"I CAUGHT ALL THE POKEMANS!!!!! Well, only 140, but..."

Pokémon is a franchise that has been around for ten years, and it hasn't done squat. It's added perks and gimmicks and timewasters galore, but aside from that, the game remains a simple, homely looking Game Boy game with the thought requirement of a rock. Pokémon Pearl and Diamond have been my addiction for the past few days, and not because it's an in-depth game that takes a lot of willpower to get through, but because it's probably the longest handheld game ever made. Aside from that, while simple, it just simply succeeds.

Succeeds at what, you may ask. It brings turn based RPG to a bunch of folks who bent under the “overwhelming” difficulty of Final Fantasy III, and dumbs it down to a nice long level grind. It's fun, but it's soon it just gets so irritatingly repetitive and boring and dull that you just can't take it any more. If you are sane in any way, any more than two hours at a time will just melt you: too much repetitiveness at once can cause danger to the brain.

Look past that, though, and what you have is a well designed RPG with loads of things to do and see. In fact, the game will probably last you around twenty hours with one playthrough (give or take about five hours, I took 25), and that's just beating the main bosses. Past that, there's the underground, there's the Pokedex catch-em-all fun, there's the legendary quests, there's just an endless amount of stuff to do. In fact, it's actually pretty crazy at times, especially when you throw in all the little things that they added to the series. So that's what Game Freak has been doing for the past two years.

The game is really less for the kiddies, too. It's a little harder, which is just what the series needed, and the crazy terrorist group Team Galactic is actually pretty crazy and heretic. The vocabulary is more sophisticated, and some of the story's subject material is much more focused and interesting than series past. It's just a little higher on the maturity scale, which is a good step. Plus, they finally trumped Silver and Gold, which are considered by many fans to be the best in the series.

Wait, hold on a minute. I'm praising a Nintendo DS game for being better than a Game Boy Color game. Well, it better be! In fact, there was no excuse for the poor quality of the GBA iterations as well, and it's about time somebody at Nintendo finally started moving some gears. Just because the game is Pokémon doesn't mean it gets a free sweep through the tubes, and there's plenty that it has to deal with. (Angry face times)

The graphics look good for the Nintendo DS for the most part. The buildings and 3D effects look nice and clean, and most of the time it all melds together fairly nicely. But then we get to battle, and what hits us is a Game Boy Color game, made bigger to meet the DS standard screen. After seeing Metroid Prime Hunters, Final Fantasy III, Mario 64, Mario Kart, et cetera et cetera, do full 3D, there's no reason why this game isn't getting the flack it deserves for having 2D playing fields that could occur on a much older system.

Sure the 3D buildings look nice, but they don't wow anybody; they look fine for a DS game. That's the problem with Game Freak: they always do the bare minimum. Sometimes, when it comes to RPG games, that's not enough, especially when half the gaming community is in love with you. That added to a few graphical glitches here or there (black bars on the side of the screen, poor 2D frame rate) all add up to an overshadowing question mark: what the heck happened here?!

I ask this also for the music. For some of the later sections in the game, the music is fantastic and brings the best out of Game Freak and their inkling of talent...if only it had been in the first half. Why should I have to wait for fourteen hours to get to the good stuff? What we have here is GBA melodies (which weren't that far removed from the GBC music in the first place) added with what the DS can do: percussion and bass. That's all that's added in this music, the rest is the usual MIDI junk from the series past; it's cheery, annoying fluff that really deserves to be turned off.

Annoying also applies to the sound effects, which are even worse. The monsters themselves have little "errtt" noises that sound like a broken amp, and most of them sound exactly alike. I'd like to see a little more than that, please. With what they created with the cartoon, you'd think they'd be able to pull off some comprehensible noise. Honestly, you really need to mute this game. (Angry face off)

But bah, it can be turned off, and it will be. The game has so much stuff to do you will be occupied with it for a good twenty-five hours, which is good for a game in this series. There's more if you want to see it, like the Underground and other such places that seem simple (and are) but can still take your portable gaming time away.

The game goes beyond the silly little presentational mishaps and is still as fun as (and might be considered to be the same thing as) the old Game Boy games. It pretty much brings new and old everything to make the best Pokémon game so far. That said, it just really doesn't add up to much, and people who already have most of the series really can't be pressed to get this one. It's still a fun, pleasing romp, just an old one.

What Pokémon should do next time around:

1) Limit the number to only 150 Pokémon, That's it, only that.

There are too many now. I will never catch 500 or whatever how many there are (493), and I don't want to try. I loved the originals because there are only 150, and that's just it. I didn't have to import and export and buy ever dumb spinoff in the series to get them all.

In the same tangent, let us catch them all in one game, or at least let us trade them over the internet. But that's a different bullet point.

2) Don't limit our internet fun.

I am sick and tired of friend codes and the losers that the game sticks me with. I know, Nintendo is scared because I might use their service to “touch the children” or something god-awful like that, but silly me, let me at least choose Pokémon I haven't seen before to trade. Or let me battle people that I don't know. PLEASE. What we have here is just plain boring.

I'm still waiting for the moment they give is the chance to catch Arceus through Wi-Fi. Now that Nintendo Power is out…what else to do with their promotional Pokemon? Plus, all those plates you found in the world? Those are all for Arceus. They have to let us have him. I have a Master Ball with his name on it.

3) Use all of the DS capabilities.

Don't have stuff that the last generation could do and just write it off. Use that lack of 450 Pokémon (as seen above) to create some real winners and animate, 3D-ify, and dazzle us with the system. Don't just leave it at the best looking Pokémon gym I've ever seen, please make it more than that.

Plus, use some good music equipment, too. Use what was done at Mt. Coronet and put that into the entire game, not that horrible Team Galactic techno sound-a-likes. That really hurt. (On a slightly different train of thought, Shadow of the Colossus's soundtrack is absolutely amazing. Don't let Sony's name take you down: it's just simply the best soundtrack I have ever heard.)

4) Fully flesh out the story.

Again, something that was just barely hinted at: I won't spoil anything, but Team Galactic is definitely deranged. I loved that. It became a really cool sequence around the sixth badge collected, and it swept me up and into the game for a good three hours. I was hooked into what would happen next, and it was fantastic. Sophisticated and well written, it was Game Freak's best moment.

Then, just as suddenly, it ended. That entire subplot, gone and not even hinted at. I really, really wanted to see more of that kind of thing…perhaps I need to go watch the third Pokémon movie again (the only one worth watching, sorta). Get a good scenario and run with it, and let me feel that rush again.

5) Get rid of Drifloon.

I'm not kidding. That thing is a freak of nature.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/10/07