Tuesday 26 January 2010

Pokemon Colosseum Game Cube Review

Introduction
The first true 3-D Pokemon game to have an adventure mode and the first Pokemon game on the GameCube.
The game takes place in the Orre region, a place where wild Pokemon is a rarity.
There is an evil organisation that is capturing Pokemon and using them as weapons, these Pokemon are known as shadow Pokemon.
Using the power of the "Snag Machine" it's up to you to steal and save all of the shadow Pokemon.

Single Player
The single player mode is a story that takes place in the Orre region, you once again take the role of a fashion challenged Pokemon trainer.
The game starts off with a cinematic cut scene I won't spoil it for those who haven't played it yet.
You start out with two Pokemon, Umbreon and Espeon, this is a good pair for double battles and you could complete the game using just these two mon, which takes away the idea of team building that made the other games work do well.
The story mode takes 15 to 30+ hours depending on how you go about completing it. If you want to play the game till you get to the ending then it will feel fairly short lived, if you try and do all side quests and capture all shadow Pokemon and purify them then it will be a very long game.

Multiplayer
This is where the game really shines, by using the GBA to GameCube link up you can battle other players party from Ruby/Sapphire using your team off the story mode, you have a choice of what battles you can do:
2 player battles:
GBA Vs GBA Single & Double
GameCube Vs GBA Single & Double

4 player battles:
GameCube Vs GBA Vs GBA Vs GBA Double battle only
GBA Vs GBA Vs GBA Vs GBA Double battle only.

Its not much better than playing on the Game boy Advance the only upside is that the Pokemon battles are in 3-D.

Gameplay
The game play is traditional Pokemon game play the only difference is that the battles seem to drag on due most likely because of the way that the attacks are done on this game, compared to the handheld games these battles feel really slow paced and dull.
Another thing that doesn't help this is the games gimmick, the shadow Pokemon, while the idea of stealing Pokemon is cool at first, it just gets really boring and frustrating after a while due to the attack they have shadow rush, the shadow Pokemon can kill them selves when you are trying to catch them which is a pain in most battles seeing how you sometimes only get one shot at this.
You will find your self going to the save point all of the time because you are worried that the shadow Pokemon will die when you fight them.
Another annoying thing about the shadow Pokemon is that they are limited to one move when you catch them and that move is shadow rush, to get the Pokemon's moves back you have to open their heart and purify them and it takes a long time to do, there are over 40 shadow Pokemon in the game and you will need to catch and purify most of them if you want to catch Ho-ho.
Because there are no wild Pokemon in the game you are limited to the Pokemon in the game but like I said before you can get through the game with just Umbreon and Espeon, but it kind of ruins the whole idea of building a team
Not to say that it ruins the game or anything like that there is some reward in catching the shadow Pokemon. Once you beat the games final boss and see the ending you are allowed to trade Pokemon from your GameCube to GBA and vice-versa, but the Pokemon have to be purified before you can trade them, most of the Pokemon in Colosseum cannot be obtained in Ruby/Sapphire so its worth it if you want the Jhoto starters, the 3 legendary dog's and Ho-oh ect.
To get Ho-oh you have to clear the Vs 100 challenge on MT.Battle, this takes a really long time as you could imagine, sometimes it can take over an hour to clear 10 battles. The good thing about it is that you can do the MT.Battle challenge using your Ruby/Sapphire Pokemon, sadly GBA Pokemon gain no exp doing this, every time you clear an area on MT.Battle you get poke coupons that you can exchange for items, not that they will be much use to you though the amount of coupons you get are very small when you consider how much the items that you trade them for cost. It's like being at an arcade it would be cheaper and easier just to buy the prizes.
The game comes with a 52 block GameCube mermory card but thats only because it take 48 blocks to store the game.

Graphics & Sound
The Graphics are split in this game, first you have the Pokemon who look amazing in battle and then you have the trainers who look kind of poor graphically. The opening cut scene is the only cinematic part of the entire game.
The music on the game isn't anything that will stay with you, it's not very good when compared to that of the GBA Pokemon games and other RPG's on GameCube.

Summary
Not the best Pokemon RPG ever made, it suffers because of its own gimmick (Kind of like most 3-D Sonic games), still fun to play through.

+Same pokemon gameplay
+Free Memory Card
+Finally a change...

-... but not a change for the best
-Kinda lame sound track
-Battles take forever.
-Where the hell are the wild pokemanz!

7/10

Notes: On europe nintendo the site had a coding problem so all the old post's with special cases like ' ended up with code everywhere. This one was a knightmare because of the e in pokemon.

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