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Pokémon Shuffle is a match-three puzzle game available for download at no cost on the 3DS, but this doesn't necessarily mean it's free. The latest in a long line of Pokémon spin-offs offers a variety of power-ups to progress through the game, with a difficulty curve that may make you actually want to take out your wallet. Considering the recent announcement that Nintendo will be involved in mobile games, we should look at this with some interest. Will their future games have Mario having to pay $1 to jump higher than normal, will Samus need to wait 30 minutes to recharge her play tank, and will Link be buying bonus dungeons? These questions need answers, so here are the thoughts of princessofmusic and I, Layell, during the first five weeks that we played Pokémon Shuffle, with our primary goal being to beat it without spending money (The Smog gave us no budget to review this game, sadly).
I've made a promise this year to hold off on buying too many video games, because wasting money on things I won't play is no fun. But then this Pokémon Shuffle game came out, and I didn't have any puzzle games on my 3DS already. Now, some spin-off games are great. But for every gem like Pokémon Snap, there is the horrid Pokémon Channel, which is the video game equivalent of giving your TV remote to your pet and watching it watch TV, then wondering why you aren't having any fun. A Pokémon game where you can spend a limitless amount of money is a dangerous thing indeed. It seems from playing that there are hearts, coins, and jewels. Why they needed all three of these currencies is beyond me, though. Hearts let you challenge stages, and you get one every half hour up to five; coins buy power-ups, while the jewels can be used to exchange large quantities of hearts or coins and are obtained in-game or with my parents' credit card. Like every dirty deal, though, bulk buys of hearts and coins will get you more rather than just trading in one jewel at a time. Jewels are also available to exchange the moment you miserably fail a match, and a pop-up will appear allowing you the opportunity to trade in a jewel for five extra turns. This seems like an awful deal, as the Moves +5 item is only 800 coins, while one jewel is worth 3000 coins. Regardless of how this goes, I'm going to try my best to play and enjoy this game without wasting any cash.
I hadn't heard about Shuffle until Layell mentioned it on our way to a bluegrass concert. He pulled out his red 3DS XL. "It's free to play," he said. I curiously peered over his shoulder as floating head icons of different Pokémon tumbled down on the 3DS's bottom screen while each move chipped away the HP of a wild Slowpoke bobbing up and down on the top screen. The visual presentation was cute and straightforward. Briefly, Layell went over the gameplay, such as the fact that beating a stage by fainting a Pokémon in as few moves as possible leads to a higher catch rate. This sounded important, so I tried to remember it. He also said something about hearts and jewels, but I didn't pay much attention. All of this was part of his sales pitch in order to get me to download the game so he could test out its StreetPass features. Free to play, huh? These words echoed in my mind over the next week, during which I made up my mind to download the game and see what the hype was about for myself. You win this time, Layell.
The next weekend, I picked up my pink 3DS and entered the eShop with trepidation. The download didn't take long, and before I knew it, floating head icons were falling downward on the game's splash screen. I pressed start and expected to be able to jump into the fray right away, but instead, a redhead named Amelia coached me through a series of tutorial stages with instructions that seemed to be designed for small children. Little did I know that after all ten tutorial stages, poor ol' Amelia goes away and you never see her again in-game, ever.
I wasn't extremely impressed with Shuffle until the tenth and last tutorial stage, which happened to be a boss battle. Having encountered and captured Audino in the stage just before, the game now pitted me against Mega Audino, an experience complete with uplifting background music and shimmery lighting. I won without much difficulty and received my very first Mega Stone, as well as a jewel.
By the time I was about 30 stages in, I had some mixed opinions about the game. Certain details of the game's design held it back, one being its limited selection of Pokémon. Most of the obtainable Pokémon so far were ones that were cute or otherwise popular, such as the Pikachu line and the Eevee line. Other things that were disappointing were its strictly linear path, lack of evolution, and lack of a "zen mode" or an unlimited mode with no extra benefits, as Shuffle offered few opportunities to enjoy tile-matching at length, with each play consuming a heart and the aim being to beat each stage as quickly as possible.
While the main stages were fun, I decided to try my hand at the Expert stages, and they were certainly an adrenaline rush. Instead of having a definite amount of turns, you are given a timer, some lasting a minute or two, others a paltry 15 or 30 seconds. Many of the Expert stages have some of the cooler Pokémon, such as Absol, Lucario, legendary Pokémon, and the final stages of the starters. My first time was essentially me throwing away a heart, but after I trained up some more, I was able to beat Absol and get some 15 percent catch rate. While I can spam moves like crazy and keep a combo going, I can't exactly think about the best moves. You unlock tougher challenges by getting S-Rank in the Main stages too. Expert stages are basically where perfectionists can show off, and S-Ranking here is a badge of honor.
Well, it appears that princessofmusic has caught up to and surpassed me. From StreetPassing her, I can see that our time played is about the same. Perhaps because she lives in the city, she's getting more StreetPasses then I am? The first pass I got gave me a jewel, which was fantastic. But it sure set me up for disappointment when every pass after that isn't much at all. You only end up getting a heart for every 10 passes or for passing the same person multiple times. I suppose they add up in time. It's fun to see what teams other folks have as well; it gives me an idea of how far they are and what they have caught.
Over the next week, I played Shuffle religiously, glaring at my 3DS between classes or on the streetcar whenever there wasn't much else to do. The rest of the game presented no significant difficulties until about three quarters of the way in, when I encountered Mega Glalie, an icy roadblock that impeded me for three days with its capability to freeze the entire screen at once. Layell and I ended up employing similar tactics to triumph, which involved blowing all of our coins on a Moves +5, Disruption Delay, and Mega Start. By then, my team was overleveled enough that a miracle took place, and I won with 15 moves remaining, a feat that unexpectedly netted me S-Rank for that stage. For the rest of the day, I accused myself of overspending before getting over it.
Meanwhile, something I actually appreciated about the game was the Special stages, which were a blessing in helping to take my mind off being hopelessly stuck. These mostly consist of time-sensitive events that are downloadable via SpotPass. Update 1.1.2 brought the limited-time Kyogre challenge, along with a welcome encore of the Mew challenge and round one of the Daily Pokémon, with a different elemental Rotom forme being available on each weekday.
Mega Gengar was just about as much of a nightmare as Mega Glalie, taking two days or so to beat. The last stretch of the game was expectedly tricky. Apparently, there's exactly one way to solve the Haxorus stage, and I resorted to looking up a precedent on YouTube in order to figure out what it was. Days later, Layell happened to be over when I tackled Mega Mewtwo Y, Shuffle's final boss. There were zero moves left when I won, and our reaction was to cheer out loud. In all, Shuffle's 150 Main stages took me twelve days to beat, or a week excluding the extra time spent grinding to get past certain bosses.
Two other things I liked about Shuffle were its scenic locations and soundtrack. The Main stages are organized in groups of ten or fifteen, with each having a different visual theme and background music. The first locale of the game is the rustic Puerto Blanco, which resembles a breezy coastal town with its marina backdrop and Greek-inspired music that uses the bouzouki, accordion, and castanets. As the game moves forward, the locations get increasingly outlandish and unsettling, including an art gallery, chilly boreal mountains, and a haunted mansion. Shuffle also shares a composer with Genius Sonority's other Pokémon titles, Colosseum and XD: Gale of Darkness, a little piece of trivia that shows with the Mega Evolution battle theme, which resembles the semifinal battle theme from Colosseum in its instrumentation and rhythm.
While princessofmusic has taken every jewel and exchanged them immediately for more hearts, I have played the long waiting game and saved each jewel to buy the most coins I can possibly get. It took time and resisting many temptations to throw them in earlier, but I think it's worth it. While I didn't get to burn through the stages as quickly, I'm now able to catch a few more Expert 'mons and fight a few of the harder stages without retrying so many times. Money is basically no problem for me at this point. Now if only I could set up some trust fund in-game for it all...
I did end up beating Mega Mewtwo's stage a few days after princessofmusic. Watching her do so before me certainly helped amp up my motivation to finish the game I introduced to her. In a brazen display of wealth, I ended up buying every power-up available and S-Ranked the psychic clone cat.
The special Lucario event that is ending soon has been quite the challenge, where the top players in each region will get the Lucarionite stone, while everyone else will wallow in their failure. I will not be one of those people. So I went back and got Mega Slowbro, as well as a few other 'mons that will demolish the so-called Aura Master. This seems like quite the turnaround from the official games where they gave away that Lucarionite to me, but I like the challenge. Like the Expert stages, this special event has a one-minute timer too, which made all the players who were too fearful to play Expert cry in despair. At first, I did a test run with no items and got a score of 7995, which was S-Rank. This I thought would be perfect; S-Rank always means I've done very well. Well, it turned out that I was in 49,244th place out of over 217,000 players. So no, that wasn't very good, and to get the Lucarionite, I needed to be in the top 20,000. Having saved my in-game money almost as much as my real-life money, I spent coins on both available power-ups and got a score of 17,906 with a rank of 3339, which was still S-Rank of course.
With more updates coming each month, it certainly seems Pokémon Shuffle was worth my time, and my wallet is no worse for wear. More updates are a given, considering that the Rotom and Eevee families have abilities that boost Megas of the same type, and currently, there are no Megas of some of these types. Some likely candidates would be the Kanto/Hoenn starters, along with Absol, Aerodactyl, Heracross, Pidgeot, and whatever else they might decide to throw in the game later that isn't already there. I would say it's an ideal 3DS download game that I can play in between other game sessions, especially considering some of the meatier 3DS games available. You can join me and other Smogoners in discussing this game over at our Orange Islands thread.
The fun wasn't over yet, because the following Monday, Shuffle announced a week-long competition to earn the Lucarionite, with the prize going to the top 20,000 scores on a timed Mega Lucario stage. The problem there was that the stone could easily just go to the players who paid the most money, so I shrugged and assumed I wasn't going to get very far. By Sunday, I had saved up enough coins to afford both a Complexity -1 and Disruption Delay, the former being the priciest item in the game with a steep price of 9000 coins. I purchased both and ended up with a score of 14,609. My heart raced like wildfire as I checked the rankings. Rank 8388 out of over 200,000 participants was better than I could've asked for, though by the time the results were announced at two in the morning, this had depreciated to rank 9758. Either way, I was an unlikely winner. Lucarionite aside, all players received a free Disruption Delay in celebration of 2.5 million downloads of Shuffle.
Monday is typically the day that brings major updates to Shuffle, and this week confirmed my suspicions by introducing a flood of new content, including a new legendary challenge to replace Mew that stars Ordinary Form Keldeo, a new bunch of Daily Pokémon, and 15 new Main stages, just over a month after the game's release. The Main stages are set in the Ludibrium-esque Wacky Workshop, and in 48 hours, I managed to complete everything with the sole exception of Milotic.
By this point, I've caught everything else in Shuffle's Main stages and obtained S-Rank on the majority of them, except for a few pesky Megas, and Layell and I still haven't paid for any jewels. In terms of what's next for Shuffle, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Groudon event down the road and maybe even a Rayquaza one, as well as more Main stages and access to Mega Stones. Microtransactions or not, Pokémon Shuffle is entertaining enough to play if you can withstand the heart system, and I'd recommend it to any Pokémon fan with a 3DS.
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