A new Pokémon Snap is here and in usual Nintendo fashion, it is many years late and named New Pokémon Snap. This game has been one that I have been eagerly awaiting for the last 20 or so years. DS came and went, 3DS came and went, Wii U kind of came and went even mobile Nintendo games were happening and still Pokémon Snap lies dormant. All of these aforementioned platforms would have been PERFECT for a Snap revival and the best we've gotten before New Pokémon Snap is a virtual console release of Pokémon Snap. Being back in Pokémon Snap feels good but in some ways, it's lacking in the charm and discovery of the original.
For those of you that have been living under a Graveler, Pokémon Snap is an on-rails level-based picture-taking safari. Each level takes you through a different environment full of Pokémon that you would expect to see in that environment. For example, Wailmer and Lapras are out in the ocean, Sandshew and Hippowdon are in the desert, and so on. The goal of each level is to take the best pictures of as many different Pokémon as you can. After the level, Professor Mirror judges these photos and gives a final score. One way New Pokémon Snap deviates from the original is in the scoring portion. Each Pokémon has 4 different levels of poses, one through four stars, and then within those star rankings, you get different colored stars based on the quality of the photo, bronze to diamond. You can only submit one picture per Pokémon so you will be running each course, and even multiple courses, multiple times to fill that Pokémon's Photodex page. One thing to be aware of going in is that Professor Mirror is a HUGE size queen. He will tell you over and over that bigger is better, so just be aware of that.
This is where my first issue with the game comes in. What qualifies as a xStar pose is very unclear and you won't know if you even got one until the very end of the course. Some are obvious, where a Pokémon does something cool and it's a four-star. Sometimes you can take two almost identical photos and they are different star rankings. This makes it difficult to know what I am looking for when I am out on a trip and causes me to just cross my fingers that the picture I took is the pose that I need.
But why should you even care about getting all the poses and the highest points per run? That is because that is, mostly, how new courses are unlocked. Each course has a research level and your research ranks up with the number of points you get at the end of each run. Increasing your research level changes things about the level itself, where some Pokémon will only be out on higher levels or behavior will be changed from level to level. This gives you a reason to run the courses multiple times as you will only be able to see certain things on higher research levels but as mentioned above this also is a gate for new courses. As you raise your research level Professor Mirror will pop up and say that he found a new spot to teleport to or that he will allow you to go to the course at night. Each course and variation of course has its own research level and set of Pokémon.
This is another issue I have with this game over the original, and it is minor. In the original, you would unlock new courses by doing things in the current one. For example, to unlock a new course in the original you had to properly time an apple throw at an Electrode so it would explode and open a new path for you. I thought that was very interesting and just fun to learn about. Something similar is done in New Pokémon Snap but this time it's the same course but different paths. In one level if you hit a Pokémon with an apple it will get mad and shoot at a rock blockage opening a new path for you to take if you want. I prefer the way the original handles this as it feels like a bigger discovery because it is a whole new course rather than just a different path around the same location, but it will somewhat scratch that same itch.
One cool addition is the ability to edit your photos after the fact by adding filters, stickers, and cool effects on them which can then be saved into your photo book. From your photo book, you can then upload these pictures to the in-game gallery where the whole world can see the cool glasses you put in Bidoof or the Marriage Story reference that most people probably aren't going to understand. It is fun being able to easily share these photos to Twitter and with other random strangers on the internet. More stickers and effects unlock as you progress through the game so if you have a great idea for an edit just wait and you will probably be able to do it later.
New Pokémon Snap brings a lot to the table with about three times the amount of Pokémon, double the number of locations, about triple if you count the variations. I enjoyed my time with the game and will continue to do so after posting this review, but something inside of me still thinks the original Pokémon Snap is the superior version. Objectively New Pokémon Snap is better than original in pretty much every way but in making everything better it feels like it lost a bit of its charm. I just want to be able to make Magikarp evolve by having it kicked into a waterfall by a Mankey or force a Charmeleon to evolve by pushing it into a lava pit but New Pokémon Snap seems to lack that kind of interaction that I really enjoyed in the original.
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