Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the late Gunpei Yokoi’s core design philosophy, the one that led to him parting ways with Nintendo when the company decided to focus on creating more powerful hardware. Lateral thinking with withered technology. The idea being, that it’s possible to create truly exceptional game designs by working around limitations. Modern retro game developers are a perfect example of this. But Nintendo itself never fully gave up on the concept, as can be seen with the Pokémon Mini, a bewildering concept that led to the creation of what I genuinely believe to be one of the greatest pinball games of all time.
If you don’t recall what the Pokémon Mini is, you can probably at least remember the Tamagotchi craze of the late nineties. Tamagotchis were, fundamentally, games that could be played on outrageously tiny devices. Pokémon was a natural fit for the concept. Ironically, as Pokémon was still seen as more of a game than a brand at the time, the Pokémon Mini when it came out in 2001 was an awkward hybrid of these ideas, a gimmick device by a major developer with crude technology with some pretty exceptional ideas.
Enter Pokémon Pinball. The idea of a pinball game themed around Pokémon was a solid one, as was seen in the Game Boy Color title which later received a Game Boy Advance sequel. But the Pokémon Mini was entirely too crude hardware-wise to emulate something as elaborate as a real pinball table. So, what the game did instead, was function as a pick-up-and-play puzzle title. You start out with one Pokémon, the very simply designed mole Diglett, to act as your bumper. With Diglett, you bump poké balls into holes. Simple, right?
What gives Pokémon Pinball for the Pokémon Mini such surprising depth is how the game demands almost perfect understanding from the player about how its generally wonky physics engine. The exact angle at which Diglett hits the ball radically alters its trajectory. Diglett can also only be held back for so long before it’s forced into making a power shot, adding an element of timing to the gameplay as well. With each of the game’s ninety stages operating under a time limit, completing Pokémon Pinball for the Pokémon Mini, requires an impressive understanding of the core mechanics from the players, something only possible because the game is so fundamentally simple.
Closer to a puzzle game than a true pinball title, Pokémon Pinball for the Pokémon Mini excels precisely because its designed less in terms of fidelity to tables than trying to make something that functions well on the Pokémon Mini’s hardware. The results are genuinely innovative, creating situations that can’t be recreated even on a real pinball table. The four stages where you catch new Pokémon to use as bumpers are a major highlight, genuinely my favorite way to catch Pokémon in any game. You have to repeatedly batter them with your poké balls, working your way around whatever obstacles are protecting them and doing so consistently enough that they don’t revive with a single hit point before you have a chance to catch them.
Getting to use these Pokémon as new bumpers is also quite rewarding. For the most part, it’s the shape of the Pokémon themselves that make them better or worse suited for certain stages. Even Clefairy, which gets the ability to influence the movement of the ball after it’s already been launched, isn’t as overpowered as you’d think because in some stages, the shape of Clefairy’s head just doesn’t get the poké ball going where you want it to go. Pikachu, the omnipresent mascot of the Pokémon franchise, unsurprisingly makes an appearance here but is unsurprisingly the worst bumper because its ears make it an awkward launcher. Still, even the electric rat has its moments, as later stages really force you to think about what kind of spin is most appropriate for the puzzle.
Pokémon Pinball for the Pokémon Mini is, in summary, a genuine gem. Not the kind of game that can be played in its original context very easily, as the Pokémon Mini unit is now a collector’s item. But the nice part of it being developed for such withered technology is that the game is trivially easy to emulate. I would encourage you to give it a shot! Psst, by the way, no one will hold it against you for using save states on level 62, I’m pretty sure the designers set the clear time on that one way too low by accident.
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