We are all quick to turn a blind eye to the actions of longtime friends, even if we know they are in the wrong. Maybe you’ve got a buddy from elementary school who is always sarcastic to waiters because he thinks it’s funny, or a girlfriend from forever who still insists on stealing the ketchup from Applebees because “it’s her thing.” This offputting behavior is overlooked because you’ve been friends for so long, but you’d never accept it in a new acquaintance. But once they cross the line – yelling an ableist slur in Costco, actually stealing money from the till – you realize that it’s been building, and this is not how friends act. You need to call them out, or shut down the friendship, because it’s not healthy for either of you. Pokémon Friends, we’re at a crossroads, and I think we need to part ways.

Pokémon, as a franchise, has a long history of odd tie in games and wild swings that hit or miss in different, sometimes confusing ways. Sure, you’ve got things like Pokémon Rangers, which is a dead series that felt truly interesting in engagement. Pokémon Trozei was strange, but it was more intuitive and interesting than Pokémon Puzzle League. Even other smartphone games, like Pokémon Cafe Mix, have a level of gameplay and engagement that are recognizable as impressive and addictive. You may not get why people are still playing Pokémon Go after you dropped it five years ago, but there’s always something new to do and players still get a massive free to play buzz from the entire ordeal. As an IP, Pokémon should be able to shift, chameleon-like, into almost any genre with some success as long as you execute the plan well.

Pokémon Friends is a confusing setup of a puzzle-game that puts you in a town where you make yarn-based stuffed animals. If you bothered playing the DLC for Pokémon Scarlet/Violet, you know that Blueberry Academy has this dope-ass machine that can print almost any item in the game and is the best, most addictive way to grind for Master Balls. Your character in Friends has a very similar machine, and you use it to…make stuffies. You put in yarn, a plushie pops out, and then everyone’s happy. Not the most brilliant back story, but it works to some degree. Yet you inexplicably have the biggest ball of yarn in Paldea, and it’s all tangled up. So you need to untangle it every day to get more yarn to make more Pokémon. Keep untangling, keep making plushies.

Rather than having you become a stuffed animal hoarder, you will, eventually, reach a point where you can go out into the world, and meet people from your town who have lost stuffed animals or are incapable of buying them because why the hell not. They just so happen to give you very specific prompts as to what stuffed animals they want, and, wouldn’t you know it, you’re so generous that you can just give them away. Awarding stuffed animals to these denizens who can’t figure out how Amazon works makes them happy, giving you friendship points (yay?), and then they give you furniture (what?). So if you’ve ever wondered what the exchange rate is for a race car bed to stuffed animal, it’s one machine-processed Fuecoco. Good luck at the swap meet with that information, and let me know if it works.

As expected, the furniture then plays into the “passive” activity of Pokémon Friends, which is decorating your room. Yes, you have a whole damn house to yourself, but the room is where you can change the wallpaper and put in the furniture you get. This must appeal to someone, but it definitely is not me. Your ability to customize things is almost violently locked behind set spots and physics that seem to be arbitrary, allowing you to sometimes but not always stack your plushies as you slowly let your room descent into clutter madness. As of right now, I think you can only show friends what your room looks like by running up to them with your device and shoving it in their faces, which, to be fair, is what a child is likely to do. It’s pretty flat and uninteresting, but at least it’s harmless, and someone will (probably) enjoy doing it.

So at this point, Pokémon Friends sounds like the normal convoluted mess of a backstory that any Pokémon game contains, no biggie. But the problem – the massive, infuriating, positively rageful problem – is the execution. Anyone looking at the trailers for Friends probably said “this looks like a mobile phone game,” and they’re exactly right. I made a point to get this game on my smartphone as well as my Switch, in spite of the fact that the Switch version is selling for an appalling ten dollars. Remember how everyone was doing a spit take that Switch 2 Welcome Tour was ten dollars instead of being free? At least that has some history and information that appeals to the Nintendo fanatic. The paywall of Pokémon Friends is the entire goddamn game, and it’s appalling.

If you play the smartphone version, you are allowed to untangle yarn once a day. In a game entirely centered around untangling yarn so you can make plushies, this is the whole purpose of playing. You can’t even do stuffy delivery until you untangle three things of yarn. Which means, theoretically, if you went free-to-play, you’d have to play this game for three days before the crux of why you even want to keep playing reveals itself. Think about that. Sure, you’re not investing 72 literal hours into the game, but needing to consciously be like “oh, this game is pretty boring, but if I keep doing it for the next two days, it might be less boring” is bananas. It’s like asking someone to do a couple of free shifts at Teavana handing out samples before even telling them what the salary might be.

Naturally, the response is to tell players to buy the console version, but that is somehow worse. Once you drop ten dollars to either unlock the full experience on your phone or just get the Switch version (and you can laugh yourself off a cliff if you think there’s cross-purchase support), Pokémon Friends opens up to how empty the game truly is. Now you can untangle to your heart’s content, doing as many puzzles as you could possibly want, getting plushies and doing quick “brain teasers” with reckless abandon. So now you just play, get yarn, unlock more plushies, and keep checking the town to see if more people want to trade end tables for Pikachus. Spoiler: even in the paid version, the number of townsfolk is pretty limited day to day, so your momentum on playing is constrained to how much you enjoy shape puzzles.

If everything up to now – the partitioned off gameplay, the overbearing need for daily check-in, the positively insipid reasoning for the plot to exist – was backed by something fun and addictive, I could almost give this a pass. It would be a mediocre title in the same degree as Pokémon Dash or Pokémon Ranch; bland, but I could see the appeal. Instead, Pokémon Friends decided to invest all of their time, effort and attention to a series of minigames that you would expect to see in mobile game ads. Every single activity, which ranges from counting to moving in a 3D space, is utterly bland and joyless. You have a single goal for each of the mini games, like connecting light bulbs, jumping on a Q*Bert inspired mountain, or seriously figuring out how shapes will fit into holes. You have three games, you finish them, and you’re done.

Here’s an anecdote no one needed: I buy very cheap belts for my job. No one checks what belt I wear, as long as I wear one, so a dollar store belt is perfect to literally keep my job. The problem is, cheap belts are affected by the weather, and one of my belts is literally rusted. So, when I need to unbuckle it, it takes a little longer because the entire thing is jammed up. In what proved to be my oddest experiment ever, I timed myself, based off a hunch, and I was right. It took more time for me to undo my belt than it took me to play through one entire game of Pokémon Friends. That obviously gets better the higher the difficulty, but it’s such a terrible starting place for an activity that, as it turns out, is as empty as it is quick.

None of these games are fun. Not a single one of them. Each one is over exceptionally quickly, and the fail state, at least at the beginning, is almost nonexistent. Almost ninety seconds to figure out what shadow a shape makes. There are so many of the activities that come across as, at best, paper thin attempts to teach kids about coding or geometry through backdoor edutainment. “Oh, you really liked getting Scorbunny to the flag? Guess what, that’s basically programming!” I would have chucked my Switch across the room if I was thirteen and my parents decided to dump ten bucks into this drivel instead of, say, any number of other titles. The only reason I kept playing more is that I wanted to see if it got better at any point. It didn’t.

Not only are the games inherently unfun, but it’s apparent that Pokémon Friends was made with smartphone fast cash first, actual console playing second. For example, several of the games use the concept of spatial movement in order to accomplish the goal, which is translated into either the Switch’s gyroscope or the L/R buttons on the Joycons. But when you use the buttons, the games are crazy easy: just hold down the direction. If you’re trying to do movement with the Switch console, it feels crazy clunky, like they just expected what works on a 5 inch smartphone to inherently be fine on a massive console. Plus, my Switch is a dedicated gaming handheld: you’d think they could make it so there wasn’t obvious frame drops when Spheal is rolling around in a circle.

Not to mention the games sometimes just feel so uninspired. Rotom gets you to light up Pokéballs to make a sequence, fine, the educational aspect is clear. Counting Froakies in a 3D space, good for awareness for younger kids. But then the sheer number of shape games. The shadow a shape will make. What a shape would look like cut in half. Can a shape fit through a hole? What will this shape look like when it’s spinning? It’s just more of the same, over and over again, with the difficulty only increasing when you next play it, which could be quite a while due to the sheer number of minigames available. That sounds like it’s a good thing; it’s really not. Because your brain feels so smooth from just doing incremental, minor improvements in difficulty over the course of long play sessions that you just want to go do anything else.

As a final nail in the coffin, Pokémon Friends never stops wanting your money and never fully satisfies either. That ten dollar purchase gets you a bunch of games, but it unlocks…seventy Pokémon that you can craft. Seventy. If you really hate money and need to get the others, each DLC pack comes with an additional 40 Pokémon, meaning you can drop forty goddamn dollars of honest-to-goodness, “we can keep the lights on and eat this week” money, and have access to one hundred and fifty Pokémon. Golly gee wizz. Is it the original 150, at least, to appease those insufferable folk who hate anything after generation one? It sure isn’t! A seemingly arbitrary collection of Pokémon, you get access to less than one fifth of the current Pokedex for the price of a used Pokémon Scarlet/Violet. Those games may not be perfect, but at least they’re games.

Wonderfy is this educational company in Tokyo that everyone’s so excited for because they made some decent collaborations in Japan with Detective Conan and other brands for educational books and software. Pokémon Friends is clearly an attempt to make the most of this IP while pushing their own attempts to engage with younger players, and it fails miserably. If you’re playing on the phone, the drip feed is painfully slow and not meant for anyone. Kids will lose interest after six seconds, and the ability to replay the same games of the day again and again is just a final bit of bitter in this failure sorbet. You can replay today’s puzzles and it changes nothing. You can’t get a better score, you can’t level up, you can’t progress. It’s just a loop of distraction that proves Wonderfy only cares about your kid’s education if you pony up the cash.

The concept is tepid at best, the graphics are generically cute and the delivery is just a mess of a golden goose situation. The day to day on the free version is hatefully slow, and, once you drop the ten bucks, you’re just turned loose with no sense of accomplishment to help you along. There’s no middle ground between “drip feed content” and “whatever, here’s a bucket.” This is the biggest brand in the world, and Pokémon Friends lashes out at each and every fan to say “you’ll pay us because we expect you to, so pony up.” Don’t be surprised for the Pokémon Center to start selling these yarn versions in the next two months, and for them to be thirty dollars a pop. I knew you were in it for the money, Pokémon Company, but this is disgusting, even for you.

Graphics: 2.5 Pretty generic in terms of Pokémon expectations, the yarn characters are pretty dead eyed and simple. I don’t hate them, but we’ve seen Pokémon do so much more, and this is so basic I would have thought it was made in secret by a knockoff company. Plush-O-Matic is clearly the PokéPrinter and failure to admit this is so telling.	Gameplay: 1.0 Brain training games that take forever to actually get challenging. Both of my children were bored and went to play something else after a couple activities. Things like Greninja’s shape cutting or Drillbur’s mushroom hunt prove that you really can put crap in a can and call it a sale.
Sound: 1.0 Ambient, flaccid tones that try to capture the soundscape already established by far more qualified and visionary composers. There’s no voice work, but it’s a Pokémon game: you knew that already.	Fun Factor: 1.0 I paid ten dollars for Pokémon to tell me I should give them more money and still have access to fewer Pokémon than the 3D Pokédex I bought for my 3DS, for the same price, and gave me considerably more joy. I hate everything about this.
Final Verdict: 1.5

Pokémon Friends is available now on the App Store, The Play Store and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed (sadly) on Nintendo Switch.