I have to warn you, prior to My Pokémon Ranch, I had never owned a single game or product that involved the pokey, and the man, and the thing where the guy comes out. So, when it fell to me to review this week’s WiiWare offering, I felt sure that there would be a great deal about it which would go over my head. The nuances of operating a farm where a squirrel is shooting lightning at a land-walking fish can be subtle, after all. Thankfully, I was able to employ the services of a consultant who is well-versed in all matters Poké, and with help, I was able to start my career as an adorably-rendered Pokémon wrangler. With two days on the ranch under my belt, let me tell you this much up front: My Pokémon Ranch is not a game. Not in the traditional sense, anyway; the interactivity is extremely minimal, there’s no story, and the only tangible objective hinges on actually owning a completely separate game and system. Put simply, if you do not own Pokémon Diamond and/or Pearl, there is little or no reason to purchase My Pokémon Ranch. But, if you do happen to own a DS and Diamond/Pearl, is My Pokémon Ranch worth the 1000 Wii Points and 123 memory blocks?
Before I got started with the ranch, my consultant filled me in on a similar product from a prior generation: Pokémon Box. Pokémon is a game centered around the location and collection of hundreds of diverse critters, and it’s not unusual for an avid player to start amassing a monster roster in excess of the game’s storage capacity. As such, Pokémon Box was released, which was not so much a game in and of itself, but extra Pokémon lodging space with a few bonus features here and there. My Pokémon Ranch is merely the latest accessory game to the main franchise, targeted specifically at folks who intend to play Diamond/Pearl on the DS. It doesn’t require Diamond/Pearl to run, but without it, there’s pretty much no point in buying My Pokémon Ranch unless you really, really like staring at the Mii Channel for hours on end and felt like getting another one.
The graphics, indeed, are Nintendo’s simplistic, Mii-grade, cuteness-over-detail trademark from end to end. The game practically announces this to you at the beginning, as it introduces you to your hostess, Hayley. Hayley is a cheerful anime girl with a Wiimote and colorful rancher duds, who promptly steps into a device which turns her, and the entire world, into the minimalistic Mii-ized visuals we’ve come to know from everything since Wii Sports. At this point, she appears on a modest field outside of a barn, and is promptly descended upon by hordes of chirping, squawking, minimally-rendered Pokémon, which nearly caused me to recoil in horror and flee the room. Hayley, however, somehow survived the assault, and proceeded to explain the game, promising that My Pokémon Ranch would enable me to watch my Pokémon’s lives, allowing me to provide them with toys, take and share pictures, and above all, “spend time” with them. She asked if I was prepared to help her fill the ranch with Pokémon. Feeling sure I would fail to withstand an army of marauding Pokémon like the one I had just witnessed, naturally I replied “No.” Sadly, Hayley’s hearing seemed to fail her again and again as I answered, forcing me to repeat myself until her hearing miraculously recovered just in time to hear a grudingly affirmative response.
Arriving at the ranch, I was outfitted with an adorable ranch get-up of my own, making me worry that I’d have to milk something at some point. Instead, Hayley helped fill the ranch with her stable of cheerful creatures: a blue penguin, a bird with a cowlick, something on fire, a floating fish, a tiger-dog, and a lovable corporate mascot. Hayley further promised to deliver one new Pokémon to the ranch per day, and I was allowed to begin exploring the game on my own and spending time with the residents.
Through thorough exploration, I was able to experience the full extent of the gameplay in six seconds — there simply isn’t any. There is literally almost nothing you can do to interact with My Pokémon Ranch at the beginning, apart from taking pictures, and you can’t even control those pictures. This, honestly, strikes me as an incredibly stupid idea. You see, My Pokémon Ranch does come with some basic interface controls, allowing you to swing the camera around, zoom in and out, and pick up and move certain Pokémon or Miis for photo ops or hopes of interaction. These abilities, however, are inaccessible when you begin. Let me repeat that: You have to unlock the ability to change the camera angle. DS connectivity notwithstanding, the entire draw of My Pokémon Ranch is to sit and watch your Miis and Pokémon frolic about together, and someone thought it was a good idea to restrict your ability to do that. Apparently, this luxury (entitled “Free Mode”) will not appear until your ranch increases a few levels — which is accomplished by having more Pokémon in residence. At the time of this writing, there are 16 pokétenants at my ranch, and I still can’t move the camera. At a rate of one game-provided new resident per day, this means that without Diamond/Pearl to fill your ranks, you could be playing this game literally for weeks before the game decides you’re good enough to look around. I can understand the draw of unlockable content, particularly when used to provide a sense of accomplishment in a game with no actual objectives. But, Nintendo, do me a favor and write this on the blackboard a few dozen times: Basic interface options should not be held in reserve as “prizes.”
Left to their own devices, the Miis and Pokémon on your ranch will begin to mill about and interact. For the most part, this involves making faces and indicative symbols at one another, though occasionally someone will pause to fix a fence or set someone else on fire. You can opt to focus on a specific ranch resident, which will also provide you with occasional captions to indicate what they’re doing. If you’ve brought along a few interesting Miis, this can prove amusing, as the game declares things like “Pikachu wants to be near Reagan” and “Is Reagan interested in Nixon?”
The game’s best features, though, show up when you decide to link up your DS. Upon choosing the connectivity feature, you are prompted to fire up your copy of Diamond or Pearl, and follow some easy on-screen instructions to wirelessly link the handheld with the console. At this point, a balloon-carried DS with propellors will fly out to your ranch, and you can start putting your collection out to pasture. The interface for this portion is handled quite nicely; the “boxes” of Pokémon from the DS game appear both on your DS screen and on the Wii monitor, synchronously highlighting your choice of critters on both devices. Selecting a Poké-pal will cause it to appear in its 3D, Mii-ized form on the Ranch, and let you explore its stats, should you choose. Once you’ve chosen to drop off a few new residents, they are removed from your DS, freeing up valuable space to catch a larger portion of ‘em all. You can also reclaim them from the ranch back into Diamond/Pearl at will.
Once you’ve chosen to link up your DS, My Pokémon Ranch actually starts to get creative and interesting. The new menagerie members will be assigned to a specific Mii, allowing players to keep track of whose are whose, and those particular Pokémon will tend to interact more with their specified “trainer.” Furthermore, once the game has discovered that you do own a copy of Diamond/Pearl, it will start presenting you with small objectives and bonuses for use in the DS game. The most basic function of this is the game’s assignments on how to fill the missing spots in your DS roster, or Pokédex, by providing you with three “Wanted Pokémon.” My consultant was presented with a set of three critters he had yet to obtain in his copy of Diamond, as well as location guides and advice as to what conditions needed to be met in order to find them. All three, conveniently, happened to be in areas immediately surrounding his in-game location, leading me to suspect that My Pokémon Ranch is able to actually feed you appropriate objectives for your particular save data. I can’t confirm this, of course. This feature, alone, makes the WiiWare an interesting selection as an accompaniment to the DS title; I could see the two products working quite nicely in tandem. The “how-to-catch” information provided on the ranch is not made available in the game before you have spotted a particular Pokémon, which could help players track down those elusive ones without the cheating sensation of consulting a FAQ.
With three wanted Pokémon to track down, we decided to see what catching them would bring to the table — after all, Hayley had promised that “something good might happen.” So, a short time later, my consultant had hunted down a few of the requests, and we re-connected to the ranch. Hayley was quite pleased, and told my friend exactly how much his Pokédex had increased — both in Pokémon seen, and caught. Also, lo and behold, it turned out one of the new residents was a Pokémon she had always wanted, and she offered to trade one of her own. One needlessly elaborate trading ceremony later, my consultant had himself a nice new cowlick-bird, which came equipped with an extra item and a non-standard maneuver, I was told, which it would be quite a hassle to try and obtain through other means.
Our time at the ranch complete for the moment, we prepared to leave. Hayley cheerfully informed us that we had the requisite number of Pokémon to expand the ranch, and that construction would be finished by tomorrow. Lousy Pokéteamsters. She also asked a few questions regarding which Pokémon she ought to bring to the ranch tomorrow (I opted for an “easygoing” Pokémon), and she showed me a silhouette of tomorrow’s arrival, leaving me to wonder who that Pokémon was. True to her word, the following morning, the ranch had a wider pasture, and Hayley had brought a litter of springy-tailed cats to celebrate. Through this leveling-up routine, I assume, I could eventually gain access to more space, some toys for the ranch, and decent camera controls.
Ultimately, the defining question to ask yourself when considering My Pokémon Ranch is “Do I own a Nintendo DS and a copy of Pokémon Diamond or Pokémon Pearl?” If the answer is no, then do not buy My Pokémon Ranch, since not only will this eliminate roughly 80% of the game’s features, but it would seem to indicate you’re not a big fan of Pokémon to begin with — which is definitely required for this to be worth your while. If you are a Pokémon player, though, you can consider My Pokémon Ranch a clever little bit of DLC for your DS game, plus an eventual route to a Mew if you need one. If $10 sounds like a good price for a pseudo-interactive Pokédex guide, some bonus critters and items, and a way to watch your Pokémon ride eachother, then, by all means. In the words of my consultant, “You already knew if you were going to buy this game before it was released.” Which, by corollary, means if you didn’t know, you needn’t buy.
July 2nd, 2008 at 8:14 pm
if its worth a 1000 points its cheap
September 6th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
wowwwwwwwww
September 13th, 2008 at 11:30 am
cool