Why Pokémon Snap was an unexpectedly great shake-up for the series
Pokémon Snap (2000)
Pokémon Snap (2000)
You don’t need a scrub like me to tell you, the insecure mess reading this, that life is inherently unfair. Neither you nor me were blessed from birth with an elite sporting ability, or with model good looks, or some other form of unique ‘talent’ to separate us from the mouthbreathers - or better still, we weren’t blessed enough to have been born into aristocracy. Can you imagine that?!
But no, not for us. We ain’t that lucky. I do hope, at least, that you and I can share this tentative sort of bottom-feeding bond together. Me and you are the luckless. We were both pretty much finished before we ever really got started, and this “life” we’re currently living now, whatever it is, is the very best we can hope for.
Eddie Hitler had it right when he told us that life was about: you get born, you keep your head down, and then you die – if you’re lucky. Mediocrity is something that we just have to get used to, or so conventional wisdom tells us.
I suppose you sometimes get those naïve sorts who don’t really know their station in life, so they begin to cope with their own doomed existence by posting “artistic” pictures of “inspirational” quotes on social media, for the viewing benefit of nobody in particular. They’re alright, Jack.
Can’t knock these people for effort – what are you without effort? But I think, on the whole, most of us have resigned ourselves to our dismal fates, and any stroke of good luck that does come our way is rightly met with either indifference, or a suspicious shrug of the shoulders.
I know that’s all a bit doomer on a Tuesday morning, and I apologise for that, but you have to understand: we had gone over 20 years without a sequel to Pokémon Snap. And, speaking for myself, I was beginning to get a bit restless. Not to mention, a little overburdened by the dark vapours that govern our existence.
But then, even on a struggling console like the Nintendo 64, and even at the height of Pokémania, why would Pokémon Snap ever be commissioned? Nobody in their right mind would think that a game like this could work. I’m sure I sneered at it myself when I first saw it – if I didn’t, I can’t begin to tell you how disappointed I would be with myself.
It’s such a weak premise that the sharpest, most charismatic man in the boardroom at Kyoto couldn’t pitch it to his fellow high-powered suits, even for a laugh. What’s that mate, you want players to go around a whopping six levels, later a seventh, taking pictures of Pokémon in various low-polygon poses?
It’s also more or less the same experience every time, with each of the levels on rails, and only 63 of the 151 Pokémon are available to snap. And all of this on the graphically fatigued N64 console. I think we can forget it, folks – a business play like that would be nowhere near enough to make Patrick Bateman sweat.
Even the play-testers and the test marketers would reject a concept like Pokémon Snap. Anyone would. A child would think it was a stupid idea. Do you hear that, Nintendo? HAL Laboratories? Do not try to be clever, and don’t bother making an artsy-fartsy camera game like this, even with your money-hungry colourful creatures bolted onto the front. And when I called up Shigeru Miyamoto sometime in 1998, and we had one of our now legendary chats, I told him exactly that.
Well, they went and did turned that concept into a game anyway, and my standing in the dog-eat-dog video game world quickly plummeted. What we’ve got here in Pokémon Snap is a game that, I must reiterate, really should not work. You can beat this one in about 45 minutes, and I’m talking about the much vaunted 100% completion in that figure.
Actually, if you indulged me a few moments, I could tell you all of the Pokémon in the game, where they appear, and how best to photograph them – there really is not that much depth to this game. But therein lies its beauty: it’s a fabulously brief diversion in our forsaken lives, a colourful, short, sharp yet ultimately pleasant shock to our plankton brains.
You travel around an island in an odd vehicle that goes on rails, and even flies in the air a bit when there’s Jigglypuffs bouncing around. Throughout your kid protagonist’s unsupervised journey on this Pokémon infested island, you can pick up apples and bait from Professor Oak, in one of his more vaguely sinister outings. You can use these tools that to coax Pokémon into various, I don't know, kawaii poses.
You can take 60 pictures in any one outing before your film runs out and you have to get the pics developed. Wow, does that sentence make no sense these days or what? Technology sure moves quick. But I suppose you couldn't expect even a turbo photography nerd like Todd Snap (and yes, that is your character's rather convenient name) to have a digital camera at the age of 10, so we'll suspend our disbelief on that one.
At almost any given moment in a stage, there's a Pokémon waiting to be painted like one of your French girls, and many hidden ones lurk as well, using nifty tricks to remain undetected – it’s up to you to flush them out. Snapping a Pokémon gets you a certain amount of points, based on whether you managed to get them from the front and at a good angle, nice and close up, preferably in the centre of the frame and even with a few of its buddies alongside.
You'll surely delight as you stop in your tracks in the Volcano stage and tease a load of hungry Charmanders. Then there’s the challenge to get all of the Jigglypuffs together for a wonderful wee concert in the Caves. There’s loads of cute little scenarios like this to find, provided you’re skilled at lobbing apples and stink bombs at your muses in a thrilling show of cruelty to Pokémon.
See, you may learn all the routines pretty quickly, and the surprise and novelty of seeing the Pokémon do different things looks like it could be in danger of wearing thin after only a few playthroughs. But there’s always a fine challenge involved in trying to manipulate the more point-rich Pokémon into giving you the fancy poses, the ones you’ll need to score big bank off the Professor.
That’s where the high replay value of Pokémon Snap lies. What could be more important than high replay value? And this game has it in spades, somehow. I mean it, even though the game is shorter than most TV episodes, you can hop on this game’s cutesy merry-go-round once a week and still not become bored of it. Anything to brighten up our doomed lives, eh?
Is this game worth buying? To be honest, as much as I love it, I certainly wouldn’t pay any more than a tenner for it. Again, that may not portray the game in a particularly good light, but you should have seen how happy we all were when Pokémon Snap’s long overdue sequel was announced. That’s probably why my man Shigsy called me up in 2021, and told me never to bother him again. You’re welcome, guys.
25 April 2023