I finally finished it.
I went into the game with equal parts optimism and curiosity. Pokémon has been one of my favorite series for over 15 years, and I had often heard this particular spinoff mentioned in the same tier as Snap and Pinball.
The very first impression I got from the game was that it felt like a fanmade romhack. Everything about the structure is aped directly from Red/Blue (and all subsequent mainline titles), but is executed with far less competency. The most glaring issue in this vein is the world itself.
Pokémon TCG has no coherent sense of place. The main character starts in a lab with a professor, because hey you guys, remember when the REAL games did that? Maybe instead of a professor who studies biological species (something that, ya know, actually makes sense) you can meet a professor of PRINTED PIECES OF PAPER!
And then, after you venture outside for the first time...
Where the hell are you? Why is there an island filled with people whose entire existence revolves around a subpar card game?
It makes no sense, and it's a very crude way of trying to give the game some sense of scope. It falls completely flat, of course, because while in the mainline games you venture down paths and roads and trails in between visiting homes and shops and gyms in proper towns, here you just move a cursor over an icon and hit A. It's a menu masquerading as a world, and it's bullshit.
The buildings themselves are awful, too. Almost all of them have the same layout... The square room that you enter, the square lounge to the left, and the square club leader room in front of you.
This is the lounge. This particular one wouldn't be offensive on its own, but all eight lounges are practically identical. There are a few random NPCs who either spout painfully dull flavor text or offer you a shitty trade deal, a card playing table, and a counter with attendants behind it
who you can't even speak to or interact with.
And why does the table exist in the lounges and in the hall where the final battle takes place, but nowhere else? Does your character just... sit on the floor when he duels everyone else?
If you look at the top of that picture, you'll see the mentally ill NPC Imakuni. Imakuni is apparently a real-ass dude who, i don't know, helped with something, and convinced Hudson to make him a character in the game. If he's supposed to come across as charming or quirky, he doesn't - he seems mentally unwell and almost predatory in how he scampers around an island in a weird costume where 80% of the inhabitants are children.
At least the club master rooms themselves have some variety in decor and themes, though their still a far cry from any proper gym.
Running down the list of clubs is pretty standard. There's the Fire Club, the Water Club, the Psychic Club, the Science Club, the Figh... what, what the hell.
The Science Club?
This was so baffling to me that I did some research to figure out what the deal was. Apparently there are only 7 elemental types in the game, and Hudson didn't want to theme a club around "colorless". Their brilliant solution was the Science Club, which is a counterpart to the Grass Club (in that decks are themed around Grass types) except - get this - the Grass Club is girls only and
the Science Club is boys only. You know, because silly girls can't do science and that was a fine view to have all the way back in 1998.
The pacing of this game is terrible. The tutorial at the very beginning does a poor job of explaining how crucial it is to amass different types of cards early on to restructure your deck. I'm familiar with TCGs - I've played Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh! and Hearthstone - but I figured I would get some prompt later on to start tinkering with custom decks, so I tried sticking with the starter one I chose for a while. After getting curbstomped several times, I did some online digging and quickly farmed the proper cards to make a Haymaker deck.
From there, I save-scummed before every match and reloaded my restore point if I got a bad hand draw. The game was a breeze after that. My complaints with that playstyle are totally on me (since I'm the one who was gaming the system), but the proper way is just so damn painful. The RNG is a monster in this game, and there's no forfeit option while you're in a match. My playtime easily would have doubled if I had played through every single match in the game, from beginning to end, without reloading to compensate for bad draws or matches where it was clear halfway through that I had no chance of winning.
I can't fault the game for the mechanics of the TCG though, because Hudson of course had nothing to do with how the card game itself plays. But since that is the ONLY mechanic, and there is nothing else around supporting it, the title feels incredibly thin. There isn't even a freaking shop to, you know, buy cards. You get packs of cards after every match you win, of course, but the contents are all randomized and it's hard to know what type of pack you'll even get before you challenge an opponent.
After defeating the four grand masters and the champion, you then inherit the legendary cards. And the legendary cards talk to you. This goes back to my first point - what the hell kind of world is this? The cards talk to you, but it seems pretty clear you are in something akin to the real world, and NOT the pokemon world. If pokemon actually existed in the Pokemon TCG universe, people would be capturing and battling the real thing instead of the card knockoff.
All of that being said, I'm still very glad I played the game. I was curious about it, and now I know. And as a huge pokemon fan, the Science Club and Imakuni alone were both novel enough from a trivia perspective to justify my playthrough. The game has some good music too, particularly the awesome
Grandmaster's Theme.
The funny thing is, I know I would have adored this game when it came out. I loved collecting the cards in real life, and I would have gladly devoted an entire summer to building an awesome deck and going about dominating the island's inhabitants the legitimate way. In that sense, I can absolutely see how people who grew up with the game look back on it fondly. That will never be me though, and I'm pretty confident in saying I will never boot this game up again.
Anyway, this was my first time being able to participate in a retroactive, and I'm very excited to hear the upcoming discussion!
