8

Thursday, May 13, 2021
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

I wasn’t particularly into “New 

Pokémon Snap” for the first couple of 
hours. I’ve been a fan of the franchise 
since I got my first Pokémon card on 
the playground in first grade, but the 
spinoff games have historically been 
hit-or-miss. Although Game Freak’s 
most recent release “Pokémon Mystery 
Dungeon: Rescue Team DX” left me 
utterly disappointed, I had very high 
hopes for “New Pokémon Snap”. 
These hopes led to me to unrealistic 
expectations, and upon starting the 
game it felt repetitive to a fault and 
overall 
unremarkable. 
However, 

about two and a half hours in, I had 
a realization — this game was never 
meant to be a grand undertaking, it was 
meant to be simple and relaxing. As 
soon as I let go and let myself enjoy the 
simplicity, I was positively hooked.

“New Pokémon Snap” is the 

sequel to 1999’s “Pokémon Snap” for 
Nintendo 64. The game follows the 

same formula as its predecessor: take 
pictures of Pokémon while riding 
along a set path, this time in one of the 
wide range of natural environments 

in the all-new Lental region. Once the 
player returns to the appropriately 
named Laboratory of Ecological and 
Natural Sciences (L.E.N.S.), biological 
researcher Professor Mirror judges 

the photos based on a four star system 
that’s organized by the quality of the 
Pokémon’s pose, placement, and size, 
among other categories. These photos 

are then saved in the “Photodex,” 
documenting each Pokémon in the 
game. The goals are simply to take 
photos that qualify for each of the star 
categories and to capture the “Illumina 

phenomenon,” which causes plants 
and Pokémon to glow.

There’s a story to pull the player 

through the game, which boils down 
to taking photos that provide Professor 
Mirror with more information on the 
phenomenon he’s investigating. With 
help from the professor’s assistant, Rita, 
and a few tools — including Fluffruits, 
a melody player, and a scanner — the 
player can gain enough trust with 
Pokémon to raise their research level 
and discover exciting new Pokémon 
behaviors.

If you’re looking for an intense and 

complex adventure, this isn’t that 
game, but it’s still well worth your 
time. “New Pokémon Snap’’ feels like 
taking a vacation without an itinerary: 
just sit back, enjoy the ride, and 
observe cute Pokémon in their natural 
habitats. In a world that typically 
presents its creatures as having some 
sort of purpose or benefit to humans, 
it’s a breath of fresh air to watch an 
ecosystem do nothing but exist. There’s 
no doubt that it’s repetitive, but it’s 
a joyful escape that’s surprisingly 

addicting. It also happens to have 
the most impressive graphics of any 
Pokémon game to date, so each picture 
can more accurately represent Lental 
in all its bright, colorful glory.

Due in part to the quality graphics, 

the game is also perfect social media 
bait. Sharing photos is explicitly 
encouraged both in-game and in 
reality. Online features include a built 
in hub to share your own photos and 
view your friends’. Pictures can also 
be enhanced with the game’s editing 
capabilities, which allow the player to 
retake photos or add filters and stickers. 
Players can view their total Photodex 
score and see how their photography 
skills stack up against their friends and 
players worldwide. With the ability to 
save photos onto the Nintendo Switch’s 
album and then share them on social 
media, “New Pokémon Snap” is sure to 
explode online. The entire world needs 
to see Bouffalant in a flower crown, 
and I now have the power to grant that 
wish. 

Dodie’s ‘Build a Problem’ celebrates where she’s been and where 

she’s going

The day before the release of her 

debut album Build a Problem, British 
singer-songwriter Dodie marked the 
10 year anniversary of her YouTube 
channel with a cover of ABBA’s “Thank 
You For the Music.” Over the last 
decade, Dodie has established herself 
as a steady presence on the platform, 
an exceedingly rare kind of content 
creator who never left to focus on other 
ventures, avoided controversy and 
grew up right alongside her audience. 
Those who have followed her over the 
years know about her mental health 
struggles, who her friends are and 
have already celebrated the release of 
multiple EPs with her.

Her work as a musician and an 

online creator is linked in a way that 
her contemporaries (for example, 
Troye Sivan, who also found fame 
through YouTube but stopped posting 
vlogs leading up to the release of his 
debut album Blue Neighborhood) 
have actively rejected. This is part 
of what makes her celebration of 10 
years on YouTube so notable. Unlike 
the shallow, cash-grabbing music of 
YouTubers and influencers like Jake 
Paul and Addison Rae, Dodie’s music 

has always been honest and grounded. 
The core of her fan base — those who 
have been around since her breakout 
song “Absolutely Smitten” or even 
longer — is loyal and was earned slowly 
but organically. Her songs often touch 
on dependency in love, her deep-
seated feelings of inadequacy, and her 
struggles with fame and her mental 
health — topics she’s never shied away 
from talking about online.

Build a Problem, Dodie’s first full-

length album, comes after 10 years and 
three EPs, and it manages to feel both 
like a culmination of everything she’s 
done so far and the very beginning of 
something big.

References to her previous work 

are scattered through the album and 
act both as easter eggs for her fans and 
reflections of her growth as an artist. 
Three songs on her new album — “Air 
So Sweet,” “Cool Girl” and “Rainbow” 
— had been previously released on 
her YouTube channel as one-take, 
unpolished videos in which she’s 
accompanied by little more than her 
ukulele.

The clearest reference and the 

thing that makes the album feel most 
like Dodie’s work coming full circle 
is “When,” a reworked version of the 
track which closed Intertwined. In 
the song, Dodie confesses to living life 

with one foot in the present and one 
in the past, “busy begging the past to 
stay.” The lyrics in the new version 
are unchanged, but Build a Problem’s 
“When” is noticeably fuller. The 
single piano, violin and cello which 
accompanied Dodie in the original 
version are replaced by a thirteen-piece 
orchestra that creates a rich, cresting, 
almost Disney-like wall of sound 
behind her voice, which has clearly 
matured since 2016.

Dodie’s intelligence as a songwriter 

and musician is emphasized by the 
changes she has made. The new 
orchestrations make the song feel fuller 
and effectively underscore the longing 
at the core of the song. The presence 
of “When” on both her debut EP and 
debut album feels like the loveliest of 
bookends, marking the beginning of 
an era and then ushering it out lovingly. 
Even though Dodie tells us that 
she’s still stuck in the past, the clear 
development in her skill as a producer 
from one “When” to another shows us 
how much she continues to grow.

Many of the album’s musical 

elements will also feel familiar to fans. 
Dodie, who through her career has 
fallen into and then elevated the “white 
girl with a ukulele” trope, employs a 
baritone ukulele as a centerpiece of 
multiple songs. It’s a trademark of hers, 

but it never feels quirky or gimmicky; 
instead, it purposefully creates a 
throughline in the album. However, 
where her YouTube videos tend to 
stick to a more minimal sound, she’s 
joined by a full set of strings on multiple 
tracks, a well-placed cello and clarinet 
in “Special Girl” and heavy percussion 
in “Boys Like You” that adds to the 
groove of the album.

Thematically, Build a Problem is rife 

with uncertainty and regret. “Hate 
Myself” and “Sorry” are the most 
obvious examples. The former is an 
upbeat, one-sided conversation with 

a partner who is prone to going silent 
during arguments, and the latter feels 
like it takes place in the immediate 
aftermath of a brutal falling out in which 
both parties have said things they wish 
they could take back. Still, there are 
pockets of hopefulness. “Rainbow” 
is an acknowledgment of Dodie’s 
bisexuality and her frustration with 
the label and public misunderstanding 
of it, but also a recognition of belonging 
to the queer community and refusal to 
change who she is.

 KATRINA STEBBINS

Daily Arts Writer

“New Pokemon Snap” is the Summer Vacation I Didn’t Know I Needed

HARPER KLOTZ

Daily Arts Writer

Courtesy of Dodie

Courtesy of Nintendo

Read more at michigandaily.com

Read more at michigandaily.com