Pokémon Jr. -- An Underappreciated Gem

Strange Licensed Role Playing Games Selection #1

Image Copyright 1998 Nintendo

Though role playing games have become more mainstream in recent years, the biggest challenge the hobby faces on a regular basis is bringing in new fans. Most normies like the idea of role playing games. After all, who doesn’t love making collaborative stories about you favorite genres with friends? Games like Clue (Cluedo for those of you across the pond) are popular, in part, because they contain the root of a shared experience. While purists may gasp at the thought, it isn’t much of a leap to describe Clue as a role playing game. The players assume the roles of the suspects and each tries to solve the mystery. More than that, in most games I’ve played with “gamers” and “non-gamers” alike my fellow Ludens have adopted accents and personalities to fit their role. Clue is more of a role playing game than Monopoly and Steve Jackson (of Steve Jackson Games) argued that Monopoly was a classic role playing game in Green Ronin’s Family Games: The 100 Best and in the mini-bio he wrote for Different Worlds Magazine in 1979.

Steve Jackson in Family Games: The 100 Best from Green Ronin

Steve Jackson in Different Worlds #2 from Different Worlds Publications

People love the idea of role playing in games, but the fact remains that games like Dungeons & Dragons are too complex and arcane for the average person to feel comfortable without an invitation. Don’t even get me started on trying to convince the newb to play a game of Champions or GURPS. It’s hard enough to get modern experienced gamers to give those games a try. Those look a bit too much like a mathematics text book to have broad appeal. I might like to play the game within the game of making characters, an exercise in spreadsheet manipulation, but that doesn’t mean other people are.

So the question becomes, how do you make a game that gets novice gamers excited about role playing games both thematically and mechanically? One of the common answers to this question is to create a licensed game. Take a setting, or intellectual property, that has a large audience and make a game that takes place in that setting. Licensed role playing games, and their buccaneer alternatives, have been a part of the role playing game hobby from the very beginning. Whether we are talking about TSR’s Buccaneered Warriors of Mars role playing game that used Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom setting without an official license, the Star Trek Role Playing Game published by Heritage USA, or Fantasy Games Unlimited’s Flash Gordon and the Warriors of Mongo, we can see that licensed games were a rich part of the hobby at the very start.

Licensed games are a great way to pull an audience in, but licensed games have a history of being pretty bad. Kevan Davis, Alex Fleetwood, Holly Gramazio, and James Wallis phrase it this way in their excellent book The Boardgame Remix Kit, “Almost all board-games based on TV programmes (sic) or films are a let-down. Not all of them, but enough that we can say with some certainty that you shouldn’t waste your money.” For every excellent Axis & Allies based GI Joe board game, there are 100 roll and move “Track” games lazily produced by the board game market. That same evaluation applies to applies to role playing games, but there have been some great licensed role playing games over the years.

While it might be tempting to do a series of articles on the “Best” licensed games, such a list would include Ghostbusters and West End Games’ Star Wars game to name only two, but that’s not the Geekerati way. Instead, I’ll be focusing on games that are “Strange.” These might be games that didn’t really understand how to bridge the gap between novice and veteran gamers in a way that created a game that could appeal to both groups. A successful licensed game needs to bring more people into gaming, but it also needs the support of existing gamers. They might also be games that had an IP that appealed to both, but the connection between mechanics and theme didn’t quite mesh.

Game #1: The Pokémon Jr. Adventure Game

So, how do you design a role playing game that leverages the property enough to appeal to its fans, while creating a rules set that is easy to learn but of high enough quality for replay?

That’s the challenge that talented game designers Bill Slavicsek and

Stan!

took on when they created the Pokémon Jr. Adventure Game. This game combined one of the hottest intellectual properties ever created with an easy to learn, and fun, set of mechanics. The game came close to becoming a classic in both the hobby and mainstream market, but it eventually faded away into obscurity.

Pokémon Jr. was respected by the game design community and was nominated for the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game of 1998 at the Origins 1999 Convention. It lost out to the Star Trek: The Next Generation RPG. Unlike a lot of other role playing games, Pokémon Jr. was intended for sale in the mainstream market. It was available for purchase at Target other mainstream stores at a cost of $11. The 1990s were a time when it was rare to see role playing games at a mass market store. Kids who grew up in the 80s might have purchased their first D&D box at Toys R Us or Kaybee Toys and today’s Target features a pretty good variety of games, but in the 1990s RPGs were a staple of hobby stores and almost nowhere else. In the end, mainstream consumers didn’t know what to do with this alternative Pokémon game, and most hobbyists where either unaware or wary of the game, so very few people bought it at that price. When the price was eventually dropped in price to discount level Pokémon Jr. finally sold like hot cakes. It just needed something to break past initial resistance. Sadly, the game then encountered licensing hell, and faded into obscurity. Pokémon Jr. was a game that should have become a long lasting staple of the hobby, but it’s now a game that no one plays.

This is a shame because Pokémon Jr. is possibly the best introductory role-playing game ever written. The game includes 26 power cards, which are in actuality Pokémon cards representing the various pocket monsters. Due to a couple of repeats in the set, there end up being 22 unique Pokémon for use in play. The game book is written with the intention that parents run the stories as narrators and their children play the Pokémon trainers. The stories are basic encounters taken from the television show and challenges are resolved by a very simple mechanic: the trainer picks which power their Pokémon uses and then rolls one 6-sided die to determine success or failure.

The stats for the Charmeleon Card Copyright 1999 Nintendo.

So far, it’s all basic stuff. Where the game excels as an introductory role playing game is how it teaches storytelling skills. At certain times during each adventure, the players are asked to describe both their actions and their surroundings. This kind of player engagement is a hallmark in narrative indie RPGs, and it is a great component of the Pokémon game.

I have personal experience playing this game and can testify to how great an introduction to the hobby it is. The first roleplaying game I played with my daughters History and Mystery. They were about six years old at the time and were, as they are now, huge fans of Pokémon. We played through the Pokémon Emergency! booklet and lamented that the game never got a sequel, but the seed for a passion for role playing games was planted and History, Mystery, and I have gone on to play Tails of Equestria: The My Little Pony Role Playing Game, HeroQuest, and Dungeons & Dragons. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be able to convince them to play the new Marvel Multiverse Role Playing Game this summer and after that, the sky is the limit!

Bill and Stan! have worked on a host of other games, but I wanted to highlight another licensed game that Stan! worked on. It’s another introductory role playing game based on a popular children’s IP. In this case, it’s based on the best selling series Warriors. The Warriors game is also well designed, and like Pokémon Jr. it didn’t get the attention it deserves. I’ll be touching on that game in a future entry in this series on strange licensed role playing games.