Pokémon Friends is the latest effort by The Pokémon Company to expand the audience of its famous property, which has been enchanting players since 1996 with its RPGs produced by Game Freak. The Pokémon brand has expanded with various games, series, movies, collectible cards, and a constant search for more audience.
While Game Freak tries to manage the need to appeal to younger audiences while also meeting the demands of dedicated fans who grew up with their RPGs on Nintendo handhelds and ask for more complexity in their projects, The Pokémon Company continues to release simple experiences. Through games that can appeal to all kinds of people, the barrier to entry in video games is becoming increasingly accessible, as evidenced by Pokémon Friends.
Composed of approximately 50 mini-games that become more difficult as you progress, Pokémon Friends is an experience more suitable for younger players, who will likely need their parents’ help in challenging moments. It is an opportunity to bond through two passions: video games and Pokémon.
Adorable mini-games
Whether on mobile devices or Nintendo Switch consoles, the mini-games are easy to understand and execute. The Pokémon Company partnered with Wonderfly Inc., a Japanese company accustomed to creating educational experiences for children, making it easy to understand what Pokémon Friends is: a learning experience for young children, where everything is better with parental supervision for shared fun.
On mobile, some motion-controlled mini-games may not work well as you often have to move the screen in a way that hinders your view of the objective, but on Nintendo Switch consoles, where you can even use the Pro controller in tabletop mode or with the console connected to the base, the controls work very well and intuitively.
Considering the simplicity of the mini-games, even as they become more challenging, the experience becomes captivating with the simple and colorful visuals, with the constant presence of the adorable creatures at the center of each mini-game.
The weight of free design even for paying users
It is easy to understand that Pokémon Friends is a child-oriented experience, although adults can also enjoy it, making its structure and design even more confusing. Pokémon Friends is designed as an educational game, where children are stimulated by the mini-games and the concept of receiving yarn balls to obtain a new random Pokémon plushie through the machine in the main menu.
In the city, there are several children who want a specific plushie, so you have to decide whether to keep it to put in your customizable room or give it to the child and receive rewards (including different stamps to mark every day you complete mini-games).
However, the free version only allows you to complete 3 mini-games per day, which you can replay as many times as you want. To unlock more mini-games per day, you have to purchase the 9.99 euro version, but the experience still remains bound to the free design, which is confusing. Pokémon Friends was not designed to break free from the free experience, which means many limitations remain. Paying does not remove the barriers, only adapts them.
You can play the mini-games as much as you want and get yarn balls to obtain more plushies, but the mini-game scores do not update, their difficulty does not increase, and new missions in the city do not appear. This is refreshed daily, so you may quickly lose the excitement of completing mini-games. The paid version does not turn into a full game, where missions appear as you complete mini-games and high scores are updated; you remain stuck in the free design, waiting for a new day for progress and new stimulating objectives.
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