Product Reviews

Good, Fun Simplicity — Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee and Poké Ball Plus Review

New Pokémon games are a great, yet different experience for all but the advanced battler. Both the games and the Poké Ball Plus are great complements to GO, too. Check out our extensive review on what’s different in Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee!

Kanto for everyone

Here’s looking at you, Pikachu.

The Pokémon games have always aimed to be accessible to everyone — from kids catching their first Pokémon, to Trainers adventuring through a new region, through to the advanced players, trying out every new strategy to add to their repertoire. With every generation, Pokémon role-playing game developers Game Freak have added layer upon layer of new features and gimmicks to each game. These changes tend to make Pokémon games easier for new players to understand, adding complexity to the core, while keeping the core game largely the same.

But with increasing competition from other video games in Japan, such as Yo-Kai Watch, something had to change. Releases came every year, and various new mechanics were added to appeal to players, old and new. Following the release of Pokémon GO, expectations changed. Where it counted, the games felt more different than they seemed similar. To players who only play GO, the concept of battling to catch Pokémon would feel foreign. The Pokémon players would encounter were largely unfamiliar — what with around three hundred different species of Pokémon. What’s more, battles themselves could be hindered from all the complexity — with various Abilities, items, and many generations of pocket monsters to account for.

Enter Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee!, the newest Pokémon role-playing games landing on the Nintendo Switch. Like Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon before it, the Pokémon: Let’s Go games attempt to break the series’ traditions, but this time by building from and tweaking the formula used in the series’ roots: the first generation of the Pokémon series, particularly Pokémon Yellow. This focus has led Game Freak to paring the games right down to the first 151 Pokémon. Plus two.

New and experienced players will find the Let’s Go games to be different. As PokéCommunity Daily will show, that’s not a bad thing.

Note, too, that the version you get determines your partner Pokémon. Let’s Go, Pikachu! features Pikachu as a starter, while Eevee is the starter for its respective version.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! have been an absolute pleasure to review, and you’ll probably notice that from the length of the review. Totalling almost 12,000 words, this review was no walk-in-the-park for me to complete. As one who is absolutely passionate about virtually every element of the Pokémon games, this review breaks down a lot of the elements and mechanics the games provide. Not being one for short opines like you’d find on the internet, I felt there’d be a good number of people looking for information on those one or two things that most reviews would never mention. (There’s nothing wrong with brevity in a review, of course.)

With being a lengthy, almost 20-page read that structures itself like I would structure a college assignment, I don’t expect readers to attempt to fully digest it in one sitting. Perhaps there’s only some parts you’d care about in the games — so by all means, skip to a section and read about what you want to read. Hopefully doing so will help you with your buying decisions for these games.

If you enjoy this review, share it! Recommend it to friends, show them parts of it, and convince them that Let’s Go is a good (or bad) game! Also consider reading our other product reviews we’ve written on PokéCommunity Daily. I hope you’ll find Daily’s reviews to be a rather entertaining read. Feel free to throw some feedback my way, buy me a drink, or just a quick kudos, via my PokéCommunity profile or Twitter account @Sotomura.

This review would not be possible without the support of PokéCommunity Daily’s staff — to our associate editors bobandbill and Volpe Artica for their constant support, and to our editing team for their proofreading and feedback. Special thanks must go out to Nintendo Australia, for providing a copy of Let’s Go, Eevee! for our review. I hope that the two weeks of playing and writing this up have been well worth it for them. And lastly, a huge thanks to you, the readers, for supporting PokéCommunity Daily.