Frankly Speaking: Pokemon Shuffle Mobile

The incredibly popular Nintendo 3DS game, Pokemon Shuffle, has found its way onto the mobile platform as of Aug. 31, 2015 as Pokemon Shuffle Mobile. This is the first time that any Pokemon game, or for that matter any Nintendo game, has officially come to mobile devices. While this is not the first Pokemon app to be released, it is the first game.

Pokemon Shuffle Mobile is a puzzle game much like Candy Crush, where you match lines of Pokemon together to get points. But in this game, you actually “battle” the Pokemon at each stage. At the very start, the tutorial for the game shows you how to catch the Pokemon by helping you catch your first three. In the game, you have a team of Pokemon, three of them being any of the ones that you captured, the fourth and head of the team is one of your Pokemon that can mega evolve. Each Pokemon only has one type, unlike the regular games, where they have two. For example, the Pokemon Heracross is both a bug type and a fighting type, but in Pokemon Shuffle Mobile, it is only a bug type. This ensures that there are no Pokemon that will have the major advantage of being quadruple effective against any other Pokemon.

There are only a few changes to the game from the original Pokemon Shuffle. The most obvious being the way that you scroll through the levels. In the original game, the scrolling is from side to side. In the mobile version, it has been fitted to go up and down. The next change is coin earning rates. Now, when you defeat a Pokemon for the first time, you will earn 200 coins instead of the original 100 (rewards do range however). When you defeat a Pokemon that you have previously beaten, you only earn 20 coins instead of 30. The coin spending costs have also changed. Some of the items have reduced in cost, but the majority of them have increased, like the ‘Moves +5’ item is now 1000 coins rather than being the original 800.

Overall, Pokemon Shuffle Mobile is a very successful port from the handheld to smart phones. With the only changes to the game really being how the game is oriented and the earning and spending rates of the coins, this first official mobile Nintendo game has earned 4.5 out of 5 stars. We hope to see more of Nintendo’s amazing games appear on the mobile gaming platform in the future.