LogFAQs > #914847845

I nabbed myself a Nintendo Switch back at the tail end of September thanks to a sweet, sweet deal from an acquaintance of mine. What have I been playing? I'm glad you pseudo-asked! I logged 56 hours on the dot with Pokemon Let's Go, Eevee before beating it just the other night. You know, this game has some obvious issues but I liked it a good bit.

I wrote a quick review for it already so I'll just paste it here:

Intro

I bought Let's Go, Eevee on a whim despite disliking much of what I'd seen during the marketing campaign. The last time I played a Pokemon game to completion was Pokemon X back in 2013 and I figured I could wait one more year for the arrival of Generation 8 before hopping back in. My immense love for Eevee seized control of me and I found myself in the possession of a copy of this game on release night. Curiously, my bank account was $60 lower than it had been before that evening.

Gameplay

There's a lot to admire about Let's Go's overall gameplay. Pokemon being visible in the overworld is a legitimate game-changer and it should be a crowning feature of future mainline entries. While somewhat janky, the ability to have any Pokemon follow you around is throughout the game is equally cool. I had a blast treating my Charizard like a replacement bicycle... provided he had ample enough leg room to compel him to even leave his Poke Ball, of course. While I wouldn't want Let's Go's streamlined lack of abilities and held items to seep into more standard titles, I must admit it was refreshing within this context. And the much-touted catching mrchanic, while hit-or-miss for me, tended to hit more often than it missed.

Unfortunately, for every admirable gameplay aspect there is something here that I didn't quite enjoy. The catching mechanic didn't replace the traditional wild Pokemon encounter style in an enticing enough way for me to stop thinking about how much I wish I could have used my Pokemon in more than just trainer battles. Along those same lines, I regret to report that while I had some wonderfully on-point days in which my Joy Con seemed to sync up well with the screen, there were other days where it seemed like something was off every time I ran into a catchable Pokemon. I never really figured out how to throw balls at moving Pokemon, either. That's probably on me for not deducing something fairly simple, but nevertheless it detracted from my experience when it happened. Catching was substantially simpler in handheld mode, but it left me wishing it were so in docked mode too. And the progression-gating at several gyms was varying degrees of goofy, climaxing with the requirement that I had a Pokemon of Level 45 or higher at Sabrina's gym. Of note, I always do once I enter that door. So why bring it up, then? Well, because I know that plenty of people do not, and many of those self-same people will tell you that they did not need to be so high a level to win.

There's a respectable layer of polish over most content, which makes the mediocre parts all the more bewildering. Your trainer says the same words of encouragement to her Pokemon during battles over and over again, and there is assuredly something else I'd intended to bring up too but I'm exhausted as I pen this review, so I'll edit this section once it inevitably comes back to me in the morning.

All told, gameplay's a mixed bag here, but what matters most is that my fun-to-meh ratio favored fun. Waltzing across Kanto with an Eevee on my head and an Alolan Raichu right behind me felt great and filled me with determination.
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~Slowbro, after this we'll go to Johto...
On a bird named Pidgeotto...~