This was originally posted on the r/Pokemon Subreddit, and has been backdated to reflect its original post time.
This got *really long,* so the Tl;dr here:
Wayyyy too many menus and buttons and currency; I can’t keep track
Too many red notif circles that I don’t know why they’re there
I think the miniaturized version of the battles is good, but
Sometimes games feel over before they start.
Removing energy cards is an awesome idea
Weakness should be deleted from the game
I feel like I don’t have enough cards to actually deckbuild; I can’t compete sometimes
Premium subscription cost sucks when compared to full-fledged games but alright for a mobile game ig
The fact that you can buy packs with Poke Gold is pay to win and terrible
Overall it’s a fun little app; I’ll probably just open packs when they come around and send my gf the screenshots. Maybe months down the line when I have more cards I’ll look into battling but for now there’s no point
Hello, everyone! Just picked up Pokemon TCG Pocket ten days ago, and I figured I’d drop my thoughts here for anyone to read or ignore.
I will say, though, that this is not intended to be an objective review in order to give you a complete look on whether or not you should start playing; it’s more supposed to be about me dumping my thoughts and seeing if any of them resonate with anyone.
So without further ado, I think it’d be helpful to give a bit of info about my thought process before playing:
To be honest, when it initially was announced I really didn’t give a crap–I used to be a big fan of the games and played them day one when they came out, but I feel Pokemon hasn’t been consistently innovating as much as some of my other favorite childhood game series (eg, Mario or Zelda), so I’ve gradually lost interest. I also tried to get into the TCG as a kid, but I quickly realized I couldn’t afford it–after all, why continually sink a stream of revenue into a card game that I could only play if I found other people to play with…when I could pay one time for a video game that I could also play solo as well as with friends and who had the added bonus of not charging me every time I wanted a new Pokemon? As such, I played a lot more of the video games, and I found myself comparing this app to my experiences in the video games a lot, for better or for worse.
I’m also not a fan of the “mobile game” monetization scheme. Put short, I want to pay money up front for access to the whole game. In my experience with mobile games, while the term “free-to-play” (ftp) is used as a front to claim that they’re giving people that may not be able to afford it a chance to play, the reality is that they just want to get as many people hooked as possible with enough cool stuff early on so that they can nickel-and-dime them into spending much more than they would actually be comfortable with spending on a game in the long run.
However, my girlfriend recently started playing, and I’m currently chilling on vacation with a lot of free time, so I said ‘screw it’ and downloaded it. I’ve been playing for ten days, and here are my thoughts (oh, and I also got the free premium pass like 4 days ago maybe):
The UI
Holy crap, this game is overwhelming. The amount of information it throws at you and the number of menus you can navigate is ridiculous. That little red notification circle is the bane of my existence–I still don’t know why my profile icon has one sometimes. And other times, it seemingly shows up just to tell me just that I made progress towards completing a mission–not that I actually completed it. So sometimes, I don’t even register that I have rewards to be claimed. I sat there for a couple minutes the other day wondering why the daily rewards I claimed had no prize, only to register that completing three daily challenges gave you a prize at the top of the screen which you need to tap to actually claim. Idk how many times I’ve missed it in the past.
One time I was wishing I had a second Ivysaur for my deck, and happened to see a button where upon pressing it I found out that I had accumulated points from opening packs and I could use those points to just pick out a specific card that I wanted. I had no clue that they were a thing and I don’t think they ever told me, but there it was. Managed to get the Ivysaur, but it left me curious if there was other stuff I/the game had just skipped over.
This is a minor complaint, but apparently there was some event that ended before I started but the shop for it was still open, so I went there and checked the little info thing next to the currency and it told me that I could get that currency from an event that had already ended. I was very confused.
Overall, if there’s a complaint I have anywhere here that you think is fixed by some already existing feature of the app, there’s a very real chance that I simply do not know that that specific feature exists.
The Gameplay
Overall, I’ve been enjoying this mini version of the tcg. I haven’t played a whole lot of the main game in my time, but as far as I can remember, this does a really good job at capturing the main idea while also adapting it to mobile platforms.
I always thought just hoping you’d have energy in the main game to attach on your turn was exceedingly lame, so I really like the idea of just always having one to attach (although having a dual-energy deck can really screw you, as the poor guy who literally didn’t get a lightning energy for the entire game and lost because of it can tell you).
They also make really good use of the fact that it’s a computer by doing things you couldn’t in a physical game, like choosing a random basic pokemon from your deck with the poke ball.
The short battles also feel pretty balanced, but I do feel like there’s a bit of a lack of back-and-forth. Very rarely am I on the edge of my seat; I feel like just getting the right pokemon on the field and energy’d up ASAP is much more important than making good strategic decisions, which leaves a bit too much to just getting good card draws than I would like. Also, I’ve seen way too many games get decided by a coin flip in their early stages than I’d care to admit. This could improve once I get experience, but at this point I wish I had a bit more influence on my games.
I also really don’t like the “weakness” mechanic at ALL. Especially considering how pressured I (and a lot of my opponents, evidently) feel to bring a mono-type deck, it sucks to see their first Pokemon and think “welp, I’ll just be taking/dealing +20 damage pretty much every attack this game, through no skill of my own.” I get that super effectiveness is a big part of the original games, but in those, you got to choose four moves of different types to use, so it’s an integral part of the strategy. In this adaptation, it feels shoehorned in and unnecessary, especially when it causes an early-game knockout that snowballs into victory. And when you have cards like Blue, Giovanni, and Potion influencing 10 or 20 damage once, it feels way unbalanced to have something where pretty much all of your moves do 20 more just because. Plus, (and this is a nitpick), with the tcg types not matching up properly with the vg types, why is my Machop doing extra damage against a Pikachu?
The “Trading”
So, trading card games have an inherent problem baked into them. Before you can get to the “game” part, you have to deal with the “trading” part (or, as you can’t do that yet, the “collecting” part). Because as far as skill expression goes in the “game” part, there’s the strategy that you express in regards to what decisions you make during the match, but there’s also the strategy you express in regards to deciding what cards to take into the match. Now that’s not the inherent problem of TCG’s–I think deckbuilding is a fun and valid form of skill expression. No, the problem is that it doesn’t matter how good at deckbuilding you are if you just don’t own the cards to put into your deck. And with this being online, you can’t even print out proxy cards just to test new decks out.
So the big issue I run into is that I find myself losing to people who have just played for months longer than I and therefore have the freedom to make better decks. I ran into someone with the message “Go easy on me–I’m still deckbuilding!” as they proceeded to bust out two Moltres and two Arcanine ex’s while I was crossing my fingers hoping that my one Venusaur ex would grace me with its presence. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a “Go easy on me–I don’t have the cards to deckbuild yet!” message.
I can’t help but compare this to the games, in which you can, for the most part, just take the time to go out and catch or trade for any number of new pokemon you want to without paying a cent. In this game, the trading feature is still coming soon, and if you’ve used up all your items on new packs, well… Pay up, I guess!
The Monetization
So now we’ve come to brass tacks–the money.
Now here’s my ideal monetization scheme:
Pay one time for the entire game, and get packs by doing quests, completing battles, that sort of thing. Don’t limit them to 12 hours in between; just reward people for playing well by giving them cards. If people want to grind for a certain card, they can put in the time and effort to do so.
Now of course, this isn’t super realistic, but for an ftp model, I’d say release a DLC pack every month or so with a bunch of cosmetic stuff and maybe a few packs up front, but let all those cosmetics be feasibly earnable through grinding via normal gameplay.
So that being said, I think the current monetization scheme is predatory, but not more predatory than any other mobile/gacha game. And your perspective can vary wildly depending on what rubric you grade it by.
Like if you’re coming from Pokemon Scarlet/Violet, a game in which you spend $95 once for the game and the DLC, which gives you an expansive story mode (I’m assuming; never actually played it), 100s of Pokemon to collect if you wanna fill out your Dex, and as many battles locally as you want and online (with a nintendo switch online prescription, which can be used for other purposes, so it’s hard to tag a monetary value to it, plus the premium sub gives you the dlc included iirc, so… yeah. anyway.).
And then you realize that the same $95 gets you…ten months of premium in pokemon tcg pocket, which gives you, to be fair, a lot more cards than you would have otherwise, but not by a whole heck of a lot. Plus, if you forget to open them, they presumably just start disappearing.
And those cards can be used to look at or to battle with, and that’s it. There’s not much else to do in the game.
From this perspective, it’s pretty predatory.
But if you’ve accepted that it’s just a mobile game and that’s how it is, then paying a few bucks a month for some more packs doesn’t seem so bad… which is kinda the point.
But to give a more specific opinion on it, I’ve more or less accepted the whole “premium subscription” concept, but the thing that really grinds my gears is the fact that you can use Poke Gold (the real money stuff) to buy packs. Yes, you use money to buy Gold to reduce the time it takes to open packs, but all that rigmarole is there to make you forget the fact that you’re just literally spending money on random cards, which I find highly problematic. Not only is this pretty clearly a pay-to-win element of the game, the whole random chance element of opening packs appeals to the same part of the brain that gambling does. People really wanna feel the rush of lucking out and getting that full art card, so they’ll buy just one more pack in order to end on a win. So… yeah.
Conclusion
While that last part was pretty negative, I overall am used to how mobile games work nowadays, so my overall opinion is that Pokemon TCG Pocket is… Fine. It’s fun to open a pack or two a day, screenshot fancy cards and send them to my girlfriend, and maybe do the occasional battle. The problem is that if I wanted to actually get deep into the game and enjoy it to its fullest, maybe I’d have been able to do that for free if I’d started from the beginning, but now… I think I’d have to shell out some cold, hard cash.
So it’s basically become just a pack opening simulator for me, which is fine, but… kinda stinks that I’ve been driven out of participating in battles because I don’t wanna crack open my wallet.