See also the franchise-wide Hilarious in Hindsight page here.
- Alternate Character Interpretation: Is the voice recognition poorly programmed, or does the problem just stem from Pikachu being disobedient like you'd expect a child to be?
- Awesome Music: The whole soundtrack applies, but especially the opening theme.
- And the credits! Pikachu sings to you! Pikachu sings to you!!
- Brutal Bonus Level: In addition to the "shadow" version of the Pokemon Quiz minigame in your room, you can also unlock an even harder variant. The game will only show you the Pokemon's shadow for a split second (though you thankfully get a countdown beforehand to ready yourself), and you have to correctly guess what shadow you just saw.
- Critic-Proof: Hey You, Pikachu! didn't do so well with the critics, having a paltry 57 aggregate score on Metacritic, and it's a common target to riff on and bash nowadays. Even a lot of older Pokémon fans didn't like it. However, it sold nearly 2 million copies anyway due to being a game that released near the height of the Pokémon craze and having a genuinely appealing concept.
- Fridge Brilliance:
- After Oak makes you say goodbye, the second-to-last comment in the credits is "Hey, Pikachu is going home." Guess who's there when you get home.
- The aforementioned Alternate Character Interpretation, which could at least serve as a plausible Hand Wave for Pikachu's inconsistent responses to your commands. After all, even real animals (especially ones that aren't as intelligent as the smartest dog breeds) don't always follow their masters' commands.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: Check the main page.
- It's Short, So It Sucks!: Besides the severe voice recognition and Pikachu AI issues, the other big criticism of this game is that there just really isn't a whole lot to do. There are only a handful of different mission types, a scant few locations with little to do in them, and a very limited selection of Pokémon for Pikachu to interact with (not counting what you can catch when fishing, there are only 20 Pokémon in this game of the 151 + Togepi that existed at the time). Then for what is available, the fishing has decent replayability as you try to break your records and achieve the world records, but for the rest it can get repetitive fast.
- Scrappy Mechanic: Ultimately what the microphone controls boil down to, especially with the hit or miss microphone it comes packaged with. Although knowing the keywords (as mentioned in the above trope) helps, Pikachu can still have a hard time understanding you.
- In the Quiz minigame in particular, Pikachu seems to have some sort of "learning" mechanic, in which the more you play the game with him the better he is at answering the questions. That said, if it's your first time playing expect Pikachu to answer questions incorrectly a LOT more often, even with perfect pronunciation.
- As stated just below, Pikachu's Discovery Days is considered the weakest point of the game due to the fixed camera controls onto Pikachu limiting the player on what they can do. This is especially true for Springleaf Fields during this part as Pikachu would commonly wave to a Charmander high on a cliff and the camera always pans to the Charmander.
- Slow-Paced Beginning: With limited camera control and no ability to hold items, Pikachu's Discovery Days is easily the weakest part of the game - it opens up nicely after that.
- Sweet Dreams Fuel: The game as a whole. It all hinges on how much you can take a game whose entire premise is romping around with a kid Pikachu. Perhaps reaches the zenith during the credits: Pikachu's singing can either make a grown man blurt out a big "d'awwwww!" or suffer a heart attack.
- That One Level:
- The piñata. Trying to navigate Pikachu around the Banana Peels to the piñata is borderline impossible, since you can only tell him simple directions with no magnitude (i.e. you can only tell him things like "left" or "right", not "slightly left" or "hard right"). Making matters worse is the fact that all it takes is one slip on a peel to get Pikachu to Rage Quit. In the Japanese version you had to break watermelons, which was just as hard.
- Ochre Woods can be this if your voice isn't crystal clear—if Pikachu asks to send a needed ingredient to Bulbasaur but misunderstands your "Yes", he'll assume "No" and eat it instead, and there's no promise that that wasn't the only one of that ingredient in the level. On the other side of the coin, he could misunderstand a "No" as "Yes" and send an ingredient that ends up tainting the food (and you can only send four ingredients before Bulbasaur calls you back, so if he does this twice with unlisted ingredients, you're getting Mystery Stew). Discovery Days is the worst in this regard because you can't collect ingredients yourself to hand to Pikachu later while he does his own thing. Also, there's always a fourth ingredient that the game doesn't tell younote , and some of the default ingredients can be hard to find.
- That One Sidequest: The Pokemon Quiz game you can play at home. Not that anyone remotely familiar with the Gen 1 pokemon wouldn't be able to identify any of the pokemon, but much of the time the voice recognition just won't recognize you saying the name of the pokemon, so often it'll say your answer was wrong even if you're a clear speaker, and it can be pretty much impossible for the game to recognize you getting more than a few of the ten questions right. Fortunately it's just a little side game that you get nothing for winning and you can completely ignore it, but the impossibility of it just because of faulty voice recognition is still frustrating to those that attempt it, and it's the go-to example people bring up to show how bad the voice recognition is.
- Not to mention that one of the answers for the Shadow Quiz is “Jigglypuff from above”, referencing an episode from the animation. Cue stunned silence and then anger.
