Game Freak know what I like and it’s Pokemon following you around. Does the rest of the game stack up? Ehhhh…

My spouse and I play Pokemon games simultaneously. Not all of them, but Sun and Moon were a fun time. This time we actually got to play a game together with the co-op mode. Since this was the way I experienced the entire game, I’ll address it up-front: the co-op partner is not at all an equal player. With her as the lead character, I felt like a second-class citizen much of the time, being denied access to menus and the ability to interact with anything at all in the world.

I still had a nice time playing with her, but I feel it wasn’t made clear to me beforehand just how limited player 2′s options are. They’re really just a tacked-on support role. The main gameplay benefit is being able to participate in battles, turning almost every trainer fight into a 2v1 (I was actually entirely barred from the occasional scripted double battle), which has the side effect of unbalancing the diffciulty somewhat. We kept a frequent party rotation so that there was still a bit of challenge, facilitated by the new Box that can be accessed anywhere on the fly.

I could also run around with my own partner mon in the world (selected by player 1), and participate in the wild catches. There’s no random battles here; wild mons will pop up bodily to roam around, and contact will initiate a Go-esque capture mode, where you fling ball after ball with enforced motion controls. It’s easy for your throws to go awry, so the ball economy is a bit out of whack, only partially alleviated by trainer battles awarding you a handful of balls each.

Overall the game is a strange mishmash: a much-too-faithful remake of Gen 1, with a smattering of improvements or features from later games, such as the removal of HMs. Red and Blue (the characters) show up to remind you this is a new story, then the plot proceeds to follow the exact same beats from 20 years ago with no deviation.

I wasn’t exactly clamouring for more Kanto, but I suppose my familiarity helped us with what is honestly sometimes confusing progression. We actually missed getting the “Fly” equivalent until very late in the game, so we did a lot more jogging around than necessary.

Again, the experience of playing with a loved one was the selling point in spite of Let’s Go’s flaws, because the game itself is a slow, by-the-numbers remake with questionable mechanics attached (eg. the single-Joycon control scheme). Having no direct control as the support partner contributed to my feeling that the game dragged. We also took to playing a podcast or music in the room, to drown out the game’s repetitive and overplayed tunes.

I’m sorry to complain so much, but I feel Game Freak should have done better with this. The protagonist still has the same blank smiling face in every situation, a common problem in Pokemon games! Whenever the main character changes rooms, enters a cutscene etc, the partner character flies off the screen and then back on with an animation that brings the pace to a halt every single time! The shadows are bafflingly low-resolution and aliased! Wild Pokemon sometimes come in “tiny” and “huge” variants that aren’t actually visibly represented on their model! Some mons straight up don’t have fainting animations! Character animations are extremely basic! Customisation exists at least, but is downright anaemic to the extent that it’s pointless! I have both irrelevant nitpicks and genuine annoyances. But hey, at least your Pokemon can walk behind you…