"Gather around the fireplace, my children; let me tell you a story"

A long time ago, jokes were intended to be funny. People would make them in a way so that they'd crack a laugh, instead of sinking to releasing stuff like Pokemon Dash. Ah, but how those days are gone. We look at some jokes that are made, and shake our heads at the stupidity. Pokemon Dash is a pretty good way to take that off of you, and I don't see how Nintendo can beat the PSP if they release garbage like this.

Looking at it from a perspective knowing nothing about it, Pokemon Dash has little to no point. You have Pikachu appearing right at the beginning, just getting in your face right at the front of the screen. Then you can continue from there and find a Grand Prix to do, but you've gotta do the training first. Alright, that's no problem, but I can only say that there is absolutely no story, no intro, and no beginning to Pokemon Dash whatsoever. For whatever reason, you can control Pikachu and only Pikachu, running around the fields and rocketing through the air, entirely pointlessly. That's how the game begins to work.

Your training immediately sets foot, running across a road to reach various checkpoints. This is done with the stylus, as you would probably immediately guess. So you basically have to keep up with a bunch of other slow, unwieldy Pokemon, rubbing a screen with a stylus and risking damage to it. So yeah, your immediate training makes you run through a bunch of checkpoints, and gets you bored with the game pretty quickly. At least in a game like Super Smash Bros. Melee, which I found tiring around the end, you can at least have tons of fun from the very beginning! At least it starts with a bit of quality, and even carries it on!

Pokemon Dash does nothing like that. So you finish with that one race, already bored and waiting for something a bit more fun to happen. Some more incredibly tedious training races, until it gets up to the hot balloons. This game might have actually merited a 2/10 if they hadn't had the balloons here, because it's the single most idiotic idea I've ever heard of. Basically, you get into a hot air balloon with no idea where the next checkpoint is. You have to follow some arrows, meanwhile in the middle of the sky so you have no idea where anything is. And you can only hope that where you land, you'll find a checkpoint near you. As the game goes on, this is ALL that it's about. Isn't that just plain sad?

That's not the only problem. If you pause the game for whatever reason (possibly damaging your screen, that might very well happen), you have the choice of leaving the race. You see, the Grand Prix has five cups, each made out of five courses. Let's say you're on the fourth or fifth of these fives, and just want to get on with it. And then you accidentally choose to quit the race. There is NO confirmation whatsoever; as soon as you press that, you're IMMEDIATELY out of the race, and you have to go through the entire five races of that cup all over again. That's another very cruel joke,
Nintendo.

After you get finished with the whole Grand Prix, odds are you'll never want to see it again, and your only ending is seeing the credits. Bah, told ya there was no plot anywhere. But then you get to go through the entire Grand Prix again, on a higher difficulty, but may the heavens have mercy on you if you want to do that. Besides the Grand Prix, you can go through the very useless time trials, or you can build extra courses if you have copies of various GBA Pokemon games (none of which I currently own), but I hear that all of them are very boring and mundane. Screw that, it fits in with everything else well.

Challenge (or lack thereof) in Pokemon Dash is mainly consisting of two things: WANTING to complete the game, and finding all the hot air balloon checkpoints, being as many as there are. Besides that, there is absolutely no challenge to be found in this game whatsoever. If you know where all the checkpoints are, you can come in first place on any course. What's more, once you get finished with a cup, you don't even need to be in first place to advance... you can be in third place and go on, making it a pure breeze to go through normal mode. Hell, even the harder modes aren't really that tough. Go figure.

Graphics here are your typical 64-bit graphics, but they're not even that good to begin with. Everything from grass, to water, to the roads... everything just looks so fuzzy. And from the hot air balloons, it's even worse. You can pretty much look at something and occasionally not even be able to tell what it is -- the only thing that will allow you to make out what it is, is the color. Grass is green and water is blue, right? And you can't forget the very beginning -- seeing Pikachu fly through the air. Not exactly something I take joy in seeing much.

As far as music goes, it's the typical thing you'd expect from a Pokemon game. Just plain cheery music everywhere, and when it's not doing that, it's very hard to remember any of it. Sound effects are also either very hard to notice, or just plain bad. On one hand, it'll be drowned out by you groaning in anger or by smashing the screen with your stylus, or you'll be hearing the annoying sound of Pikachu running through the grass. Is that really what running through grass is supposed to sound like? And even though you're Pikachu throughout the whole game, you'll be VERY annoyed with screams of "PIKA, PIKA!" during the entire course of the game.

There is absolutely nothing good that I can pick off my hand and put on Pokemon Dash. Everything about it is terrible: there is no plot to speak of; the gameplay is boring, laughable, and downright insipid; the graphics seems to just be there to be there; and the music and sound effects are instantly forgettable, and if you can remember them, you'll remember them by how bad they were. Absolutely everything here blows, and as such it doesn't even deserve a single point out of the ten available. Save your $30 for something which has at least a remote bit of quality.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 08/02/05