Poll: What’s The Best Pokémon Spin-Off Game? Rate Your Favourites For Our Upcoming Ranking

Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo Life
21st March 2024 is the 25th anniversary of Pokémon Snap for the N64, a great little on-rails shoot ’em up from HAL Laboratory where you attempt to catch ’em all in your camera lens. It’s available to play on Switch with a Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack subscription, and we’d thoroughly recommend checking it out if you haven’t in the past 25 years.

Pokémon Snap got a long-awaited sequel in 2021 — the imaginatively titled New Pokémon Snap — and together they represent two fan-favourite spin-offs from the monolithic Pokémon series.

But this anniversary got us thinking: What is the best Pokémon spin-off? Well, that’s the question we’re posing today, soliciting ratings from your good selves in preparation for the full reveal in our time-honoured, reader-ranked tradition.

Image: Nintendo Life
Below you’ll find a list of every non-mainline Pokémon game released in the West for console or mobile. Registered Nintendo Life readers can click on the ones they’ve played and assign a score from 1-10. All those ratings will then be assembled into a ranked list of every Pokémon spin-off, which we’ll publish in due course.

What do we mean by ‘spin-off’? Essentially, any game featuring Pokémon that’s not part of the mainline series. We’ve taken the liberty of excluding some ‘utility’ software and Dex apps (having Pokémon HOME in there amongst the games would be weird), and you won’t see PC, arcade, or Pokémon Mini games either.

Otherwise, you should find every Pokémon spin-off in the list below.

Rate each Pokémon spin-off you’ve played:
Click the stars below to rate out of 10 each non-mainline Pokémon game you’ve played on Nintendo systems:

Thanks for rating your favourites. We’ll be revealing the results soon, but remember: much like our platform Top 50s, the list will be fluid, so even if you miss out on voting before the results are revealed, you can still influence the ranking after publication. Let us know in the comments if you think there’s something missing.