Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness

"Pokemon Colosseum 1.5: Minimal Effort to the XTREME"

So, as you can hopefully tell from the title, this game is basically a rehash of Colosseum rereleased to the unsuspecting public. It's really too bad, because I was hoping for a bit more from this game. Oh well...

Story: 8/10

One of the highlights of the game. Pokemon games aren't especially known for their enthralling stories, which mostly consist of "If you don't want to become a Pokemon Master, you won't be cool" as its main basis. XD actually manages to vary from this crippling trait, as there are a few plot twists here and there that are pretty well thought out (especially at the end). Five years after the story of Colosseum, CIPHER is once again ravaging the countryside with their renegade shadow Pokemon, and it's up to you, the generic hero, to stop them. Though that doesn't seem particularly interesting in itself, the story doesn't stay on that track forever. It's not on par with the Final Fantasy series, clearly, but it's definitely a step in the right direction for the Pokemon series.

Graphics: 7/10

Almost identical to Colosseum. The only really new thing they added are effects for attacks, which look great. That's really the only major difference, however. I really wish they had at least tried to improve the graphics here or there.

Gameplay: 4/10

Sigh... this is where the game really falls short. The gameplay is okay in itself, but it's really the fact that it's almost a carbon copy of what you do in Colosseum, with just a few differences. First off, most of the towns/cities from Colosseum reappear in XD, such as Agate, Phenac, Pyrite, Realgam Tower, and Mt. Battle. Usually this would be all right, but the fact of the matter is is that XD doesn't offer many new places to go to either. In fact, most of the action happens in those five locales. This game really could've used a change of scenery but unfortunately the game developers didn't deliver in that category.

The whole shadow Pokemon concept is mainly the same old thing. You still have to catch a lot of them through the same tedious method of whittling down their health and throwing some balls at 'em, and praying to God they don't destroy your team with their uncharacteristically overpowered attacks. (The developers decided to make all shadow attacks super effective against all non-shadow pokemon, which becomes a big problem when the shadow pokemon later in the game have extremely powerful shadow attacks.) Purifying them is a lot easier, now, though: the developers realized that walking around with the shadow Pokemon took waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long and added nothing to the overall feel of the game, so they added in the Purify Chamber. This thing I like: I won't go into the specifics of it, but it basically allows you to quickly purify up to nine shadow pokemon at a time. This is one added gameplay element that I definitely appreciate.

The other gameplay element they added is the ability to catch wild pokemon, which sounds great on paper. What doesn't sound so good is that you can only catch nine different wild pokemon. Why they would restrict this new element so heavily is beyond me. Maybe they wanted the amount of new pokemon you can catch to add up to 100. That's cute and all, but I really would've appreciated more in this category.

Anyway, there really isn't much else that's new. The battle mechanics are identical to Colosseum: almost everything is a double battle, and everything else from every other Pokemon game applies. I never understood why they made everything in this game a double battle. Maybe they decided to compensate for the lack of them in the RS series. Either way, they're innovative and fun for the first few hours but after that they become mundane. The game is extremely battle-intensive, relying on them to fill up your gameplay hours. The battles themselves take too long, as they're convoluted with cutscenes that show the appearance of a new pokemon, or show your opponent standing around, or show the graphic for an attack. These things really bog down on the battles in general, to the point where I'm switching my TV to football while I continually press the A button to hopefully choose the right attacks.

Overall, the gameplay isn't so bad in itself, it's just far too similar to Colosseum to earn a higher grade.

Sound: 5/10

This is similar to the problem I had with gameplay. Simply put, they recycled almost all of the music from Colosseum and reused it for this game. There are a few new tunes here and there, but they were so sparse that they didn't really add anything. Plus the fact that some of the new music is downright awful: the battle theme for a wild pokemon battle sounds like chase music from an old Western movie.

Replay Value: 3/10

Well, the game takes about 25 hours on average to complete. I didn't feel like replaying the game after I beat it the first time... so... y'know. Not much here either.

Overall: 5/10

This would've been a much better game if the developers had taken the time to vary it from Colosseum at least a little. But they didn't. Minimal effort to the xtreme.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 10/17/05