What is it with the “New” in the title? Why not called it Pokemon Snap 2? Or Pokemon Snap Switch? It’s only gonna be new for a short amount of time.

That said, people have really been waiting for a new one of these for a long time. The N64 Pokemon Snap was really fun. A bit short, but a cool experiment with mixing rail shooter gameplay with puzzle gameplay, adding a really interesting scoring system too. But somehow it never happened, for 22 whole years. I figured back in the Wiii era that the Wiimote would be perfect for a new one, but nope. So I was pretty excited to finally see this one popping up.

Let’s see if it lives up to the original… or if it’s even better!

Developer: Bandai Namco Games
Publisher: Nintendo
Release date: April 30th 2021
Platforms: Switch
Genre: On-rails photography puzzle game

This is certainly not a game you play for the story. You just gotta ask one or two questions and the whole thing somehow manages to fall apart completely (for example, why does this camera only store 72 pictures? That’s ridiculous. They have the tech for a flying, teleporting vehicle that can create force fields that not only let you go deep underwater, but also in the heavy heat of a volcano… but somehow they can’t figure out how to make a 1TB MicroSD drive? Dumb). So let’s just ignore this. This is a game you play to take pictures of pokemon, not to follow a story.

So I guess what I should mention first is that this game is beautiful. Really really pretty. They allow a lot of stuff to happen without major framerate issues, which is nice. The pokemon 3D models look really good, and there’s lots of fun animations for each of them. And there’s a solid number of pokemon too. Some really stupid people cry because there’s “only” over 200, but this isn’t the type of game that benefits from getting more of them, specifically. It COULD, but it doesn’t. Each area looks really great, there’s lots to look at and some of them have important stuff hidden in the environment. Just don’t look at the textures TOO much, this IS a Switch game after all. One small issue is the FOV in the game, it’s tiny. If it were on PC I’d boost this shit to 110, this feels like 60 or 50. Feels a bit constrained.

The gameplay is pretty straightforward. The NEO-ONE vehicle moves at a set speed (eventually you can make it move faster, also it moves slower when you zoom in with the camera and/or look behind), so you only need to aim your camera, point it at what you want to take pictures of, and press the A button. You can zoom in to get more precise/closer shots.

Pressing B throws apples. Apples can bonk pokemon slightly to annoy them, and also they might go to the apple to eat it. Pressing Y throws Illumina Orbs. Hitting Crystal Bloom flowers with them illuminate a small range about them, sometimes it does something, sometimes not. It may summon certain pokemon, for example, for special shots. Illumina Orbs also illuminate pokemon, makes them shine a bit… This isn’t particularly useful except SOME pokemon (I will complain about that soon, don’t worry) have special actions when they’re illuminated. You can press X to scan the area, which will highlight things of interest, and also point out pokemon in your view (some of them are hidden so it’s a good way to find who may be hiding). This sometimes makes the pokemon react for some special actions. Pressing R plays some music. This makes certain pokemon react and do special actions. Some of them when they’re already doing specific things, like sleeping (the music might wake them up… or not). So there’s a lot you can do. At first it’s only taking photos, but as you progress you get more of these features.

When you finish a level, Professor Mirror evaluates your photos. You pick ONE photo per Pokemon. Photos are ranked from 1 star to 4 stars. The stars don’t denote quality, but rather which pose the pokemon is doing in the photo. So if the pokemon is just standing around, that’s 1 star. If the pokemon is eating or getting hit by an apple, that’s probably 2 stars. If the pokemon is doing a special action, that’s gonna be a 3 or 4 star photo. You have a photodex, which includes the 4 stars for each pokemon in the game, and one of the optional goals is to fill each of the stars for each of the pokemon (so that’s at least 800 separate photos to take if you want to do everything). The actual quality of the photo is scored in a few ways. The pose of the pokemon, the size of the pokemon in the frame (bigger=better but also seeing the whole body and not be too zoomed in is important), if the pokemon is centered in the frame, if the pokemon is looking at you (the more at you it’s looking, the better, so a photo from the side or behind is worth less points), and if there’s other pokemon in the shot (with score for them depending on similar things). Your score goes from bronze to diamond stars, diamond requiring at least 4000 points. The highest I got was just over 5500.

There’s many ways to progress through the actual game. One of them is leveling up. There’s a point threshold on each level, based on the point total of the pictures you chose in the level. When you get enough points, you increase the Research Level of that level. That allows you to select that Research Level when you select the level. If you go to the Florio level at Research Level 2, that changes how the pokemon in it act when you go through, and also the selection of pokemon, there may be more that the Research Level 1 version didn’t have. Each level gets up to Level 3, at which point you can level to Max. Level Max is the same as Level 3 when it comes to gameplay, as far as I’ve seen.

The other ways to progress is to find Crystal Bloom flowers that are shining. Those allow you to get the Illumina Orb for that island’s levels. Then there’s ancient ruins, which are hidden in each level in some way. Getting a photo of that will have some sort of story progression. Some of these, may it be Crystal Blooms or Ancient Ruins, may be hidden behind certain research levels, and having to find alternate paths through levels, which may require some puzzle-solving.

A great thing about this game is how much content there is. It’s actually kinda crazy. The N64 game had 7 levels. Not a lot of variety there, beyond replaying them when you get different items, there’s not much to them. This game has 25 levels. And each level has 3 variations based on your research level in them. And many of the levels have alternate paths which lead to completely different areas. So that’s 75 levels at least. More if you want to count alternate paths as different levels. Nice upgrade from the first game. Sure the beach looks the same each time, but depending on your research level it gives you more pokemon to photograph, or different situations which can lead to better photos. So it basically is different, functionally.

There’s requests, which are largely optional, but what they do are actually pretty interesting. They give you vague hints about how some pokemon will act in certain situations. Like “Oh hey I saw this pokemon do a thing”, then you have to figure out how to make them to that thing. This is one way to figure out how to get the 3 and 4 star shots for some of the pokeymanz.

There’s a few things I feel need a bit of a fix, specifically with the items/abilities you can use. Like, the pester ball made sense in the N64 game, the Illumina orb here… doesn’t. You just have to throw it at everything and hope something happens. With the pester ball, you could guess what the effect might be depending on which pokemon you could hit with it. It’s just too much pointless trial and error. For every pokemon in the game, you need to figure out: which reacts to illumina orbs, which will react to the scanning sound, which will react to the music, which will react to getting taken a picture of (which happens)… and considering there’s over 200 pokemon to figure out, it’s a bit of an annoying element. If there was a good way to figure out who may react to what, it’d be fine. There isn’t, other than the apples which you’ll see easily which ones might react positively/negatively to it. The request system helps, but not always.

That said, it’s not so annoying that it makes the game not fun. Quite the opposite, you kinda test all sort of pokemon at once whenever you go through a level anyways, so you figure it out pretty naturally. It’s just that, if there’s a request that says something happens at a certain spot (which will be pictured) and you have no idea which pokemon are involved and what to do to them to make them do the special thing… you’re left with just trying everything on everyone at random until something does happen. It’s not very intuitive

The only other very subjective issue I have is how scoring works. All that really matters is if the pokemon is centered, takes a lot of the photo (without spilling out too much) and is facing you… but you can easily take photos that are way prettier and might not have the pokemon facing the camera, or being center frame, or taking most of the space on the image, but the game doesn’t score for pictures actually being pretty. I guess that would be too hard to do, and that’s why you have a separate photo album (mine is all bidoof photos) and online sharing for the pictures you really like, but it would be nice for really good photos (when it comes to the actual art of photography) to get some kind of acknowledgement in-game.

Overall

I really enjoyed this game. The scoring is fun, the puzzles are decent, it looks really awesome as long as you don’t zoom into environment textures too much, and there’s a shitload of content with 3 versions each of 25 different levels, so functionally that’s 75 different levels (compared to 7 on the N64, and that’s if you really want to count the Mew level… I guess I am counting the level 1 versions of the Illumina levels so fair enough).

I did mention my issue with the Illumina orbs and the weirdly annoying amount of trial and error on each of the 200+ pokemon to figure out how to make them do things, but I don’t think it’s that big an issue. I just wish the Illumina orbs made some kind of in-world sense, how am I supposed to know what pokemon will do a special pose or something when I use an orb on them just by looking at them? At least a pester ball was a bit more obvious about what it did. Then again, the music has the same issue, and that issue also basically existed in the N64 game as well.

It’s a pretty long game, especially if you want to 100% (I finished the story and kept playing it for a while after, and I still haven’t found every pokemon, I only have 2 islands/areas that I have found all of them… let alone gotten all the 1 to 4 star shots for each of them). For what it is, it’s got a LOT to do. The first game could be easily finished in an afternoon rental (which is how I experienced it back in the day), this one will take you considerably longer… especially if you suck like me and don’t figure out the alternate route in the Maricopia area that leads to that area’s ancient ruins.

I absolutely recommend this game. It would be weird not to get it, in fact.