Pokémon Ranger (DS)

The main method for capturing new creatures across the Pokémon series, weakening them through combat until they cannot break out of a Poké Ball, emerged from the original games’ focus on turn-based battles. Pokémon Ranger, while still a role-playing game like the mainline entries, tries to reinvent the process from the ground up though and ties it to the Nintendo DS’s touch screen capabilities. Catching one of around 200 colorful critters now involves encircling them with loops drawn with the DS’s stylus, but it seems like this brand new approach might not have been thought through enough to carry an entire game.

 

Pokémon Ranger takes place in the Fiorre region where Pokémon battles and Poké Balls are unheard of, people instead trying to live together peacefully with the mostly wild but powerful creatures of their world. However, an organization trains up people known as Pokémon rangers who can help quell any monsters that cause problems while also finding ways to repurpose their incredible powers to assist in moments of danger or disaster. Rangers are able to temporarily recruit wild Pokémon with their Stylers, these somehow sending positive thoughts to the creatures as you draw rings around them in order to pacify them and tame them enough that they can potentially provide some aid. Some issues with the Styler method of capturing become pretty apparent early on. To successfully recruit a Pokémon to your side, you need to draw a certain amount of uninterrupted loops around that creature. If the monster touches the line it will break and reset all progress, and if they attack that line directly you’ll also lose Styler energy, the player forced back to the last save point if their Styler breaks entirely.

Since all progress is immediately void in a ring capture scenario if the line is in any way broken, there’s an emphasis on encircling your target quickly. The ring already needs to be small enough or it won’t be detected properly, but the rapid spinning required to wear down more powerful Pokémon leads to inconsistencies in shape and spacing that can be easily exploited by your target. There is sometimes value in slowly drawing your uninterrupted line, a few Pokémon having behavior that specifically requires following them as they move around a lot but aren’t always openly aggressive towards your line, but many more will attack the moment they see your work. You can bait them into an attack and then try to wrap your rings around them afterwards, but while some early Pokémon require some reasonably small amount of rings, many required captures can hit surprisingly high numbers. The dragon Pokémon Salamence demands a whopping 21 rings and is a necessary capture, but there is at least a clear methodology for getting so many rings in that battle even though it might take a long time for it to finally line up properly. For other creatures though, even ones with smaller requirements, the capturing process can become needlessly long and dull thanks to their belligerent behavior.

 

While the wonderfully varied designs and abilities of Pokémon are often a perk of the franchise, here it’s easy to come to resent their special powers and behavioral quirks. For example, the bipedal tadpole with a swirly stomach Poliwhirl isn’t a particularly important creature to capture, but if it starts utilizing its water blast attack, there is nothing you can do but sit back and wait for a while for it to stop before trying to wrap rings around it again. Creatures like the sumo-inspired Hariyama have a tendency to repeat their attack over and over again for a fair bit, your only real consistent trick for potentially stopping a monster from getting stuck in a slow uneventful attack loop being to release your line before it breaks, a “false capture” of sorts causing them to get caught in a sphere of energy that disables them briefly. You can’t draw useful rings around them during the false capture though and after they’re back out they’ll often immediately try to attack again, but you can at least disrupt a few boss Pokémon a bit with this tactic since there is also the concern of lingering dangers. Pokémon like the sludge pile Muk will not only leave a toxic trail as they move that you can’t draw over, but they’ll spit out poison puddles as well that briefly make an area of the screen damage your Styler if you touch it. Some resistance is expected and is meant to make these more like battles, but there isn’t much consideration for how these powers should be integrated. You are too often left watching and waiting as a creature makes it impossible to make a concise enough ring to start capturing them or just keeps repeating an attack loop for no real reason. Even worse, even the most basic and easy to catch creatures can wander right off the screen and spend some time inaccessible. This makes some sense for something like the speedy standing weasel Sneasel, but even the slow-moving caterpillar Wurmple can just end up out of play for a while and you have nothing to do while it’s gone.

 

Some ring battles will bring in multiple Pokémon at once as well, this just making it far more likely your line won’t have room to wrap around anything and there isn’t always a good deal of consideration for how the different behaviors of the monsters present will impact your work. Even if a difficult Pokémon has openings, if it has back-up you might spend a lot of time trying to find an opening that won’t really come together until finally they move in just the right way. Your lack of influence over proceedings ends up being a huge damper on the ring capturing process, but you do at least have some hope for potentially making a grueling conflict come to a surprisingly quick and easy end. While capturing Pokémon tends to relate to specific tasks you’ll need to complete with their abilities, you can also call on a monster you captured to assist during another ring capture. Pokémon come with a range of different affinities, their type influencing which power you can utilize mid-battle. A water type lets you make a bubble you can toss towards a creature to trap it briefly, a ghost lets you make little shades by drawing rings who scare a Pokémon into staying in place, and many types like grass and ground will make the space the ring is drawn hard to cross. Your targets can still find ways around these and activating an assist takes a few seconds so they might wander off to somewhere where the power might not even leave them vulnerable for a proper capture afterwards, and this system is further limited by the fact you can only have a few captured Pokémon with you at a time. A captured Pokémon also abandons you after its assist power is used, meaning you can’t always justify having certain creatures help since you need them for actual progression-based activities. You do always have one Pokémon who will stick by your side though, this being an electric mouse who is either Plusle if you play as a girl or Minun if you play as a guy. Usually electric type Pokémon play the vital role of being the only way to heal your Styler while out in the field, but Plusle and Minun have a Discharge attack that gradually powers up as you draw rings, this letting you stun creatures when activated. However, Pokémon types means sometimes creatures outright resist these assists, and that earlier mentioned Salamence battle has it completely resist the effects of Discharge while locking you out of using any other Pokémon.

The best ring captures end up being the short and easy ones because any time Pokémon Ranger gets creative with what your target can do, you’re likely going to suffer a longer and less interactive battle for it. You don’t need to capture every Pokémon you come across at least, many of them wandering around as either something you can grab if you want to complete your browser’s log of all Pokémon or if they serve some purpose to progressing. At times a road may be blocked by boulders, a tree may be on fire, or a gap might need to be crossed, and here the captured Pokémon can provide aid outside of ring battles. They’ll disappear the moment they perform their helpful task, but finding a nearby creature and capturing it for it’s ability is a common purpose to actually engaging with wild Pokémon rather than running away from them. This interactions are as simple as drawing a line from your helper to the area of interest so it works a bit like a key unlocking the way forward, but there is suitable setting variety so you’re not only encountering new types of creatures all along the journey, but what they might do for your adventure varies and finding out what out of the local wildlife can help this time is at least an interesting process, the game even having some kindness in making crucial creatures often much simpler to capture.

 

There are moments where you face a mandatory ring battle where it’s about freeing creatures controlled by an evil organization though that often make up the more demanding skirmishes. While Pokémon Ranger’s story begins with you starting off in your new job and doing little odd tasks, soon a villainous group known as the Go-Rock Squad arises and steals something known as the Super Styler which is said to be able to compel Pokémon to help regardless of their power or if the user is sending good vibes through the Styler. The friendly thoughts emitted by a ranger’s styler can override its influence though, so when you encounter members of the Go-Rock Squad and their enslaved Pokémon, you must work to free them. There are plenty of confrontations with Go-Rock Squad members along the story path that lean into the worse kind of battles where there are too many Pokémon present or the creatures they utilize are too ornery to wrap up in a reasonable time frame, but at the same time things are less difficult most of the time and more often a matter of patience and being careful to remove your stylus from the touch screen often to avoid damage. Your actual input isn’t what’s being tested very often which makes these encounters you can’t run from more annoying to run into, especially if it involves the group’s leaders the Go-Rock Quads. This band of siblings often introduce themselves by repeating the same slow intro while they also tend to appear close to the moments where the game whips out its toughest fights, meaning a failure can send you back to the last save point to see the unskippable scenes all over again. The Go-Rock Squad in general is somewhat silly to soften the experience a bit, but they’re not quite goofy enough for it to really make them an interesting adversarial group. You will become more capable as you complete more captures and earn energy and there are a few optional activities like Capture Challenges where you try to snag as many wild critters as you can in a time limit, but it’s not really anything that’s going to add life to this thin plot and unappealing gameplay system.

THE VERDICT: Pokémon Ranger attempts to concoct various ways it colorful creatures can oppose the ring-drawing system at the core of its action and ends up making things drag out because you’re left with little recourse to it. The ring drawing having a set amount of complete loops required to snag a Pokémon that resets any time the line breaks means the often flighty targets will keep slipping from your grasp, the difficulty emerging not so much from your own failure to draw circles quickly but from the fact that only at certain times is the creature even capable of being caught as it makes you watch it leave the screen, repeat attacks you can’t stop, or the battlefield is littered with too many obstructions to reasonably draw until they fade away. You can eventually find your openings and there are thankfully a good deal of smaller quick captures, but these instead are low in substance much like the fairly plain plot. There’s some appeal to figuring out how to use wildlife to overcome barriers to progress, but Pokémon Ranger core action never quite comes together despite its efforts.

 

And so, I give Pokémon Ranger for Nintendo DS…

A BAD rating. To ensure my criticism remains constructive this is often the part of a review where I being to theorize on what adjustment could be made to improve the experience, but time has already given us the benefit of seeing how this ring-drawing formula can be improved upon. The sequel Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia already hit on a smart idea, that being focusing on depleting a Pokémon’s health gauge rather than needing to draw a set amount of loops that can’t be interrupted in any way. While this doesn’t complete redeem the circle-drawing system, it does address a good deal of the first game’s flaws. Pokémon Ranger’s approach leads to moments where there is nothing to do in a fight but wait for the moment to try and draw more circles, but when there isn’t actual opposition the task is a bit too basic to enjoy as well. The Pokémon do need the room to fight back, but if they do so by leaving the screen or making it impossible to draw around them for a period, the player is left with nothing to think about or do. The assist system was almost a step in the right direction, their influence strong and one reason this game wasn’t rated lower but their cost is sometimes too high to justify their use since you need certain creatures for other interactions and some story battles with the Go-Rock Squad won’t even give you the chance to go back and recruit more assists between fights.

 

When a Pokémon game makes you want to spend less time capturing it’s colorful and interesting creatures, it has definitely failed on some level. Already the fact Pokémon leave your side so quickly makes capturing them less appealing, and the browser descriptions don’t help since they focus more on their utility in solving problems rather than telling you more about a unique monster. Pokémon Ranger tried to reinvent the capturing side of the franchise but couldn’t figure out how to make it appealing enough to justify the new direction, but it’s at least not an absolute failure since it does sometimes keep it simple enough not to rankle the player. Experimenting with the stylus-based play didn’t produce too many successes here, but this at least got this Pokémon side franchise going so other entries could try and spend more time refining it into something a bit less rough.