Pocket Card Jockey Staff Credits

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - No one else is doing it...

Once upon a time, GAME FREAK released a quirky, small game (and a free demo that's still available and transfers your progress to the full game) on the Nintendo 3DS eShop called Pocket Card Jockey. Quite frankly, KoopaTV has been the best place to get information on Pocket Card Jockey because it's just been ignored in most other places. See KoopaTV's article on Pocket Card Jockey's game mechanics here and an article on Pocket Card Jockey's time-attack records here.

As for those other places, even something as basic as the Pocket Card Jockey staff credits is... currently not posted anywhere on the Internet. It's not on Giant Bomb. It's not on the Internet Gaming Database. It's not on Metacritic/GameFAQs. MobyGames doesn't have the credits either. Those sites (besides MobyGames) all have designated pages on their sites for where the credits would go... but those pages have no content on them. (Metacritic and Giant Bomb do still have advertisements, however.)

There's a current controversy going on now with GAME FREAK and how they staff their projects, with some misguided armchair game producers believing that GAME FREAK is somehow prioritising (from a resource standpoint) the team that works on non-Pokémon projects over the Pokémon team. That's just wrong, but since no one's posted the credits for games that team has made, like Pocket Card Jockey, no one really knows what's right. Just look at the dislike bar on Little Town Hero's September Nintendo Direct trailer. (And all the negative comments due to Pokémon fans.)

KoopaTV is going to change that. Here are the full credits to Pocket Card Jockey:

You need to get a gold medal in every G1 race to unlock the staff credits.
That's REALLY difficult. Must be why no one's posted the credits yet.

Presented by GAME FREAK...

POCKET CARD JOCKEY STAFF CREDITS

DIRECTOR

Masao Taya

PLANNING

Go Ichinose

Masao Taya

Toshihiro Obata

PROGRAMMING

Masao Taya

Toshihiro Obata

Yu Mutou

HORSE DESIGN

Nakayu

Kumiko Ito

Masumi Sugiyama

Etsuko Yamamoto

HUMAN DESIGN

Kenkichi Toyama

GRAPHICS

Kenkichi Toyama

Kumiko Ito

Masumi Sugiyama

Masato Misaki

Kouyousha Ltd.

Etsuko Yamamoto

UK Nakagawa

SOUND

Go Ichinose

LEVEL DESIGN

Go Ichinose

Toshihiro Obata

Masato Misaki

SCRIPT

Masao Taya

LOCALIZATION

Flyhigh Works Co., Ltd

Seigai Kou

Toshie Somiya

Nintendo of America Localization

Rich Amtower

Tim O'Leary

Audrey Drake

Raymond Elliget

NCL Localization Coordinator

Megumi Masumoto

SPECIAL THANKS

Fontworks Inc.

Shigeki Morimoto

Koji Nishino

Hironobu Yoshida

Teruyuki Shimoyamada

Reiko Tanoue

Hitomi Sato

Toshinobu Matsumiya

Minako Adachi

Futoshi Kajita

Masafumi Nukita

Natsumi Inoue

Hisanao Suzuki

Koji Kawada

Akira Nakamura

Emi Endo

Yu Sunaga

Yu Narisada

Kasumi Sasaki

Takao Unno

Teiko Sasaki

Yoshio Tajiri

Kenji Tominaga

ADVISER

Ken Sugimori

PRODUCER

Tetsuya Watanabe

GENERAL PRODUCER

Junichi Masuda

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

Satoshi Tajiri

You'll notice that the majority of the people in the credits are in the Special Thanks section, and it's never obvious what contribution those folks had on the product, if any. They're pretty much all from GAME FREAK, though, from the Pokémon side.

Some notes about the company names there, because GAME FREAK is clearly capable of outsourcing for their smaller team. (They're clearly doing that for Little Town Hero and its soundtrack, composed by Toby Fox of Undertale fame.)

Kouyousha Ltd. is... a Japanese company that I'm not really sure what they do. However, according to their website and Google Translate, they...

“We received orders for data conversion and high-definition work for the smartphone version, UI design for the smartphone version, and production of implementation data. We have received orders for the design work of new horses and event horses and the production of mounting data.” 

Who knows what data was exactly being converted, but I guess user interface design qualifies as GRAPHICS.

(I should note that before coming to the 3DS, Pocket Card Jockey was a Japanese smartphone game called Solitiba.)

Flyhigh Works, which contrary to the credits spells their CEO's name as Seigei Kou, works with a lot of Nintendo Switch indies to bring their games to Asian markets, among other duties. Localisation is obviously not something GAME FREAK probably wants to handle internally, and there's a lot of Nintendo people in the credits that helped with that.

Fontworks Inc. has a collection of Japanese fonts that GAME FREAK probably licensed for Pocket Card Jockey. Most recently, Square Enix used them for Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age. Nintendo used them for Miitomo.

If you remove the people outside of GAME FREAK and everyone in and below the SPECIAL THANKS section, there are ten unique people who worked on Pocket Card Jockey. There were a lot of roles done by the same person.

Far from a massive team sucking all of GAME FREAK's resources and budgets. Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield's problems have nothing to do with GAME FREAK's other projects.

...Though I'm of the opinion that, depending on the project, GAME FREAK really does have much more potential expanding their brand recognition past Pokémon. Pocket Card Jockey is better than every mainline Pokémon RPG. You should try it and buy it on the Nintendo 3DS eShop. 


Ludwig provided the different websites’ Pocket Card Jockey pages as archived web pages because he gets the feeling they might take the credits information off KoopaTV and put it on their own sites, and he wants everyone to know that KoopaTV is the FIRST place on the Internet with this information. And the game has been out for three years now but doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. That needs to change sometime soon. The video version of the credits reel isn't on YouTube, but it's also completely uninteresting since it's the names in white text on a black background with the horse on the top screen endlessly galloping.


GAME FREAK is very inconsistent on the name of the director for this game.