November 15, 2021|

Filed under: Editorial

Holism: New Pokémon Snap’s Four Star System

EDIT (November 19, 2022): Due to my deletion of my Twitter account, I’ve replaced the Tweets I embedded with screenshots of them. I’ve also saved the New Pokémon Snap pictures that are in them, in case I find a way to better embed them.

All screenshots from New Pokémon Snap were taken by me.

Pokémon Snap had a great idea when it came out in 1999. Exploring a picturesque area, discovering magical creatures, and taking pictures of their behavior captured the appeals of exploration and photography. Literally, you captured it on film. Instead of having you walk out on your own, you rode a safe floating car on a predetermined path as you looked for interesting subjects to capture on film. It was a nonviolent first-person rail shooter, an odd mix of ideas that proved accessible and intuitive. You were aiming and shooting, but your ammunition was just pictures. You moved on a set path, but the camera was yours to control. You had no health or fail states, just the images you took with you (which you could even print out, provided you were close to a Blockbuster back then).

Seeing Pokémon move in 3D, out of turn-based combat, was revelatory.

Being tied to the Pokémon series, which had already become a massive multimedia franchise, only helped it further. Pokémon is a game about finding beautiful, incredible creatures… and training them to fight. It’s led to an excellent turn-based combat system and plenty of great action-oriented spin-offs, but fully pacifist ones are special. They imagine the series’ hundreds of wonderful Pocket Monsters as more than tools for battles, maybe even as the kind of wild, living creatures they ostensibly are. That was a big part of Snap’s charm; it actually did send you to areas where Pokémon were just animals. They ran, played, ate, fought, and slept. And it was your job to show those sides of them.

This was how I showed these images when my Twitter account existed. It’s inelegant but gets the job done, and it was important to keep them in groups.

However, there were a few limits. Firstly, the game was fairly small by design. Six main levels and only sixty-three Pokémon (not bad, admittedly – only 151 existed at the time) made the game a somewhat smaller affair. Snap was HAL Laboratory’s first release after Super Smash Bros., and while the game’s levels were vaster than anything the studio had done before, there were still limits in what they could show. This was a Nintendo 64 game, after all, if one that was made late in the console’s life cycle.

A weirder issue was how the game judged your photography. The way Snap works is that you sit yourself in your floating car as it takes you through the level. You spend that time looking for Pokémon and snapping pictures, ideally of them doing something more “interesting” than standing passively (typically, a response to a stimulus you provide, most prominently by throwing fruit near or at them). After you complete your level, the pictures you submit get judged. Is the Pokémon in the center frame? Is it doing something interesting? Was that something the response to you goading it with an apple? Often, though, those might not even matter much, and well timed and prepared shots would inexplicably get scored lower than ones of Pokémon barely in frame.

Part of it was how vague the system could be at times. It was unclear what you could have done better.

This is an inevitability when making a game that tries to quantify things on an artistic or aesthetic level. Games are art, but they’re not great as artists or art critics. Any system trying to judge or gauge things may be good at what to prioritize or how to combine conditions, but it can be fooled by accident. And even when it works, there’s still the broader issue of the programming not being able to read aesthetics in the way we can. Maybe that picture of a Magikarp by the river – the one in that lovely header Voyager made – just looks more interesting when the Pokémon’s at a distance? Maybe a passive, more relaxed image provides something an active, hectic one doesn’t? But while Snap provided an album for your favorite shots, there’s something… limited about that. Those are for the ones you like, not the ones the game likes. You want validation the game cannot give.

New Pokémon Snap, a 2021 reboot / sequel (now made by Bandai-Namco, for Nintendo Switch, and with the ability to share your pictures online with much more ease), attempts to solve this issue. And it should be said that this game also has the same problem. It will fall by the algorithm at all times, as it would have to. Sometimes it’ll give you a weird or unfair score. Sometimes it’ll inexplicably focus on the wrong Pokémon. And more than sometimes, its preference for conditions of the subject gets in the way of broader value in composition (i.e. sometimes a shot from further away is prettier than getting the entire body into frame). This first image I took of Wailord doesn’t fit the game’s visual ideals, but I’ll be damned if it’s not so much more interesting than a standard mid-frame of the giant whale.

The plot of New Pokémon Snap involves you going through a geographically diverse archipelago – by the end, a park, camp, jungle, river, beach, reef, undersea cave, desert, badlands, volcano, seasonally shifting forest, snowfield, cavern, and ruin – photographing Pokémon, and trying to understand a series of things that tie the islands together. You have to find special flowers that alter how the local Pokémon behave and engage in “boss fights” in which you photograph giant, mysterious Monsters. But the general experience is the same as the original: being driven along a path, seeing animals, and trying to land the best shots you can in the time and with the film you have. It makes for an exceptionally satisfying experience, and a standout in a year that already saw Hitman 3, Resident Evil Village, Deltarune Chapter 2, and Metroid Dread.

At first glance, what’s improved the most is size. There’s over two hundred Pokémon in the game’s “PhotoDex” encyclopedia, all rendered far more lovingly by the Switch’s twenty years improved graphical capabilities. There’s more they can do and more ways for you to interact with them. The number of levels has doubled, on top of each having several variants, alternate paths, and lightly upgraded forms (all of which give and remove specific opportunities). A DLC upgrade added two and a half levels. It’s a surprisingly robust game for a Pokémon spin-off and a sequel to Snap. About all that’s missing from the first game is the iconic sequence where you influence a Charmeleon’s evolution.

The first time I got a four-star shot of Caterpie – at least, I think I was the one who took it. May have been a family member. Since it’s new, I didn’t get the choice of whether it should replace the one that’s already in the PhotoDex.

The rating system is also more grander, albeit in a way that also makes the scoring easier to understand. You still have size and pose, but other metrics are much more clear. How much your subject faces you, the presence of other Pokémon (any Pokémon; the first Snap only cared if you got multiple versions of your subject), exciting backgrounds; these are direct. It also provides a way in which you can focus on one thing in favor of the others and still get a decent score, or just understand why things shook out the way they did. This doesn’t get over that issue of a conventional low score sometimes being more aesthetically nice, but it gives you direction and clarity. These expansions are useful for making Snap a strong sequel, but one expansion is very much worthy of note, and that’s the star rating.

Like most Pokémon games, there are effectively two goals: getting to the end (in this case, discovering the lost “Illumina Pokémon” of legend) and filling out your encyclopedia for nothing but bragging rights and the experience of seeing every Monster in town. But unlike the mainline series, the PhotoDex entry for each monster doesn’t get filled out with just the first picture you take of them. Each Pokémon’s entry is represented by four types of photo, and it’s up to you to get the pictures that meet the needs of the 1, 2, 3, and 4-☆ rankings. For instance, here are the four I filled out for Lycanroc, a Pokémon with multiple forms that can each be represented in the PhotoDex as much or as little as you’d like.

The differences are fairly easy to understand. 1-☆ shots feature the Pokémon in a mostly static position. They’re easy to take, but getting the perfect shot of a Wurmple’s crawl or a Scorbunny’s nap still takes work. 2-☆ are a bit more intensive, because they typically revolve around the Pokémon interacting with you. You use a Fluffruit to feed or hit them, then you take a shot of them eating the apple or screaming at you (other options include using an electric scanner to get their attention, playing a soft lullaby, and energizing them with a ball of electricity). It’s the 3- and 4-☆ ones that are the most rewarding, as they involve unique or rare or complicated actions. A Trubbish spewing Poison Gas on an Eevee, a Pinsir leaping out of an underground nest, an Inkay harassing a Chinchou; these are more exciting – and more difficult. You usually have to do something to trigger their action, but even when you don’t, finding the right place and time to take it is hard. Anyone who’s managed to get the image of Pidgeot swooping in to grab a Magikarp knows that.

The immediate benefit of the rating system is that it justifies getting multiple kinds of pictures. Instead of a system that solely prioritizes complex actions over more pleasing compositions, every kind of shot is valuable in its own way. The game definitely considers the higher star ratings to be more important – they net you more points, which goes further into accessing alternate versions of each location – but the lower tier ones still matter. You have to get them for one hundred percent completion, and they still provide those points. But that also means you’re incentivized to not just get the 1 and 2-☆ pictures, but really good 1 and 2-☆ pictures.

The pictures that fall into the higher end ratings are typically the ones used in the game’s robust mission system. It’s a completely optional side of the Snap where various supporting characters give you a request for some kind of shot and little more than a hint on how to do so. It can be a devil of a time finding the 3 and 4-☆ ones for one Monster or another, so this provides you with clues. And a lot of clues at that; there are dozens and dozens, a few of them covering the same Pokémon. It’s helpful for players who are having trouble getting all four photos, but completing a request can also spark a player’s ideas for how to approach another course. There’s also a fairly wide range of complexity and difficulty between each request, so players will likely complete a few by accident (sometimes you can even submit a picture that should – but won’t always – fulfill a request that hasn’t been added yet).

It’s worth noting that the vast majority of Pokémon in New Pokémon Snap have multiple poses that trigger the higher star ratings. In fact, some of the requests actually obscure a few others. You can probably fill out at least most of the ‘Dex without completing (or noticing) a single mission. But that’s something for longterm players to find, and it’s not a requirement to learn every single trick. All that matters to the game is that you try to engage with it and show your subjects at multiple angles. Many of these higher level shots demand a lot – they often require you to study the way the Pokémon move, to use extra tools like fruit or music, or even to manipulate the speed of your car, the Neo-One. Having multiple paths that the PhotoDex considers equally valid is incredibly helpful, since it allows you to also bypass the requests if all you want is the filled ‘Dex.

That leads into what’s probably the greatest boon, which is that it does wonders for Snap’s replayability. Having four times the slots to fill gives you all the more reason to go back again and again, and it incentivizes studying every animal whose path you meet. When you finish a course, you submit your photos, but only one for each Pokémon (in pics with multiple subjects, that’s typically the one in the center, though you can manipulate that). That means it takes at least four runs to get every Pokémon, even if you can find them in multiple locations. But if you’re invested in filling out just one PhotoDex entry, then you’ll probably want to try working on the others, because it’s still a course. You still go on a controlled, first person rail every time, so why not grab the others?

Near the end of the game, the Neo-One gets various controls to manipulate its speed – though not the speed of the Pokémon, which leads to different opportunities – and after playing through any level once you can quit at any point to the evaluation portion. So it’s entirely possible for players to go through a route and only care about one target, one goal (I’ve done that when I was focused on just filling out one request or another). That tends to happen much later, after you’ve already gone through a sizable amount of the game. It’s also an inevitability, because no amount of new or mechanically diverse content will ever stave off people wanting to just focus on the things they’re missing. But that’s fine. It doesn’t undermine the greater amount of content or keep you from ever experiencing it.

These are all mechanical benefits, but a purely thematic one is how New Pokémon Snap uses the star ratings to further the core idea that powered the original Pokémon Snap, that you are a largely distant figure experiencing the joy of seeing animals in nature (even if the game lets you interact with them). If your job is to learn about the Pokémon of the Lental Region, then only showing a Mandibuzz or Crabominable at their most wild doesn’t cut it. The goal is to see how these creatures live, to get a more fleshed out perspective on them, and the only way to show that would be to show them in different states of being – and for some of them, different habitats.

Those quieter aspects are often easy to ignore – in video games, and in real life. As much as you want to see that grand animal move, there’s something compelling in its napping or relaxing as well. And while that’s true in general, it’s especially so for Pokémon, a series that started as and is most famous for being an action series, if a turn-based one. Even in the modern mainline entries, Pokémon in contexts other than battle screens is rather limited. When a Pokémon sleeps in one of the RPGs, that’s because it was hit with Hypnosis or is healing damage by using Rest. Here, it’s because it’s just at a point in the day where it goes to sleep.

All of this revolves around an idea of the experience being more and greater. The Pokémon have more to do – and more to do with each other, as interactions between them constitute many of the higher tier photo opportunities. Your abilities have more function, and you have four times the way to officially present each creature (plus, of course, you have a surprisingly small bonus section for extra photos). That demands exploration, but it also rewards it – less with the in-game points or the “request complete” banner over each mission, but with direct proof of your efforts. Each picture tells you so much more than an achievement ever could, because it’s a literal capture of where you were, what you did, and what you saw.

The Pokémon franchise is an odd one. It’s so successful, and it has so many extensions of the brand, but it’s just as happy to abandon an idea as come up with it at all. For every Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, there’s a Hey You, Pikachu! For its mostly mediocre thousand-plus episode anime, it’s got just one rather good live action movie. Its path is littered with so many forgotten spin-offs and experiments, from the absolutely mercenary to the utterly imaginative. The first Pokémon Snap was one of the latter; for many players, it was symbolic of Pokémon’s ability to create a great idea, execute it, and throw it away without a care. The mix of mechanical genres, the interest in the natural world, the empowering nature of its photography; in retrospect, it feels like a game that had to happen. And, just as much, it feels like a Pokémon game that would inevitably be abandoned in favor of Dance! Pikachu or whatever, to inspire follow-ups only in the dreams of fans. According to New’s director, Haruki Suzaki, there apparently had been prior stabs at a sequel, but from a distance you’d be forgiven for assuming otherwise.

For its part, New Pokémon Snap is exactly what a dream follow-up should be. It marshals two decades of improved graphics and an incredible art direction to create what a fan of the first game envisioned in those late-Nineties visuals. Its Pokémon are more alive and animated. It’s larger and more ambitious in virtually every way. It includes totally new ideas. And I think this is all both supported and encapsulated by its rating system. It connects everything, from the appeal of simply taking snapshots to the desire to find every secret or trick to the ballooning scope. It’s easy to miss just how much it adds to the experience, and maybe that’s fitting. It supports what matters most from the background, never letting it get ahead of what lies in your sights.