"Take a racing game, add a dash of Pokemon, stir not-so well. Serves 2 out of 10."

It saddens me that Nintendo thinks they can churn out horrible Pokemon spin-offs and have people buy them. It saddens me more that they're probably right.

Pokemon Dash deviants from the traditional Pokemon RPG format that fans of the series actually want, and instead presents us with a racing game. Not a kart racing game, though, an on foot racing game. The basic goal of the game is to race from point A to point B across a series of about five different obstacles, such as a lava. That's it. That's the entire game. When I bought this game from Walmart on the spur of the moment decision, the incompetent Walmart employee (because all Walmart employees are) dropped the game on the floor. Since DS games could in nice sturdy cases, I didn't care, but after playing the game I have to wonder if being dropped on the floor damaged the cartridge in a way that removed the actual game, leaving me only with a simple little racing minigame.

Pokemon Dash quite possibly has the least story of any game ever. Tetris had a better story than this. There's no reason WHY you're racing, or why you're controlling Pikachu and no other Pokemon, or why you have access to hot air balloons. The opening cutscene shows Pikachu running towards you, followed by a “PIKA PIKA PIKACHU”. And that's the story. I know that other Pokemon games aren't going to be made into books any time soon, but this is just degrading.

So the gameplay must be good, right? Surely all games with no story have excellent gameplay. Well, no. Pokemon Dash could accurately be described as “all the excitement of holding one direction on the D-Pad, but with hand cramps.” Your goal is to get from start to finish, while tagging a number of checkpoints along the way, in the correct order. Breaking this up will be the balloon segments, where you must locate a balloon item, take to the skies, and search frantically for your next goal, then plummet from beyond the clouds and land, SMACK, on the pavement. Repeat this until you're tired of the game. Seriously, that's all there is. Sure, there are a few neat tracks, but it's still the same basic concept, and the basic concept is terrible.

It doesn't help that the game controls horribly. Remember in first grade art class, when you thought you were avant garde by drawing “a black panther in a black forest at midnight”, which lead to you rubbing your black crayon back on forth across the paper, until it was whittled down to a nub? That's how this game controls. Move your stylus to the right, pick it up from the touch pad, move it back to the start, set it down, and move it to the right again. Repeat a couple hundred times, then start going up instead. To deploy a balloon, once you have the item, move your stylus from top to bottom of a bar on the side of the screen. Why you can't just push a button, I have no idea. I really cannot think of a worse way to control a game.

In most “kooky” racing games, you are provided with a plethora of items with which to sabotage your opponents. Not in Dash. Besides the balloons, your only items are an assortment of barriers that allow you to run at full speed over tough terrain or cross dangerous terrain. Wow. I'd forgive this if you were given a decent choice of racers, but you only get one. There are, what, 390-some Pokemon, and you're stuck with possibly the worst out of all of them, the electric rat called Pikachu. Joy. The opponents are always the same Pokemon as well, which goes to show that this game has nothing to do with Pokemon, really. You could replace the Pokemon with brightly colored frogs and it would be fundamentally the same.

The sad thing is that this game relies on possibly the most violent rubberband AI I've ever seen. If you pull into the lead, your opponents will not only suddenly catch up to you, they'll rocket ahead of you on later tracks and reach the finish line, leaving you in the dust. And if you think the racers in the F-Zero series were violent, you haven't seen anything yet. The enemy Pokemon in this game are as evil as the hounds of hell, and will go so far as to go out of their way to push you into lava or some other hazard.

I can't even say this game has good graphics or sound. The graphics look like those of games on the PSOne, at best. Everything is so blurry that you can only really differentiate between grass and sand by the color. The sound, too, is awful, something I can say has not been true of any other Pokemon game I've played before. Luckily you won't miss out of anything by turning your volume down to its lowest setting – AKA “off”.

There's not even any reason to rent this game. Because of the control scheme, you'll end up out $5 and with a messed up DS screen, hand cramps, or both. If you REALLY have to play this game, find someone else who has it and ask to try it on their DS.

No story, awful gameplay, depressingly bad controls, mind-blanking repetition, terrible sound, and below average graphics earn Pokemon Dash a bottom of the barrel two out of ten.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 11/28/05