What is New Pokémon Snap?
The old Pokémon Snap was released in 1999 and was a game where you took photos of Pokémon in different habitats, angles, and positions. In the New Pokémon Snap, players live again the story of a Pokémon photographer. You have over 200 Pokémon to investigate, and capture beautiful and exciting moments, while helping Professor Mirror and Rita. Check out the New Pokémon Snap reveal trailer. Aren’t they the cutest?
New Pokémon Snap Plot
The game will take place in Lental, a new franchise region, where Professor Mirror and his assistant Rita want to study the new bugs and their modifications. Explore beaches, jungles, and deserts to take photos of each Pokémon to help them in their work. What happens is that the Pokémon and vegetation from the region of Lental are appearing with an unknown glow that only happens there. Professor Mirror called it the Illumina phenomenon and is the basis of the plot of New Pokémon Snap.
New Pokémon Snap Gameplay
To proceed through Lental, the player will use a new vehicle that protects the photographer and offers important information about the fauna of the region. The vehicle is called NEO-ONE, a vehicle with automatic steering that will lead you through various paths on each island while you concentrate on taking the perfect pictures. Pokémon can behave in different ways if they are in their territory, walking alone or in groups. This allows you to have several takes of the same Pokémon in different situations. Also, players can throw Flufffruit and interact with Pokémon. In this way, you get their attention and you can watch them eat or even unlock new positions when they would otherwise just pass you by. In the trailer we can see a Pinsir and Heracross fighting, would they stop if give them a treat or fight even harder to see who gets the prize? Take a look at some of the Pokémon, Lental region, and the Illumina phenomenon in the trailer one click - or tap - away: When more opportunities present themselves, the more challenging it is, and the higher your score will be if you capture the perfect moment with your camera. Professor Mirror will rate and score players’ pictures taken in their adventures. Pokémon photography is scored based on the subjects’ poses, how big they appear, how directly they face the camera, and if they cover most of the frame. As players take more photos and carry out research in their journey, they can see the appearance and behavior of Pokémon in totally new ways. Players will have to take many photos and use their highest-scoring photos to fill their Photodex, a collection of Pokémon photos.
New Pokémon Snap Release Date and Platforms
New Pokémon Snap will be released on April 30, 2021, and preorders started already. As expected, it will be a Nintendo Switch exclusive. Players could hope for a Nintendo 3DS or even a mobile version since Pokémon is going hard on smartphones, but at the moment, no further platforms have been announced.
Additional Information for New Pokémon Snap
In the first Pokémon Snap, we had 63 Pokémon, all from Generation 1. Now, there’s a lot of great-great-grandchildren until Generation 8, and as Nintendo stated, over 200 Pokémon, so expect to see a lot of adorable and fierce little monsters. Nintendo’s official website has revealed that New Pokémon Snap will have online features of some kind. So far, we don’t have much information about what online gameplay entails. It can be some cooperative or competitive way where you take pictures at the same time as another player or even a simple leaderboard for you to show your family that all your selfies in the bathroom were finally worth it. Keep in mind that at the time of the launch of the first Pokémon Snap, 1999, cameras were still limited to taking pictures. Today, we have almost limitless different filters and effects. Will Nintendo include any of this technology in our budding Pokemon photographer’s camera? I’m certain the wait will pay off.
