Pokémon Ranger
Remember the early days of the Nintendo DS, when Nintendo was really into games that used the stylus and touchscreen in cool and inventive ways? It was in that heady era that Hal Labs brought us 2006’s Pokémon Ranger, a game in which you draw circles around pocket monsters to capture them. There’s really only so much you can do with a stylus.
Instead of healing your Pokémon at a Pokémon center, you recharge your stylus’ capture power. Teaming up with different monster types gives your stylus different powers, which makes rapidly drawing circles slightly more fun and dynamic than simply doing it on a piece of paper.
Not only is Pokémon Ranger much more fun than it sounds, it actually spawned a pair of sequels, Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia and Pokémon Ranger: Guardian Signs, making it one of the more prolific handheld Pokémon spinoffs.
