaking through tall grass and around trees to get the jump on unaware pokémon, suggesting stealth will play a large role in the capturing this time around. You’ll also be able to throw pokéballs containing captured monsters directly at wild pokémon, leading to the series’ standard turn-based battles.

“Pokémon Legends: Arceus was developed with the desire to deliver an experience infused with new action and RPG elements that go beyond the framework established thus far, while honoring the core gameplay of past Pokémon titles,” The Pokémon Company said in a statement.

Elsewhere in the presentation, The Pokémon Company also announced the widely rumored remakes of the Nintendo DS-era Pokémon Diamond and Pearl for the Switch. Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are expected to launch in late 2021 and are being developed by Ilca Inc., best known for Pokémon Home.

The Pokémon Company also showed off some new footage of the previously announced New Pokémon Snap, slated for a Switch release on April 30. Players will be able to crop and edit photos taken in the game with stickers and frames and then share them with other players online, earning points based on their photos’ popularity. Players will also be able to throw fruit and glowing “lumina orbs” to help get monster shots that will receive a better rating from the game’s algorithm.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1745594

We don’t often write about mere game announcement teases here on Ars Technica, mainly because doing so with any frequency would leave little time for writing about anything else. But we’ll make an exception for today’s surprise announcement that Pokémon Snap is finally getting a Switch-based sequel, over 20 years after the original became a cult classic on the Nintendo 64.

The announcement of New Pokémon Snap, which came this morning as part of a Pokémon Presents YouTube presentation, was light on details but full of “not final” gameplay footage “from a game under development,” as the fine print disclaimers warned. What we can see of the gameplay in the short clip should be familiar to those who played the Nintendo 64 cult classic back in 1999.

Using a first-person camera viewfinder perspective, players aim to get the best shots of Pokémon cavorting about environments ranging from sandy beaches to clear blue waters, grasslands, and dense forests. Pokémon lures also make an appearance, letting players draw monsters out from hiding for better shots as they scroll automatically through the islands. Players will presumably be rated on their ability to frame and compose interesting shots, as in the original.

Pokémon large and small from throughout the series’ history feature in the trailer, confirming that this isn’t a mere remaster of the original game (which only featured monsters from the original selection of 151). There’s no release date yet for the Bandai Namco-developed game, which is “Under Construction!” according to the teaser trailer.

Photo modes have become a relatively standard feature of big-budget games in the decades since Pokémon Snap‘s debut. But those modes are usually intended just for a player’s personal aesthetic appreciation and not integrated deeply into the game’s own reward structure (even when the game seems to be begging for it). PlayStation 3 safari simulator Afrika is one of the only games to draw direct inspiration from Snap‘s photo-based gameplay.

Elsewhere in its presentation, the Pokémon Company announced a themed tooth-brushing app called Pokémon Smile, a tile-matching game called Pokémon Café Mix, and upcoming DLC for Pokémon Sword and Shield.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1684413

Finally: a true Pokémon game on a flagship Nintendo console.

Last year’s Pokémon Let’s Go games were technically the Switch’s first Pokémon RPGs, but those remakes of the original Red and Blue were greatly simplified and softened up to cater to newer and younger players who got their start with Pokémon Go. Pokémon Sword and Shield, on the other hand, are “real” mainline Pokémon games, serving as direct sequels to 2016’s Sun and Moon and continuing the franchise that began with Red and Blue in 1998 (1996 for Japanese players).

That means Sword and Shield feature the same basic skeleton that has grown into a Pokémon tradition over the past 20+ years. You pick a starter Pokémon and then travel around the region, catching more monsters and earning eight badges so you can earn the right to challenge the region’s Champion and become the very best, like no one ever was. Along the way, you encounter and vanquish a team of bumbling low-level criminals, repeatedly battle with a rival who helps you hone your skills, and solve a regional mystery that ends with you capturing one or more ancient legendary creatures.

Because Sword and Shield throw you into the deep end pretty quickly, they’re not great introductions for newbies; try the Let’s Go games for that, or even Pokémon Go. But for series fans, these are the sequels you’ve been waiting for… with one substantial caveat.

Pokémon without all the Pokémon

Any discussion of what has changed in Sword and Shield needs to start with the games’ most controversial subtraction: for the first time in the series’ history, a mainline Pokémon game won’t actually include all the Pokémon.

Every Pokémon game has a “regional” Pokédex that blends the region’s new creatures with a cross-section of monsters from older games. But after you beat the main quest, previous titles opened up a “national” Pokédex, letting you collect all of the Pokémon from every title and (eventually) letting you import Pokémon from previous generations. In Sword and Shield, a mix of 400-odd monsters, old and new, are the only ones available for the entire game—meaning hundreds more are not available at all. Mega Evolutions are gone, as are most of the regional Pokémon forms from Sun and Moon. The Pokémon Home app will still recognize all existing Pokémon when it comes out next year, but you can’t pull them into Sword or Shield, and Game Freak isn’t planning to add them in later.

The bottleneck is, supposedly, a lack of development time and resources. And before you casually dismiss that rationale, the monsters that are in Sword and Shield are clearly more than just refurbished versions of the models used in the 3DS games. Every Pokémon that makes the jump to the Switch needed to be retextured and tweaked and made usable in the mega-sized Dynamax mode (more on that in a moment). It’s clearly a non-trivial amount of work, especially when multiplied across a sprawling history of 800-plus monsters.

When you’re playing the single-player campaign, the amount and variety of Pokémon available actually feels pretty good. For longtime players and monster collectors, though, it’s hard not to feel a bit resentful. Suddenly, a series that has focused on catching ‘em all for more than two decades has decided that hundreds of Pokémon are not actually essential to the Pokémon experience after all. I’ve been importing certain individual Pokémon from game to game since 2003, and I always appreciated that Game Freak encouraged this kind of sentimental attachment. Not anymore.

With half of all existing Pokémon gone, the “long tail” of Sword and Shield—the stuff that players have always done after the main single-player story has been cleared—has been dramatically reduced in size and scope relative to previous games. The reduced Pokédex also seriously limits the variety of possible monster teams and strategies that make the competitive circuit interesting.

Maybe Pokémon Home will include a battling component, or maybe a re-release of Sword and Shield a couple of years from now will fill in the rest of the monster roster. But despite Sword and Shield‘s many improvements, I’d imagine many competitive players will continue to use Sun and Moon just for the larger roster.

A console-size Pokémon

Now let’s focus on the good stuff, because there is a lot of it, national ‘dex controversy aside.

It starts with some console-scale world-building. In previous Pokémon games, the environments have always looked more or less like our own, And while we’re told that Pokémon vary widely in size and weight, small portable screens have always (by necessity) sort of flattened the monsters out so that a tiny Caterpie looks not all that different from a 21-foot-long Gyarados. Thanks to the extra power of the Switch, Sword and Shield can finally show us a world that’s big enough to show us what a Pokémon-centric society would really look like—Sun and Moon attempted this, but they were held back by the aging hardware of the 3DS.

The best example of this is the game’s “Wild Area,” a wide-open field between cities with a free-range camera where dozens of Pokémon of different shapes and sizes roam free. Not only does this make an unprecedentedly large and varied roster of Pokémon available from very near the start of the game, but if you’re not careful you can run into high-leveled monsters that will absolutely wipe your fledgling team out if you’re not ready to deal with them.

The game’s cities and battles feel bigger, too; each city is built around a gigantic stadium where battles can happen in front of thousands of spectators. And these cities all have distinct and memorable designs that usually complement the Pokémon type used in the stadium. Sadly, though, there’s not much reason to come back to most of these cities once you clear the stadium challenge and break into everyone’s homes to look for items.

Like most Switch games, Sword and Shield deploy some graphical trickery to keep things running smoothly—shadows lose resolution quickly as you move away from objects, for instance, and far-off objects can often pop into existence (the way that Pokémon actually spring up as they pop in makes this graphical artifact more playful and intentional-looking). These aren’t the best-looking games on the Switch, or even the best-looking RPGs (Dragon Quest XI running on the Switch manages better draw distance and more detailed environments, for instance, though the resolution is often visibly lower). Still, the monster designs, environments, and big, colorful character models all look good. This is definitely the look that Sun and Moon were going for but executed more successfully on new hardware.

That said, this does look and feel a bit like a scaled-up portable game in a lot of ways. Text size and the information density of the game’s UI all seem tuned for play on the handheld screen rather than a TV screen. The game seems marginally better-optimized for handheld mode, too—the only times I noticed small framerate dips were exclusively in docked mode. On the other hand, the game retains all of the handy and quick-to-access local multiplayer features from the previous 3DS versions.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1600607

Pokémon: Detective Pikachu is the best video game adaptation I’ve ever seen in a theater. And it’s even better than that weak praise might imply.

We could spend this entire article regretting the existence of Uwe Boll or arguing the merits of the Tomb Raider and Resident Evil film series, but Detective Pikachu is such a fun, polished film that those comparison points really don’t make sense. The more important comparison point is Pokémon itself—and the many feature-length cartoons that it has already been attached to.

Detective Pikachu is brisk, whimsical, and family-friendly, but it particularly wins out—and survives its pitfalls—by doing something really surprising: fully breaking from the Pokémon game-plot paradigm.

Take me down to Ryme City

The film emphasizes this quality by opening with a clever fake-out. We begin with the camera flying over a sleepy, pastoral town where Pokémon meander in fields of tall grass (you know, just like in the games). Our protagonist, a 21-year-old guy named Tim (Justice Smith of Jurassic World 2), is urged by a childhood buddy to get back into the catch-‘em-all swing of things—”relive the good ol’ days!”—and bumbles his attempt in comedic fashion.

No thanks, not for me, he says. Tim likes his job as an insurance agent. Series fans might expect the film to go down a “Pokémon trainer” path from here, where Tim has a revelation, invests in a carton of fancy Pokeballs, and competes to master the strengths and weaknesses of a cast of Pokémon, all while making friends along the way.

Instead, Tim gets some really bad news, and he has to pick up the pieces—in Ryme City, the one metropolis in a Pokémon-infested Earth where trainer battles don’t happen. It’s a “place where humans and Pokémon live side by side,” we hear in a newsreel description on Tim’s train ride. When he arrives, the whole Pokémon-infested city unfurls. And it’s glorious.

We get to Ryme City early in Detective Pikachu, which means most of the 100-minute runtime is spent in a place where roughly 50 Pokémon types hang out in city streets, at cafes, in underground nightclubs, and around nearby canyons and valleys—either commingling with their human companions (one per resident), wandering the world in richly animated herds, or working odd jobs. A four-armed Machamp directs car traffic around a passed-out Snorlax. A Loudred finds a comical opportunity to provide sound amplification at a “concert” of sorts.

As much as I enjoyed seeing Detective Pikachu in a theater, I cannot wait for this film to land on Blu-ray so that I can savor its massive crowds of people walking side by side with so many Pokémon. Each of these sequences can whiz by with only a few seconds of visible Pokémon, but the effort to individually animate each creature and have them blend so seamlessly with their environs is some of the most impressive stuff I’ve seen in a Hollywood production since I began reviewing films at Ars Technica.

This goes doubly for the scenes where we see major Pokémon characters hold onto and climb over their human allies. I’ve never seen CGI characters’ fur and other materials mesh so perfectly with human actors in their vicinity. I actually noticed some ho-hum applications of ambient occlusion and shadows in the film’s opening sequence, so I was heartened to see that visual annoyance prove an exception, not the rule.

Sorry, Pixar. The Detective Pikachu crew deserves your usual Oscar slot next year.

Don’t gotta catch ’em all

But what really gives me shivers is how well Detective Pikachu skips past the usual Pokémon-cartoon baggage. What is each Pokémon’s superpower? How should you best counter a certain creature in a battle? What do you need to effectively capture or evolve an elusive character?

Detective Pikachu doesn’t care. It doesn’t even list most of the creatures’ names, let alone their battle strengths and weaknesses, because this production is not beholden to cartoon adaptations’ usual video game tie-in issues. Again: this is not the story of a burgeoning Pokémon trainer.

Dozens of Pokémon characters whiz by with their animations, actions, and goofy voices pulling the weight of comedy and excitement, and you don’t need to know squat about the series to appreciate any of it. Think of A New Hope‘s cantina scene, where mystery and goofiness set plenty into motion, and then imagine a film letting that perspective ride for its entire runtime. It’s awesome. That fun only multiplies if you’re familiar with a particular character’s game abilities and see how those are reflected in cute, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments.

This sense of constant, seamless visual candy is the difference-maker for a film whose plot is otherwise rote. This is a mystery movie that children can enjoy, after all, so you can expect all the twists and nuance of something like The Great Mouse Detective. Plot points fall all too conveniently into place. The protagonists take some questionable, not-at-all stealthy actions while uncovering an evil plot. Deceptions and twists reveal themselves pretty blatantly.

Tolerable flyover above Montana

Yet Detective Pikachu never really feels rote or predictable, thanks to how it slips two secret tricks into a mystery-by-numbers screenplay: silly Pokémon, and Pikachu voice actor Ryan Reynolds.

I admit, I had my reservations about Reynolds’ role after hearing his work as the murderous, foul-mouthed voice of Deadpool. Yet within two minutes of Reynolds manifesting as Detective Pikachu (whose voice can only be understood by Tim in this Poké-world), I was sold. There’s subtlety and nuance (if you can believe it) for how Reynolds voices the world’s most popular electric-mouse mascot, and his reimagining of the typically squeaky character fits.

Believe it: Pikachu makes sense as a friendly, over-caffeinated, and eager adult who can reflect with a somber tone one moment and turn wimpy and terrified the next. The slyness and dripping sarcasm of Deadpool’s voice is nowhere to be found here, and the whole thing benefits from Tim as a confused, straight-man partner. What’s more, since Tim and Detective Pikachu don’t go down the normal Pokémon-adventure route of master and monster, we get to see Tim “grow up” in subtle, surprising ways, as opposed to his transforming into an against-all-odds action star.

Thank goodness, because the rest of the live-action cast ranges from serviceable to obnoxious. Tim’s eventual foil, a perky reporter (Kathryn Newton), has all the subtlety and gravitas of a Hannah Montana guest-star, while a haughty, sneering business executive (Chris Geere) wallops viewers over the head with the idea that we’re not supposed to like or trust him. If either actor wants to reprise their exact performance in the future, they’d be incredible fits for an average Pokémon cartoon.

But their campy, overeager performances are still a good fit and certainly not worth getting hung up over. They’re good mid-film reminders that you’re not watching Detective Pikachu for a refreshing new twist on the usual mystery story. Instead, attend this film to savor what happens when a film crew leverages the strengths of a zany, massive cast of monsters while checking their plot-dragging, game-battling baggage at the theater door. Should every other upcoming video game film start by shamelessly copying Detective Pikachu‘s formula, the cinematic world would be the better for it.

If Pokémon has become a part of your life for any reason—you played it, your kids play it, or you got hooked on Pokémon Go for a few months—go see this hilarious, sweet, and wide-eyed film. If not, prepare to have a perfectly good time while being confused by whatever the heck a Gengar is.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1502171

Enlarge / You’ve probably caught at least one of these, right? (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

On August 27, 1998, Topeka, Kansas became Topikachu for one day—a ceremonial renaming to celebrate the US arrival of a new video game franchise, Pokémon. While popular previously in Japan, the franchise’s impact has been felt in the US ever since. To remember this gaming landmark, we’re resurfacing this classic Ars tale of franchise fandom over Labor Day Weekend. The piece re-emerged once before in February 2016 for the 20th anniversary of the original release of Pokémon Red and Green in Japan, and it originally ran in October 2013.

I’ve been playing Pokémon games since I was 13, and I’ve felt just a little too old for the games pretty much the entire time. Having an eight-year-old brother slavishly devoted to the games, and the anime, and the trading cards, told Young Andrew all he needed to know about the age of kids who were into Pokémon. Even once he (er, me) finally gave in to his curiosity and began playing Pokémon Blue (via the No$gmb emulator on the computer), he only played it with headphones in and the door to his bedroom closed. That experience set the tone for the next decade-plus of Pokémon playing: done in secret, kept to myself, a source of shame.

I’ve never watched the anime. I don’t collect the cards. I don’t play the weird offshoot games like Pokémon Snap, Pokémon Rumble, or Hey You, Pikachu! or whatever. My possession of Pokémon merchandise is limited to a handful of figurines I picked up when I went to Japan in 2010. But every time a new game in the main RPG series has come out, I’ve been there. The games have been with me through childhood into adolescence and adulthood, and while they’ve changed (and I’ve changed) the things I enjoy about them haven’t.

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http://arstechnica.com/?p=355021

Enlarge / A screen from the Pokemon Essentials interface showing how to build a map with the tool in RPG Maker.

Nintendo has a long history of using legal action to take down fan games based on its popular copyrighted franchises. Now the company is taking aim at one of the tools used to build some of those fan games.

Since 2007, Pokémon Essentials has been a crucial part of the Pokémon fan game community. As a free mod for the paid RPG Maker software, Pokémon Essentials offers all the graphics, music, maps, and tilesets a fan game maker needs to craft their own Poké-adventure.

Fans of the tool congregated around the PokeCommunity forums and a dedicated Pokémon Essentials wiki to download files, share creations, and discuss the scene. Earlier this week, however, PokéCommunity forum moderator Marin announced that “the Pokémon Essentials wikia and all downloads for it have been taken down due to a copyright claim by Nintendo of America.” That means “we will not allow Pokémon Essentials or any of its assets to be hosted or distributed on PokéCommunity,” the announcement reads. “We sincerely apologise that we have to do this, but there is no going around it.”

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https://arstechnica.com/?p=1365825