The story behind the Detective Pikachu games is a rather odd one. I won’t go into t00 much detail, but, as we all know, we had a Hollywood Blockbuster film based off the first game. The game had come out in 2018 with the film following only a year later. A part of me always suspected the game was made with the making of a movie in mind. While most Pokémon games are developed by Game Freak, they aren’t the only ones that develop Pokémon games. In fact, Game Freak primarily works on the core series while all the offshoots are by other sister developers, such as Creatures who did both Detective Pikachu games. With the first being released five years ago, and this new “Detective Pikachu Returns” only this week. So, five years in development, this new title must be something special, let’s dive in!
The general basis of Detective Pikachu revolves around the main protagonist Tim Goodman, who somehow has the ability to talk to a specific Pikachu. It’s still strange seeing a Pikachu speak like a human, but here we are. Together they unfolded a crazy mystery much larger than they ever could suspect, with some interesting revelations at the end. If you watched the movie, you’d know what I mean. In “Detective Pikachu Returns” the duo finds another mystery to solve, in this case revolving Pokémon behaving very strangely and is somehow connected to a mysterious chemical which stirs the balance between humans and Pokémon. Again, taking place in Rhyme City, a very cool place where both humans and Pokémon coexist peacefully. It’s really cool seeing many of the Pokémon I loved growing up walking around the streets and working random jobs around the town, it’s a cool vibe to see and certainly a change of pace from the usual straight forward Pokémon games where you gotta catch’em all.
So, with five years in development, how does this game play? Must be something very unique I’d imagine. Unfortunately, not so much. The gameplay elements are fairly minimal and not too different from the original, as this is still mostly a point-and-click style adventure game. Most of the gameplay you play as Tim as you and Pikachu wander around looking for clues by talking to humans, or having Pikachu interacting with another Pokémon. During your conversations you do have a small variety of dialogue options, but I don’t think the choices you make in what you say will often change the story much since you will have to get the right answers from who you’re talking to eventually. As you are assembling a theory the game has you doing deductive reasoning which are essentially multiple-choice questions, even if you mess up on an answer, the game is forgiving and ends up correcting you. In other words, it’s probably more difficult not solving the mystery.
One interesting addition to this game was the ability to have Pikachu recruit other Pokémon for a period of time to use that specific Pokémon’s ability to help further your case somehow. I need to talk about the graphics here for a moment; this game looks incredibly dated, even for a dated console like the Nintendo Switch itself, I feel like this game could easily run on the 3DS still to this day, if Nintendo still supported it. We may be spoiled by the lack of loading screens in this day and age, but, even for Nintendo, these loading screens are also noticeably long. With how little is done in every aspect of this game, I have no idea why it took the developers five years to get this released. Perhaps there’s a lot more to this story I don’t know, maybe they were working on a completely different version and ended up going back to the drawing board. I’m still giving this game more or less of a pass despite so much against it, primarily because as a Pokémon fan, it’s always nice to see a new perspective of that world and it’s still filled with the charm you know and expect. For a fifteen-hour experience and one that is certainly catered more to kids rather than the fans that grew up with the franchise, it’s nice that Nintendo opted to not charge customers full price for this title. While I should rate this a six out of ten, I’m bumping it an extra point just for my love of this world and, even as an adult, I managed to find some aspects of the story I found enjoyable, even if the game loved to hold my hand the whole way through.
7/10
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Gaming since I was given an original Nintendo as a kid. I love great storytelling and unique ingenuity. When both collide in a single game, I'm a happy gamer. Twitter/IG @NickNavarro87
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