YMMV / Detective Pikachu Returns

• Captain Obvious Reveal: "Memories of the Bamboo Forest" is dedicated to spelling out what fans probably expected ever since the first game: Harry's mind is inside of Pikachu, courtesy of Mewtwo's intervention after they got into a car accident. Pikachu and Mewtwo's conversation at the end was regarding separating them once again, though Harry chose not to until he could be sure Pikachu wouldn't be lost as a result. It doesn't help that this is the same as the movie adaptation, making it even more obvious an outcome.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Charles Merloch's entire plan was to synchronize his mind into Deoxys's mind to basically become a god. Come Pokémon Scarlet and Violet (which is implied to be set a few years in the future), this can be casually achieved at Blueberry Academy.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: A criticism of the game is that it has three fewer chapters than its predecessor, despite being on stronger hardware than the Nintendo 3DS that the original game was bound to.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Some influence has been taken from the movie adaptation, specifically the late-story plot developments of "Harry's mind is put inside Pikachu's body by Mewtwo because Harry is critically wounded", "someone in the government is actually the main villain", and "the Big Bad steals the body of a powerful Psychic-type Legendary". As a result, many viewers of the movie can wind up disappointed: even if the plan for the sequel was to feature all of this story all along, that the movie released four years earlier and had all the same major plot developments in a Compressed Adaptation with less Filler makes Returns not only feel inferior for using the story more poorly, but also less surprising for being a retread, which hurts the game when its genre (Mystery Fiction) is based on twists and discovery.
• Narm:
  • The expressions outside of cutscenes suffer greatly from this, glaringly more so when it's Rachel venting off her anger, as her default expression is a smiling one, so it looks unnatural to see her look angry, only to go back to smiling for no good reason.
  • Near the end of the first chapter, Detective Pikachu passes out while eating macaroni and cheese, only for the game to cut to a flashback where Harry Goodman tells Irene he wants a divorce. The extreme contrast from eating mac n' cheese to the line "I want a divorce", in addition to the line's delivery, just make it come across as hilarious.
• Obvious Judas: It turns out that the mastermind of the entire game's plot is Charles Merloch. This fact becomes progressively more obvious throughout the story, since Merloch makes appearances all throughout the story yet never bothers to be friendly nor explain much of who he is. One moment especially stands out for how suspicious Merloch is, which happens to be right in his introduction scene: suddenly plucking a bit of Pikachu's fur without bothering to to wait for his or Tim's consent, which immediately screams that he has some ulterior motive involving Pikachu.
• Sequelitis: Due to being just as easy as the original game, rehashing many elements of the movie including the main Plot Twist, and its shorter length, many people consider this game inferior to its predecessor.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Sophia & Irene Goodman show up for the first time, but they only ever serve to be spoken to at the start of each chapter without ever becoming integral to the plot. With the fact that Sophia also can understand Pikachu's words, the potential to get her more involved is not exploited.
  • Emilia Christie was all but stated to be a potential love interest for Tim, given the Ship Tease hints Tim had for her. Not only is she Demoted to Extra, but she's entirely replaced with Rachel Myers, moving all the Ship Tease to her (though Tim is never shown infatuated for her).
• Uncertain Audience: A very common criticism is that while the game is very easy to play and the cases themselves are clearly meant to be able to be solved by young children, the story contains elements fairly dark for the franchise that is more in line of a pre-teen and up game, making the game feel very disjointed and not fully appealing to one age group.

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