Pokemon Colosseum

"You can't catch them all, you can barely catch any!"

Pokemon Colosseum
At first, I was pretty excited about pokemon being brought to the gamecube. It was ok, but not what I expected. Lots of the things that I loved about pokemon were gone, and we ended up with a pretty much generic bad RPG where you fight with monsters.

Gameplay 6/10
Catching pokemon isn't as simple as it used to be. There are no more wild battles. That's the first thing that ticked me off. You need to battle trainers and see if they have shadow pokemon you can steal. And once you catch them, that's not it. They're still shadow pokemon and you have to purify them by battling, using the “call” option when they're in hyper mode, and a lot of other things. Once their shadow bar hits the bottom, you have to travel to Agate Village, and go to Celebi Forest. Then you use the shrine's power and the pokemon becomes pure, and it's shadow rush attack and is replaced by an attack which usually isn't so great. A bonus to the gameplay is once you beat the game (Which may take a while) you can trade pokemon from GC to GBA. There are lots of pokemon in Colosseum that can't be found in Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, Fire Red, and Leaf Green but most of them you still can't catch. At least you can transfer the 3 legendary dogs, Entei, Raikou and Suicune to one of your GBA pokemon games. Be aware that they're very hard to catch and once you get them to low health, they kill themselves with shadow rush which causes recoil damage.

There aren't many sidequests. There are some, but they don't give that good of rewards. And you don't have to worry about checking each house in the town because there will be a boring NPC that has nothing to do with the story at all and just wastes your time by saying things that are really weird or obvious.

Story Mode 7/10
You steal a machine that lets you capture pokemon already owned by trainers, and you have to stop a criminal organization of people who turn pokemon evil with a special machine. You stop them by defeating all of their bosses.

Multiplayer 2/10
The multiplayer was pathetic. There's no more renting pokemon like you used to in Pokemon Stadium. To use multiplayer, you have to have a GBA, a pokemon game for GBA for each GBA, and a GBA-GC link cable. If you want to play with 4 people who don't have those, that may cost a lot of money. Plus the battles are unfair unless the levels of the pokemon in colosseum and the GBAs are the same or close.

Graphics 9/10
Pokemon look great, characters look good, the background is nice and pretty. The only bad part is the battle animations. Some of the attacks don't look right, and the pokemon never actually make physical contact. I think it would've been ok to actually show the pokemon hitting each other. The show is more aimed towards little kids and the pokemon make physical contact there. It doesn't really make that much sense.

Misc
You can't save anywhere you want to in this game. You have to find a pc which are usually in pokemon centers, or some odd spot in the middle of a secret base. Not being able to save right away is annoying, especially for those who always end up playing right before they have to leave to go some place, and their parents are yelling at you, but you don't want to just shut it off because you were fighting one of the really hard bosses that took you 15 tries to beat.

The pokedex is replaced with a PDA which you can get E-Mails and look at information about the shadow pokemon you've seen and captured. But still, you don't get any information about the pokemon you've captured.

Controls -/-
Same controls as usual in a pokemon game. If you've never played pokemon before, it doesn't take very long to learn them

Battle System 8/10
Hasn't really changed much at all. For people who have never played pokemon, it's turn-based and it pretty much has a generic RPG battle system with no simple attacks and just 4 moves. You learn new attacks, but you have to replace one of the 4 you already have. It gets annoying once you have a really good moveset. Pokemon have weaknesses. It helps to know who you're going against. If the other person has the pokemon types you're weak to, you're pretty much screwed. Most trainers only use one type of pokemon and when you're weak to their attacks it does A LOT more than it would normally do. And of course, if their moves keep hitting super-effectives on you, chances are, your moves are weak to them, so they do less than normal.

Replay Value 4/10
If you've read my other reviews, you know I don't like games that pretty much force you to play again to get all the weapons/secret items/monsters. There's no way you can get all of the pokemon in one playthrough. You'll have to go through it again to get all of the pokemon.

Buy or Rent: Buy
This game really isn't good if you just rent it. It's a long game, so if you really want to play it, you should just go ahead and buy it.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/28/05