Caught Up: Pokemon Let’s Go, Pikachu

No one will ever read these if I don’t post with any consistency.

‘Let’s Go, Pikachu’ (which I’m going to refer to from here as ‘LGP’) is weird. My sister (Arlis) by now has played through the whole main game and into or through a big chunk of the postgame content. I turned to her on the couch and asked her straight out: will I like LGP? She pauses and puts her clasped hands in front of her as she tries to put together a response.

“First of all… yes.”

I knew the game would be weird, and I didn’t plan to play it. I have a long and storied history with Pokemon as a franchise. I’ve played all the main generational entries, some of the remakes, and a bunch of the spinoffs. I love it and it’s a part of me.

Some of the games are openly weird in their own ways. Pokemon Quest and Pokemon Duel are very much their own things entirely. But LGP is a remake of Yellow Version with a bizarre take based off Pokemon GO.

The way they’ve eliminated random battles is amazing and I would love to see it in the series proper. Wild Pokemon spawn from tall grass and wander around the map nearby, not unlike the way enemies wander around in Super Mario RPG, for example. This allows mechanics like encounter chaining to work better than in the main series because you can honestly just avoid all Pokemon except the ones you’re chaining.

I started the game by naming my partner Chocobo (Let’s Go, Chocobo) and my rival Dingus Joe. I assumed the rival would be a rudeboy like Blue/Gary Oak, but no, Blue is actually a character in the game separate from your rival. Your rival, who I gave a mean name to, is a sweet boy who loves Pokemon and wants you both to become great trainers. He’s supportive and sweet and incredibly endearing and I’ve started calling him DJ in my head canon as a way of conceding that I was very wrong in my assumptions of how the rival character would come across.

When I realized the game explicitly told you how many times you’d chained catching the same Pokemon, I spent a couple hours next to Viridian City until I’d chained 169 female Nidorans and encountered a shiny one. My shiny Nidorina (Anima) is like level 32 and is a monster.

TBQH if I hadn’t done this from the start, the game would be a lot harder and I wouldn’t have learned some of the things I have. Spending all this time boosting my catch combo left me with a TON of Health candies, which I had no idea what to do with.

The removal of EVs for AVs, which are raised by feeding your Pokemon candies, threw me so hard and left me in a position where I almost ended up out of my depth because I didn’t understand that my Pokemon weren’t gaining stats the way they could’ve been. My instinct was to mistrust the candies because I didn’t understand them, and that’s how I ended up with a bunch of dramatically underpowered Pokemon. On one hand, I think it’s a neat change for the series, but on the other, it’s absolutely busted and drives home just how much this game is designed for single player experiences versus multiplayer battles.

LGP is just ‘Pokemon’ enough to be familiar and fun, but weird enough to make it a standout entry parallel to the core series games. I’m into it.