It seems like every Pokémon Direct spends more than half its runtime detailing updates for or announcing casual Pokémon spin-offs. From Pokémon Café ReMix to Pokémon Sleep, we’ve gotten so many Pokémon-themed experiences that any new announcements outside of the Generation X games feel as tired as a Snorlax after a large meal. This gives the most recent release — Pokémon Friends — an uphill battle to gain the attention of an increasingly broad Pokémon audience.
Pokémon Friends features a collection of simple puzzle-style minigames that reward you with different types of yarn that you can then throw into a Plush-O-Matic to pop out a collectible Pokémon Plush. From Sparky Yarn to Creepy Yarn, each corresponds with Pokémon types. For example, you’ll get Ghost and Poison-type Pokémon from Creepy Yarn like Gengar and Croagunk, while Sparky Yarn yields only electric critters like Pikachu and Pachirisu.
Yup, Pokémon Friends is more or less a gacha game, albeit not a punishing one. Most yarn types have a rare Pokémon to pull at about a 2% rate compared to the other ‘mons at around 8%. You can place these plushies off in little room dioramas or give them to NPCs looking for a specific type to complete daily quests in order to collect more furniture for your rooms, and that’s about it. There’s no online functionality like a trading system or a way to share your rooms.
The plushies are definitely cute, but as there are only about a dozen to collect of each type of yarn, pulling your favourites doesn’t feel quite as exciting as pulling an Immersive card in Pokémon TCG Pocket or another comparable gacha game. I don’t count this as a negative, necessarily. TCG Pocket is far more ‘predatory’ while Pokémon Friends maintains a much less stressful vibe; that said, if you’re looking to grind out the full Plush Dex, you likely won’t find it all that rewarding an experience.
Actual problems begin to pop up like Digletts when you start playing the puzzles. These aren’t designed for 35-year-olds like myself who have played Pokémon since they were 9 years old; rather, they’re simple puzzles made with children in mind that were clearly created for mobile play and not the Nintendo Switch.
This is seen in the puzzles themselves — which we’ll get to — and the way they’re presented. In the free mobile version of Pokémon Friends, you need to drop $9.99 USD otherwise you’re locked to just a few puzzles each day. In turn, this means you’ll get to pull way fewer plushies, making the entire experience far more drawn out.
On Switch, you have to pay $9.99 to even download the game with two $15 puzzle packs available to purchase that add an additional 10 puzzles and 40 plushies each automatically into the pools. This means that with the initial purchase you can play as many sets of puzzles as you want and pull as many plushies as you want in a given day, unless you restrict yourself with an in-game setting.
As we purchased the Pokémon Friends Combo Bundle that comes with the two puzzle packs for the slightly discounted price of $35, we had a total of 50 puzzles to experience. Each time you play, Pokémon Friends throws at you three random puzzles with around three to six stages of that specific puzzle to complete.
They start off incredibly simple but level up in difficulty after each completion. Many of them focus on shapes, like Pumpkaboo’s Shadow Show, where you have to judge what the 2D silhouette of a 3D Tetris-like block will look like when Pumpkaboo casts light upon it. In others, like Lotad’s Ferry Service, you guide a cute little Bulbasaur across a pond by figuring out the correct Lotads to ride on.
Despite how much I enjoyed seeing some of my favourite Pokémon star in their own minigames, I grew tired of several of the puzzles rather quickly – even with all 50 puzzles unlocked. I can only imagine how tired I’d grow of Pikachu’s Power Line and Greninja’s Secret Shapes if I only had the base 30 puzzles to play, especially when those puzzles sometimes repeat the same stages at higher difficulties and you can’t pick which ones you’d like to play or block the ones you’re bored of.
Pokémon Friends was clearly designed with the mobile version’s daily restriction in mind, which makes playing for more than a couple of hours at a time a detriment to the experience.
And as you’d expect in a mobile-first title, most puzzles greatly benefit from the Switch’s touchscreen controls. You see, the quicker you solve the puzzles, the better quality yarn you receive, giving you a chance to pull an extra plush and to reach new high scores. If you want to play docked with a controller, you’ll still be able to clear every puzzle, but you’ll definitely lose a few seconds here and there.
On the other hand, trying to organise your plushies in a room with both the controller and touchscreen is an exercise in frustration; the drag-and-place function simply doesn’t work all that well with room depth, which makes placing your Flygon next to your Salamance plush an annoying endeavour.
Despite starting off simple enough that toddlers can take them on, the puzzles begin to show some bite around level six or seven, with a max level of nine. Mind you, they never reach Professor Layton-levels of mind-straining difficulty, but even those 35-year-olds that grew up with Pokémon will have to pause and think every so often at higher levels.
I certainly preferred some puzzles over others. Think Outside The Box had me rotate a box crammed with squares and rectangles to free a Rowlet or Slowpoke from within, providing a lot of thoughtful challenge at later levels. And I enjoyed most puzzles where I controlled a Pokémon directly, such as Topsy-Turvy Espeon that uses blocks and gravity in clever ways.
At the same time, I didn’t enjoy guessing the amount of hidden crates behind the visible ones in Blocked Boxes, nor did I find Square Solver and Tricky Triangle appealing when they popped up; both simply require you to connect-the-right-dots to make the required shape and have no relationship with Pokémon other than some background art.
Regardless of whether I enjoyed specific puzzles or not, they were all responsive and smooth on the Switch 2 I played on. That said, Pokémon Friends still seems out of place on Nintendo’s handheld hybrids. The entire package has a ‘freemium’ mobile feel that would be easier to digest if it were, for example, a free-to-download title with $5 puzzle packs instead of a $9.99 base purchase with more expensive DLC.
Conclusion
In the end, even the fun puzzles began to grow stale after only a few hours of play as they’re so quick to complete and pop up so often, which dampened my enthusiasm for unlocking Mudkip and Jirachi plushies to decorate my rooms with.
I have no desire to boot up Pokémon Friends daily for a few quick puzzles like how I rip packs in TCG Pocket, leaving me with the sense that this puzzle package will fade into the background with other casual spin-off titles, forgotten about until the next Pokémon Direct that announces a handful more overpriced puzzle packs instead of Generation X.
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