LogFAQs > #968570624

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/6/6/AAA-H0AADwa-.jpg

And my god, there's so many areas in this game! The amount of content in this game is staggering. My pessimistic estimate for how many areas there'd be was like, 6, which is how many there was in the original; I figured there wouldn't be many more than 10 at best. Not unreasonable for me to assume, considering Mario Party Superstars ended up on the pessimistic end. But if I counted right there's 15, many of which have day and night variants, and all of which have multiple different possible setups beyond that, as well as like, six boss levels? Three of the areas they added as free DLC after the game was released, which was really nice, because even with just 12 areas this game still felt really packed with things to do and places to go. It took me something like 15-20 hours just to beat the game, much less get every Pokemons' photo and complete all of the (ridiculously hard) challenges, which is way, way more life than I thought a game like this would have.

I haven't really gotten into playing this game for score, but I'm absolutely fascinated by the New Pokemon Snap community, who have assembled a really impressive list of high scores for every possible photo in the game, and since you can get four different photos of each Pokemon, there's like... well over a thousand different photos. Seriously, this game has a lot of content. There's so much strategy and effort that goes into maximizing the score of each shot - the original Pokemon Snap had pretty obvious caps for each shot to hit, making maximizing the score a little bit simpler, but NPS is far more demanding, giving you perfect scores only if your shot is truly as perfect as it can be, and most of the time you can't even maximize every score at once, which leads to some really interesting strategies being used to get the best score on some shots. This makes it really unlikely that the true maximum score for every shot can ever truly be narrowed down, which just makes the prospect of aiming for high scores all the more exciting.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/6/7/AAA-H0AADwa_.jpg

I'm in love with this game. I played it all summer while sitting outside in the hammock - I'm always a real sucker for games that are about exploring really beautiful natural environments, so this game's right up my alley. I'm kinda itching to go back to it, actually, because I never quite 100% completed it. I'm close, but not there yet. Except I'm not close on the challenges - those are so hard that it's insane, and it really shows you how much there is to do. You'd think that it wouldn't be hard to figure out every combination of thing you can do to get Pokemon to respond to you, but there's a surprising number of ways to manipulate them, which makes this a surprisingly potent puzzle game.

By the way, I have to say that I'm shocked that Polygon didn't even include this game in their *top 50* games of 2021. They included a few games in there that I think are kind of duds! Not to mention that they listed some lazy stuff like "Genshin Impact 2.0" and "Animal Crossing 2.0" which really didn't need to be on the list. I know, it's kind of lame to defend a Nintendo game like this because it's not like they need it, but this one really deserves serious critical acclaim; it's not for everyone, but it definitely deserves to be taken seriously on a GOTY shortlist. I'm honestly shocked I'm saying that, because I wouldn't say it about almost any other Pokemon game that's ever been released. A lot of them are fun, and some of them are even good, but something as high quality, high effort, and polished as New Pokemon Snap is nearly unprecedented in the franchise. Seriously, I can't believe how above and beyond they went on this - it actually made the 20+ year wait worth it. They somehow delivered on the best possible version of what this long-awaited sequel could have been.

Next up: If you've been paying attention, I've already said this game is on the list. Are you surprised I put it this high?