Since the advent of the smartphone, many people now consider themselves ‘photographers.’ Even I like to think myself a dab hand at taking photographs. Whether it’s a portrait of a friend or a landscape detailing the natural scenery before. How hard can it be? True, I might not have a ‘proper’ camera with detachable lens and the technical know-how of what anything else means on the mode dial beyond the norm, but I understand basic composition, lighting, subject and background! 

So, when New Pokemon Snap was announced, I was excited. I would show all the doubters that my eye for detail was second to none. The photos that would cover my Facebook page would be so spectacular that everyone on my friend list would encourage me to create an Instagram account. This new game was going to be a breeze, I thought, even though I had never played the original Pokemon Snap (because I was a penniless student back in the good old days).

Caught up with trips and Trails of Cold Steel 3, it was a good deal longer for me to do anything substantial with New Pokemon Snap. I started off by creating my character and began to take photos of the Pokemon roaming around the Lental region. At first, I thought it quite quaint – sitting in a strange pod and taking photos of the Pokemon that dashed to and fro as they interacted in their natural environment.

Once I had unlocked fluffruit, though, was when the real fun started. I’d throw them near Pokemon or at them. Honestly, I was a real terror throughout Florio Nature Park as I booped all the native Pokemon with apples as I hoped to see their reactions. 

In time, I unlocked more courses. But in doing so, I also unlocked special requests for certain photos of Pokemon behaviours. And I feel it was this mechanic that eventually took away most of the joy that I had initially felt in playing such a carefree game. No longer could I just observe the Pokemon doing what they wanted out in the world and seeing how they’d react when I used the scanner, threw an Illumina orb or played a pretty little tune for them to listen to. Now, I needed to make sure that they did something specific and wait for the perfect time to snap a shot.

More gregarious than that were the hidden requirements for certain photos. The wording for the pictures, on occasion, did not match what was actually required. You had to experiment and set up specific situations. It became too much of a puzzle of how to get a Pokemon to do something rather than the simple joy of taking the time to observe the world around me.

This was aggravated by how repetitive most of the game was. You would set off on the same course, with a few changes depending on the level, and be forced to watch everything from start to finish. That was, until Turbo was unlocked late in the game.

I can recall with vivid clarity that I tried a course nigh on ten times, trying to fulfil one requirement of having Pidgeot snatching Magikarp from the water. And always, I’d be just shy of taking the photo that Professor Mirror would acknowledge.

The same could be said of the three friends: Grookey, Scorbunny and Pichu in the flower garden. I’m not sure if it was because I should have kept the camera trained more on Scorbunny when I snapped the shot of the tree surrounding a Crystalbloom, but none of the ones I took were recognised by the game as a completion of the request. And it is such a shame that in order to make sure that I complete these requests, I have to look it up on the internet for their solutions.

My one other nitpick was the fact that most of the photos to be taken of the Illumina Pokemon felt like gimmick boss battles that usually involved chasing them down and pelting them with both fluffruit and illumina orbs. This would have been fine except for the fact that the arc when both items are thrown never sat well with me and I’d inevitably just watch as I missed the Pokemon by mere inches.

Admittedly, once I did manage to get a Pokemon to show off their inner glow, the photos taken were stunning. Steelix, in particular, as it dived towards me to burrow in the ground next to my small NEO-One. Or Milotic as it swam through the water, looking as glamorous as ever.

The only other issue I encountered with the game was the difference in sound mixing. If it was not a cutscene, the generic dialogue to indicate a character was speaking was far too quiet. Both when it was docked and when my Switch was in handheld mode. The jarring difference in volume meant that I had to keep adjusting it. Perhaps I should have simply played the game without any voices for the human characters.

To cut a long story short, New Pokemon Snap did not immediately click with me as I had hoped. I like to think that I simply wasn’t in the mood for a light-hearted adventure of taking photos of Pokemon. Or maybe it was the fact that I wasn’t patient enough to wait for the perfect moment. Who’s to say? 

What I can rightly admit, as one of the world’s leading unpopular opinions, is that I didn’t enjoy it as much as everyone else on the internet seems to have. It was a good distraction for a few good hours – with a mystery to solve about how the illumina Pokemon managed to save the Lental region from a dastardly meteorite two thousands years ago, but it didn’t capture my imagination as much as I had hoped it would.