And why can it not get an HD remake?
When I was growing up, I had a boyfriend very in the Star Wars customizable card game. He took two binders with him during the fifth grade: one for his schoolwork and one for all his cards. I do not know if he actually played it with other people – I certainly did not know of anyone else at school who kept it busy – but he liked to break out the binder during lunch to give us all the new cards he had has, to show. bought the weekend. If YouTube was something when we were kids, he would probably have had a channel besides him that opens booster packs that earn $ 125,000 a year.
I did not get the appeal of collectible card games, and as I grew up and was introduced to more of them, the opinion did not change. But in 2004, I started softening up with the idea of playing a game built to collect tickets and manage decks. It was the year Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories came out, and although I know his combat system is a big point of contention, it grabbed my hook, line and sinker. I beloved by trying the menus to assemble the best deck possible, and out of that game I was ready to give the genre a try. Or, at least, a video version of it.
Unfortunately, the first two games I played were SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters DS and Marvel Trading Card Game. Nothing will turn a newcomer away from card games faster than something as shitty as the titles. Whatever the goodwill in the genre is Reminder chain planted in me was dead when I happily exchanged them for $ 2 in GameStop.
Over the past few years, I have reopened myself to collectible card games with Shadowverse on my iPad. With the game, I immersed my toes in the genre without spending a lot of time or money, and it offers plenty of enjoyment. It allowed me to be a comfortable fan of card games, but after the past month I think I’m ready to dive deep for the first time. Because in 2021 I played Pokémon Trading Card Game for the first time, and all I ask myself is what the hell took me so long?
If you are not familiar with it, Pokémon Trading Card Game is an adaptation of the Table Card Game (TCG) that was first released in 1998 for the Game Boy Color. It brought together more than 200 cards from the TCG’s first three sets and recreated them as best as possible on an 8-bit device, packing them into an adventure that would be familiar to fans who have their teeth on the series cut it Pokémon Red and Blue. There are clubs to conquer, NPCs to challenge, grandmasters to defeat and legendary maps to collect. And everything is fucking brilliant.
One of the biggest things at stake is the non-linear approach to progression. There are no routes to travel here, no times for XP. You can challenge any of your opponents in any order you want so you can get the sweet booster packs that cough them up when defeated. You can jump back and forth between two clubs or just keep moving one on your deck until you can claim a victory. It is really up to the player to decide how he wants to proceed.
Unlike the games in the mainline Pokémon series, it has a very small number of opponents that players have to face. But this is probably best, because fighting against them can take some time. As soon as you fight, Pokémon Trading Card Game does an amazing job of recreating the TCG experience with a single screen 8-bit device. Today’s card games are marred by advances in technology, but Hudson Soft and Creatures Inc. knocked the presentation out of the park while limited to 160×144 pixels and far fewer buttons than modern consoles.
Just like the real TGC, Pokémon Trading Card Game limit players to 60 cards in their suit. You can build your deck from Pokémon cards, energy cards and trainer cards, and the decks are shuffled at the beginning of each game. Each player can have one Pokémon at a time in battle and up to five on their bench. Pokémon cards have a move or two associated with them that requires an energy card to use. The first player to collect all the prize cards, or eliminate all the Pokémon on the opponent’s bench, wins. But as you will soon realize, the road to victory is a mixture of skill and luck, and the odds are often not in your favor.
During my adventure on TCG Island (yes, that’s what they called the island here), I fought myself at the beginning of games through bad draws and terrible luck with coins. I ended fights quickly thanks to excellent starting hands, but I also had to put up matches that dragged on due to the poor initial draw for me and my opponent. But even if they feel like they’re going on forever, they’re never dull.
I am amazed at how much I ended up in the drama of these fights. I have had matches where a certain victory slipped through my fingers thanks to some bad coins, or I managed to get back from the brink of defeat with several card draws in my favor. It’s exciting, and I can not remember when last a Pokémon game had me so on the edge of my seat.
It can also be incredibly aggravating. I played games where coins were played against me eight times out of ten. My first fight against the Water Club Master lasted almost twenty minutes, just for me to fall short against her. In our second game, she wiped the floor with me because she was able to develop her Squirtle into a Blastoise in four turns while I wanted to add another second man to my couch.
As frustrating as the lack of happiness can be, it never demoralizes me. In fact, it has the opposite reaction. The more I lose, the more I want to fight. Even if the same opponent beats me five times in a row (thank you very much, Mr. Lightning Club Master), I never want to give up; I never want to quit. It’s not quite like I usually am. I am very quiet in the face of even slight adversity as I write about Zelda II is any indication, but with Pokémon Trading Card Game, it’s like there’s this driving force in me that I never knew existed.
Maybe it’s because every defeat is a learning opportunity that pushes me back into the menus to refine my deck. Just like with Reminder chainI spend a lot of time figuring out my optimal deck setup for each encounter and trying to find the right balance between the three types of cards. In the beginning, I just put things together to see what would happen, but now that I’ve just finished my sixth club, I’ve been obsessed with building irreplaceable decks.
And obsessive is not something I thought I would be with this game. I have to thank our own Dan Roemer for putting the idea in my head last year to give it a try, because I can not say that it is one of the most addictive games I have ever played. It’s really a shame that we never got an official western release of the sequel, because I know that once I finish it, I want more. I think my only hope is when I look at how the credits stay Pokémon Trading Card Game, SNK will be ready with the Switch port of the Neo Geo Pocket Colors SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters Clash that we all just wait until it’s announced.
Filed under …