If you wanted to see the clearest vision of Nintendo ’s forthcoming strategy for smartphones, you have your answer this morning in the form of Pokémon Go, a joint venture between The Pokémon Company, Nintendo and AR developer Niantic.
The game sounds amazing. It’s an AR experience that will direct players to various locations near them, or far away, where they’ll discover Pokémon in the “real world” that can be captured with the Go app. And, much like handheld games, wandering around might run you smack into another trainer who wants to battle. There also appear to be “public events,” as it were, where players can all team up to take down a particularly monstrous foe; a large-scale battle with Mewtwo in Times Square is the showcased example.
This all feels a bit too good to be true for me, as I’m having flashbacks to when I was a kid and I was hearing about a pair of awesome new Pokémon games for the N64. I thought at last, the time had come for a fully 3D Pokemon experience, but instead I got an incredibly limited battle sim in the form of Pokémon Stadium, and an on-the-rails picture-taking experience with Pokémon Snap. Those games may have their nostalgic appeal at this point, but my ten year-old self was definitely thinking at the time “this is not what I was expecting.”
I’m not saying not to be optimistic, and the concept behind Pokémon Go looks cool. But here are a few grains of salt I’m worried about based on the announcement today