Pokémon Trading Card Game (Game Boy Color)

When the Pokemon craze hit in the late 1990s, there were three different means through which Pokemania was seizing the nation. The video games were and still are the most important part of the franchise, informing the directions other media take and making up the bulk of the series’s revenue, but the cartoon allowed people to experience more digestible portions of the collectible monster series for free on T.V. while the trading card game offered a more tangible collecting and battling experience. In fact, the success of the trading card game lead to it looping back around to join the video game branch of Pokemon, a virtual adaptation gracing the Game Boy Color and mixing together the designs of both ways to play Pokemon into a new experience.

Even in its digital form though, the Pokemon Trading Card Game is still a game where the most important mechanics are the ones taken from its physical counterpart. In a Pokemon card battle, two players get to bring in a deck of sixty cards. There are three major types of cards the player will fill their deck with, but by far the most important cards in the game are the Pokemon themselves. The player is able to have up to six Pokemon in play at once, up to five sitting on the bench but one always needing to be forward in the active battling slot. Each Pokemon has a few important details to keep track of like their specific health, what type they are, what their retreat cost is if you want to swap them with a benched Pokemon, and what their attacks are. A Pokemon can have two abilities, the most common purpose for these being to deal damage to the opposing Pokemon. While damage is definitely their primary purpose, many attacks can have special effects, some being as simple as a chance to deal more damage, but others packing more unique abilities like drawing a card or inflicting a status effect on the opponent. Statuses are definitely a helpful tool for the one inflicting it, but they can be a nuisance if you happen to own the Pokemon who just became afflicted with Sleep, Confusion, Paralysis, or Poison. This is primarily because some of the statuses involve the random luck of coin flips, with a Pokemon sleeping and unable to act until you flip a heads, a Pokemon’s action replaced with damaging itself if you flip tails on the persistent confusion, but Paralysis and Poison at least avoid the random chance mechanics, Paralysis just being a single lost turn for the Pokemon and Poison inflicting gradual damage between player turns. In general, it is expected that some random chance will impact a card game, the luck of the draw being a core part of the design after all, but having a Pokemon stuck sleeping because of rotten luck can still lead to drastic shifts in a game’s outcome.

Inflicting statuses, as you might expect, is a pretty good strategy for the player to employ, but there are plenty of others one to structure a deck around. Some Pokemon can evolve into more powerful Pokemon who can deal more damage and take more hits, so a deck that’s about building up to a powerhouse like the water turtle Blastoise or plant monster Venusaur can lead to a runaway victory if structured to support it. On the other hand, there are plenty of Pokemon who don’t evolve that can have a strategy focused on hitting fast and hard based around them, cards like the boxer Hitmonchan and electric Electabuzz both having decent HP and attack power without having to go through the evolutionary process. You can go for riskier attacks as well, the living rock Geodude packing a move that is multiplied by every coin flip that lands on heads until you fail, and others like the monstrous kangaroo Kangaskhan hinging on the coin flips so it can deal anywhere from 0 to 80 damage, very few Pokemon reaching a health total beyond 80 HP. You can even build up strong cards that aren’t evolved like the legendary birds Articuno and Moltres for hefty damage, but even these have counters like Mr. Mime, a Pokemon who takes advantage of its passive Pokemon Power to completely resist attacks that deal 30 damage or more. Pokemon Powers take the slot of an attack and provide special functions that don’t use up that Pokemon’s attacking turn, so these can add an extra layer of strategy to their use, especially when they’re in supporting roles. It can be a little clunky to try and read details on cards though due to how the game chooses to display them, but the game makes sure to show you a description of anything that happens even if you need to navigate a few menus if you want to read about an attack or effect before it’s used.

The other two types of cards you can expect in a deck feed into the action of the Pokemon, the most important ones being the Energy cards. Every Pokemon in the game has a type, these being things like Fire, Water, Psychic, Fighting, and so on. That Pokemon’s type determines which Pokemon might take more or less damage from them based on weaknesses or resistances, but many Pokemon require Energy matching their type to perform their attacks. Some can take Energy from any type to power certain attacks, the Colorless Pokemon especially being good fits in many decks due to their Energy flexibility, but usually half your deck will need to be Energy cards to fuel the actions of your Pokemon. The Energy costs of an attack vary and there are ways to lose and gain more Energy, but most of the time you need to equip it from the hand and can only equip one per turn, strength usually scaling with the Energy cost to make pricier options more worthwhile. However, the race to get your Pokemon ready to attack can be helped with the use of Trainer cards, these cards providing a special effect the moment they’re played. It can be something as simple as switching your active Pokemon with a benched one for free or searching your deck for certain cards, but you can also force your opponent to put one of their benched Pokemon forward, bring back your own discarded cards, or remove Energy from opposing Pokemon. Betters Trainer cards often have a price or a chance of failure, but they still make up a crucial part of any deck that is aiming for consistent success or multi-card combos and can make for a few interesting shake-ups midbattle.

A trading card battle ends when one of three conditions are met. If the player has no active Pokemon in play or on the bench, they lose the battle, making it wise to keep your play area populated even if your opponent might have ways to attack or effect your reserve Pokemon. Another way of losing that essentially ensures battles don’t last too long is that a player who runs out of cards in their deck will lose the battle, but the main way the game expects you to succeed is through acquiring prizes. When you knock out an enemy’s Pokemon, you get to draw one of your prize cards, a selection of randomly picked cards from your deck that, if you manage to draw them all, ends the game and results in your victory. Prizes are an interesting mechanic, bad luck potentially meaning an important combo card ends up unavailable until you’ve defeated a Pokemon or two, but the rule about needing active Pokemon to continue can also mean you can quickly eliminate an opponent who had unfortunate luck in drawing cards.

The story structure for playing the Pokemon Card Game actually mirrors the typical Pokemon RPGs, the player setting out on a quest to defeat eight special clubs and then tackle four grandmaster battlers in a row, the player working on acquiring more cards along the way to make a steadily better deck or building multiple decks to have more options to handle more specific situations. Acquiring cards is actually pretty reliable and easy, any opponent you beat usually giving up two booster packs that will provide you 10 new cards each. This reliable means of new cards ensures that your deck can keep improving and you can usually get duplicates of useful cards well enough to ensure the required niches in a deck design are filled with up to 4 duplicates of any non-Energy card, Energies given special treatment to ensure you can have enough to fuel your attacks. The club structure even allows you to cater your deck to try and exploit enemy weaknesses, every Pokemon type save colorless having a club, although then there are clubs like the Science Club and Rock Club where they repeat types but with different themes since the Pokemon card game doesn’t have enough unique types to fill an eight club structure. A type disadvantage on your side can be harmful, but having the type edge against an opponent isn’t necessary, mostly because the AI isn’t always the best player. While some opponents like the delightful Strange Man Imakuni play poorly on purpose, other times the AI opponents will leave in a Pokemon that will die and lose the game despite having healthy options on the bench they can swap in, or they’ll not use an attack that might stun the opponent when that small risk is their only chance for survival in that moment. Enemies often opt for greater damage rather than more useful effects, meaning you’re not always in as much danger of losing as you should be. This AI design is likely to avoid them being too tough on novice players as well as supporting the fact you can tackle the clubs in any order you choose, but losing most of the time just results in you needing to try again anyway, easing some of the aggravation bad coin flips or draws could otherwise inflict. They do pack different strategies and the more important opponents are often smarter, but the game remains pretty manageable throughout if you have a well-rounded deck design.

The clubs are pretty standard in their structure, the player usually needing to beat a few club members and then the leader, but some like the Fighting Club require tracking down their members at other clubs and the Fire Club wants you to have a large enough card collection before you can face its leader. Collecting in the Pokemon Trading Card Game is mostly fed by the the booster packs, but you can also find opportunities to trade with characters in game, the cards featured drawn from the real life Base Set, Jungle, and Fossil card sets as well as some Promotional cards and ones unique to this game. Video game exclusive cards tend to have random effects as part of their design, like the transforming Ditto who will become a random Pokemon from your deck or the cat Pokemon Meowth who attacks a random benched Pokemon with its attack, but there are still some reliable unique cards like the vine Pokemon Tangela who can inflict Poison pretty easily and then Paralyze with its other attack to gradually whittle down threats. While there are inevitably duds who might take too long to get going or are far too situational like the digital Pokemon Porygon who alters weaknesses and resistances but has no damaging attacks to support that gimmick, there are still enough good options to encourage some creativity and decks that are based around different Energy types. Some cards are locked behind a Card Pop! multiplayer function where players get a random card per individual person met, so trying to collect them all can be needlessly excruciating despite the game’s generosity elsewhere, but for their use in battling, there are enough viable options to keep battles entertaining.

THE VERDICT: The Pokemon Trading Game video game’s quality hinges, unsurprisingly, on the strength of the physical card game it’s adapting, carrying over much of the appeal with the variety of Pokemon featured, the unique attacks and strategies, and the cards that influence play and disrupt the battles in interesting ways. Some randomness is inevitable in a card game, although coin flips for success can lead to disproportionate moments of it, but for the most part, most battles are enjoyable, quick, and are rewarded properly. The AI in the game isn’t always the smartest opponent however, meaning that some battles will be a little plain or a bit too easy, the club structure sometimes making it a little too easy to counter your opponents as well. Still, it’s an admirable adaptation of the card game that captures enough of the appeal of battling and collecting to have a pretty good level of enjoyment present throughout.

And so, I give Pokemon Trading Card Game for Game Boy Color…

A GOOD rating. Your enjoyment of this game will likely be contingent on whether or not you enjoy the trading card game in general, which feels like a fairly good spot for a game adaptation to be. As a card game, the Pokemon Trading Card Game is pretty soundly designed, the card sets in this game not featuring any runaway tactics fit to always win the fight but the cards still coming together in ways that can lead to reliable victories. Your game-controlled opponents however are often given gimmick decks to match their club or ones with little synergy though, so while they do put up a fight, they’re not really going to provide the intense matches that real life battles against unknown decks can bring. They do still provide the variety that encourages updating and customizing your deck strategies over the course of the full game though, new booster packs offering new opportunities for different ways to play. Perhaps if they were too competent the moments where your Pokemon is asleep due to constant failed coin flips would be too grating to tolerate though, but a difficulty option or even just a greater amount of capable foes would make things more engaging. However, there’s still enough card game fun here to carry the experience when it comes to both fighting and collecting the cards.

I have many fond memories of playing the physical Pokemon card game, but there was always the price issue when it came to having more available play options, a concern endemic to most TCGs. Besides the barrier of entry that is buying a video game though, the Pokemon Trading Card Game is able to make battling and collecting much more achievable and reliable, the lessened difficulty of it all an acceptable price for being able to play it without having to shell out the cash for random cards and only being able to play people with similar interests to you.