Masuda on Pokemon: Let’s Go, Pikachu / Eevee – visual style, changes, and more

Ahead of Pokemon: Let’s Go, Pikachu / Eevee’s launch, Bahamut spoke with director Junichi Masuda. Siliconera translated the discussion points.

You can find a summary of what was shared below. Topics include the game’s visual style, changes that were made, and more.

– Voice actor Aoi Yuuki was specially instructed her to make sounds that mix together the characteristics of the different names for Eevee around the world
– The more kid-friendly look is used and the music adheres more to the original compositions, as Game Freak anticipated that parents or other people might find the game uncomfortable if there was too much violence or noise from the TV
– New protagonists and rivals because newcomers to the Pokemon series have their own characters that feel like they belong to them, but there are some elements in the games for older fans as well
– Some story aspects from the original were streamlined
– The pace of gameplay has been sped up to accommodate the lifestyle of new gamers who grew up with smartphones and YouTube, in ways like the Run button being removed so that pushing the joystick all the way is already running speed
– There are influences from the anime like Team Rocket with Jesse and James, how Pikachu sits on your shoulder like how Pikachu did with Ash, etc.
– Two-player support was added as a way for parents to play with their kids or for players to work together with a friend who doesn’t have the game, hence the drop-in nature
– If the second player becomes interested in playing the game for themselves, they can easily do so via a different user account
– Masuda is personally more familiar with needing to lower Pokemon health before capture them, but with Pokemon GO players all around the world with the notion that ‘catching Pokemon doesn’t require battling,’ they had to reconsider this paradigm
– That’ why the pleasure in catching Pokemon in this game is derived from the actual ‘catching’ aspect, similar to insect-catching
– Using the Partner Pokemon for Secret Techniques was a natural evolution of wanting to remove HMs without losing the sense of progression and them realizing that the Partner Pokemon always being together with the protagonist meant they could make the Pokemon learn these Secret Techniques to help out their Trainer
– Pokemon now appear on the overworld since Game Freak knew how players would evade tall grass to avoid encounters anyways, so it’s really just giving control back to the player on whether to battle or not
– Another benefit is that now you can see how the Pokemon act and move around in the overworld
– PC/Box system was scrapped after the development team had a lot of discussion, and decided it was better to let players be able to use their Pokemon anywhere, since they caught it anyways
– Eevee knows more exclusive moves than Pikachu, but this is a way of balancing out Pikachu’s advantage of being Electric-type, compared to Eevee’s Normal-type
– Without exclusive moves, Eevee would be strictly worse off
– The Kanto Pokedex once again only contains 151 Pokemon so that things weren’t overcomplicated and so that completing the Pokedex “was an achievable goal”
– Game Freak wanted Meltan to embody the enjoyable aspect of ‘catching Pokemon many times and collecting candy to evolve’ found in Pokemon GO, which led to it having an evolution