Pokemon Go is a phenomenon. I hesitate to write ‘was’ because, despite not having the cultural impact that swept the world back in summer ‘16, it’s still earning billions of dollars a year from a committed playerbase. It’s the biggest mobile game in the world, grossing more revenue than Grand Theft Auto 5 and closing in on Fortnite. But it wasn’t Pokemon’s first augmented reality game.
Pokemon Go is based on Niantic’s more niche AR game, Ingress. However, Nintendo had already tested the waters of augmented reality with its flagship franchise on the Nintendo DS. Unfortunately, thanks to the company’s anti-consumer and anti-preservation decision to shut down the eShop, you soon won’t be able to buy Pokemon Dream Radar ever again.
I can already hear you quote Jeremy Clarkson to me. “Oh no! Anyway…” You may not lament the loss of a niche Pokemon spin-off that wasn’t ever great, but it’s a problem. Dream Radar is an AR game that uses the 3DS’ camera and gyro sensor to project clouds onto the world around you, which you can tap to encounter Pokemon. It’s pretty basic and there is no story at all, but it was innovative for its time and a core part of Pokemon history.
The game introduced Professor Burnet, who you may remember from Pokemon Sun & Moon where she’s married to Professor Kukui. She’s not a character of great importance, but she doesn’t deserve to be cast out into the void of the Interdream Zone forever.
Pokemon Dream Radar is also the game that introduced the Therian Formes of Tornadus, Thundurus, and Landorus. If you don’t own Dream Radar already and wanted to legitimately get those formes in Pokemon Black 2 & White 2 after next week, tough luck. You can never get them. The only way to get the Reveal Glass, which changes their formes at will, is by taking Therian Forme Landorus to the Abundant Shrine. And if you can’t transfer a Therian Forme Landorus to Black 2 & White 2 in the first place, you’ll find yourself in a bit of a pickle.
Even if you can confidently say that you’ll never play Gen 5 again, you should care about this. First of all, play Gen 5 again. It’s great. Secondly, Dream Radar is one of hundreds of games that are being erased from existence next week. Nintendo closing the eShop ensures that players will never be able to buy eShop-only games on the 3DS and Wii U ever again. The developers who worked to create these games have swathes of their CVs wiped from existence, and future generations will not be able to access these games at all.
With developers working on remakes because old games are being rendered unplayable on modern hardware and other games simply being lost as eShops shut down, game preservation is looking more bleak than ever. While you may be okay with not ever playing Pokemon Dream Radar again, what if the same happened for Mario 64, a game that heralded in 3D platformers and inspired a generation of classics? What if you could never play Breath of the Wild again? I know I’m dealing in hypotheticals here, but preserving game history is important, even for the likes of Dream Radar or Trozei. Not many people will lament the loss of Pokemon Candy Crush, but someone might. And it’s not fair to say that someone will never be able to play it again.
Game history is important, and yet preservation seems to be the last thing on companies’ minds at the moment. Maybe The Pokemon Company will try to sell us New Pokemon Dream Radar in a couple of years and it has profit in mind. Maybe it just doesn’t care. But it should. The fewer avenues there are to access games legally, the more players will turn to piracy as a form of preservation, especially when there are no other ways to buy the game.
If you want to play Dream Radar ever again, if you want to experience Pokemon’s pre-Go AR experiment, or if you want Therian Formes in Black 2 & White 2, now’s the time to buy. After next week, you won’t be able to.