Review: Pokemon Friends Feels Like Phone Games Shown in Ads

You know those ads you see browsing on social media that show various light logic, puzzle, and action games you can play on a phone or tablet? The ones that claim to increase in difficulty and gauge things like spatial awareness, reasoning, and pattern recognition? Pokemon Friends, the latest spin-off game from Nintendo, hand, Wonderfy, and The Pokemon Works, feels like a compilation of a lot of those types of titles. Except unlike D3 Publisher and Monkeycraft’s Yeah! You Want “Those Games,” Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let’s See You Clear Them!, this is a far more earnest take on the idea.

Pokemon Friends begins with players known for making amigurumi knit plush of iconic characters from the series moving to Think Town. The problem is, while traveling, all of the yarn got tangled up. You need to solve puzzles with Pokemon in order to get rid of the knots and get enough balls, cones, and skeins of wool to start making toys again. Once you do, you can check in with the residents in town to see what sorts of stuffed animals they might want, getting points to unlock more requests and additional calendar stamps in the process. 

The ideal way of playing Pokemon Friends involves following a certain routine. Load up the game. Choose to untangle some threads by going through three random minigames. You don’t know which ones you’ll get, and higher difficulties will automatically unlock and appear as you clear lower ones. Clearing it within the time limits nets you yarn. You then go to the machine and insert it. If you’ve been keeping up with playing on a daily basis or performed well enough in that day’s minigame to earn higher quality wool, you might even get more skeins or create more than one plush. You can then check friend quests to see if you made stuffed animals that meet requirements, netting you more cosmetic items for your room or calendar. Depending on if you have the base game and add-ons determines which puzzles, amigurumi, and customization items you can get from friend quests.

As you might expect, the minigames play a huge part in how satisfying Pokemon Friends can be, and I’ve found it isn’t about until the fifth level of difficulty that things can start to get challenging. I genuinely find Stamp-n-Roll, which is in the second DLC pack, difficult after you get a few stages in, since you really need to think about where the stamp will appear on the rolling cube quickly. Don’t Wake Gengar, from that same add-on, is cute since it involves properly placing lanterns to illuminate every space except the ones where sleeping Gengar are. Both Wooloo’s Way Home and Tinkatuff Tunneling both involve a Tinkaton smashing blocks, but you need to essentially use spacial awareness and minimal moves to efficiently work things out. Flight Paths and Magnezone March get great once you have multiple types of Pokemon or groups to get covering spaces. And if you really get into trying to speedrun puzzles, finding out when to switch between touchscreen and standard controls to optimize your time can even be fun.

That said, there are some that feel boring, easy, and perhaps even a little lazy. Find the Froakie involves rotating and… counting Froakies on a platform. Both Shine on Cherrim and Operation: Bath Time are almost identical types of puzzles involving turning angled blockades to hit multiple Pokemon with either light or water. Tricky Triangle and Square Solver are the exact same, only involving “drawing” different shapes on graphing paper with preassigned dots. So while most of the puzzles are fine or even great once you hit the level five difficulty, others are bland or repetitious. 

I will say that the customization element isn’t all that exciting to me, at least at this point, because Pokemon Friends pretty much involves seeing the plush you make as a commodity. The Friend Quests require them. There are certain percentage odds of getting a character out of the yarn you put into the machine. See, you might find you used a Mimikyu one day for one quest where it was one of multiple characters to meet a requirement. Then the next day, a quest comes up that specifically needs a Mimikyu. And you don’t end up seeing another one for five days. And so in the name of never seeing that request haunting you again, you never put any virtual toy on display unless you already have at least two of them, so you can always fulfill any order. (I may have a problem.) 

I feel like the more I play Pokemon Friends and unlock higher difficulty levels of its puzzles, the more I enjoy it. It’s absolutely simple. Also, imagery aside, some of its puzzles have little to do with the series or characters. Not to mention getting the best scores means playing in handheld mode and switching between touchscreen and standard controls for maximum efficiency. But it is charming, in its way, and I find I had fun with it when I’d play for about 15 minutes each day.

Pokemon Friends is available on the Switch and mobile devices.