Review: Pokémon Quest (Android)

Hello once more my little monsters. I had a bit of a crappy day today, so I decided to forget all about it and write you all a nice little bonus blog. That will cheer me right up! Recently I got a phone that actually works, and isn’t powered by fossil fuels anymore. Finally I could play what some people consider worse than Fortnite, Mobile Games! What else what I play but Pokémon though? So today we have a review for Pokémon Quest!

The concept:
Describing what Quest is about is already a bit difficult, in essence I would describe it as an on rails Pokémon Mystery dungeon like game, which played a lot of minecraft at the daycare center. From the egg between those two, came Pokémon Quest. In non poké-players terms, it’s a semi automated dungeon-runner with cubelike pokémon. You play a nameless and faceless adventurer along with their robot pal MoBee. Mobee and you travel on a cute little ship , when you stumble upon Tumblecube Island, which is is a very diverse island, with lush jungles and scorching deserts, alongside vast pink plains and some cavelike stuff, among other things. Each area holds a variation of the original first generation pokémon, as well as some tribal statues you and Mobee are trying to collect. Don’t ask why, it’s just a thing you do. It doesn’t take MoBee long to locate you a starter pokémon, you get choose from Bulbasaur, Charmander, Squirtle, Eevee and Pikachu. Of course I chose my pal Bulbasaur.
From there on out you get to explore the island.

The Atmosphere
The game’s main selling point is how freaking adorable it looks. Cube Bulbasaur is kawaii as frizzlesticks. Kawaii being weeaboo for cute. Man is this game adorable.  After your first expedition you get a base camp where all your pokémon gather and hang out. You can see your cube pidgey hang out with your cube bulbasaur playing together by jumping in rhythm. Sometimes they even stack themselves on top of each other, which also looks adorable. Sometimes you just see them talking to each other, well you actually see a bunch of shaking cubes.. but you know what’s it about.  The amount of life they managed to get into these cubes is truly amazing Attacks are mostly recognisable , for example my bulbasaur knew petal dance which is animated a series of pink cubes spinning around, but pidgey actually got a little tornado for gust. The cubiness never is used to excessive and there is still a distinct pokémon feeling about how everything looks. The sounds are okay, of course it does feature the original cries of pokemon, which is super neat and whenever you attract a new pokemon, you get them blacked out with just their cry, reminiscent of the “who is that pokémon” game we all know and love. It’s charming throughout.  The music is nice and peppy, though they oftenly feature weird sound bites inside them and can be really busy. I don’t mind , cause it’s totally me, but I can see this getting annoying to some in time.
The game is quite grindy so music is created a lot.  I am not particularly fond of the boss theme for that reason. All in all they create a solid atmosphere that makes the game fun to look at and listen too. A nitpick of mine is how they could have made the layout feel a bit more inline with what we usually see from Pokémon games. The chosen Icon and HUDS just don’t feel very Pokémon like to me, making me believe this might have started out as a different game. 

Technical Thingies:
Programming wise the game is pretty solid. I have to commend the Autoplay AI (which you in time will use)  for actually being somewhat tactical in when to use powers and when it doesn’t. Yet for boss battles you might want to consider taking back control, because the difficulty scale is a tad on the harsh side. The game oftenly provides a power level you need to have to pass a mission, but this doesn’t always fly true. Nor do the reckoning type badges apply to each level making the game feel a bit wonky at times. Loading times also seem a bit longer then what is needed for the actual screen to appear, causing me to press buttons without them responding, however in fairness this may also be due to the hot weather slightly affecting my screen. The biggest technical snafu however is the pathfinding.
As mentioned earlier pokemon move sort of on rails. However that rails is randomised each time. They just run to a new random spawn zone on the map without you controlling it. In doing so however both your team as the enemies can’t tell if there is a river , a mountain or nothing in between you. They do learn but if Pidgey and Bulbasaur clip behind a rock and Vulpix is free, the latter will not wait for it’s team members and go on a suicide mission, which can be detrimental to runs. They did make a button to fix those issues though, that cause a pokemon to backdash.
On the plus side, controls are simple clean and as soon AS they are responsive they react accurately and properly. Swapping item, placing decorations and all the extra stuff works very smoothly so I’d say the game preforms average to okay on this area.

The gameplay
Unfortunately I can’t be quite as positive about the gameplay, though I would not call the game pay to win too much, the pase can be dreadfully slow if you don’t pay. 
In essence the game works like this, in your base camp there is a cooking pot. You toss some fruits, mushrooms and fossils (for some reason) in the pot to cook meals.
These meals attract pokémon that you can add to your team. You can take up to three cuties on an expedition with you, giving you new power up items and ingredients to cook with. Each time you start cooking it will show you a 0 out of X number. The X is how many expeditions you have to do before your new soup is ready, iow you need to play that many rounds to get a new pokémon. You level up your Pokémon by having them go on expeditions or by doing training. New moves can only be learned through training and that is exactly where the game falls apart for me. Training..sacrifices pokémon you caught, the more pokemon of the same type you use.. the more experience you get. Move learning however is an entirely different form of training als requiring you to sack of some Pokémon. A soup will, at least in the earliest stages take you about two two five expeditions. Each expedition costing Mobee some battery energy. He has five! energy. Each bar recharges in 30 minutes. This means you’ll get one or maybe two pokémon per two and a half hours. These pokémon are heavily RNG influenced. A pokémon can learn one or two moves, which can both be status or attacking moves. Everyone has a basic attack as well.  These basic attacks are super weak though, so basically if after two and a half hours you get your new mon and it only learns lightscreen… you either need to sacrifice four pokemon (10 hours of work) to learn it a new one, or rely on RNG and hope that you attract a better one by creating a similar soup. Luckily this is somewhat compensated by recipes. Certain types of soup attract certain type of Pokémon, so if you need a water type, it’s a safe bet to cook with a lot of blue ingredients. My luck in attracting Pokémon is horrendous , though I did manage to get my hands on a shiny machop! If you pick up certain package deals you will get up to three extra cooking pots, which I must say are somewhat fairly priced for something that effectively doubles up to quadruples  your game speed. The expeditions themselves are fun and short enough just to fire your phone up for briefly. The descent autopilot makes it into a decent idle game as well. Just turn it on while chopping your salad or flipping your burger and you can still have a fun time, if you don’t mind trying your luck. The in game currency you can get fast enough to expand your pokemon slots and item slots without it limiting your game, just don’t go crazy and shop for to many decorations in the beginning. Those offer you a bonus themselves but until you get a versatile team, having power up items and plenty pokemon is more beneficial. No great gameplay, but it’s free to start so it doesn’t underachieve for me either.

Score
Definitely the cutest pokemon game, (at least if we don’t consider the ones who use the IP illegally) you can get on your phone, but with plenty of frustrations to be had if you allow it to. Something you can easily pass upon  and you would not really miss out on anything, yet again if you really love pokémon or even just love to see some cute cubed monsters running around there is no really any harm in playing it either. You will not even feel totally ripped off, if you buy the adventure packs. As for available purchases this game does actually give you some worth for your buck. Guaranteed pokémon, and permanent game speed upgrades?! I can totally live with those.  Don’t expect a Pokémon Go like mobile game which you can constantly play though. Compare this game to an episode of a Joy of Painting (Bob Ross).
There’s a lot of happy little things and some bosses you can beat the devil out off, but in between those waits it’s borings as flan.

An I don’t mind it, seems like a perfect score, it’s exactly how I feel about the Joy of Painting as well. Have you played this game? What is your favorite mobile Pokémon game?
What is your best happily little accident? Leave a like and thanks for reading once more.
Stay a thinned Alizarine Crimson! (That’s Pink)