Pokemon Masters Review

A note before going into detail about this game: I am up to Chapter 10 in its Story Mode, have completed just one "Event" so far, and haven't obtained anywhere close to all the characters, so the opinions expressed here are to some degree tentative.  Nevertheless, I feel I have spent enough time with this game that I can now say a lot about what I do and don't like about it. Onto the details.

Hey; how did you know I wore a ring?!  Or were you talking about yours?

Foreward

In case you haven't heard, Pokemon Masters is a mobile platform spin-off of the Pokemon series, and while it keeps the collecting aspect of the core series, this time each Pokemon obtained has a human trainer to go with it; trainers brought back from all previous generations of Pokemon thus far.  In fact, these human trainers are what you collect directly, their (under most circumstances) one-Pokemon-each forming what is known as a "sync pair" with them, and them all having gathered on the Island of Pasio to compete in a special tournament called the Pokemon Masters League, and their dialogue and interactions with each other and the player occupy a lot of the story now.  This new focus on a previously underrepresented aspect of the Pokemon series proves to be double-edged; displaying some admirable creativity and passion, but with frequent reminders that this isn't what the series was designed to do.

Story Time

I've read it said in multiple other places that this game has good writing.  By the standards set by other Pokemon games, that's a fair assessment.  Characters speak in ways that fit their archetypes, occasionally their dialogue is relatable, and on some rare occasions it can be funny.  However, the problem is that this still is a Pokemon game, so not much is really going on in it to foster stimulating conversation.  The vast majority of what everyone talks about is Pokemon, a fair amount of talk about Pokemon is about them battling, and a fair amount of that Pokemon battle talk is about battling in the Pokemon Masters League tournament, which in typical Pokemon fashion takes center stage even though there's also a rival and an evil team to take on.

Well this sounds exciting!  Except that fight never happens.

Yes; such shallow plot, characterization and dialogue are typical of Pokemon games, and that wasn't a big deal in games where plot, characterization and dialogue weren't the big draw anyway, but in this game they are, and having to wade through so much more of the same gets tiresome fast.  There are some dialogue trees in the process, but no choice really makes any difference besides sometimes getting a different response.

There's no greater testament to how much this game's banking on character appeal and dialogue than the "Sync Pair Stories".  These side missions, of which each sync pair has at least one, mostly have no actual gameplay; merely many lines of dialogue to read through or pretend you're reading through as you keep tapping the screen.  They aren't what I'd call optional, as they grant you extra gems that can be used for the game's "GachaPon" system, which both unlocks new characters and can help power up characters you already own. (More on that later)

For a game whose appeal is supposed to be its characters, it doesn't focus nearly enough on making its characters appealing.  One of the most immediately noticeable missteps of the game's story is that while the first two allies it grants the player are Brock and Misty, presumably due to them being Ash's traveling companions in the first three seasons of the anime, their personalities here bear no resemblance to those of their anime counterparts.  Granted, the anime is divisive even among Pokemon fans, with some opining that it makes the whole franchise look too childish, but since these characters are obviously there for people who do like the anime, lacking parity just makes them feel hollow.  Brock being constantly lovestruck and Misty having a hot temper may not be the deepest character traits and their appeal is subjective, but at least they're something.  Brock and Misty in this game don't have much of anything to their personalities.

Also noticeable is that the graphics and voice acting don't do a very thorough job of bringing these characters to life.  In still photos, Pokemon Masters looks quite good; while I wish most characters weren't so skinny and it seems like their upper bodies are a bit too small compared to their lower bodies, the vibrant colors and cell-shading give it an appropriately animesque look that's easy on the eyes.  In motion, though, this game can stumble into the uncanny valley, with animations that seem poorly utilized or at times outright unfinished.  Cutscenes progress as you click through lines of dialogue, and while the game is waiting for you to move on, characters might freeze in an awkward pose, or cycle repeatedly through an animation that seems like it's only supposed to be played once and then stop at the end.

Misty's mouth is not moving during that caption; it is just frozen in that open pose.

Then there are moments where dialogue text refers to things happening which clearly aren't, such as Korrina saying to watch her do her rolling axe kick and not doing it, or Blaine telling Flannery to get back up when she's already standing.  Voice acting, meanwhile, is constantly like that, with every character's voice being limited to an introduction speech and a few catchphrases.  Those catchphrases do well enough to add personality to battles, but they're spruced into text dialogue that is saying different things; sometimes very different.

So in short, a good rule of thumb for game narratives should be that their quality should increase with their presence, and this one's quality has increased, but not nearly as much as its presence has.  If only they let people talk about something other than Pokemon, even things that seem as mundane as taxes, vacuum cleaning and hiphop, they might manage to give people comparable appeal to Pokemon.  But still, at least it has the things the Pokemon games are good at to fall back on, right?  Somewhat.

Enough Talk; Let's Fight!

Combat in the traditional Pokemon games is turn-based, usually one-on-one, occasionally two-on-two, or very rarely three-on-three, utilizing four moves per-Pokemon, each with a limited number of uses, and an expanded "Rock Paper Scissors" system of strengths and weaknesses to the Pokemon and their moves.  This game's battle system bears an obvious resemblance to those, but almost everything has been altered to some degree.  Combat is now in real-time, the four-moves of every sync pair are split between the trainer's moves (most of which affect status) and the Pokemon's moves (most of which damage other Pokemon), and each sync pair only has one strength and weakness compared to others.  Often, they're based on how the Pokemon's type worked in the core series, but with only one power relationship in each direction allowed, it can only go so far.  Finally, while the trainers' moves still have a limited number of total uses, Pokemon moves have switched to using up stores of an energy meter that gradually recharges. (Generally the better the move, the more energy it costs.) Finally, bit by bit super attacks called "Sync Moves" charge up, which can make a big difference between victory and defeat.

All of the pros and cons surrounding basically every move lend the combat in Pokemon Masters far more depth than you'd expect from a free-to-play game on a non-game-focused platform; possibly even enough to garner the affection of fans of the core Pokemon titles, despite the reduced use of type effectiveness.  In stark contrast to the narrative portions of the game, you can't just click through battles and expect to win unless you're a much higher level than the opponent; you constantly have to think. (You can set an AI to fight battles for you, but it's not very smart.)  That's good.

However, some of the limitations placed on moves slow things down far more than they should in a real-time combat game, and worse still, keep the team mechanics from reaching their full potential much of the time.  The aforementioned energy meter is unrealistically shared by all three Pokemon on a team, and while sometimes being unrealistic can lead to better gameplay, it really doesn't here.  If a Pokemon's attacks have an advantage over an opponent (and it's easy to adjust your team so that they will), the best strategy is usually to fire off these super-effective attacks (or just one, repeatedly) as quickly as possible, hogging up most if not all of the energy bar.  As a result, in most matches I have fought, there's at least one Pokemon that I don't use for anything besides an extra target for opponents to hopefully attack instead of my more effective Pokemon--and in some matches, two Pokemon might be ignored in kind.

Come on, refill! Cross Poison!  Cross Poison!

Another place where unrealistic mechanics bog the gameplay down is the relationship between Pokemon and their trainers.  They're obviously separate entities, but if you choose to use a trainer move (which again, don't affect the energy meter), somehow that trainer's Pokemon's moves become unavailable to use for a time.  Probably a brief time, but when you have two other Pokemon who aren't disabled that's just one more thing that will lead to some Pokemon doing almost nothing.  Conversely, while the trainers aren't attacked directly in fights, if their Pokemon faint that makes the trainers' moves unusable, too.  What can I say, when a big part of a game's premise is that a party of three is fighting in tandem and a third of that party is often nearly useless, something has gone wrong, and play-testing should have made them see that and fix it.

The Story Mode of Pokémon Masters is almost completely linear, with scant room for emergence.  In occasional sections you'll be allowed to navigate a bit around a map by clicking on arrows, looking for (poorly hidden) items and talking to people, but the majority of Story Mode is you moving where the plot says, meeting whom the plot says, talking and fighting with whom the plot says, in the order the plot says.  Even though you can change who's on your team between every sub-chapter, that has no bearing on which characters feature in the cutscenes.  As addressed in last section, the story that gives this mode its name isn't exactly worth the price of admission, and then at some point, difficulty shoots up, forcing grinding, and engagement with that plot plummets even further.

Let's Keep Fighting!

Pokémon Masters has been praised for how limited its microtransactions are, with the only things costing real money being the gems used for the trainer gacha machine--and note that the Story Mode will unlock a lot of sync pairs, and that there are many in-game ways to get the gems.  That is indeed nice, especially in a franchise aimed at children, but it seems like the game was designed to feature a lot more microtransactions that were dropped before release.  I say this because much as in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Legends and probably other freemium mobile games, the new, stronger opponents in later chapters will force you to battle weaker opponents to level up, and it seems purposefully inefficient.  Leveling up seems straightforward at first; just fight and gain experience, but it soon becomes apparent just how much more complicated it is.  Sync pairs have maximum level caps that you must pay other items to raise, and furthermore, leveling up does not unlock new moves the way it does in the core series; these, too, require items to buy.  Finally, there are items that can be spent to level up characters in the same way as experience was.  The fastest way to earn all of these items is to visit a designated training area, but it's still not very fast.  It's a mess of collectable trinkets that seems to be there just to annoy people into paying their way through it, except they can't.

Of course, grinding (that is, fighting weaker enemies to power up gradually) is common in the core Pokémon RPGs, too.  There are likely few RPGs where it isn't.  However, in the past it felt better incorporated into the adventure.  Can't beat this gym leader?  Then take a hike to the outskirts of the town, explore tall grass, and get in fights with Pokémon to power up, and then come back into town.  It's wasn't great worldbuilding, but it still lent some sense of a consistent story.  In Pokémon Masters, a game with almost no independent movement, you just open a menu and select what you want to do; continue the Story Mode, whose battles are tied together by cutscenes and dialog, or spend some time in Training Mode, whose battles aren't.  This game breaks with freemium convention by having no energy system to limit how much you can fight these battles before having to either wait or pay for a refill; you are free to play this game for as long as you like, earning what you can. [NOTE: That has changed since I wrote this article] But would you really want to?  Your reward for playing this game more is getting to play it more, and playing it just isn't that satisfying.

Conclusion

This review has been almost entirely criticism, so to clear the air up, the game is not terrible.  Its actual combat has a commendable amount of depth for a mobile game, and on occasion its dialogue is appealing.  Everything in this game is, at worst, okay.  It doesn't often rise much higher, though, and the thing about things that are just okay is that when they're constantly crammed down one's throat, particularly the same few just-okay things repeatedly, they start to feel much worse than just okay.  Among mobile freemium RPGs, you can certainly do worse, but among Pokémon RPGs you can certainly do better.  DeNA seems to have missed the point of making a Pokémon game.  They focused on the things that the Pokémon series hasn't traditionally been good at without changing them enough, while throwing out many things that the series has been good at and changing those few good things it left in too much.  However, I still support a character-focused Pokémon game in theory, and I hope this game can eventually grow into its self-appointed shoes with new events.  For the moment, though, while this isn't the worst mobile game I've played by a long shot, it is easily one of the most disappointing.