Spinoff Spotlight: Pokémon Café (Re)Mix
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Art by in the hills.
Introduction
Anyone who's followed the history of Pokémon will know that the franchise is hardly a stranger to spinoffs. Like other famous titles under Nintendo's banner, the series has transcended genres, platforms, and even company borders as the franchise adapted to a new paradigm of international releases and trends in gaming. Whether this is good or bad for the core game development is a separate discussion, but looking at the games getting churned out in the late 2010s, it's clear that spinoffs have taken off in increasingly varied and experimental directions. I mean, let's face it: ten years ago, nobody could have expected Pokémon to have its own tooth-brushing app.
Perhaps one of the most cross-platform initiatives of 2020 was a curious little offering by the name of Pokémon Café Mix (later rebranded as ReMix after a major update in 2021) - not only has this game made a splash for itself for merchandising, it's even had a few tie-ins with actual Pokémon cafés! Developed by Genius Sonority, Café Mix is yet another notch in the company's list of spinoff involvements, including another free-to-play release in Pokémon Shuffle, aka "Pokémon meets Candy Crush". While clearly unable to hold a candle to the worldwide phenomenon of GO, Shuffle plodded on steadily since its 2015 debut, covering seven generations of Pokémon until it was quietly put on life support and its in-game events set to loop indefinitely. So how does Café ReMix hold up amidst the other Pokémon spinoffs available today?
Background, Gameplay and Mechanics
The story behind Café ReMix is about as simple as it gets: after visiting a café that's run and frequented by humans and Pokémon, you and your Eevee partner are inspired to take the reins at a café of your own. Joined by the ever-helpful Leah, you resolve to make your Pokémon café the best café ever! (...For Pokémon, that is, because Leah's the only human that exists in the game past the opening cutscene.) And how do you go about doing this? By serving up tasty treat after treat to Pokémon who visit your café until they join up, of course!
As is the case with most free-to-play games, Café ReMix uses an energy system - but unlike that of Candy Crush or Gardenscapes, playing a level uses up 1 out of 5 Energy, win or lose. Following the update to ReMix, energy recharges every 15 minutes instead of the genre-typical 30, and sending energy among teammates has also been implemented.
The gameplay in Café ReMix primarily takes place on levels filled with Pokémon and ingredient icons that fall from above, representing a variety of Pokémon-themed dishes and beverages. By dragging their finger across the screen and linking up chains of identical Pokémon icons, players complete levels by reaching score requirements, thus serving up tasty treats to hungry customers and getting paid in acorns. The longer the chain, the higher your score, and chains spawn megaphones that can be tapped to blow up nearby icons. Linking up chains also adds to a Pokémon's skill meter, allowing players to use up a move to release a Skill that removes icons and hazards. Use up a move? Yes, just like most free-to-play puzzle games, every level comes with a limited number of moves, so combos and chains must be made carefully! ReMix doesn't simply stop there either; upon clearing out a level's basic requirements and netting a star, the game board will be refreshed with a new layout and set of objectives, allowing players to gun for additional stars by clearing these out too.
Getting stars is important for Café ReMix, as stars not only affect how many acorns you get for completion, but also the affection of your Pokémon customers. Filling up a Pokémon's Heart meter will impress them so much they'll join your café staff, and each Pokémon boasts its own unique skill and menu specialty. Rowlet, for instance, releases a row of leaves and specializes in Drinks, allowing it to score more points on Drinks-based stages, while Meowth releases a square-sized slash pattern and scores more on Entreés. As they're used in levels, staff members will slowly level up and unlock various perks, including score increases, faster Skill generation, and bonus effects when interacting with hazards such as immediately destroying them via a nearby combo without using a Skill. As an option, players can also train their Pokémon directly by grinding on specific Training levels, exchanging the ability to earn acorns for giving your staff a steadier experience boost.
Levelling up Pokémon also serves another important function - as your team levels up, the Pokémon themselves become inspired to dream up new recipes, ranging from the Buneary Nut Frappe to the Burnt-Caramel Vulpix Sundae. Each recipe comes with its own level requirements, which lock the player into playing a level that lets them unlock said recipe, after which new Pokémon become available as customers as they're lured by the new offerings. Progress also adds a variety of in-game hazards that have to be removed for level completion, typically themed towards new offerings. For example, the Fluffy Eevee Pancakes will cause whipped cream icons to start spawning on stages, and they require three adjacent combos to break down or a skill or megaphone to remove, while the Dugtrio Sandwich Trio levels may include tomatoes that have to be shifted into baskets. Sounds confusing? Luckily, every stage has its own "recommended Pokémon" based on the expected hazards and food type, which removes the need for guesswork when it comes to bringing a Pokémon to a level, and ReMix even includes the ability to preview a stage so you always know what you're up against.
Adding more staff members will also unlock visual upgrades to the Café, opening up different wings and decorations as the restaurant grows in size. Once all Main Orders have been finished, players can enter "Master Café Mode", where they can play through randomly selected stages for weekly rewards. It might take newer players some time before they get to that though, considering that ReMix started out with 300 Main Orders with another 400 waiting in the wings - and factoring in the levels from the original Café Mix, which were also ported over as a separate mode, there are almost two thousand levels in the game!
Development Cycle
Following its release on June 11th 2020 for Android devices (iOS and Nintendo Switch on June 17th), Pokémon Café Mix chugged steadily along with additional content. Within a month following the launch date, Genius Sonority regularly released new levels for both Main and Master Café Modes, up to a tune of 75 levels in total every two weeks - as well as new Pokémon to hire, new food items to cook (and additional hazards to deal with), and further café expansions with the help of some friendly wandering Timburr. The initial few weeks also saw the company take an active role in balancing the game based on player feedback; the difficulty of over a hundred initial stages was toned down, and the Munchlax icon was fixed to "weigh" as much as other icons after players found its "heavier" characteristic interfered with the game's physics to an infuriating degree. Along with other Quality of Life updates, it became clear that Genius Sonority had a better understanding of free-to-play game development after cutting their teeth with Pokémon Shuffle.
Eventually, the game started incorporating events into its schedule, releasing event-exclusive Pokémon guests such as the Galar starters, which would show up for two weeks to be recruited before leaving. This was followed up with Team Events, in which players form groups of up to 30 and collectively try to clear as many levels as they can to fill larger requirement meters for hungry guests such as Snorlax and Galarian Slowpoke as well as some seasonally themed customers such as Mimikyu and Christmas Lucario! August 2020 also saw a one-time implementation of "Leah's Cheer Rush" event, where clearing levels in succession without failure would prompt Leah to start adding bonus moves and megaphones to make solving stages much easier.
Beyond this, however, the game hadn't pushed the boundaries of events all that much, and the same events started looping by January 2021. All things considered, this might not have been an entirely bad thing; as more and more stages were released to players, it became increasingly difficult for newcomers to pick up and stay invested in the game, due in no small part to the sheer number of levels they had to clear.
The random nature of Pokémon customers queuing up also made it much harder to recruit and train new releases, simply because of the increased pool of Pokémon guests that could appear. By the late game it would take cycling through hundreds of Master Café Mode levels just to recruit the newer Pokémon such as Emolga and Whimsicott, and training them became a much larger chore due to their larger experience meters compared to the early releases of Snubbull and Squirtle. By February 2021, new Pokémon were eventually also phased out from newer stages, although this didn't stop the developers from adding new hazards to later stages, despite not including additional menu offerings to match.
Recognizing the need to revitalize a stagnating game, Genius Sonority officially announced that Café Mix would be revamped as Café ReMix, with a limited beta testing done in Japan before the game was finally updated on October 27th 2021. With this update, players were thrust into a treat-filled offering, with events themed to Mew, Charizard, and a new Eevee outfit almost right off the bat, along with the ability to switch outfits for Pokémon and unlock recipes based on player preference. More importantly, significant beneficial updates were also added, such as the ability to re-roll customers from a range of Pokémon instead of risking being stuck at serving the same customer, and being able to finish stages at different levels of completion, meaning that players would always have more options to finish the game without ever feeling soft-locked.
Pros and Cons: One Year Looking Back
The Pros
Right off the bat, what stands out for Café ReMix is its visuals. Rendered with an aesthetic that wouldn't look out of place in a European storybook, it's clear that the art direction by Hiroyuki Yamamoto was meant to endear the game to potential players, be it through Leah and her ever-growing team of Pokémon staff and customers, or the scrumptiously social media-worthy Pokémon dishes on offer. Little touches like idle animations of wait staff falling asleep over time showcase just how much attention the developers have paid to making Café Mix a treat to play, and certainly a far cry from the utilitarian approach that Shuffle had.
Visuals alone don't make a game, though, and the good news is that the gameplay is largely solid. The core mechanic of making linear combos with your finger is simple enough, and the added complexity of hazards that are introduced over time goes a long way in extending the game's shelf life, making it an experience that's easy to pick up, yet more tricky and complex to master than initially meets the eye. Certainly, there are elements of luck when it comes to negotiating some of the hazards - gravity and collision-based ones such as tomatoes, basil and milk shakers being the main culprits - but unlike Shuffle and other similar Bejeweled-style games, you don't feel like you fail stages because the game didn't spawn the correct icons for you.
The Cons
This isn't to say that the game is without its faults, which are unfortunately exacerbated by its premise of a random queue of Pokémon. Prior to the release of new stages, it was entirely possible to come across levels that all but mandate a specific Pokémon you haven't hired yet, purely because that Pokémon didn't visit the café often enough. Early adopters of the game will remember Master Café Mode Order 43, which forced most players to pay their way through due to a lack of Meowth on their team, as a result of how late that Pokémon was introduced during initial release. While the developers were careful to avoid this occurrence by spacing out new Main Order Pokémon and levels that require them, the range of guests available to players by the late game made it even harder to train up specific staff members, if you hadn't already been actively playing Master Orders purely to level up specific teammates; Bewear, Emolga, and Whimsicott were prime problem examples. Sure, you could technically pay large amounts of acorns to get them during Daily invites, but that just ends up killing player momentum and brings up the issue of "paying to win" that free-to-play games often suffer from.
Beyond the variety of levels, it also become clear that the game had stagnated on its visuals, which is a huge shame considering that the art was the game's main attention grabber to start with. On top of the game not introducing new food items to match the additional challenges and hazards, the game limited its cosmetic changes to a one-time makeover for the café lobby during Hallowe'en and a Christmas outfit for Lucario. Being able to modify the decorations of your café is something that most "business ownership sim" games do come with as a selling point, and could easily have turned into a potential source of revenue for the developers, so it feels like a very missed opportunity to keep players invested and engaged.
The ReMix
Did ReMix fix all these problems after its release? The good news is that ReMix started introducing new Pokémon and costumes at launch. The downside is that these events can be extremely time- and effort-intensive, as tends to be the case for freely downloadable games. While being able to play once every 15 minutes mitigates this somewhat, it simply gives the developers opportunities to lock objectives behind tougher mission requirements, with the option to pay for a seasonal subscription that increases the points accrued towards said requirements. Other events such as Sweets Eevee are entirely based around spending huge amounts of acorns as objectives, putting more pressure on new players to speed through levels - and this is made all the worse by the developers' baffling decision to remove acorn rewards from Master Café Mode levels, meaning players won't be able to farm acorns after finishing the available Main Stage orders.
It wouldn't be accurate to say that ReMix leaves new players in the dust, though. The updates made to ReMix have also made the game more forgiving for less experienced newcomers: being able to finish a stage at a range of completion levels, or the option to train Pokémon so they can handle tougher stages, means that players always have a variety of options to ensure they don't stay stuck, although the current issue with inability to farm acorns is a significant restraint.
The months that followed have not made it easier for new players, with the introduction of shiny Pokémon and Pelipper's delivery service, and it's here that the inevitable predatory practices of mobile game development trends have kicked in. Shiny Pokémon need very little introduction for players familiar with the franchise: these specimens show up on very rare occasion and have to be befriended by clearing levels (assuming that they're not given away in events), while Pelipper's delivery service allows players to send Pelipper out for 23 hours and bring back kitchen notes for upgrading Pokémon in exchange, or even recruit exclusive staff members such as Victini and Pachirisu. The delivery service essentially adds gacha elements to Café ReMix for a very, very slim chance of catching them all, with the odds of recruiting Victini or Pachirisu having a 0.45 to 0.75% chance of occurring every time Pelipper is sent out. While you can pay acorns to rush Pelipper's delivery or send it out on bonus runs, at 3,000 acorns per express delivery and 30,000 acorns for 11 express runs, it's not hard to see how players will be pressured to pay through the nose for a chance at getting otherwise inaccessible recruits. With all that said, given Shuffle's and Café Mix's tendency to loop events over time, odds are good that events will get to a point where they're released on autopilot with progress saved in between, so it should be possible for players to eventually get everything available for free.
Final Thoughts
Pokémon Café ReMix might be one of the least "Pokémon" spinoffs the franchise has spawned in its lifetime. There's no combat system that the series was based on, there's very limited lore beyond the animations that play during Pokémon skills, and there's simply not a lot of species to collect from the vast bestiary that the series has built up over the years. But if you look beyond that and take Pokémon Café ReMix for what it is, you'll find yourself enthralled by a wholesome, low-stakes experience of serving adorable Pokémon with adorable food that you can take at your own pace, on your own terms, and without burning a hole in your pocket.
So what're you waiting for? Get out there, serve some cute customers, and bon appetit!
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