Pokémon TCG Pocket has been quite the roller coaster ride. It’s absolutely got its hooks in a lot of us at Kotaku, and we’re playing it every day. But at the same time, it’s unquestionably a predatory gacha game using a children’s IP. What a muddle. But there’s one thing that’s unambiguous: there’s a lot of room for improvement.
We’ve pulled together the most egregious issues that exist in the mobile card game today, most of which seem reasonably simple to address. Most—some are big demands, but given it’s already made $120 million, we reckon the resources are there.
2 / 12
One of the most peculiar aspects of Pokémon TCG Pocket is the game’s hiding of significant features. Despite playing for three weeks, we only just discovered the game has a wishlist option!
Most significant of these anomalies is the Pack Point Exchange. This is one of the game’s 840,391 in-game currencies, gained whenever you open a pack, and used to “buy” cards outright to add to your collection. The game at least introduces this concept to you, but later, when you want to find it again, it’s bizarrely concealed.
To use the points, you have to do something entirely counter-intuitive: Go as if to open a pack. This is genuinely the only place in the game where you can access the feature, and it’s completely unlabeled too. Once you’ve tapped to open a new pack, next to the three pack arts you can choose from, in a tiny circle at the bottom-right of the screen, there’s a picture of…well, it’s a picture of a zippo lighter. Tap that, and then you can buy cards. It’s ridiculous!
And talking of the Pack Point Exchange…
3 / 12
The most obvious place to put the Pack Point Exchange button would be when browsing your own collection, the My Cards area. Here, in yet another unlabeled feature, you can toggle an anonymous switch at the top to reveal the gaps for all the non-secret rare cards in your collection. Tap on these, and you can see all the details, except for the artwork (and indeed wishlist them).
But what you cannot do is buy them with the Pack Points! It’s such an unbelievably obvious option, making it downright odd that it wasn’t in the game at launch. Come on, Pocket, do the right thing.
4 / 12
Look, we’ve had a long day, our eyes are bleary from staring at screens and the faces of other human beings, and we don’t need that glare.
Ethan put it like this when discussing the game’s desperate need for a dark mode:
It’s midnight. The room is pitch black. I gingerly creep into bed so as not to disturb the amorphous blob of children that may be residing somewhere near its center. I’m sleep-deprived but unable to turn my brain off. I pull out my phone and see a tiny notification out of the corner of my eye that my booster pack stamina has recharged. My finger taps the Pokémon TCG Pocket icon to open the game and collect my rewards. The light of a hundred dying suns immediately fills the room.
Genuinely, I’ve used Pokémon TCG Pocket instead of my phone’s torch when getting around the house with the lights off. That’s probably a bit much.
5 / 12
During a TCG battle with a complete stranger, there is very often the need to communicate something to your opponent. More than anything else, just a way to say “sorry” when you’ve completely missed that it’s your turn and have forced them to watch you running down the clock for no good reason.
It’d be lovely to be able to throw up a “GG” when you see their deck falling into place (whether genuine or sarcastic, and they’ll never know), or a cheeky “Sorry!” when you see them flip four tails in a row. Or a guilty face when your own pack deals you exactly the right cards on your first turn.
Clearly nothing that can be abused, and obviously nothing that lets you send messages, but just a bunch of emojis would make a big difference. Think of Marvel Snap’s wonderfully expressive options, that end up becoming a bizarre language in and of themselves.
6 / 12
Pocket’s daily free items in the Shop are pretty dreadful, but they’re something. And yet, when you click on them to pick them up…there’s nothing! There’s no little animation to show the hourglass and ticket jumping into our inventory, no sparkly flurry of stars that pops out from the screen—it just fades a bit.
In a game that’s been designed from the ground up to be a dopamine factory, it’s the most weirdly unsatisfactory moment in your daily play. Given what you gain is so miniscule (an hour off the time before your next Wonder Pick, and another shop ticket to add to the pile), we at least need to be given some positive feedback for clicking the button like a good mouse.
7 / 12
If you’ve collected any real-life cards from any TCGs, you’ll know that you literally cannot buy a card binder so small that it can only contain 30 cards. Even those teeny ones Pokémon calls “mini portfolios” contain 60 cards! So why do Pocket’s binders limit you to half of that?!
It’s the most arbitrary choice, especially given a bog-standard three-by-three binder offers 360 slots as standard. That’d be a mess in the current format, obviously, but that brings us to the next point:
Let binders be binders! Binders aren’t a long, scrolling list. You wouldn’t be able to fit them into your bag. So why not let them be presented a page at a time, and let us flip the pages? It’d be so good! Do that! Quickly!
8 / 12
Wonder Pick is a nice idea that plays out in the meanest way. It allows you to see a selection of packs opened by other players, pick one, and then choose one of the five cards at random.
Of course, you’ll pick a pack that has a card you really want in it, and then have a 20 percent chance of actually getting it. So four times out of five, you don’t get what you wanted. That sucks enough on its own, but the game’s insistence on painfully slowly returning you to the screen to watch the rest of the cards flip over, showing you the location of the card you actually wanted, is miserable.
Perhaps some people want it, want to know where it would have been, so they can cry, “That was the card I was going to choose! Why did I change my mind!” But sensible people would rather not, and it’d be lovely to have an option to have this moment of mocking torture taken away.
9 / 12
Battling random people is very simple, and with a billion-trillion players, you never need to wait for a match. But battling someone specific is currently a more convoluted affair. You need to create a password, and then that other person needs to enter the same password, then you have the game search for others using that word to pair up. It works, and that’s all fine, but it could be so much simpler. There’s a friends list! You can click on profiles of people you’ve befriended, view their battle record, see their emblems, number of cards, and unlocked achievements. But you cannot just click to send a battle request. Which is bonkers.
So, you know, add that.
10 / 12
What a mess this game is. It’s like new features were added via a game of pin the tail on the donkey, the developers blindfolding themselves before slapping a button or core element into the UI.
The eight different pages of the Shop, split into three sections, with a page in two of them that’s just completely blank, are indicative of what a muddle everything is. It needs to be screwed up into a ball and thrown away, starting over entirely.
As mentioned, the option to spend Pack Points is hidden only on the page for opening packs, while buttons to access your own decks appear at random in different places on the screen, in different sections, but then disappear on the sub-pages where you want them most. There are seven different pages of missions (although that goes up and down as events come and go), but for some reason one of them (Themed Collections) is on a button separate from all the other tabs. Absolutely everything is loopy, and it’s far too hard to remember where you’re supposed to go for each disparate element.
11 / 12
OK, this is where it gets a bit more serious. Of all the strangest choices this deeply strange card game makes, the paid-for Premium Missions are the worst. Asking people for $10 a month, and then offering a handful of desultory tasks with insultingly poor rewards, all easily completed in a couple of days of casual play, feels like a monstrous misstep.
Rewards are so awful. Giving paying customers a single Pack Hourglass for completing “Open 20 booster packs,” for instance, is gobsmacking. Weeeeeee, a whole hour off before I can open a new pack! However can you afford to be so generous?!
A battle pass is supposed to be a series of grinds that give players a motivation to keep coming back all season. Sure, there are crazy people who’ll somehow reach level 200 in Fortnite in the first week, but for normies, it’s a long list of rewards given for continued progress, combined with new missions every day, week, and storyline. And it costs less, and lasts three times as long!
Or for a more direct comparison, look at Marvel Snap. For the fee, you get an enormously long list of unlocks that’ll take you weeks to finish, unlocking the coolest versions of favorite cards, and all manner of other decorative bonuses. In this light, Pocket’s battle pass is outrageous, its embarrassing handful of rewards gained almost immediately (five Mewtwo-themed decorations, and a single Pikachu card), the Premium section of both the Missions and the Shop then just left grayed out and a grim reminder of wasted money for the other 29 days in the month.
Yes, you get an extra pack a day for this too. That’s not nothing. But it’s also nowhere near enough.
This desperately needs to be improved, or people are going to bail on it in droves. In fact, the launch version has been so awful that some sort of redress seems in order, an apologetic pile of hourglasses and shop tickets handed to us suckers who forked out in the hope that it would update or improve at some point after the two week free trial.
.
12 / 12