quite a fun spin-off of the main Pokémon series. The sprites look amazing, even better than the mainline games, but it suffers from "first in the series" syndrome, there are some incredibly hard catches (Salamance drove me insane) due to not yet having implemented the "fill up bar" mechanic that is found in later installments. The story is passable (though it made me giggle a little with some of the writing, which is rare from pokemon games) and even though the game boils down to just spinning circles in your DS screen, it still finds cool ways to innovate on that single mechanic with the various assists.
Overall, I had quite a lot of with the game, my main issues are the repetitiveness that surges after a while due to the game being still very simple , the plot not being as explored as it could've been and the mechanics not aging the best.
Still , if anyone is interested, I really recommned trying these spin offs! Maybe don't start with this one, but if you do, have patience and go with the mindset that some parts will feel pretty outdated.

I really enjoy this game and would play more if I wasn't concerned about destroying my phone screen and stylus.

It's repetitive but I find the core mechanic so engaging that it really doesn't matter and it does a good job of scattering secrets across the map which makes it thrilling to stumble on a random Venusaur in a cave.

Good game, keen to play the sequels sometime

was gonna play the sequel when apple finally let emulators onto the app store, but i decided to try the first one instead.

- the core concept is solid, but the fun just isn’t there
- partner assists that would spawn under the line (grass for example) felt useless
- tedious boss fights. charizard in particular made me put the game down
- story and characters are paper thin

there is something to this though. hoping my nostalgia for the sequel isn’t misplaced!

It's not even nostalgia kicking in here, they had a really good idea for a game and ran with it. It's a game purposefully designed for a touchscreen, and it's a lot of fun. While the gameplay is just drawing circles at most, they actually give you a wide range of fun mechanics to help you out during that game. It's definitely not fleshed out as much as it could be, but they were def in their experimental bag w this one. The fact that pokemon can just help you draw circles better is cool and makes you want to collect more mons.

They need to make this a mobile game. If someone from nintendo reads this, you need to make a mobile gacha game based around the pokemon ranger core mechanic. You will make millions. I'll send a check when I see the game announcement.