New Pokémon Snap (Nintendo Switch Review)

New Pokémon Snap
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Released April 30, 2021
Directed by Haruki Suzaki
Developed by Bandai Namco Studios
Published by Nintendo
$59.99 was mistaken for a Crystal Bloom in the making of this review.

Needless to say, you ain’t playing the N64 game anymore.

I almost never get excited for the announcement of new Nintendo games because, well, I grew up. You can take it for granted Nintendo is going to keep releasing their cash cows and it’s embarrassing that adults act surprised when they’re announced. “Wait, they’re making a new Mario game, you say? Gosh, I thought the last one was certain to be the last one. Do you think it’ll have Bowser in it? OMG, it DOES have Bowser?! Are you kidding me?! Mario is back, baby! This is the greatest moment of my life! HYPED!” Yeah, I was like that once. You know, when I was 10 years old. But when New Pokémon Snap was announced in 2021, I reverted back to being a squealing 10 year old. I didn’t see it coming. I don’t think anyone did, as it’d been over twenty years since the original game. Easily the most hyped I’ve been for any video game in this decade. Then, when New Pokémon Snap was released, it not only lived up to my expectations, but left the original game in a smoking crater. New Snap is the rare sequel that improved upon the formula to such a degree that it rendered the original game practically unplayable.

And apparently despite selling two-and-a-half million copies, almost nobody actually put that much time into it. It probably killed the franchise off for good, and I even have proof of that, but I’ll get to that.

For all the bitching that I’m about to do, make no mistake that New Snap’s scoring system is so much better than the original. There’s no ridiculous “doubling the points for centering the photo” crapola. No, there’s all kinds of other crapola. I think I’m about to set the world record for complaining about a game in a positive review of the game.

The core gameplay from the first game returns. Don’t think of Pokémon Snap as a photography game but rather as a video game version of an old school arcade shooting gallery where the bullets cause the robotic contraptions to react. While traveling along an on-the-rails path of each level, you can interact with a series of mostly preset encounters with Pokémon. You can feed them or bash them over their witless heads with apples, or use the apples to lure them towards other Pokémon or points of interest, and while they do this, you’re trying to center them in the frame and snap photos of them. The challenge comes from the fact that you can only submit a single photo of each species of Pokémon to be scored each run through a level.

Since the franchise is basically fantasy cockfighting for children, of course there’s multiple instances where they fight, but it usually involves multiple steps. As an added bonus, in many fights, you can actually choose who you want to win by throwing an illumina orb at either one. This isn’t one of those cases, as this fight can be interrupted with a call for peace. It’s adorable.

It might sound exactly the same as the original, but New Snap is a much, much meatier game. The original Snap only saved one photo for each of the game’s 63 total Pokémon. Once you found the highest-scoring pose for each Pokémon and got a quality photo of it, the game was basically over. The scoring system was pretty simple and kind of primitive, doubling the score of a photo just for centering it, among other balance issues. So while it might take a while to get that one coveted photo centered or angled just right, it wasn’t exactly the deepest game.

You also needed to be zoomed in for the original game in order to take a picture. That’s no longer the case. Plus, I mean….. Christ, look at that. Nintendo 64 should be renamed the Dairy 64 because it aged like milk and now all that’s left is cheese.

New Pokémon Snap not only has nearly four times as many Pokémon at 234 total, but it’s seeking four different (wink wink) photos of each of them. Original Pokémon Snap challenged players to find the 63 highest scoring poses of each Pokémon. New Pokemon Snap? It wants you to find an eye-popping 936 photos for the Photodex, aka the thing that tells you what your ultimate score is.

Sometimes crappy pictures score fairly decently and sometimes good pictures don’t score what they ought to. And sometimes you wonder how you found an extra two points between one crappy picture and another. Welcome to New Pokémon Snap.

The scoring system is more elaborate too, measuring things like pose, size, direction, and placement within the photo to the single digit. The poses are placed into different “star rating” categories, with the more basic poses being one star and the more complicated ones being four star. In theory, at least. Whether or not it makes sense is another matter that I’ll get into, but it certainly adds to the excitement. I’ve literally had dozens of instances of beating previous photos by a single point, and hundreds of new photos won by single digits. Anything that scores 4,000 or more points earns diamond status, IE the maximum rating.

Outside of the photodex itself, you can save any photo you want. I’ve never really played all that much with the editing tools but they’re pretty extensive. The re-snap button shown here allows you to change the angle of the picture like you’re back in the level, zooming in and out. It doesn’t count for your score, obviously, but it’s a nice addition. You can also earn, through the special requests, things to present them like frames or stickers. It’s really elaborate, so if you’re a creative type, this will have even more meat on its bones than I’m going to talk about.

And that’s not all the content, either. There’s also 234 special requests that don’t necessarily have to count towards your Photodex. For the requests, your score doesn’t matter at all, and the first time you submit a request photo, the request is fulfilled forever and that photo is permanently saved as a memento (and can’t be replaced, even if it really, really sucks and/or likely shouldn’t have even counted).

When a photo fulfills a request, it’ll have this little “talk” bubble on it, so at least it’s not a random guess whether or not you’re submitting a correct photo. BUT, you do have to actually submit the photo for evaluation to clear the request, so if it’s hard to get, you might not want to take other photos of that species and have the temptation of finishing a request versus scoring on a photo. I kicked myself many times for passing on a special requests to roll the dice on a high score opportunity.

Throwing apples at the Pocket Monsters and the flute returns from the first game, as does turbo boosting, but in the new game, you can now also do “scans” that not only locate Pokémon, objects, and alternate routes, but the scan causes various effects to the Pokémon. The majority of the time, it gets their attention and makes them perk up at you, and usually interrupts whatever they’re doing. The scan might also trigger an event or scare off the Pokémon. The pester balls from the original game are gone, replaced with “illumina orbs” that light up the Pokémon, sometimes activating effects (such as picking the winner of a fight) or just making them stand out more in pictures (it matters too).

One time I got these two Pikachus running through the beach. They’re not supposed to be reachable like this, but I was both smashing them with apples and getting other Pokémon to stop the vehicle.

Another new idea that’s barely covered (if it is at all) in the game’s instructions is the fact that you can subtly manipulate the approximate physical location of the vehicle on the track, along with delaying various timing-based Pokémon actions. Okay, so this is kind of hard to explain. While you’re on a preset path, the direction you point and zoom the camera DOES actually make teeny tiny adjustments to the physical location of the vehicle. Let’s say you’re approaching a Pokémon on your left and you want to get closer to it than the “natural” path does. If you turn your camera left, zoom in (zooming slows the vehicle down) and stay that way, even if you’re not focused on anything, you will actually be a hair closer to Pokémon when the vehicle arrives at its location. It’s called drifting and it’s the key to a lot of photos.

This was done using the drifting technique to get a fraction closer. If you zoom in directly on a Pokémon, you ALMOST approach it. Think of it as the Autopia at Disneyland where you’re not really driving a car but kind of wiggling it just a little bit back and forth.

And this zooming in on nothing can also prevent certain actions from beginning, allowing you to be closer when specific animations happen OR when Pokémon spawn into the course. This is absolutely essentially for some time-sensitive photos such as in the forest when Pancham and Bulbasaur are riding a Drampa and you have to get a photo of Pancham smiling at the camera, UP CLOSE, in the split second before they round a corner and the shot is no longer possible. If you look down at the ground or to the side or anywhere but the location the Drampa flies into the playfield, it will delay when it makes its entrance. There is no other way to get the 4K in points needed for the diamond status. So even the movement of the on-the-rails vehicle itself offers a LOT of user-controlled flexibility.

And that’s what I have to show for it. It scores 4,284 and took me roughly a million attempts, give or take.

Finally, if needing over fourteen times as many photos as the original game to complete your album isn’t “big enough,” there’s the actual levels themselves. The original game had six levels and a “boss fight” for lack of a better term where you try to get a photo of Mew. What levels it had were fairly straight forward and offered little in the way of alternative ways to play. New Snap has fifteen locations and six boss fights. I called them locations and not levels because every single location offers multiple variations, or “levels” of content that are further split into day and night, which usually involves roster changes in the level and has a different variety of pose opportunities.

Sadly, only The Reef has “evening” as opposed to “night” and a truly awe-inspiring sunset. This is seriously a beautiful game when it wants to be. God, I would love for this to get the full Switch 2 upgrade treatment.

While you can look at the “levels” of each course as a difficulty setting, really it’s best to think of them as a complexity setting. The higher the level, the more variables there are. BUT, that doesn’t mean high score chasers will want to only play on the highest level. Sometimes specific events only happen on lower levels. One of the best examples is a pose that happens between the Carbink and Sableye. Both are found in the Cave courses and, exclusively on Level 2, there’s a scene where three Sableyes are chasing a Carbink. Giving the Carbink two illumina orbs causes it to attack the Sableyes.

As far as I’ve been able to tell, this is the only spot in the entire game where you can get a 4,000 point or “diamond status” three star photo of Sableye and THE ONLY three star pose Carbink does in the game, and it happens outside of the highest level of complexity the Cave has to offer. You don’t even go that direction in the Cave on level one and the scene doesn’t happen at all on level three if you take that branching path. By the way, in creating that clip, since I didn’t know if I should focus on the Sableyes reaction or the Carbink’s attack, I did both and ended up nabbing two new high scores.

Even after you reach the maximum levels, the game gives you plenty of reasons to adjust to lower ones because there’s dozens upon dozens of other poses that only happen on those levels. So, how many total levels are there in the game? Well, following the free-to-download DLC update, the map has fifteen selectable locations, like so:

Still plenty of blank spots, Nintendo. Just sayin’.

But, keep in mind that “Illumina Spots” are boss levels and are NOT the same courses as those they’re paired with. So when you click the dot for Florio Park and you see that you can play day, night, or illumina spot, it’s one course remixed five ways (3 Day, 2 Night) and a separate boss course remixed twice. There’s six bosses, so just this map alone has twenty-one different courses. Occasionally, an alternate route in a course is so dramatic it might as well be two different courses in one, as is the case with the Undersea course, but I’ll just count it as one. “There’s only fourteen dots on that map.” Right, but the game’s main menu is also itself a course, the Research Camp (you click the upper left hand corner), which also has two variations. If the menu screen looks like this:

You’ll start the course near that campfire. However, if the main menu looks like this:

If you want to change which of the two starting locations you’ll enter, it’s a cinch. Just click research, then exit back to the main menu and it’ll be the other one. The Research Center is by far the shortest level in the game, but even it’s packed with stuff.

You’ll start in front of the lab and have completely different poses and photo opportunities. Even the alternate path that takes you briefly inside the lab has changes based on which of the two starting locations you pick. So with that said, how many total levels, alternate paths, and hidden paths (IE the game doesn’t prompt you and it requires a special activation) are there in the game? Hell, I don’t know, so I’ll list them, or at least the ones I know about.

• Research Camp (Camp): 2 Different Starting Locations or “Levels”
  One major alternate path in each that takes you into the lab
• Florio Nature Park (Park): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels, and 2 Illumina Spot Levels
  Day level 3 and Night levels 1 & 2 has a minor alternate path that takes you across the Bidoof dam.
  Both Day & Night can transfer to Secret Side Path, although any pictures taken there are scored separately.
  Level 2 in the Illumina Spot has four different randomly decided starting positions for Meganium.
• Secret Side Path (Side Path): 1 Day Level, 1 Night Level
  Both Day & Night have a major alternate path that takes you off the main path and into Snolax’s den.
  Day has a minor hidden path. Playing the flute in the first hollow log will take you above Torterra instead of underneath it.
  Both Day & Night end on a remixed version of Florio Nature Park’s final scene, though any pictures taken there are scored separately.
• Founja Jungle (Jungle): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
  Every level Day & Night has a major (but short) alternate path that takes you off the main path and through a swamp.
  Day level 3 & Night level 2 has an additional (but short) major alternate path that takes you off the main path and behind the waterfall.
  Night level 2 has an additional (but short) hidden path where a Liepard knocks you off the tree in the main path.
• Mightywide River (River): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
  All levels have a major alternate path that takes you off the main path through a cave.
  Day level 3 has a minor hidden path where a Quagsire knocks you off the main path (can’t go into the alternate route if you activate this).
  Night level 3 has a minor hidden path where a Feraligatr (briefly) knocks you off the main path.
• Elsewhere Forest (Forest): 3 Levels and 2 Illumina Spot Levels
  The level is like a maze structured as a main chamber, a scene based on a season, a main chamber, and an ending scene
  Level 1 will take you randomly to Spring or Summer for the second scene.
  Level 2 will randomly take you to Fall or Winter for the second scene.
  Level 3 allows players to control which of the four seasons they go to based on how they interact with the Espeon, so four major alternate paths.
  Level 3 has a hidden path that’s permanently unlocked as an alternate path to a different finale if you lead the Deerling through the second main chamber.
• Blushing Beach (Beach): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
  Every level Day & Night has a major alternate path that takes you out into the water.
• Maricopia Reef (Reef): 3 Day Levels, 2 Evening Levels
  Every level Day & Evening has a major alternate path at the end.
  Day levels 2 & 3 and Evening levels 1 & 2 have minor hidden paths based facing left or right when you approach Wailord.
• Lental Seafloor (Undersea): 3 Levels, 2 Illumina Spot Levels
  Levels 2 & 3 have a major alternate path near the start that takes you through, for all intent and purposes, an entirely different course.
  Level 3’s alternate path has an additional major hidden path if you rescue a Lanturn from a pair of Frillish that takes you into Lugia’s lair.
• Sweltering Sands (Sands): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
  Day levels 2 & 3 and Night level 2 have a major alternate path leading to a different final scene.
• Barren Badlands (Badlands): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
  Day levels 2 & 3 have a major alternate path that changes the entire middle of the level.
  Night level 2 has the same major alternate path as Day, but it requires you to photograph at least three Digletts at the start of the stage to activate.
• Fireflow Volcano (Volcano): 3 Levels, 2 Illumina Spot Levels
  Level 3 has a major alternate path that takes you to a different final room.
  Level 2 in the Illumina Spot has a hidden path based on how soon you put out the fires in at least one Volcarona.
• Shivering Snowfields (Snowfields): 3 Day Levels, 2 Night Levels
  Day Levels 2 & 3 and Night Level 2 have a major alternate path.
  The alternate path either rejoins the main path or you can take a second major alternate path that takes you to a different ending.
• Outaway Cave (Cave): 3 Levels, 2 Illumina Spot Levels
  Level 3 has an alternate path in the middle of the level.
  THAT alternate path has a hidden path that takes you to a different ending.
  If you stay on the main path, there’s another hidden path near the end of the level that takes you to a different main path ending.
  Level 2 in the Illumina Spot has a major alternate route with a different ending.
• Ruins of Remembrance (Ruins): 3 Levels, 2 Illumina Spot Levels
  There’s a minor alternate ending to all three Ruins levels.

That’s a sh*t ton of game for $59.99. With all the character variables factored in, we’re talking millions, if not billions of variables at your disposal. In a game based around finding the highest possible scores in four different tiers for each Pokémon, that’s a lot of flexibility a player is given. After over 800 hours of gameplay (UPDATE: despite it saying that in my profile, I did the math and it’s physically impossible I played the game so much from where I started this review, so I think the game is counting hours even when the Switch is on sleep as long as the game is on, so it’s probably closer to 200 hours) and at least four multi-week binges since 2021, I’m still finding new high score poses. I just found this one a couple days ago literally in the first course of the game. It had been staring me in the face the entire time.

After over five years of playing this, including six weeks straight of addiction to this, I’m still finding higher scoring pictures off total flukes. Like I would never have found this photo if I hadn’t zoomed through the park before the Dodiro runs away AND taken this one single picture of it, thus forcing my hand to choose this photo for evaluation.

And of course, a new discovery doesn’t end with the discovery. Like in the above example, once I realized the scoring opportunity that happened there and the angle that the game desired, I replayed it and ended up increasing the score from the 4,796 it started the day at to 4,942, and loving every moment of it. Multiply that experience by 936. THAT is what New Pokémon Snap is offering players. That’s a LOT of gameplay for one game.

Most importantly, I never got bored with New Pokémon Snap. Every single main course is a banger and there’s just so much stuff inside each of them and so many different ways to approach each run you make. I’ve been playing this since the week it came out in 2021, and for this review, I’ve been playing New Pokémon Snap for SIX WEEKS STRAIGHT, and I really don’t even want to stop. If you wonder where I’ve been for the last six weeks, this really is it. It worked out for me too, except the way it worked out for me also made me realize we’re unlikely to ever get a Pokémon Snap 3, even though this sold around two-and-a-half million copies.

Mew was the last boss in the first game. Now it just shows up as post game content in the Jungle course, both day and night. “Is that 5,923 points for a photo not even centered in the frame?” Yep.

As a scoring-based game, New Pokémon Snap has global leaderboards, the main one of which measures what your Photodex’s score is, IE the combined score of the highest scoring version of each photo. You wouldn’t expect me, someone with shaky hands and not exactly a professional-quality gamer, to be ranked high on New Pokémon Snap’s leaderboard. The game is five years old so people have had plenty of time to get their scores up. And, well, it’s Pokémon. One of the biggest franchises in the world. But, as of this writing, in a game with 2.5 million copies sold and even more players, I’m ranked #212 in the world for Photodex and (with the help of my family, since not all course records are mine) #403 for total course score.

Individual photos don’t have leaderboards. Only the Photodex, the total course scores, and the individual courses. At one point, I couldn’t claim my Photodex score was entirely mine, as I play this game a lot with my family and they had some high score photos. But I’ve since replaced every photo not taken by me (I think there might be one or two exceptions but come on) with higher scoring photos, and any family sessions take place on a separate account, though it’s not high scoring because I ain’t allowed to play. I can watch, but I’m banned from playing because I “know where everything is.” You know, fam, I really don’t. Total bullsh*t, I tell you.

UPDATE: The day after this was published I climbed to #208 in the world. I’ll quit at 200. Cross my heart.

This should be a huge deal for me. I mean, I’ve set literally dozens of digital pinball world record scores, a few of which still stand, BUT, digital pinball isn’t exactly on the level of popularity as Pokémon. Plus, it’s not like I found myself this high on the leaderboard because the game just came out. I started this review six weeks ago ranked around 90,000th, give or take, and now, I’m 212th. I’m not THAT good. Something about that sounds fishy, right? Well, the score is legitimate and I didn’t use any cheating tactics or glitch the game. Well, except maybe this photo, which my family and I have dubbed the “Mystery Bidoof” photo.

Absolutely no clue why that scored so high, as it normally doesn’t get 945 pose points. Something happened. It’s not facing the camera. It’s not even lit-up. We’ve tried to replicate it and never come even close to getting 945 in pose. When this was declared the new high score for the two star Bidoof, I almost didn’t realize it. The only reason this was submitted for evaluation was because it was the only photo I had of Bidoof that run. (shrug). But otherwise, my Photodex is legit, and #212 in the world. What. The. F*ck?! The problem is, people don’t seem to be “beating” New Pokémon Snap. But at least it gave me a direction for this review: WHY?! Why is this amazing, immersive, unique gaming experience that’s overflowing with content getting so little engagement?

It’s really not even that high of scores in my Photodex either. This pic right here is still my four star photo for Starmie. Top players are easily over 5K for photos like these. I’m not using guides to find the photos outside a handful of instances when I was still trying to get one of every picture so that I could have this review up in a reasonable time (hah, how’d that work out for you, Cathy?!). Actually, online resources are woefully out of date for this game and often not helpful at all. Guides to “diamonding” the pictures usually are just advice to get the bare minimum 4K and not pictures with higher-yielding photos. Sometimes the advice is outright bad. Most of my photos were found just by plain old looking around. That’s the point of the game, right? That’s the fun stuff.

Well before I had any clue where I would end up in the rankings, I wanted to have a different angle for this review than contemporary reviews. The game is over five years old, after all, so ironically “New” Pokemon Snap isn’t really new anymore. I chose this for the next review after the big video pinball feature because I knew I was guaranteed to have fun and have plenty of stuff to talk about, but I didn’t want to just do a plea for a second chance for New Pokémon Snap. I needed an angle, so I came up with “how hard is it to 100% the game?” I defined 100%ing New Pokémon Snap as scoring a diamond rating (4,000 points or more) on all 936 photos and completing all 234 special requests. I thought it would make for a neat review, and I did end up reaching my goal. This link takes you to all my scores. 4K or more on every photo. Done and done.

This three star photo of Swinnub was one of the final diamond pictures I needed (I think it was second-to-last). This only scored 4,049 points and took me a half hour by itself to clear the 4K mark.

Except, something startling happened along the way: my global ranking. Not just how high I was, but how fast it happened. I entered into the top 500 global rankings before I even had all 936 photos. Actually, when I tied for 499th, I still had seven photos missing from my Photodex and nineteen others that didn’t have the diamond status. What?! And THAT got me into the top 500? Okay, so most gamers don’t ace games these days. That’s not a newsflash, and anyone who has heard the “rare achievement” chime on their Xbox knows that way too many achievements get that chime because most owners never actually play the games, Hell, I’m sort of guilty myself with this very game since, again, even though I’ve been playing this at least a couple weeks a year since it came out, I started this review ranked around 90,000th and with a very incomplete Photodex. Like so many others, I never tried for 100%. Once I did try, I realized a really, REALLY low amount of players are actually exploring New Pokémon Snap.

Technically I’m also ranked #403 in total course score, but that one isn’t ALL me. When you play a level, you get a course score based on the combined score of each photo you submit multiplied by the number of Pokemon you took pictures of. Unlike my photodex, some of the course records on the Indie Gamer Chick account don’t belong to me, but instead my family, and I didn’t really try for any during this review. I’ve reached the point where I’ll enter a level and just take pictures of two or three Pokémon I’m working to bump-up the scores on. So *I’m* ranked 212 in Photodex while the Vice Family is #403 in course score.

I thought the Pokémon franchise’s fans were into “catching ’em all” and all that jazz. That clearly isn’t the case with this game, which didn’t capture young people’s imaginations the way the original game captured mine. My nieces and nephew all agreed the low engagement has to do with the sparse roster (234 sounds great, but it’s still nowhere near a complete franchise roster even in 2021) and the lack of “Shiny” hunting, which is a popular mechanic in the franchise. They’re big Pokémon fans so I assume they might be right, at least for their age group and general Pokémon fans.

This is a totally RNG-based pose, as all characters “idle” from time to time, and most have multiple idle poses chosen at random. Pikachu alone has five or six different ones, if not more. I actually like that luck factors in a little bit. While it doesn’t totally prevent the characters from feeling like animatronics, it comes close. I also like that there’s no shiny hunting. BUT, if they wanted to include it, they could use it to incentivize high score chasing. Like make it so you can’t get a “shiny” photo unless you’ve diamonded the character. There’s so much untapped potential in this, not just for casual Pokémon fans like me but hardcore Pokémon fans who this game, apparently, doesn’t really appeal to.

Based on how I climbed the leaderboard and what those scores I passed along the way were, I guesstimate that, conservatively, less than four-thousand players have gotten all 936 photos (unless they just walked away with poses scoring 3,000 or less on tons of photos) and well under a thousand players (out of over 2.5 million) actually tried to get a diamond rating on every photo. Not get every diamond, but just tried. The truth is, it really wasn’t that hard to get one of each photo. The diamonds and a couple of the special requests were, but one star through four star photos themselves? I could probably count on one hand how many put up a real fight. Yet, I’m in the top 0.00848 of all players.

Look! It’s Luxray’s butthole! Confirmed: Pokémon poop!

It’s like a f*cking dagger to my heart because I love Pokémon Snap as a concept and as a gaming franchise, but with engagement THIS low on a Pokémon game? Hell, it’s probably the death of the Snap series. And I’m not even using some of the lame ass tactics the top ranked players are using. A popular strategy involves pausing and unpausing the game repeatedly, which automatically centers the camera’s focus and also increases the scoring window for specific poses, even glitching them out somewhat (IE you can see the pose on the screen before it actually starts to animate). I swear to God, I’m not trying to judge anyone based on their style of gameplay and if you actually have fun doing this sh*t, more power to you. But personally, *I* think it looks like a boring, tedious slog of a way to play a game, and what are you accomplishing? A high ranking on a game that I entered the top 500 on without even finishing all the objectives? You’re turning THIS game into a slog for THAT accomplishment? It’s like I said in my Pac-Man review: I might not be setting any world records, but I bet I’m having more fun than the people who are, because that sh*t looks f*cking boring.

Of course, in fairness to those players who are turning an exciting game into a slog, that strategy does exist for a reason. Okay, here comes the negative side of this review, and please, remember, this is a YES! review. I love this game. I want you to play it. I want to plummet down the rankings because New Pokémon Snap gets a second wind and a new wave of popularity. I would be VERY happy to wake up and find myself 250,000th in the world. Got that? Good. Here comes the bad.

Look, it’s Wailord. What, you don’t see it in this photo? Neither do I.

I have a theory as to why the game isn’t being finished by more players or even just played more, and that’s because New Pokémon Snap is (checks notes) broken. Like, broken-broken. People are quitting not because they dislike the concept but because the game often doesn’t work and who wants to bother with a game like that? The #1 most obvious broken element is sometimes the game takes the picture of the wrong f*cking thing. Each photo counts towards one Pokémon or object, and only one. Even if they’re the same species and all clustered up, while you’re getting points for all of them, only one is considered the focus of the picture and the main thing being judged. So take this photo:

This pose happens at the end of the River course on level 3. To activate this pose, you have to throw illumina orbs at three Swamperts “hidden” along the river course to set up the pose and then one final orb right at the very end of the level. The three Swamperts will launch out of the water and dive back in within a single second. Because it takes work throughout the whole level, this isn’t the type of picture you can just spam and quickly submit over and over. It takes time to set up. Even with those circumstances, I’ve activated this “pose” at the end of the river course a few dozen times and this was my highest scoring photo of it. Top players using the pause technique are scoring between 5,500 to over 5,700. I’m stuck at 4,924.

Notice I said “highest scoring” and not “best.” I’ve actually had WAY better pictures of this sequence. Ones that should, based on my research, have scored 5,200+ minimum, only when I submitted them for evaluation, they scored under 4,000 points. Wait, what? How? Because the camera wasn’t focused on the closest Swampert, but one of the rear ones. This is why players who discovered that the game automatically centers photos and delays or extends scoring windows started pausing and unpausing, sometimes extending one second poses into nearly a minute to get that one photo. If you’re like me and think that sounds miserable and ruinous towards fun, your only other option is to aim, shoot, and hope the game focuses on the correct one. Remember the panda on the dragon?

This one?

That’s another photo that you have to manually activate over the course of a level, and this pose happens at the end of what is probably the longest course in the game. Even if you go for ONLY this photo, each time will take five minutes just for this, give or take. Again, I’ve had MUCH better photos than this one that sits in my Photodex. Dozens of better ones, in fact. Closer, with the Pancham facing me. But they weren’t counted as Pancham pictures. Instead, they counted as Drampa pictures. Unless you’re slamming the pause button over and over like you’re doing your best NES Advantage “slow motion” impersonation, you don’t have time to stop, aim, and shoot on this. This pose is gone in a second, and there’s nothing worse than THINKING you got the picture you were looking for only to find out it’s actually something else after the level ends and you see what you got.

I’ve had worse examples but I wanted to give you an idea of how hard this is.

Normally as a game critic, I don’t offer solutions for problems with games. That’s not my job. I’m a reviewer and a critic, not a game maker. But the solution is so self-evident that it’s stunning it wasn’t part of the game all along, or patched in later. Nintendo and Bandai Namco should have looked at how f*cking tediously top players were playing the game to earn their points and adjusted the game accordingly. I don’t mean blocking the pause technique. If people want to be boring while playing a game, no skin off my teeth. But they could have eliminated the need or desire to do that by allowing players to select any Pokémon in the photo as the focus on the photo. Look at these three pictures of Grookey:

They look the same (which is another huge problem I’ll get into), but they’re actually three different tiers of photos that happen in a two second window at the end of the Park. You only have a split second to get the four star photo of Grookey, and then it shifts to the two or three star photo. Again, I’ve done MUCH better, for all three. But even with Grookey focused and perfectly centered in the frame, hundreds of different times the game said “this must be a photo of the crystal bloom” or one of the other Pokémon in the picture.

While there is a crystal bloom section in the Photodex, they’re not Pokémon and score no points as photos. In the linear story part of the game, you’re required to photograph them, which is why this is a thing. The problem is, long after you NEED to photograph them, the camera, in any close call, will always prioritize them over the Pokémon. There’s no way to stop it. There’s no toggle to prevent the camera from focusing on non-Pokémon, which is another fix that’s so obvious that it makes me think the developers are morons for not including it. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this is why, going off the global rankings, literally millions of players quit the game early and never returned. Those above pictures are in the FIRST COURSE IN THE GAME!

The big photos of Pichu, Shaymin, Scorbunny, and Grookey have them grouped together around the crystal, and literally every photo in this area becomes problematic. It would be REALLY nice if they patched-in a toggle that the camera would never, under any circumstance, focus on a crystal bloom or ancient ruins. Allow players to opt out of it. Since they never even attempted to fix this, I assume it’s deliberately trollish design, signed off on by all bosses at Nintendo and Bandai Namco, for the sake of making it “challenging.” God, I can’t imagine why this had such low playtime among its 2.5 million copies sold.

While I sincerely believe New Pokemon Snap is an immersive game, this problem actually breaks the logic of the immersion. In the story logic of the game, you’re handing these photos to a professor for evaluation. So why would a professor look at this photo:

It’s actually more rare to get the photo you’re trying for during this sequence because the hit boxes for the mushrooms are overlapping where the Cleffa is placed. Why even set this with a gap large enough to clearly see the Cleffa if the zooming and focus will always go to the Morelulls? “Maybe it’s meant to be a scene for the Morelulls?” Nope. The Morelulls have their backs turned to you, thus assuring very low direction points and making it clear this is NOT a scene created as a photo opportunity for them.

And not ask the person handing him it “what is this picture about?” Why does it have to be decided at the moment the photo is snapped if the whole shtick of the game is that a photographer is handing already taken photos to someone else to have them rated? Wouldn’t the photographer be able to decide what the photo is about at any time before they submit it for review? This is immersion shattering to a degree that’s stunning. It’s such an obvious fix, and one the game engine should easily be able to handle because it already recognizes and awards points for everything in the photo. This is EASY, guys. As easy as any fix in the history of video games is. This type of thing is not a rare slip. VERY often, you can have something appear suddenly in the camera, like this Gliscor that is so very clearly the focus of the picture: