I really didn't want to write this. I really tried to jump on the Pokemon Go bandwagon, and it was nice while it lasted, but I'm afraid the honeymoon period is over. Almost overnight, I've gone from "I can't believe I finally caught Bulbasaur!" To "Why am I doing this?", and that was when I decided to stop.
Don't get me wrong, I've been a pokemon fan for more than 15 years. I've watched the anime as a kid, and even though I never had the Gameboy experience, I joined the club at a later age by emulating the games on PC and various mobile phones... and I'm not ashamed to admit (or maybe I should be?) that I currently own a Nintendo 2DS, with a copy of each of Pokemon Y and Pokemon Ruby sitting comfortably in my cupboard. When I first heard about Pokemon Go, I got excited enough to do cartwheels in my living room, because getting the chance to "catch em all" in person and make my childhood dreams come to life sounded too good to be true. Alas, my well-earned sense of adult skepticism proved well-founded, because it really was too good be true.
Here are the top 15 reasons why I believe that Pokemon Go is far from being the real-life simulator we were promised:
1- Nintendo has admitted that they don't actually make the game themselves, and thus their ability to influence any future updates or the direction the game is taking in general is non-existent, and the developers can pretty much take whatever liberties they want with the source material.
2- There are in-game micro-transactions. By definition, in order for Niantic to make their money, people have to feel motivated to buy items from their shop, so it is neigh on impossible to be good at this game without giving in to the temptation to buy something.
3- This game is nothing more than a hoarding exercise. While anyone who's ever played a pokemon game would probably tell you that the games had paper-thin excuses for plots and laughable dialogues, there was at least an end in sight when you battled the elite 4 and beat the game. This time, you just hoard as many pokemon as possible, which is an endless pursuit.
4- Speaking of, in previous pokemon games it was theoretically possible to catch all the pokemon in the particular copy of the game you bought (if you put in a lot of time and are lucky and have no life <cough>), but since they've only introduced the original 150 pokemon so far, I'm inclined to believe that they'll be adding the later pokemon generations soon and it will grow harder and harder to catch em all.
5- All the walking around was cute at first, but it's getting old really fast. The game doesn't have any sense of identity or any activity you can do while you're in-doors -where most people spend most of their day- which forces you to only be able to play while you're outside... and even then, personally if there were a pokemon 20 meters away, maybe I'd go slightly out of my way to catch it, but all the stories I hear about people getting Uber rides and having them drive them around so they can catch pokemon is frankly completely banana-nut-butters to me. Maybe I'm too lazy or not "dedicated", but I like to think that I'm smart enough to not be sent running around all over a city because a cartoon yellow mouse told me to.
6- Coming back to leveling up and evolving your pokemon, it's beyond stupid the way it's being done now. No I bloody well won't catch 100 Magikarps to get a Gyarados, or catch a whole bunch of Pidgeys so I can level up my Pidgeot. The good old fashioned way of leveling up the pokemon through battles makes much more sense.
7- Which brings us to the heart of the matter; the battles are way too simplistic and are solely based on one arbitrary number (CP). Whatever elements of strategy there are traditionally in a pokemon game are completely gone; gone are the days when you had to think for hours which 4 attacks you'd give your pokemon to increase their survivability; and the days when you had to think long and hard which team of 6 pokemon to carry around which would cover most of the pokemon types.
Instead of expertly choosing the perfect pokemon type and attack to counter your opponent's pokemon, and thinking 2 steps ahead about what you would do to counter the other pokemon your opponent would probably switch into the battle; you just swipe and tap your way to a cheap tasteless victory, devoid of any sense of achievement, where pokemon types and attacks no longer seem to carry any weight. You just have to catch every motherfucker you run into, keep the strongest ones and dump all the rest, which is as elegant a solution as lighting a candle with a flamethrower, albeit with half the finesse. 8- The reason why pokemon games were ever so successful is because pokemon games are all about petty victories delivered in an easy fix to an entitled generation of millennials, and that was easy enough when the virtual pokemon world consisted of 5 small villages with a population of only about 200 people total. In such a small world, being "the very best" was easy, but Nintendo always made it hard enough to make the player feel like they achieved something and that they really were the best at this, even if it was against a bunch of NPC characters in a virtual world. However the real world, as it turns out, is a huge place. Being the very best Pokemon Go player out of about 1 billion people is nowhere near as easy as beating the original games, especially considering the sheer number of unemployed people who have eagerly seized on this game as a chance to give their lives a sense of purpose.
9- A lot of the pokemon either spawn in particular geographic locations or under certain very specific conditions. This was a minor inconvenience in pokemon games where 1 hour in real life was equal to one whole day in the game, and where you could teach one of your pokemon "fly" and they would take you to any city in the world you wished to go to, but in real-life having to wait a whole day until it's night time so you can catch a ghost-type pokemon is a level of dedication many people don't have to their actual real-life jobs... and don't get me started on having to fly to Australia to even get a chance at catching a Kanghaskhan. 10- By the way; traditionally in pokemon games, the legendary pokemon are just that; legends. There is only one per world, so the player character is the only character in that world who would have it. There are two ways for Niantic to handle this in Pokemon Go; either they make it possible for all players to obtain one, which would cheapen them and destroy their legendary status as well as ensure that all the gyms would soon be dominated exclusively by them; or only create one of each and make them as immensely rare and powerful as they are supposed to be... in real life, how good do you think your odds are to catch that one Zapdos, as opposed to the other billion players who are as eager as you? 11- Catching pokemon is pathetically easy. You just throw the poke-ball. Once upon a time, you had to engineer a perfect scenario where you attack the pokemon with attacks that were just strong enough to weaken them but not strong enough to make them faint. All the times you met a rare pokemon only to attack it with an attack which was just a little bit too strong, causing it to faint and losing the chance to catch it made it a lot more rewarding when you finally managed to get it right... And even then, you had to have a good enough poke-ball or else you would have spent hours flicking poke-balls at the pokemon and it might have ended up escaping anyway. Now if you just throw enough poke-balls at it, you're bound to catch it eventually, which is very weak. 12- There's no pokemon league or any kind of competition that you are motivated to win. Let's pretend you did manage to catch them all and level them all up higher than everyone else in the world. How would your efforts be recognized? You would be able to dominate that one gym near your house. Oh wow, great job... and while we're at it, pokemon gyms shouldn't be a dime a dozen and around every corner, or you wouldn't get any gratification out of beating one; having maybe one or two per city and awarding whoever beats them with a badge would make much more sense than the current way it's being done, where you can't go 20 steps in any direction without stumbling into a gym. 13- I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I don't buy into all these crackpot paranoid scenarios people have been cooking up, but I'd have to be terribly naive to think that no one is using the massive amount of data generated by this game. Just by tracking my geographic locations and using all the points I caught pokemon at as a breadcrumb trail, it would be easy enough for a 5 year old to join the dots and figure out my daily routine; where I live, where I work and what route I take to get to work, and even where I like to go on my weekends. I'm not saying that the Mossad will send their top agent to take me out on my way to my office in Bracknell, but I'm sure this data can be used in other less sinister ways such as targeted advertising, and that rubs me up the wrong way because I didn't consent to this... or maybe I did; I didn't read the terms of the agreement just as I'm sure no one else in the world did. 14- Hatching pokemon... yes, I agree that forcing people to go out and walk around is a definite positive about this game, but having to walk 2-10 kilometers to hatch one single pokemon is excessive, and the fact that we only have one free incubator per player makes it obvious that this is done on purpose to force players to buy new incubators. I don't know about you guys, but there is nothing I'm less likely to spend money on than micro-transactions to help me hatch imaginary eggs on a game, no matter how much I love the Pokemon franchise. 15- Finally, catching the same pokemon every day is boring. Not enough is being done to shuffle the pokemon around regionally; if you walk the same route, odds are you'll find the same pokemon every day (trust me, I speak from personal experience). On the other hand, the game is not consistent- water type pokemon are occasionally found nowhere near water bodies (I found a Squirtle in my hallway) while on the other hand I've never caught a grass type pokemon at a park... which I suppose is a good thing when it comes to catching fire-type pokemon because then we'd only be able to catch them at industrial furnaces, the surface of the sun or hell. This was always going to be a dilemma for the developers; if they made pokemon exclusively spawn in areas that fit their type, you'd have only been able to catch ground/rock types in deserts or in mountainous areas, water-type pokemon near rivers/lakes/seas, etc, and this would have limited each player to whatever pokemon happen to fit their geographic locations; but if they had made it more random, then players seeking a certain type of pokemon wouldn't have known where to go to find one.
This uncertainty is compounded by the fact that Niantic doesn't communicate at all with players; there are no official player guides or tips, and players have so far been largely forced to figure things out on their own, which lends credence to my theory that this game is a front to collect player data, since Niantic don't seem too keen on developing or refining the "game" aspect of the game. Come to think of it, this seems to be a much more sound business model than the (probably) insignificant number of micro-transactions that players make; I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that the game's main revenue stream is selling data to whoever needs it, much like carrying your own personal Varys in your pocket (except that he's spying on you)... and since, again, no one bothers to read the terms of the agreement, this data-gathering could very well have been something we unknowingly agreed to when we clicked "accept", which would make it completely legal.
Not mentioning the lack of pokemon centres to heal pokemon and the ability to trade them with friends -which I understand will be implemented in future updates- aside from all the points covered above, the game servers are consistently overloaded and the game lacks polish altogether, always prone to crashes and freezes... and I completely understand how difficult it is to manage a game of that size with that many players internationally, but I'm tired of waiting for hours at a time during peak hours to be able to get in. Perhaps these are issues that will get solved organically as the developers understand more and more how to optimize the game and iron out the kinks, but to be honest I feel like it's too much effort on my part for nothing in return. I've always wanted to have a trusty Charizard I could count on if I ever got into a fight, but I don't think I want one so badly that I'd catch an average of 50 Charmanders to get a decent-powered Charizard, just so I can place him at a "gym" and leave him there to defend my honor as the damsel in distress. If I'm not giving the orders and directing the battle, it's really not worth it for me. Long-story short, this game is definitely a step in the right direction but as I'm sure many others have already pointed out, it's not the real-life pokemon simulator it could have been. I believe I speak for a wide demographic of pokemon fans who would be prepared to actually pay a one-time fee to buy a game which is more true to the roots of the franchise, rather than this bland, corporate attempt at capitalizing on the nostalgia of an aging demogographic of pokemon fans who now suddenly have access to some sweet, sweet disposable income. We deserve better than this... and the franchise which practically raised us damn well deserves better than this.
Instead of expertly choosing the perfect pokemon type and attack to counter your opponent's pokemon, and thinking 2 steps ahead about what you would do to counter the other pokemon your opponent would probably switch into the battle; you just swipe and tap your way to a cheap tasteless victory, devoid of any sense of achievement, where pokemon types and attacks no longer seem to carry any weight. You just have to catch every motherfucker you run into, keep the strongest ones and dump all the rest, which is as elegant a solution as lighting a candle with a flamethrower, albeit with half the finesse. 8- The reason why pokemon games were ever so successful is because pokemon games are all about petty victories delivered in an easy fix to an entitled generation of millennials, and that was easy enough when the virtual pokemon world consisted of 5 small villages with a population of only about 200 people total. In such a small world, being "the very best" was easy, but Nintendo always made it hard enough to make the player feel like they achieved something and that they really were the best at this, even if it was against a bunch of NPC characters in a virtual world. However the real world, as it turns out, is a huge place. Being the very best Pokemon Go player out of about 1 billion people is nowhere near as easy as beating the original games, especially considering the sheer number of unemployed people who have eagerly seized on this game as a chance to give their lives a sense of purpose.
9- A lot of the pokemon either spawn in particular geographic locations or under certain very specific conditions. This was a minor inconvenience in pokemon games where 1 hour in real life was equal to one whole day in the game, and where you could teach one of your pokemon "fly" and they would take you to any city in the world you wished to go to, but in real-life having to wait a whole day until it's night time so you can catch a ghost-type pokemon is a level of dedication many people don't have to their actual real-life jobs... and don't get me started on having to fly to Australia to even get a chance at catching a Kanghaskhan. 10- By the way; traditionally in pokemon games, the legendary pokemon are just that; legends. There is only one per world, so the player character is the only character in that world who would have it. There are two ways for Niantic to handle this in Pokemon Go; either they make it possible for all players to obtain one, which would cheapen them and destroy their legendary status as well as ensure that all the gyms would soon be dominated exclusively by them; or only create one of each and make them as immensely rare and powerful as they are supposed to be... in real life, how good do you think your odds are to catch that one Zapdos, as opposed to the other billion players who are as eager as you? 11- Catching pokemon is pathetically easy. You just throw the poke-ball. Once upon a time, you had to engineer a perfect scenario where you attack the pokemon with attacks that were just strong enough to weaken them but not strong enough to make them faint. All the times you met a rare pokemon only to attack it with an attack which was just a little bit too strong, causing it to faint and losing the chance to catch it made it a lot more rewarding when you finally managed to get it right... And even then, you had to have a good enough poke-ball or else you would have spent hours flicking poke-balls at the pokemon and it might have ended up escaping anyway. Now if you just throw enough poke-balls at it, you're bound to catch it eventually, which is very weak. 12- There's no pokemon league or any kind of competition that you are motivated to win. Let's pretend you did manage to catch them all and level them all up higher than everyone else in the world. How would your efforts be recognized? You would be able to dominate that one gym near your house. Oh wow, great job... and while we're at it, pokemon gyms shouldn't be a dime a dozen and around every corner, or you wouldn't get any gratification out of beating one; having maybe one or two per city and awarding whoever beats them with a badge would make much more sense than the current way it's being done, where you can't go 20 steps in any direction without stumbling into a gym. 13- I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I don't buy into all these crackpot paranoid scenarios people have been cooking up, but I'd have to be terribly naive to think that no one is using the massive amount of data generated by this game. Just by tracking my geographic locations and using all the points I caught pokemon at as a breadcrumb trail, it would be easy enough for a 5 year old to join the dots and figure out my daily routine; where I live, where I work and what route I take to get to work, and even where I like to go on my weekends. I'm not saying that the Mossad will send their top agent to take me out on my way to my office in Bracknell, but I'm sure this data can be used in other less sinister ways such as targeted advertising, and that rubs me up the wrong way because I didn't consent to this... or maybe I did; I didn't read the terms of the agreement just as I'm sure no one else in the world did. 14- Hatching pokemon... yes, I agree that forcing people to go out and walk around is a definite positive about this game, but having to walk 2-10 kilometers to hatch one single pokemon is excessive, and the fact that we only have one free incubator per player makes it obvious that this is done on purpose to force players to buy new incubators. I don't know about you guys, but there is nothing I'm less likely to spend money on than micro-transactions to help me hatch imaginary eggs on a game, no matter how much I love the Pokemon franchise. 15- Finally, catching the same pokemon every day is boring. Not enough is being done to shuffle the pokemon around regionally; if you walk the same route, odds are you'll find the same pokemon every day (trust me, I speak from personal experience). On the other hand, the game is not consistent- water type pokemon are occasionally found nowhere near water bodies (I found a Squirtle in my hallway) while on the other hand I've never caught a grass type pokemon at a park... which I suppose is a good thing when it comes to catching fire-type pokemon because then we'd only be able to catch them at industrial furnaces, the surface of the sun or hell. This was always going to be a dilemma for the developers; if they made pokemon exclusively spawn in areas that fit their type, you'd have only been able to catch ground/rock types in deserts or in mountainous areas, water-type pokemon near rivers/lakes/seas, etc, and this would have limited each player to whatever pokemon happen to fit their geographic locations; but if they had made it more random, then players seeking a certain type of pokemon wouldn't have known where to go to find one.
This uncertainty is compounded by the fact that Niantic doesn't communicate at all with players; there are no official player guides or tips, and players have so far been largely forced to figure things out on their own, which lends credence to my theory that this game is a front to collect player data, since Niantic don't seem too keen on developing or refining the "game" aspect of the game. Come to think of it, this seems to be a much more sound business model than the (probably) insignificant number of micro-transactions that players make; I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that the game's main revenue stream is selling data to whoever needs it, much like carrying your own personal Varys in your pocket (except that he's spying on you)... and since, again, no one bothers to read the terms of the agreement, this data-gathering could very well have been something we unknowingly agreed to when we clicked "accept", which would make it completely legal.
Not mentioning the lack of pokemon centres to heal pokemon and the ability to trade them with friends -which I understand will be implemented in future updates- aside from all the points covered above, the game servers are consistently overloaded and the game lacks polish altogether, always prone to crashes and freezes... and I completely understand how difficult it is to manage a game of that size with that many players internationally, but I'm tired of waiting for hours at a time during peak hours to be able to get in. Perhaps these are issues that will get solved organically as the developers understand more and more how to optimize the game and iron out the kinks, but to be honest I feel like it's too much effort on my part for nothing in return. I've always wanted to have a trusty Charizard I could count on if I ever got into a fight, but I don't think I want one so badly that I'd catch an average of 50 Charmanders to get a decent-powered Charizard, just so I can place him at a "gym" and leave him there to defend my honor as the damsel in distress. If I'm not giving the orders and directing the battle, it's really not worth it for me. Long-story short, this game is definitely a step in the right direction but as I'm sure many others have already pointed out, it's not the real-life pokemon simulator it could have been. I believe I speak for a wide demographic of pokemon fans who would be prepared to actually pay a one-time fee to buy a game which is more true to the roots of the franchise, rather than this bland, corporate attempt at capitalizing on the nostalgia of an aging demogographic of pokemon fans who now suddenly have access to some sweet, sweet disposable income. We deserve better than this... and the franchise which practically raised us damn well deserves better than this.
