The original Detective Pikachu came seemingly out of nowhere. Detective Pikachu is a Pokémon spin-off game released for 3DS in 2016; it is a game where you investigate and solve crimes with gameplay similar to that of the ace attorney series. The game has slow gameplay, an underwhelming story, and a bland soundtrack, but in many ways, is a good game. While most of the cases are too slow for my liking, they provide decent kid-friendly mysteries to solve with satisfying “Ah-ha!” moments that utilize the abilities of pokémon in unique ways.
While Detective Pikachu had flaws, I saw the 3DS game as a rough-around-the-edges pilot with heaps of potential. After the surprise arrival of a Detective Pikachu movie which grossed 400 million dollars, it seemed like the Pokémon Company saw that potential too. We were poised to receive a sequel game which would improve on the flaws of the original while providing new mysteries to solve.
Detective Pikachu Returns is an awful, boring game which removes everything good about the original while providing an ending with no room for growth. The Pokémon Company has dug this series’ grave with this game.
Remember, this review reflects my experience and therefore everyone else’s as well. If you disagree with any point I bring in this post, then you should reflect on your opinion until you agree with me as I am correct and you are wrong. Thank you for reading!
Gameplay
The gameplay in this game is a severe downgrade from the first game. Evidence collection has been stripped to its barest form. In the first game, anytime you investigated a relevant item, or spoke to a witness, the item or testimony would be added to your inventory as something you can look at and use for the deduction sections. In this game, there is no evidence collection, just testimony, and the testimony is not used in the deduction sections. Instead, once you collect the right testimonies, you are immediately prompted to answer some multiple-choice questions to solve part of the mystery. This game is much less “collect evidence and come to your own conclusions until you decide you are ready to deduce the answer” and more “talk to all the people, then answer some brain-dead multiple-choice questions so that Detective Pikachu can explain what happened.”
In several instances, I thought that the most interesting questions of a case were glossed over without the player doing anything. In one part of the game, you come across a set of footprints on the ground. Instead of collecting pictures of each relevant pokémon’s footprint, or using logic to figure out the answer, Detective Pikachu just straight up says “Oh, these are Tangela’s footprints.” This was a prime opportunity for the player to have a direct role in solving the mystery, but it was immediately shoved out of the way by this dialogue.
While the deduction segments were completely botched, this game did add one good mechanic. There are new sections where you play as Pikachu and ride a pokémon. Each rideable pokémon has an ability used to solve puzzles. For example, while riding Luxray, you can hold a button to see through walls. The abilities are underdeveloped, but they still add variety to the investigation process.
Animations
The animation in this game is lazy. All of the characters and pokemon feel really sluggish when they move. This especially hurts during the fight scenes. There are missing animations and obvious shortcuts everywhere such as the lack of mouth rigging on most pokemon. Instead, their mouth is an image mapped to that part of their face which looks cheap when you see their mouth image change during the cutscenes. Also, no characters have a turning around animation. Instead, when you talk to them, they do their walking animation in place as their model rotates towards you way slower than it should. It feels like this was a placeholder until a real turning animation was made, which it never was.
Story
The story has some redeeming qualities but is not great. Looking at individual cases, I’d say, ‘The Missing Jewel’ and ‘Detainee Pikachu’ are the best of the bunch in terms of having a believable and appealing mystery. Their execution is not great due to the state of the gameplay, but the writing is passable. The others don’t make a ton of sense.
The overall story is a mess. Here is a summary: Since the R incident in the first game, there has been more demand for pokémon to be better restricted so that they don’t break everything. Thus, a new part of the government was created called Unitas which detains rowdy pokémon, but it turns out this organization is evil and is actually forcing pokémon to commit crimes so that they can arrest said pokémon to justify Unitas’ existence. To control a pokémon, the bad guys put a ‘control cube’ anywhere on their body. When this thing is on, the pokémon will apparently listen to any command given to it by one of the bad guys and the pokémon won’t remember anything while the cube is attached.
The cubes don’t appear to be well attached to the pokémon, they just kind of hang off of their model, plainly visible, large, and out of place. Despite this, they are pretty hard to take off, and no one other than Tim is able to notice them. The story would have played out a lot differently if anyone else was capable of seeing these cubes. It would have been better if the control mechanism was invisible.
(Spoilers Ahead)
The reveal that Detective Pikachu was really Tim’s dad in his Pikachu’s body this whole time was underwhelming. This was exactly the solution in the movie, so it’s disappointing to see it done the same way here. The deductions where Pikachu contradicts himself when telling the story of meeting Harry are lame. To finally solve the driving mystery of the series because Pikachu suddenly remembered it for no reason is super stupid. Why was Tim investigating this in the first place if Pikachu would have remembered on his own anyway?
As for the end of the game… it doesn’t make much sense. The head of Unitas turns out to be a scientist named Murloch. It turns out he has a plan separate from the whole Unitas thing and he was just using Unitas as funding for his real evil project which is a plan to fuse with the pokémon Deoxys. This plan feels shoehorned in; it doesn’t directly have anything to do with the control cubes. I think they had him have this plan so that they could have a “realistic” way for Harry to get back into his own body, but it isn’t done well at all. Oh yeah, Murloch’s also keeping Harry’s lifeless corpse in a glass chamber for some reason. How convenient.
Pikachu sacrifices himself to defeat Merloch and save everyone else. After they escape, the building literally explodes launching the container with Harry’s body 100 feet into the air. Then the tube fell down hard, and it opened and inexplicably, Harry and Pikachu were both in the chamber, back in their own bodies, and without a single injury from the fall.
In an after credits scene, Pikachu “pikas” to the camera, confirming that he is a normal pikachu. So, not only is the main mystery of the series solved; the namesake of the series, Detective Pikachu, literally no longer exists. I guess we won’t be getting another entry in this series.
Score
I was excited for this game. Maybe I was the only one, but I saw potential in this series as a kid-friendly investigation game. And yet, like so many other Pokémon games nowadays, it came out half-baked. Dammit Pokémon, make better games!