Pokémon Snap (Nintendo 64 Review)

Pokémon Snap
Platform: Nintendo 64
Released March 21, 1999 (Japan) July 26, 1999
Directed by Yoichi Yamamoto, Koji Inokuchi, and Akira Takeshima
Developed by HAL Laboratory
Published by Nintendo
Included with Switch Online Expansion Pack

If you’ve ever wondered what the f*ck is up with “Jack and Beans” trust me, the story is bonkers.

Miracles do happen. If you need proof, look at Pokémon Snap actually making it to release. It almost didn’t happen. It was to be a launch game for the Nintendo 64’s 64DD accessory. However, it wasn’t even meant to be a Pokémon game, and it’s not even entirely clear if it was primarily a photography game. I say “entirely clear” because nobody knows what exactly the original game, titled Jack and the Beanstalk, was meant to be. Yes, as in “Jack and Beans” which was the code name for the development team at HAL working on the project. I’d never actually heard this story before starting this review and only found out about it when I tried to look up who this developer Jack and Beans was that I’d never even heard of so I could give them all the hero cookies in the world for the good job they did.

I’ve never been into bird watching. I like zoos, I guess. I’ve been to the San Diego Zoo three times, which is once more than I’ve been to the San Francisco Zoo that’s like thirty minutes from my house. But I’d take a trip to Disneyland over the zoo, and I’ve never been on safari. Yet I wish there were other games like this. I think it would be my favorite genre.

It kind of makes sense that I’d never heard this stuff before. The thing is, I couldn’t find anything that outright confirms what kind of game Jack and the Beanstalk was going to be. Not so much as a single screenshot has ever been released. Besides the mysterious Return of Donkey Kong for the NES (my personal theory is it was going to be a re-spriting of some Famicom game, possibly Adventure Island), the Jack and the Beanstalk project is probably the single biggest Nintendo mystery of them all. What is known is that nobody at HAL or Nintendo was happy with how it was turning out and the project stalled. When Nintendo was caught by surprise by the sudden popularity of Pokémon, here sat a fairly impressive game engine hosting a game the makers didn’t like. Satoru Iwata seems like he confirmed it was a photography game, but did he really?

Originally, Pokémon Snap for the Nintendo 64 system wasn’t a Pokémon game, but rather a normal game in which you took photos, but the motivation for playing the game wasn’t clear. We wondered what players would enjoy taking pictures of, and later on we made a somewhat forced switch to taking pictures of Pokémon.
-Satoru Iwata in 2010

So it had photography BUT no clear reason to take pictures, but I don’t believe it was actually a photography-focused game because too many other known details don’t mesh with that. Like planting seeds that would grow in real time using the 64DD’s clock. I think pictures was *a* mechanic, but not THE mechanic. In other words, it would be like saying Animal Crossing is primarily a bug catching game because you have a bug net. That’s only part of the story. Another aspect of the Jack and the Beanstalk legend is that some elements of the cancelled game were transferred to the Earthbound 64 project, also for the 64DD, which was “near-finished” or “half-finished” and probably the single most wanted cancelled video game EVER. At this point I’ll note that the decision to move Snap to just the plain old N64 happened at the eleventh hour. It could have just as well been cancelled. By the way, if you want to freak out, take a look at a screenshot from Earthbound 64.

Now take a look at this completely unrelated picture I just took of Pokémon Snap that I’m placing here for absolutely no reason.

Is he cross-eyed?

If you just did a double take, I’m right there with you. So, based on the information out there, there’s a few safe bets that I’m going to make. I think that Jack and the Beanstalk was an on-the-rails game designed NOT around photography but instead primarily on the lobbing mechanic that eventually became the apples and puffballs in Pokémon Snap, including lobbing seeds. I think the photography was a side-quest or puzzle solving element that was directionless, but a switch was made when someone realized it was the most addictive part of the game and would allow them to explore the Pokémon characters in their natural habitat. The end result was one of the N64’s most unsung gems. If you’ve rolled your eyes at the concept, I’m going to really ask you to give it a shot……

By buying New Pokémon Snap for Switch.

The first time I actually triggered this scenario as a kid, I ran and got my parents so they could see it. Lapras was my favorite Pokémon. I mean besides Pikachu, obviously.

Pokémon Snap was probably my third favorite Nintendo 64 game growing up, behind Banjo-Kazooie and Ocarina of Time. Calling it a “photography game” doesn’t do it justice. It’s more like a puzzler crossed with an on-the-rails shooter that replaces bullets with photons, with a safari setting AND constructed like a Disneyland dark ride. Riding a specialized vehicle that you have no directional control over and, actually, don’t even unlock the ability to speed forward until late in the linear part of the game, you travel through six levels and then the most disappointing finale since Seinfeld, snapping pictures of the pocket monsters and occasionally smashing them over the head with apples or poisoning them. The object is to collect the single best photo you can of all 63 Pokémon in the game. Yeah, the roster is sparse.

This is one of the best photos I’ve taken, except, thanks to an emulator, I found out a different picture that wasn’t remotely as visually satisfying scored a lot more points. I love(d) Pokémon Snap, but it has a lot of problems.

There’s two twists. The first is that you’re only allowed to take sixty photos per stage. The second twist is that you can only submit one photo of each Pokémon for evaluation, and you won’t know if you chose the highest possible scoring photo. I have to admit, the closest thing to fun I had during this play session was from using an emulator because I could mess around with the road not traveled, sometimes with frustrating results like the above example. You see, the real object is to manipulate the Pokémon into making higher-yielding poses. The scoring system judges you on how big the Pokémon is in the frame and what its pose is, then doubles those two totals if the Pokémon is in the center of the frame. Sometimes there’s also a special condition, like this:

Pikachu surfing is worth more than Pikachu on a ball, even if the ball one looks RIGHT AT THE CAMERA, the only time it actually does that in the game I think.

If there is a special bonus, its score is also doubled, which tilts the scoring towards these conditions. Finally, you get bonus points if there’s more than one of the same type of Pokémon in the photo. If the score is higher than your previous best score, the new photo is automatically added to your photo album and the old one is deleted permanently, so you’ll have sixty-three photos in the ultimate album that have one combined total score. You might need to replay stages just to incrementally get a shot that’s ten points better than your previous best. There’s almost no RNG. Where a Pokémon is located is where it’ll be located every time you play, but you can then alter its behavior by, say, luring it closer to you with an apple or playing the flute to make it dance. It’s very addictive, and frustrating.

This is an example of a “puzzle.” Hit this Electrode with an apple, causing it to explode and clear the path for the next stage. You only have to do this one, then it serves no purpose.

Sigh. This is the part where this review becomes seriously the most difficult one I’ve done in a while. I loved Pokémon Snap as a kid, but the moment New Pokémon Snap for the Switch released, it completely left the original in a smoking crater. It’s a better game in every imaginable way. It has *a lot* more levels with better, more immersive level design. It has more lifelike Pokémon behavior, a LOT more Pokémon (234 total following the free content update, 3.7x as much as this game has), more puzzles, and you’re not just looking for one high scoring photo of each Pokémon but instead you’re looking for four. The goal of 63 perfect photos is now instead nearly a thousand. New Pokémon Snap might actually be, not kidding, my favorite video game ever. THAT game offers tons of side quests, and the levels usually have multiple branching paths, and each level offers multiple tiers of the level that have different lineups of Pokémon behaving in different ways, all while retaining the best aspect of the first game: no RNG. You know what will happen and when it will happen in the level. Levels are so full of interesting visuals and well-placed Pokémon that every single level legitimately feels like an interactive Disneyland dark ride.

This came out in America less than two weeks after I turned 10 years old and I was hooked. I spent the last third of the summer of 1999 playing this and only this, and I still don’t know exactly how I’m supposed to take a picture of Magneton. It’s the game’s poster child for its issue with unintuitive poses and scoring.

I never made the Disneyland dark ride connection with the original Pokémon Snap. The photography is genuinely fun. But, thanks to the limits of the Nintendo 64, the levels aren’t really visually interesting. They’re kind of bland and don’t feel “lived in” except maybe the river. The Pokémon also almost never feel like living creatures. They usually feel stiff, emotionless, and robotic. Because of that, sometimes it’s not entirely clear what exactly gets the big points. Pictures of things like Slowpoke that seem like the same pose to me sometimes score 750 points for the pose and sometimes 800, and it’s not intuitive at all. Or look at the above photo. Where’s the center of it? It’s not between the three. Professor Oak yelled at me for that. New Pokémon Snap has this problem too and plenty of other problems, but asking for players to collect four poses total of the Pokémon while still playing by the same rules as the first game, IE only submitting one photo of a specific Pokémon per level, eases that frustration a great deal.

To unlock the final stage, you have to find a “sign” IE a natural formation that looks like Pokémon in each stage. This is the volcano level’s sign, though it looks more like something out of Weekly World News.

The scoring system is also vastly improved in the sequel, and the controls, and the menus. Even the photography itself. You have to zoom to take a photo in the Nintendo 64 game. You don’t in the new one, and boy, does it make a difference. I never expected Pokémon Snap to get a sequel, and the fact that it not only got one but it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played in my life made playing THIS version of the game kind of boring. A lot of my childhood games didn’t age well, but few have been rendered as completely obsolete as Pokémon Snap. I was going to give it a YES! anyway because I was like “well I can’t say it’s a bad game.” It’s not. Seriously. This is proof that sometimes games just die of old age.

Pokémon Snap ends with a sort-of boss fight in that the only Pokémon in the final stage is Mew, who has a shield that blocks you from photographing it. You have to hit it with three “pester balls”, then hit it with another before it reaches the shield, then snap a photo of it. I *hated* this as a kid, as the time investment for this level, all to get ONE Pokémon that then automatically scores huge points and is guaranteed to be your “best photo” in the menu regardless of how good it is. The sequel is even worse about its multiple bosses, which are easily the low point of the game.

I’m heartbroken for Pokémon Snap because the truth is it didn’t really do anything wrong. But I spent the whole time playing it thinking “I wish I was playing New Pokémon Snap instead.” Literally, no matter what level it was or what I was doing, I didn’t want to play it at all. I wanted to play the sequel. The charm is lost. The excitement is lost. Hell, even the menus made me say “I wish I was playing New Pokémon Snap instead. They go quicker.” Everything is lost, and thus Pokémon Snap, literally a game that completely owned me for months as a 10 year old and then replayed multiple times in the years that followed, is just not fun anymore. Usually only sports games deal with obsolescence through the advancement of gaming technology. After all, the quest is still fun, right? The levels? The characters? And had the sequel never come out, yes, that would have been the case with Pokémon Snap just like any other score-driven game. But New Pokémon Snap did come out, and the original is dead. Sad but true.

In fairness, not ALL the Pokémon feel not-alive. The single most alive feeling ones in the game are the Charmanders, who will call out to others that some bozo is feeding them. The one and only time I smiled playing this in 2026, even if the actual scenery made me wonder “how did I EVER get immersed in Nintendo 64 games?”

With Pokémon Snap, I’m grateful for the hundreds of hours of entertainment I got out of it during my childhood. I will always cherish those memories. But it’s seriously not realistic to think that a game like that would age well. I am NOT going to get that quality of entertainment out of it in the 2020s or beyond. It had a time, and that time has passed. But myself and my family have have put hundreds of hours into New Pokémon Snap and intend to keep playing it. I’ve already put a lot more time into it than I ever did Pokémon Snap, and I f*cking LOVED Pokémon Snap, for years. So really the sequel will be the age-proof game. Well, unless another sequel comes out that adds even more levels and things to do. So if someone asked me “should I play this?” I would say “no, you SHOULD play New Pokémon Snap.” I can’t recommend a game I literally wished I wasn’t playing even if I did sink hundreds of joyous hours into it twenty-seven years ago. It’s not 1999 anymore. RIP Pokémon Snap, killed by fratricide. Or possibly parricide depending on how you look at it.
Verdict: (wipes tear) NO!
Way to ruin your 15th anniversary, Indie Gamer Chick! Thank you EVERYONE for fifteen years! Classic Pinball Video Games: The Definitive Review will be released very soon. I’m still working on it and a review of New Pokémon Snap.

Pokémon Snap 64 fans when they read this review. Listen, I’m going to drool all over the sequel.