Welcome back to Flashback Fridays! What better game to review for Pokemon Week than an old fan favorite, Pokemon Snap!
Pokemon Snap follows a budding photographer by the name of Todd Snap who has been tasked by the legendary Pokemon Professor Oak to assist with his studies. The setting is Pokemon Island and is almost untouched by humans offering the perfect study opportunity.
The game is technically an on rails shooter as you sit in a cart and traverse several courses of varying climates and habitats. Your job is to get the best photos of Pokemon which are judged by size, center alignment and pose of the Pokemon. But it wouldn't be much of a game if you simply were a snap happy camera buff taking photos of Pokemon right? Right! That's where the world interaction comes in. To get Pokemon closer to your cart and to make them pose, you unlock items as you progress such as fruit, which allow you to coax Pokemon into doing tricks. The staggered item unlocks encourage the player to revisit courses over and over as you find new paths and new Pokemon to photograph, increasing replay value.
For its time, Pokemon Snap utilized the N64 to bring the world of Pokemon to life and flesh out all your favorites from Gen 1. All 151 of them are here to find and snap, and they are all in great 3D detailed models. Sound brings the ambiance up a notch and helps immerse you in this world and Pokemon cries are faithful to the anime series. One major setback is the games length. It features only around 7 courses which, even revisited, you can knock over on a lazy afternoon.
That being said there was something magical about seeing Pokemon in 3D and I remember hiring this game out for weeks on end. Rumours are abound of a remake for the 3DS and knowing Nintendo, where there's smoke, there's fire. This Pokemaniac can only hope for the day that comes out but until then, I'm grabbing this off the Virtual Console to try to "snap" them all!
So What's it Like?
Virtua Cop + National Geographic Documentary = Pokemon Snap.
I give it 8/10
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