Mobile Exploitation At Its Worst
Nintendo may refuse to bring its games to mobile platforms, but it doesn't seem to oppose bringing the mobile experience to its handhelds. Pokemon Shuffle, now officially launched alongside the New 3DS, brings the worst of mobile games like Candy Crush to Nintendo's handheld.
At its core, Pokemon Shuffle is a match-3 Candy Crush clone with a Pokemon blanket thrown on top and a couple of new mechanics. Each level is themed after a specific Pokemon, with the goal being to complete the level in as few turns as possible to increase your chance of catching said Pokemon at the end. As you collect more Pokemon, you can use them in your roster for added bonuses in later games.
Pokemon Shuffle has the additional strategy of choosing which of your captured pokemon to bring into battle, as the game employs the type weakness for added damage and each Pokemon has their own individual effects. This mechanic adds a ton of strategy, not only forcing you to carefully decide who to bring into battle but also adding trickery later on when the target you're catching adds his own healing pieces to the field.
The easy to pick up mechanics blend well with the cutesy graphics and familiar Pokemon, at least for about ten minutes until the tutorial ends and the content gating begins. Pokemon Shuffle has three types of currency: Hearts, gems, and coins. Hearts are the energy system, replenishing once every half hour up to a maximum of five. Gems are the cash shop currency and cost $1 apiece, and can be used to buy five hearts or three thousand coins. Since each level takes roughly thirty seconds to complete, you'll get a whole two and a half minutes of entertainment for two and a half hours of waiting.
As you progress, the chances of capturing Pokemon get lower and lower, and this is where the game just throws off all preconception and reveals its true form. While forcing you to spend hearts replaying levels to increase your odds past single digit percentages might be bad enough in itself, Pokemon Shuffle uses this as an opportunity to offer the player a mega ball. Sure they cost 2,500 coins (roughly 83 cents or 25 played games at 100 coins each), but the real kicker is that it adds a pretty marginal amount to your odds, so chances are you'll still wind up paying up for nothing.
The deck also seems stacked against, shall we call them, more popular monsters. I had no problem catching catching the most obscure creatures with odds down near 10%, but somehow couldn't shake a Pikachu or a Pichu despite both being in the 60-70% range. In fact, it seems like the more popular a character likely is, the greater the odds that they'll get break free on at least your first and second attempts, regardless of your percentage. Maybe this is just a coincidence, but given the monetization platform, I'm willing to bet that the table is rigged.
And naturally Nintendo comes right out of the gate swinging with the other part of this game's monetization malpractice: Timed events. For the first few weeks after launch, and only the first few weeks, you can catch Mew. With its own "special" menu, there are plenty more to come. As you'd expect, Mew has a pretty small percentage chance of catching, and the timed nature only serves to further encourage you to spend money on gems.
This also doesn't count the coin shop, where you can spend coins on all sorts of expensive pay to win items like additional turns, disruption delays, and a complexity reducer. Each complexity reducing item comes out to 9,000 coins, or $3 in the cash shop. Each.
Pokemon Shuffle is the worst kind of monetization, one that exploits a game directly advertised to children, using a child-focused IP, on a system that is specifically developed to be child-friendly. It's particularly disappointing when you realize that this is a fun game, at least until it stops you from playing. There isn't even any 3D component. If you threw away the microtransactions, you could easily get away with charging ten or fifteen bucks for the whole package.
In fact, you can do just that by picking up Pokemon Battle Trozei.
