yet another

My sister and I pooled all of the Gamestop gift cards that we’ve accumulated over the years and bought a Wii, as well as an additional controller and twenty dollars’ worth of Wii Points. And man oh man, the Wii is just freaking awesome.

The first thing we ever bought with our points was My Pokemon Ranch. It’s surprisingly addictive, but not in the traditional video-game-addict sort of way. I can see why a lot of people out there aren’t impressed with MPR, but I personally think it’s enthralling.

First off, if you don’t have a DS and a copy of either Pearl or Diamond, this is not for you. You can still play with it by using Hayley’s (NPC) Pokemon. Every day she brings in several of one type of Pokemon, and you can influence what she’ll bring the next day by answering some vague questions. (Should I bring a white Pokemon? Fire Pokemon? etc.) Overall though, if you don’t have Pokemon of your own, it gets dull really quickly. Which brings me to my next point…

If you’re the kind of hardcore player who scoffs at the Pokemon side games and just want to get right to battling, this also isn’t for you. If you thought Pokemon Snap was stupid, you’ll hate this. There is actually very little user interaction: your main functions are to pick up and move your Pokemon, Miis, or toys around the ranch, and to take pictures. There are two camera functions that you can flip through, manual or auto, and there is the ability to arrange your Pokemon into a parade. But otherwise, the bulk of this “game” is to just watch your Pokemon hang out. It makes for a pretty great screensaver, but that still doesn’t hide the fact that it is indeed a screensaver.

The graphics have also been knocked for being PS1-ish in quality. It really depends on your preferences: my sister and mother love the cutesy style, and I find it tolerable. Perhaps our biggest complaint would be that they’re not to scale, meaning that our Igglybuff is 3/4 the size of Palkia. But it’s pretty understandable why that is: can you imagine 999 Wailords stomping around? Check out some of the screenshots below, and if you hate the graphic style, then yeah, don’t get this. But I mean, come on, cut Nintendo some slack: there are 493 different Pokemon, plus their various alternate forms (Shellos’ colors, Unowns’ forms, etc.). Multiply that by two to get all their shiny forms, PLUS render all their interactions with each other, the Miis, and the various toys, and then cram all of that into a 30MB download. I’d say that’s pretty damn impressive.

So why do I like this so much if there isn’t much to do? Because I’m not a hardcore battler, and I enjoy just hanging out and watching my Pokemon interact with each other. Surprisingly enough, each Pokemon retains their personalities from the games: if your Garchomp is adamant, like how mine is, it will go around and attack everyone around it. If your Alakazam is timid, it will be shy and stay away from others. Espeon, who is psychic and weak to dark, runs away from Umbreon and Tyranitar; meanwhile Milotic and Marill get along because they’re both water. There are different toys for them to play with, such as the microphone (if they talk into it, you can hear their cries from your remote speaker) and the pitfall (which is so squeeee adorable that I can barely stand it). They ride around on each other, pick each other up, use their various attacks, and run around and have a great time. Plus they can all interact with various Miis that you dump in your ranch. If Chiyoko dumps a Pidgey into the ranch, the Pidgey will have a tendency to hang around Chiyoko instead of Michiko. And every fifteen minutes or so, all the Pokemon and Miis on the ranch get together for some kind of photo op, which varies depending on how many and what kinds of Pokemon you have.

On top of all that, there is the Wanted Pokemon feature, which is where Hayley posts up on the BBS some Pokemon that you don’t have in your Pokedex. She asks for you to find them and then upload them to the ranch. This is a great way to motivate people into filling out their dex, as well as to add some variety to the ranch. Plus, there is a chance that she’ll ask to trade your Wanted Pokemon with one of her own, which often have hard-to-get egg/TM moves. At some point she’ll also trade you a Phione and Mew, which hasn’t happened to us yet, but we’re looking forward to it. I mean, a legit Mew alone would be worth the 1000 Wii points; everything else is basically bonus. There are some other minor features like Club Look-See, where you can visit another NPC’s themed ranch, and the ability to visit any of your friends’ ranches if they also have MPR.

In closing, no, this isn’t really a game. Don’t go into it expecting to do a whole lot. And if you don’t have the DS titles, then you should probably skip this one. If you do have the DS titles though, it’s a handy way to store an additional 999 Pokemon and get a legit Mew, as well as watch your creations romp around and act all adorable and whatnot. Graphics are okay, controls are basic, and interaction is minimal, but probably the worst limitation is that you can only withdraw Pokemon from the same cartridge that you deposited them from, which means no trading either locally or over the WiFi. If you have two carts but only one DS, sorry, you can’t transfer Pokemon from Diamond to Ranch to Pearl. Furthermore, if you erase the original DS save file, the Pokemon you deposited to the Ranch are there forever, as there is no way to withdraw them.

There are definite reason why this game is getting low scores from many major review sites. But if you can overlook all these flaws, you can get a lot of simple enjoyment from watching your Pokemon play together.

What worked:

1. Legit Mew!!
2. Mii integration
3. Controls and functions are easy to understand
4. 999 storage space
5. Pokemon behaving in surprisingly unique ways, based on type, species, nature, etc.
6. Wii-to-DS functionality is highly intuitive
7. Picture-taking abilities and opportunities, as well as sending pictures to friends or to the Wii Message Board
8. Able to pull from 8 different DS cards, so if you have other family members who play, you can see your Pokemon interacting with theirs

How it could have been so much better:

1. Able to transfer Pokemon from different DS save files (a la Pokemon Box)
2. Having even the most rudimentary of interactions such as petting, feeding, or grooming
3. Gain some kind of reward for leaving Pokemon on the ranch, such as leveling up happiness or luster
4. Some kind of trading, either GTS-style or among friends
5. Having a mini-game or two
6. Different environments for the different types, like a pond for the fish
7. Better graphics
8. If nothing else, at least make this title $3-5 cheaper to compensate for the aforementioned limitations

FINAL SCORE: 4/10 if you have the DS titles, 1/10 if you don’t.