I’m not proud of the confession I’m about to make, but here goes: I’m still playing Pokemon TCG Pocket. Despite being entirely aware that it’s built to take my money and not provide all that much value to my life otherwise, I redownloaded the app a few days after deleting it and have been checking in daily since. At dinner yesterday, I got a notification that I could open a new booster pack and I did so at the table. It’s not looking good for me.
It’s probably a good thing, then, that I have so many gripes with the game’s UI, some of which annoy me to the point of wanting to fling my phone into the sea. Granted, I have a very low threshold for annoyance, but this is a Pokemon app that’s made absurd amounts of money. Surely it can afford to implement a better UI than this.
Pressing Complete All Missions Does Not Complete All Missions
Pokemon TCG Pocket has loads of little tasks for you to do, each of which is tied to a different page. There are daily missions, which reward you for opening packs, battling, and Wonder Picking. There are Dex missions for reaching certain numbers of PokeDex completion. There are Deck missions, for building specific decks, Premium missions if you have the premium battle pass, and separate Event pages for different Events.
When you finish missions, you get to mark them as complete and collect your rewards. There’s a handy Complete All button on the missions menu that you can use to mark all your completed missions in a single tap, but you’ll have to use it for each page where you have completed missions. It also won’t collect your Daily Mission rewards for you, meaning if you forget to press yet another icon, you’ll have to go back into the menu to do it. This is basic user design. It’s very annoying, and I have to deal with it nearly every day.
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Pokemon TCG Pocket Is Not Friendly To My Completionist Pathology
Pokemon TCG Pocket is the Pokemon card game for collectors, but it’s still not giving me what I need.
Why Is Spending Pack Points This Hard?
Pack Points are the bane of my existence. Firstly, you can only access them by opening the booster pack menu, which is counterintuitive since you won’t be opening a booster pack. Secondly, unlike nearly every other menu in the game, it doesn’t have an obvious quick scroll that allows you to quickly skip to the Pokemon type you’re looking for – you have to start scrolling, find the tiny scroll bar on the side, and try quick scrolling from there. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Fat thumbs? Tough luck.
Worse, you have to scroll, because there’s no search function, nor is there any way to filter the cards by type, cost, or whether you’ve wishlisted them. You can’t reorganise them in any way. You can’t go straight to Pack Points by tapping on an undiscovered card in your collection. It’s just two-thumbed scrolling and misery.
Major Features Are Hidden
Oh, right, the wishlist. Did you know the app had a wishlist? I didn’t until Kotaku reported on it, which is incredibly annoying. Why wasn’t there a little pop-up telling me this existed?
The Wishlist is mostly useful when you’re Wonder Picking. Actually, that’s its only use right now. You have to go to your PokeDex, unhide the cards you haven’t found yet by tapping an unlabelled toggle slider on the top (why is this unlabelled?!), tap on a gap in your collection (these are also only labelled with numbers, so you might have to look up the number of the card you’re looking for), and then click a tiny heart in the top right corner to add it to your wishlist.
From then on, you’ll see that wishlisted card marked with an easy-to-miss pink heart when it appears in Wonder Picks, which will help you at least distinguish which Wonder Picks to spend your wonder stamina on. It will not show up in Pack Points. You also can’t mass select cards you haven’t found yet to add them to your Wishlist. It’s only useful in one use case, when it could be useful in so many. It makes me want to tear my hair out.
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Pokemon Pocket Is Filling The Sticker-Album Shaped Hole In My Life
I know they’re cards, but they feel more like stickers to me.
Battling Friends Is A Chore
You’re on your lunch break. Your friend is also on their lunch break. You decide to do a quick battle. You can’t go to your friends list and start a match from there, though that seems like it would be the most intuitive way to play. No, you have to go to the battle menu, tap on versus, tap on Private Match, create a password, leave the app to send that password to your friend, and wait for them to accept. Mewtwo wept.
Let Me Edit And Create Decks From The Battle Menu
This is mostly a problem when you’re just starting out. As you’re getting into Solo Battles for the first time, the game might recommend that you use certain Pokemon types against certain decks. Unfortunately, you can’t create decks from the battle menu, nor can you edit them – you have to go to a totally different page to do that. This is a relatively small gripe, all things considered, but I had to move between these pages so many times.
Fast Forward Doesn’t Fast Forward Enough
The fast forward button on pack opening animations only speeds up one animation, so you have to keep tapping it to get through the whole process. It barely saves any time. Defeats the purpose of having a fast forward button, really.
Experience the fun of collecting Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) cards with Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, an upcoming game for iOS and Android devices from Creatures Inc., the original developers of the Pokémon TCG, and DeNA Co., Ltd.
In this game, you will be able to open two booster packs every day at no cost. You can collect digital cards featuring nostalgic artwork from the past as well as brand-new cards that are exclusive to Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket.
Be on the lookout for new “immersive cards,” which will make you feel as though you’ve leapt into the world of the card’s illustration.