A look at what Nintendo has done with free-to-play.

For some time now, Nintendo has been trying to find a way to harness the power of free-to-play to their platforms. With the relative success of their other free-to-play titles such titles as Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball and Steel Diver: Sub Wars, it is no wonder that the Big N continues to want to experiment with this model with their other franchises. One of the more recent examples, and one that is perhaps the most interesting, involves one of Nintendo’s most popular series to date: Pokémon.

In February, Nintendo released Pokémon Shuffle, a free-to-play tile-matching puzzle game featuring characters from the Pokémon universe. The game is divided into individual stages, each with a new Pokémon that you must “capture.” In order to complete the stage, the player must earn a certain number of points without exceeding the allotted number of moves. The less moves you use to reach the goal, the higher the chance you will capture the new Pokémon.

The first few stages are relatively easy, with little to no effort required to complete the bulk of them. But as the game progresses, things get a little bit more complicated. The levels get harder. The allotted number of moves decreases. The simple act of scoring enough points becomes much more difficult than before. Now, to win, the player must strategically swap tiles and set up potential combination chains, which is essential to pass many of the game’s latter stages. This level of depth is not found in very many other games of this type, which is why I grew fond of Pokémon Shuffle rather quickly.

But then the free-to-play elements creep in, and I cannot help but feel disappointed that they exist. Every time you play a stage, you lose a heart. Out of hearts? Well, you have to wait thirty minutes until you can get another one, or shell out some real cash to speed up the process. Every once in a while, you will accumulate diamonds that allow you to purchase power-ups, which you can use to make a difficult stage easier. Out of diamonds? Do not worry, because you can use real cash to purchase more! As a purist, I am not one to use these power-ups, much less spend actual money on them. As the stage grow more difficult, however, I find myself frustrated that such a system is in place, because I know that it exists only to extort money out of me, a perfect example of a free-to-play model gone pay-to-win.

In April, Nintendo released yet another free-to-play Pokémon game, this one titled Pokémon Rumble World. The fourth entry into the Pokémon Rumble series, players take control of a toy Pokémon and guide it across the kingdom, completing missions by destroying enemy Pokémon along the way a la Gauntlet. Each zone houses different Pokémon, each of which can be collected when you defeat them. It is, then, the perfect game to scratch that collectionist itch of yours without breaking the bank.

Yet, as with Pokémon Shuffle, Pokémon Rumble World fails to keep my interest for long without pushing in-app purchases on me. After completing each stage, you must wait for a certain amount of time before you can replay that stage again (just in case you did not catch every Pokémon you saw the first time around). In the earlier stages, the recharge time is relatively short, limited to just a few minutes. But as you play more and more levels, the recharge time increases, to the point where you might be waiting an hour just to play the level again. You can also purchase new levels too if you do not want to wait, but that, of course, costs real world money.

It may seem as if I am describing both of these free-to-play experiments as failures, but I assure you that they are not. Perhaps what frustrates me the most is that both of these games could have been great standalone titles, marred only by in-app purchases and annoying pay walls. But maybe that is the point. These are not your typical cheap free-to-play experiences that you might find on your smartphone. No, these are experiences that I found myself going back to from time to time because I actually enjoyed them, at least until I could not move on without paying.

With that in mind, then, perhaps Pokémon Shuffle and Pokémon Rumble World are, in fact, successes. Not financial successes (they might have been, but Nintendo has not released the numbers), but successful in that it gave me, as a 3DS owner, a new reason to pick up my 3DS. And it worked. For the weeks following the release of Pokémon Shuffle, my 3DS saw a renaissance. I started to bring it to me to class every day again (something I had not done since I completed all the StreetPass puzzles a few months ago). I began to open up my 3DS multiple times a day just to check in to see if I had time to finish a stage or two on the go. I was using my 3DS more often than I had since Smash Bros. came out last October.

The same happened to me with Pokémon Rumble World.

My initial thought when playing these games was that Nintendo had failed, that they had embraced the wrong side of free-to-play and that they were screwing up yet again, doing everything that they shouldn’t be doing with the model. And maybe in five years’ time, I’ll be right. But for the time being, I will be happily embracing Nintendo’s free-to-play endeavors, because at the end of the day, I am more than happy to try out something that is free, especially if the game is good. And as far as Nintendo games go, well, they are pretty darn good if you ask me.

So what about you? How do you feel about Nintendo’s free-to-play endeavors? Do you enjoy Pokémon Shuffle or Pokémon Rumble World? Let me know in the comments below!