New Pokemon Snap Review

Twenty-two years is one hell of a long time to wait for a sequel. Yet that’s exactly how long fans have had to wait for New Pokemon Snap, the long-awaited follow-up to the 1999 Nintendo 64 original Pokemon photography game.

It’s pretty odd that we had to wait so long. Pokemon Snap was one of the earlier Pokemon spinoff titles, and was released during Pokemon’s initial red hot booming period. It quickly became a fan favorite, partly because it was among the first instances many people got to see Pokemon in a video game outside of the Gameboy, but mostly because it was a great concept: combining the world of Pokemon with photography, taking pictures of the titular creatures in their natural habitats. It’s easy to see why it won Pokemon fans over so much.

Of course, not every game withstands the test of time. Though the original Pokemon Snap is a fun little endeavor, time has revealed it to be a bit on the shallow side. Released during Pokemon’s early years (when “catching them all” was actually plausible), Pokemon Snap only featured 63 of the original 151 Pokemon. Its stages – which worked with on-rail mechanics, where the player would be able to interact with and influence scripted events as they automatically went by – were short and fun, but rarely required revisiting. Though the game included some puzzle elements (figuring out how to get a Pokemon to pose for the perfect shot, unlocking the passageways to the next levels, and the like) they were once again in limited supply.

I myself obsessed over Pokemon Snap in the N64 days, and while I was ecstatic when it made its way to the Wii Virtual Console, the experience wasn’t quite the same. Sure, it was still fun, but lacked the depth to make me delve into it like I once did (that didn’t stop me from buying it again on the Wii U though).

If anything, the shortcomings of the original Pokemon Snap only made its fans yearn for a sequel even more (self included). The concept of Pokemon Snap is just too good, and was always begging to be expanded upon. Fans of Pokemon Snap deserved a follow-up that lived up to their memories of the original.

Thankfully, that’s exactly what New Pokemon Snap is. We may have had to wait an excruciating twenty-two years, but New Pokemon Snap delivers on the sequel we’d always hoped for: It features the same core gameplay of the original, but expanded on it in every way, with a newfound depth and replay value that make it the most fun I’ve had with a Pokemon title in I don’t even remember how long.

New Pokemon Snap takes players to the Lental Region, where they meet Professor Mirror, who is studying both the Pokemon of the region as well as its “Illumina phenomenon” which causes Pokemon (and some plants) to emit a mysterious glow. It’s up to the player to photograph the Pokemon so that Professor Mirror can better study their behavior and the effects the Illumina phenomenon has on them.

Like the original, the stages are played on rails, with the player taking photos as they automatically pass by. Also like the original, New Pokemon Snap is one of those rare, relaxing games where the player can’t really lose. The goal is to simply take the best pictures you can. You can take up to 72 photos every time you play a stage, and use them to photograph whichever Pokemon you want. You can snap multiple pictures of any Pokemon you see, but you can only take one photo of each Pokemon you photographed to the professor every time you play a stage, so be sure to send in your best photo of each for the best score!

There is a bit of a change to how the professor grades your photos this time around. You’ll still receive points for things like the composition of your photo, whether or not the Pokemon is facing the camera, how close the Pokemon is, etc. But now the actions the Pokemon in the photo is doing will earn the photo a rank of one to four stars (if a Pokemon is just standing there, expect a one-star photo, but if you can get a Pokemon to do something more, the rank will be higher). The player’s photodex can contain four photos of each Pokemon registered, one for each star rank. So that alone already gives players more incentive for repeat visits to stages.

That isn’t the only source of replay value New Pokemon Snap provides, however. Now, the stages themselves are constantly changing! Though the courses in New Pokemon Snap remain pleasantly short, there’s a lot more to them. For starters, playing a level enough times and earning enough points will level up that stage, which will then introduce new Pokemon and pathways to that course. Some stages even include separate day and night versions, with the player being able to level up both versions of a stage to unlock even more! Eventually, levels will introduce branching pathways, and like the original, some even include puzzle elements that can unlock additional paths and stages. And if you miss the way a certain level used to be when you first visited it, you can revisit the earlier versions of stages any time you want. It’s really quite impressive how much New Pokemon Snap can get out of even a single level.

As you play through the game, you’ll also unlock new features. As in the original game, you can throw Fluffruit (basically an apple) or play music to get a Pokemon’s attention or make it behave a certain way. Replacing the original game’s Pester Ball this time, however, are Illumina Orbs, which will give Pokemon that aforementioned glow for a short time, and often change their behavior. You can now also scan a stage to get a briefing on all the Pokemon in your immediate area (as well as select which path to take when you reach a fork in the road), but the scan will also affect certain Pokemon. There are even some instances where combining these items will give additional results.

Basically, even though New Pokemon Snap features the same style of short, on-rails stages as the N64 original, there’s so much more to them. At any given moment, there’s so much going on around you, that it really is impossible to get everything in a single trip. It’s pretty fun to decide which things you want to focus on during a specific run of a stage, and which ones can wait until later.

It doesn’t even stop there, however. Now, when you save photos to your album, you can edit them with filters, frames and stickers, and then share them online if you want. You can ‘like’ other people’s photos (referred to as giving “Sweet! Medals”) and hope they do the same for yours. As you play through the game, you unlock more editing features (frames, filters, stickers, as well as decorations for your personal profile). Again, there’s a lot of fun to be had with all this (though the limit of 28 characters in a photo’s description has prevented me from making many a desired reference, unfortunately). As an added bonus, if someone has taken photos of a Pokemon or area you haven’t seen yet, it will be blocked unless you choose to see it, which is pretty cool.

My only complaint with the photo sharing is that you have an odd limit of only six photos to be uploaded at any given time. The professor can also (randomly) choose two additional photos of yours to share online, but that’s just two more slots for photos I could be uploading myself! Granted, you can swap which six you want in and out at any time, so it isn’t a big deal, but why such an odd limitation?

If there’s a more notable drawback to New Pokemon Snap, it’s that some objectives are strangely vague. This is true of unlocking some of the branching paths, though most of those aren’t too hard to figure out. When it comes to Requests, on the other hand, many of them are so vague in their descriptions that I’ve had to look up guides to see what they mean. And even after watching some guides, I’m left baffled as to how I was supposed to know that’s what the request was asking of me.

These requests are essentially little side missions. After you discover a certain Pokemon or reach a certain point in the game, you’ll receive a request asking for a specific picture in relation to those discoveries (taking a photo of a Pokemon doing a specific action, finding out what Pokemon lives in a particular cave, things like that). Some of these requests reward the player with some of the aforementioned customizable items for your photo album (but some don’t reward anything, which is pretty weird in itself). They’re fun in concept, but too many of these requests don’t make the objective clear enough.

Something that New Pokemon Snap really deserves credit for are the visuals. New Pokemon Snap is a gorgeous game to look at! The Pokemon themselves have never looked better, and the environments are so beautiful to look at, I sometimes take photos of just the scenery so I can look at it in the album later. It’s weird how the mainline Pokemon games like Sword and Shield continue to look kind of behind the times, but a spinoff like New Pokemon Snap is one of the best looking games on the Nintendo Switch.

The music is also joyful, and really fits the relaxed nature of the game. It may not be among the best Switch soundtracks, but it’s appropriately atmospheric for each stage, and simple and fun in between them. It was perhaps a missed opportunity to not feature new versions of any of the tracks from the original game, however. You don’t want to overdo it and rely completely on returning music, but considering this is the longest gap between a Nintendo game and its sequel to date (I believe), it would have been a nostalgic euphoria to hear two or three musical pieces from the original make a return.

New Pokemon Snap is something of a dream come true. Even as I’ve lost my enthusiasm for the mainline Pokemon games, I’ve still longed for a follow-up to Pokemon Snap that could build on the original’s concept. To not only have a Pokemon Snap sequel after all these years, but to also have it be the game we thought we could only wish for in how it adds so much to every aspect of the formula, can make it seem like an almost surreal experience. While it may take something away from Pokemon Snap if we started getting sequels as regularly as other Pokemon games, I do hope we don’t have to wait another twenty-two years for a third entry. New Pokemon Snap really is the Pokemon Snap title worthy of our memories of the original.

Now that we’re on the subject of long overdue Nintendo sequels, how about Super Mario RPG 2?

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