Game Review: Pokemon Trading Card Game (Game Boy Color)
Feat. Inscryption
You are Mark, a Pokemon Trading Card Game1 collector. You collect the cards but don’t really battle anyone, until you hear of a contest: beat the Pokemon TCG League2 and get The Legendary Cards, one-of-a-kind items that are actually quite shitty competitively-speaking.3 You talk to Dr. Mason, the professor-equivalent of your region, who gives you a starter deck and tells you to get eight medals and then the cards, while listening to one of the best chiptune soundtracks ever composed.
The “gameplay loop” is borderline non-existent in Pokemon TCG. There is an overworld, both in map and Gold/Silver-style interior levels, but you don’t really do puzzles. Some NPCs need to be defeated before other NPCs will fight you, but that’s about it.
You go from place to place, beat trainers with cards, get more cards from them, rework your deck, fight other trainers with new cards. Theoretically, you could make a really good deck early on and win against the League, which is why the game doesn’t let you do that and artificially gates your progress.
I’m conflicted on that design decision. On one hand, it stops the game from being over really fast, and stops you from minmaxing your deck to What Works Against Courtney’s Moltres. On the other, you don’t level up from fights or unlock features, so really you are ready for the League right after the tutorial.
There’s also a few local multiplayer features I didn’t get to play for obvious reasons, but it seems like this would be a really long-lasting game to play with your friends. I’m fairly sure the present Pokemon TCG is completely bloated and unplayable, so that’s not an option.
What about the battles themselves? I don’t find deck building particularly engaging, but something about the moment-to-moment turn-based tactics did it for me. It’s completely normal for a single turn to be composed of ten different actions that build on each other just to get a single pokemon evolution, for example, which sounds annoying but is satisfying in practice.
However, the actual Pokemon Trading Card Game is really poorly designed, mainly due to the overused RNG mechanics. Lemme give you an example: there’s an attack that makes you flip eight coins to determine the damage you’ll do. Anything over four is deadly in most cases, but get ready to see a lot of coins get flipped. Status effects? All about coin flipping.
So what I did is just ignore those mechanics for most of the game and stick to a pretty basic deck. What the numbers say on the card is the damage you deal after attacking, that’s how games should work. Fucking coin flips.
Once you finally get all the medals, you can face the League, a five-match boss rush. I think you’re pretty much forced at this point to have multiple decks,4 and I had to regretfully build a w*ter default deck to get past the first couple battles.
That leads me to a specific anecdote, which is that the only instance of what could be called “grinding” I had to do in the game involved fighting some guy in a lab to get Water Energy cards in order to build a specific setup. The game is really stingy about giving energy cards out for some reason. I get collecting is half the game, but they in particular could be free and nothing about the game would change for the worse.
Thankfully the other League members were more beatable with my usual bread and butter deck. The final fight is particularly laughable, since your rival is using all four legendary cards and they don’t work at all well together.
All in all, surprisingly, a fun and REALLY addictive game made exclusively to monetize a children’s fad in 1998. I legitimately could not stop playing it until it was over, neglecting my usual webfiction hobbies.
To the inevitable question: I can’t say how it compares it to other card games, given I’ve played zero traditional ones, but this, to me, stands out as a great introduction to the genre. I’m now going to tackle the japan-exclusive sequel, thankfully translated by fans. Wish me good coin flips.
9/10 - Sometimes, less is more.
To people who are really out of the loop, the Pokemon Trading Card Game is a real physical thing that I played in real life almost two decades ago, if not more (I retain no useful memories of it). It still survives and apparently Logan Paul briefly made it popular again in 2020, but I haven’t seen it around myself. I’m comfortable calling it a dead piece of culture in what’s worryingly becoming a theme of these reviews.
This is not the actual name, it’s probably something like Trading Card Masters, but seriously, the localization in this game was so spotty compared to the original Pokemon. Everything sounds stupid.
Barring Moltres, the one card my deck needed to be great and a card you don’t get until the end of the game. Thank god the GBC-standard Online TCG Tournament scene is so active…
Unless you’re really good at making versatile decks, which I’m obviously not. I welcome advanced deck analysis in the comments.