Pokémon GO Could Use an Instruction Manual

Paging Niantic: GO Battle League in particular might benefit from a primer or two.

“Wait, so I shouldn’t just use the team that the game gives me?”

One of the things I enjoyed as a kid when I got a new video game was—and sorry if this makes me a dork or a geek or (gasp!) a dweeb—looking through the official instruction manual that came with the packaging. Amid the excitement of tearing into the box and extracting a prized new cartridge from its moorings, leafing through the small guide inserted with each title was part of the ritual. Reading about the plot, the characters, and the modes of play—sweet Lord Arceus, all the modes of play—only further whetted my appetite for the intermittent 16-bit joy and frustration I would soon encounter. Heck, even the pages devoted to the in-game options menu were vaguely interesting to me. Not only were those simpler times, but I’m also evidently easily amused.

In today’s landscape of digital copies of games not even guaranteed to be accessible down the road owing to their likely dependence on the livelihood of the platform or service needed to run them, the experience of opening a brand-new game is a sad casualty of the shift away from physical media, at least from my vantage point. The silver lining, I suppose, is that no cartridges and discs to store or cardboard, plastic, or Styrofoam to dispose of makes for less clutter around the house and waste. Still, I feel like something is lost in the move to downloads and streaming. Watching a percentage completion bar fill up on my Nintendo Switch? It’s just not the same.

In some cases, not only is the absence of an artifact like a capital-I, capital-M Instruction Manual less, shall we say, romantic, the lack of written information on a game’s intricacies can be downright detrimental to the player. You may already be nodding your head, knowing where I’m going with this. Yes, dear Reader, I would argue that Pokémon GO is exactly this sort of game.

The genesis of my deliberation on this topic stems from a recent Twitch stream discussion with Caroline, better known to her community as carolinux355 (please do follow—she’s an absolute delight). Caroline is a variety streamer whose content includes speedruns and playthroughs of Legend of Zelda titles like The Minish Cap, crochet and other bits of crafting, and—Arceus bless her—GO Battle League. She is very much the antithesis of a sweaty try-hard, seeking to reach Rank 20, if that, and move onto the next season. She doesn’t know her counts, she still hasn’t learned the Type Chart (despite vowing over a year ago that she would), and her primary guiding principle when building teams is “vibes.” These are not meant as serious criticisms, mind you—they’re details meant to flesh out her profile as a battler to you.

During her last PoGO stream, Caroline, who also played a bit of Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket following her GBL sets, mentioned how she had been gravitating more to TCG Pocket lately, in part because, with TCG, everything is out in the open for you to read and use to make decisions. If a card has some sort of special condition or passive effect, it says right on the face what that is. There’s no guess work, including how much damage an attack will do. Barring any weaknesses based on types or any moves that buff or debuff the opposing Pokémon’s power, the number you see is the number you get.

A strict one-to-one comparison between battling in Pokémon GO and Pokémon TCG Pocket is a difficult, if impossible, one to make. GBL battles are carried out in real time, whereas TCG battles are turn-based, giving each player time to deliberate before making their next move. Having too much data on screen during GBL battles also runs the risk of information overload. Assuming the game is working correctly in the first place—a rather big assumption for PoGO, as you well know—an excess of visual cues could be distracting. For someone like me who can barely walk and chew gum at the same time, it would probably lead to me losing even harder than usual.

That said, I think Caroline might have a point as regards the overall dearth of instructive material in Pokémon GO. We’ve already talked at length on The PoGO Journal about how the game can feel inaccessible if not patently hostile to newcomers, requiring a significant time investment and, depending on the game mode, seriously favoring paying customers. While not to completely absolve players of their responsibility to do their homework, in fairness to them, Pokémon GO can be fairly complex at times, especially with respect to battles. And if you’re relying solely on in-game prompts to get up to speed, Trainer, you might be in for a rough go of it.

For the sake of a comparison, TCG Pocket, to help players get a feel for battles, offers two separate seven-part guides for new and advanced players. Even Pokémon UNITE, which I’ve almost assuredly forsaken at this point, compels those just starting out to go through a guided tutorial mode. Pokémon GO, meanwhile, features, uh, Training? It’s not even particularly good training either. You face an AI opponent who only shields in Master League battles (and, even then, does so regardless of context), who never switches out, and who, in some instances, uses underpowered or fringe Pokémon you’re unlikely to see except at Rank 1. In other words, it’s poor preparation for the rigors of competitive play, not to mention criminally boring.

The bulk of what I’ve learned in terms of team building and “advanced” strategy has come from watching PoGO content creators on YouTube and Twitch and from visiting apps/websites devoted to PvP play created by members of the community—not from battling in Pokémon GO. This isn’t to say that I haven’t picked things up simply from playing and don’t continue to do so. If I were going it alone, however, I probably wouldn’t even hit Ace rank, let alone Veteran or higher. No wonder so many Trainers don’t end up battling. Frankly, the notion of jumping into ranked play all but blind is daunting.

I know these sentiments will strike a chord with a number of readers here. Much in the way Niantic does a poor job communicating accurate information about events to the player base outside of the game, PoGO doesn’t prime its users well for success within the app. This is felt most acutely with GO Battle League, but even new features like Max Battles can seem haphazardly introduced (“Max Mushrooms? What the heck are these?”). Again, care should be taken not to have any guidance feel too intrusive, lest the display appear crowded or gameplay become yet more sluggish. Ultimately, though, Pokémon GO can and should be doing more to accommodate casual players, and a critical aspect of that is guiding them on how to play. The days of printed instruction manuals may be over, but the tradition of providing customers a helping hand shouldn’t be abandoned altogether.