Caelin Bragg
Lantern Staff
Pokémon’s introduction to the mobile market with Pokémon Masters has promise but is weighed down by lackluster gameplay wrapped in a predatory business model.
Masters is the latest Nintendo IP to be made into a mobile game by DeNA. Releasing on Thursday, Aug. 29 for iOS and Android, Masters is a standard free-to-play gacha game where players recruit various characters by spending in-game currency that can either be earned through playing the game or by paying real money as a shortcut.
Despite what its name might suggest, Masters hardly resembles anything someone would recognize as a Pokémon game. The game forgoes the traditional one-on-one, turn-based battles for three-on-three, real-time battles instead. As a result, all the player’s Pokémon share a global meter that slowly fills over the course of a battle, and combat moves take a varying amount of the meter to use. While not a terrible battle system outright, it’s a far cry from the depths Pokémon games should have. And with no plans to add PvP battles, it struggles to keep the game interesting enough to pull the player along its story mode.
Pokémon games have never been known for their deep narratives, but Masters takes the “collect badges, beat the bad team and win the Pokémon League” to its extreme; it’s a stretch to say this game even has a story. However, like most gacha games, a lot of the fun narrative comes from interacting with the characters the player recruits, and Masters has plenty of fan service to keep veterans of the series coming back every day but offers little in the way of keeping newcomers interested.
Masters’ biggest problems show when analyzing the game’s free-to-play aspects. The characters recruited in Masters are called “sync-pairs,” a duo of a character from the series with a Pokémon closely associated with said character. The series’ most iconic gimmick, catching and training Pokémon, has been entirely removed in favor of traditional gacha mechanics.
Obtaining these sync-pairs is also more chore than fun. The time it takes to collect enough gems, this game’s currency, to recruit one sync-pair is excruciatingly slow, and, so far, the paid offers aren’t better, with each sync-pair costing roughly $3 dollars each. Most gacha games struggle to strike a fair balance for players, and, seeing as it’s been reported that Masters earned over $25 million in its first week, players will lap it up regardless.
Pokémon Masters is, at best, a fun timewaster for longtime fans of the series. Seeing some of the series’ most beloved characters interacting with each other has its worth, and there’s an obvious demand for it, which makes it more unfortunate that it’s trapped within a game like Masters.
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