Hey You, Pikachu!
A virtual pet Pokémon game for the Nintendo 64 where you befriend a wild Pikachu. Using Professor Oak's new human-to-Pokémon translation device, the Poké Helper, you guide Pikachu as he goes on adventures and plays with his Pokémon friends. Most of the game play consists of saying short phrases to Pikachu via a microphone.
It is also made of the cotton candy from your childhood, and began a small subseries of Pokémon games geared for small children that involve Pikachu running around acting all cute: it was succeeded by Pokémon Channel and Poke Park Wii.
Tropes used in Hey You, Pikachu! include:
- An Interior Designer Is You: Stuff you collect in the levels can be brought back home into the room and back garden. The player doesn't really decide what goes where, but you can play with Pikachu using them.
- A Boy and His X
- Animal Talk: You need the Poké Helper (or the megaphone) to communicate with Pikachu, though he can talk to other Pokémon regardless of species.
- Banana Peel: Pikachu can slip on these in the pinata game (or anytime he's careless after eating a banana).
- Berserk Button: Pikachu hates being called a rat.
- Cultural Translation: The cupcake that Pikachu steals from you was originally an onigiri.
- Dueling Games: The U.S. version of the game was released around the same time as the Dreamcast's voice controlled pet simulator, Seaman. That's right folks, this example of Dueling Games includes the sugar coated adventures of a child raising a Pikachu... and a game where the plural form of the title is a naughty word.
- Defeat Means Friendship: Averted. You befriend Pikachu without battles or Poké Balls.
- Dumb Blonde: A non-human example but he is yellow and he does need the user's help to do pretty much anything.
- Extreme Omnivore: Pikachu again. Especially annoying when he grabs the megaphone out of your hands and eats it only to wince with a disgusted "Pii-yuck!". He has so little knowledge of what's edible that it's amazing he can survive in the wild.
- Fishing Minigame: And you can win posters to hang on your wall if you do well enough!
- Getting Crap Past the Radar: There's an object called a 'yellow ball' that Pikachu grabs out of nowhere and flings at the user... Only it's more brown than yellow and surrounded by stink clouds. Pikapoo, anyone?
- Guide Dang It: Some of Bulbasaur's cooking ingredients. To be specific, the game told you three ingredients necessary for the recipe. The Guide Dang It? There were always FOUR ingredients, but the game would never tell you that. On the plus side, the fourth can be anything edible, but some go better in some recipes than others, making for another Guide Dang It.
- Also, some of the Pokémon names are pronounced a bit... oddly.
- Hammerspace: Where Pikachu gets his pad of paper and drawing utensils.
- Harmless Electrocution: Hitting you with a thunderbolt is Pikachu's way of playing tag.
- Improbable Accessory Effect: Some of the uses for the megaphone make perfect sense. You can use it to call Pikachu when he steals the Poké Helper, call lost Poliwag over to you, or scare away the Haunter. On the other hand, you can also use its speech bubbles to... knock fruit out of trees?[1]
- Lightning Can Do Anything: Including turning corn on the cob into popcorn -- complete with a carton.
- Loyal Animal Companion
- No Export for You: This took a ridiculously long time (two years!) to get to the US, so guess what that meant for everywhere else...
- Releases in already English-speaking countries such as the UK and Australia were probably scrapped because it would be hard to program the voice recognition system to understand those accents.
- There's also the issue of creating versions for other languages, too.
- No Name Given: The user is only ever spoken to in second person.
- You can't name the Pikachu, so you have to refer to him by his species.
- Rainbow Speak: Words Pikachu understands are in red. The word "Pikachu" itself is yellow.
- Ridiculously Cute Critter: Pikachu -- and if you tell him so, he blushes making himself even more adorable.
- And Togepi!
- And Caterpie!
- And Charmander!
- And everyone!
- Sugar Bowl: The game takes place in an idyllic forest full of cheerful, frolicking Pokémon.
- Take That: Pikachu gets angry if you mention the Playstation or Sega.
- Universal Translator: The Poké Helper seems to be one, at least in terms of human to Pikachu. And unlike Dr. Kaminko's translator, it actually works.
- Video Game Caring Potential: Giving Pikachu compliments, getting Bulbasaur's picnic ingredients right, buying fun stuff at the shop...
- Video Game Cruelty Potential
- You can bully the poor little guy by encouraging him to eat garbage, yelling in his ears with a megaphone, and calling him "electric rat".
- Also, there's a graphics glitch where you can make it look like a sword is going through Pikachu.
- During the mission where you babysit for Butterfree, you can wait for the Caterpie to get hungry and just let them suffer.
- You can yell extremely vulgar things at Pikachu... through a megaphone.