The Best Spin-Off Pokemon Games After 25 Years - ComicBook.com

The mainline Pokemon games that started with Pokemon Red and Green 25 years ago today are undoubtedly the backbone of the franchise – the games the community waits to hear more about each generation – but there’s an entire ecosystem of spin-off games propping them up.

While the longevity and availability of these spin-off titles don’t always match that of the core Pokemon games, they’re often associated with many fans’ best memories of the Pokemon franchise.

It’s also hard not to have a favorite spin-off game considering how many of them there are.

These sorts of branching Pokemon games started picking up steam on the Nintendo 64 and the Game Boy family of devices first and have continued strong throughout the years in the form of virtual console games, apps, and proper spin-offs.

With so many to pick from, we took at look at The Pokemon Company’s collection of spin-off games on its 25th anniversary to highlight ones which stood out the most.

You can check out our picks from different Pokemon-minded members of the ComicBook.com team below, and be sure to share your favorites in the replies if you’ve got a spin-off Pokemon game that’s stuck with you over the years.

The spin-off was an inventive take on the wider Pokemon world, showing what the “average people” who weren’t traveling across the region battling in gyms did with their partner Pokemon.

While other Pokemon games do show some levels of Pokemon/human integration, Detective Pikachu is really the game that brought the Pokemon world to life, which is likely why movie producers opted to turn it into a movie.

Although the gameplay wasn’t too deep, I do think Detective Pikachu was one of the first games to really try to examine the Pokemon world and the humans who live it in a different way.

This was the first game that tried to explain what the use of psychic powers would look like to the unfamiliar eye, or just how dangerous (and wonderful) Pokemon are.

When talking about the best Pokemon spin-offs, it's impossible for me to not mention Pokemon Snap.

Snap was one of the first spin-offs of the series, and it's an important one, as it marked the first time Pokemon could be seen in a three-dimensional world.

Even though I wouldn’t call it my favorite Pokemon spin-off ever made, it’s one that I have a bizarre soft spot for and continue to think of warmly.

Pokemon has welcomed a number of excellent spin-off titles in its time, but none of them top Pokemon Stadium in my eyes.

Over the years, it seems the fandom has embraced Pokemon Stadium once again all thanks to its addictive mini games, and I can't blame it.

I still play these games on occasion with my fiance, and the game's start-up screen never fails to remind me of the joys Pokemon Stadium gave me as a kid.

There’s been no shortage of puzzle games based around popular franchises, and the Pokemon series has several of its own as far as the spin-off games go, but Pokemon Puzzle League was something special.

While most of these sorts of puzzle games are races against the clock and your own personal scores, Pokemon Puzzle League was able to implement the Pokemon formula in a way that made every match feel frantic and rewarding even if you were just playing against the AI.

Being a puzzle game at heart with a Pokemon reskin on top of that, the random nature of the falling Type-themed blocks made every challenge feel different from the one before it.

Because there was no previous knowledge of the Pokemon games needed to get started, the game was able to transcend generations so long as people could grasp its core block-matching concepts.

Considering how popular Pokemon apps are in addition to the console spin-offs, there are plenty of ways we can (and should) see Pokemon Puzzle League revived somehow.