Magikarp Jump: A study of Form vs Function

About a week ago, I noticed that just about everyone in my Twitter feed was head-over-heels fora new Nintendo mobile game called Magikarp Jump. People were posting pictures of their Pokemon, complimenting their ‘mon on jobs well done or raging about random events in the game. A close friend of mine even suggested that I pick it up at once and, with high hopes, I downloaded it.

The premise of the game is simple: have your Magikarp jump higher than other trainers’ Magikarp and take a grand tour through the game’s imaginary Magikarp-only league. You get your Magikarp to jump higher by feeding it and training it. Food for your Pokemon is drip-fed to you over time, and you get one “Training” session per half hour. Once your Magikarp reaches its limit, you get a better one, and start again.

Now, every part of this system appeals to me. I play a lot of clicker games and idle games in my spare time. I loved the hell out of Cookie Clicker and its infinite bootleg variations. I’ve spent hours playing Trimps and other games that require nothing but waiting. I’ve even dabbled in an idling MMO (yes, that’s a thing). I have, on occasion, referred to my PC as a skinner box. And yet somehow Magikarp Jump failed to reel me in.

Sometimes I play games and I don’t fully understand why I like or dislike them right away; sometimes I need to have a long meditation on an experience before I understand my feelings on it. Magikarp Jump is not one such game. In a few minutes of playtime, I was already growing weary of the game, and for good reason: Magikarp Jump is so slow-paced it makes me wonder if the devs actually want you to play it.

Every single action in the game is an ordeal. I can almost hear Nintendo laughing at me.

“Want to feed your Magikarp all the food you’ve collected in the past hour? Sure, you can select it all at once, then you have to wait an agonizingly long time as you watch your idiot fish amble across the screen eating each piece of food one bite at a time. Want to skip that animation? Too bad. Want to do something else while he’s taking tiny bites for the next 30 seconds? You can’t, we’ve locked every button down. Want to put the phone down and do something else? Hahaha, you feeble-minded fool, if you lock your phone we’ll pause everything exactly where it is. No skipping this!”

And then there’s the league battles. Oh my sweet Lord, those League battles. They’re your only reliable way to earn coins, the game’s basic currency, and they are the whole point of the game. Your end goal is to get all 8 league badges and become the master Magikarp trainer. Each match takes roughly 30 seconds or so to complete. You have no input during this time except to hit “next” a few times, and hope that your Magikarp is better than the other guy’s. You can’t see any of your opponent’s information, so it’s a blind guess every time. If you fail, you can’t challenge the league for another hour and a half. I get that this is a mobile game, and I’m supposed to say “oh well” and put the game in my pocket, but a wait that long makes me want to throw my phone across the room. Oh, and don’t bother reading any of the flavor text for each match, it’s entirely inane. I stopped reading it after a match or two and I’m confident I’m not missing any “plot” points.

Just like league battles, training sessions are more or less unskippable cutscenes. The game randomly decides on a training type, like chopping down trees or hitting a sandbag, and then you watch your Magikarp do it for a few seconds. You can tap the screen and see it happen faster, but it has no impact on the results. Then, after some more arduous loading screens, you’re deposited back into your little Magikarp pond. Unless, that is, you get a random event afterwards.

Some of these random events just give you money. That’s always nice. Others give you an option to take a risky move or leave the risk behind. Saying no to these events will always result in gained experience, while saying yes might get you something that, with another few minutes of playing, you’d have anyways… or you lose all your experience. There’s very few reasons to spring for the risky options. Some of the riskier ones even outright steal your Magikarp, invalidating hours of your time. You ever have a document crash on you only to realize you hadn’t saved in hours? Yeah, it feels like that.

I really tried to like this game, I really did, but in the end the execution is so flawed, and even basic actions take so long that even the payoff of winning a league battle is reduced down to nil. Clickers and Idlers are supposed to be addictive, not painful. There needs to be a payoff of something bigger lurking on the horizon. The only thing lurking on Magikarp Jump‘s horizon is the uninstall button.