Pokémon Masters is another mobile gacha offering from Nintendo and it just disappointed me, much like Dr Mario World (and Mario Kart World as well). In it you go through missions and fight with some iconic pokémon trainers from all over the lore. To do so, you recruit them in your party, upgrade their skills, complete missions and mash through a lot of dialogue. This game has a ton of production values, but ultimately still results in a product that feels shallow, unbalanced and exploitative.
After starting the game, you are introduced via Brock and Misty to the Pokemon Masters League, the challenge which you’re undertaking with your starter pikachu. The game is divided in multiple chapters where you’ll alternate between dialogue segments and battle segments with some light exploration thrown in the middle. The dialogue is well written and the character designs they’ve created for this game is pretty neat even if there are no stakes, you talk to many characters only to serve the next fight, and I’ve never really played Pokémon for the story, so it’s kinda lost on me.
The fights themselves are a weird real-time thing where a meter fills up and you use bars of the meter to do certain moves - some take more than others and are more effective - or use items with one of your three trainers. You target enemies at the top of the screen and try to hit their weaknesses. It’s a bit frantic and also feels bogged down for no reason. What if you don’t have any pokemon with moves strong against your opponent, does it matter who attacks? What if you DO have one, is it worth it for you to do anything else than spam that one move? Moves have some special properties like lowering stats and they can take multiple bars of action do to but they all feel the same in the end, you don’t have enough information to pick the best ones.
So I just put the game on complete auto-mode. Super-fast battles and cutscene skip. I know, at this point I’m barely playing it anymore, what’s left to do is the usual free-to-play fare; Daily login rewards, quests to get premium currency (weirdly split between paid currency and free one with some limitations when you don’t spend real money) that you then use to pull more masters with low rates that you need to use a bunch of items to upgrade their moves and learn new ones. It’s not very fun.
I stopped playing Pokémon Masters when I got to a fight that I couldn’t win and didn’t know what I was doing wrong. The game didn’t catch my attention enough so that made me uninstall it. There are some good things in there, like the characters and some of the flavor on the dialogue, but this doesn’t make a fun game, there would’ve needed to be more meat, gameplay-wise for me to be keep playing it.
