Nintendo Australia and New Zealand have had the opportunity to chat with Junichi Masuda and Kensaku Nabana about the upcoming Pokemon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokemon: Let’s go, Eevee! Both of these titles are coming to the Nintendo Switch on the 16th of November and should appeal to newcomers and veterans of the popular franchise. If you are a Pokemon fan, then this question and answer session should certainly appeal to you.
Thanks to Mathieu Van Mulders for the tip!
Reblogged this on madonisblog and commented:
A lil contribution, hooray ^.^
Nah, prolly not.
Still better than MTV right now.
I’m only getting it for Eevee as she’ll be the star of the version I get. If Let’s GO continues on as it’s own line of spin-offs after the first set, I’m drawing the line at Let’s GO! Eevee.
I hope the game let’s us choose the gender of our Pikachu/Eevee, too.
I still don’t know what the sales are going to be like. On the one hand, it’s a Pokémon game, but on the other hand, I feel like Masuda has angered a lot of the long-term core fans with these spinoffs. I’ll be buying a copy to see what it’s like, but I think the majority of the audience is going to those 10 and under, so it’ll fall to their parents to justify spending $300 on a Switch and another $60 on one of these titles. Also, it looks like I’m going to have to wait on getting Melmetal, since I don’t have a smartphone, so I won’t be able to get a Meltan… or evolve it with candies, for that matter. Horrible decision to lock it behind GO specifically, by the way. Maybe next year it’ll be distributed via Mystery Gift instead.
Hopefully. With an alternate way to evolve it, too. Making them exclusive to GO and Let’s GO! is gonna piss off the core fans a hell of a lot more than GO & Let’s GO! have, so hopefully they won’t make that mistake.
Well, I haven’t bought a new Pokemon game since X/Y and I didn’t finish it. Before that I think it was Black/White. I do still love Pokemon, and while I might buy a new main line Pokemon game on the Switch, Let’s Go is a no brainer because of my 5 year old. She picked the Pikachu one and we’re pumped to play it together. I really think they’re not counting on those long-term core fans at all. They’re going after that nostalgia card for the 90s kids with kids now. Plus they’re obviously trying to hit that Let’s Go audience.
The fact of the matter is, Nintendo has been worried for years that their recruitment numbers with kids has been too low. The majority of their audience is far older than what the games are intended for, and if the series can’t bring in younger fans, it will stop being an evergreen IP for them. So either this, or they need to make a dark, gritty Pokemon, and that’d be hilarious.
I think the problem with Pokemon comes from game-freak focusing more on how to market it then making a good game. At the moment the game feels like it only exist to sell the toys to young children (kind of like an 80’s-90’s cartoon).
Pokemon has always been ‘My first RPG’ far as marketing goes, nothing in the game really requires that much thought.
Thanks to the lack of a ranking system the battling online has always been a broken mess (taking away eggs won’t fix that problem).
^-o The game is rated 7+ where I’m from (Basic reading skills and fantasy violence).
There already is a dark Pokemon game, it’s called Colosseum (it has a squeal called ‘gale of darkness’)
https://bit.ly/2qqypvL
That got a lower age rating then let’s go.
https://art.gametdb.com/wii/coverfullHQ/EN/GXXP01.png
XD Just spotted that the link wasn’t in English.
Ha, to be fair, Pokemon has always felt like a scheme to sell toys. Watch the show, buy the game, buy the toys, buy the cards. I know my parents felt that way.
It all started from the game.
It feels like franchise has kind of eaten itself. I kind of feel sorry for ‘ the Pokemon company’, can’t be easy keeping track of all the sub groups in this franchise.
If you want a good game from a young child ‘pokemon park 2’ on wii is really good.
Do you know what is sad, I haven’t seen any ‘let’s go’ advertising outside of online? When sun/moon came out it was everywhere! bus’s, shops, billboards, adverts on tv.
I just can’t see them moving 6-16 million at this rate (average for a mainline game). o-o I sure hope it does better then the normal spin off numbers (1 million). There is a big difference between the two.
The gap between what fan’s will and won’t buy is really large. If game freak really do want to get into the top 5 bestselling games of all-time (red/blue is currently in the top 10) They will need to give the game more mass appeal.
Pokemon is the biggest franchise in the world at the moment.
T-o I guess that’s why I get really angry when Masuda/fans refer to game-freak as an indie studio (its not).
game freak (pokemon) vs level 5 (yo kai watch, professor layton, in no kuni).
O_O If there not careful ‘yo kai watch 4’ might actually have a chance of beating Pokemon in the sales department.
In the US, it was a carefully crafted marketing release to make something big out of a new Japanese fad. I remember getting hooked by the commercials for the show, waiting for the first episode to air, actually getting my butt out of bed early enough to watch on the WB before school (I’d catch the end of the Robocop cartoon if I got up early enough). It wasn’t until 20 days later that the game came out and by then I HAD to have it. I was amazed that my mom got it for me without my having to ask. We didn’t have much money, so it was a big deal to get a game outside of Birthday/Christmas. The cards came out right after Christmas and that basically became playground currency.
In the US, Tamagotchi had just hit hard, Beanie Babies had everyone collecting “em all,” and they wanted the next big thing. There’s an early South Park episode parodying the whole thing, with one kid always being a week behind the trend of what Pokemon thing the kids were all playing (show, toys, game, convention etc).
As for sales, I have no idea how Let’s Go will do. I don’t think we’ll actually know until we see what happens over Christmas. But remember, with video games and movies, tons of advertisement dollars often means they’re not confident in the product. When word of mouth will sell the product, you don’t waste money on a media blitz.
^-^ Your nice (lots of people planning to play this game just swear and pitch a fit).
I can understand why gamefreak is worried about Pokemon, the player count has been stagnant (16 million is still nothing to worry about) and they really do need to pull in new blood.
I remember getting my first Pokemon game, I had to save a lot of pocket money over month’s.
“When word of mouth will sell the product, you don’t waste money on a media blitz.”
XD But that is why ‘the Pokemon company’ exists. They are there to manage all marketing aspects of the franchise.
All this shows is that Nintendo doesn’t want to put the money into it.