Nintendo Okie

Howdy: 

• Lots of Pokemon to collect.
• Simple, yet addictive gameplay.
• The ability to take screenshots to share.

See Ya’:

• Bland environments, blocky characters.
• Can become repetitive.
• Some slow down during intense combat.
• 1500 Point price tag is a bit high.

It’s safe to say that when you think of a Pokemon video game the first thing that pops into your mind is the deep many hour experience that you get on a Nintendo handheld.  The thought of a Pokemon brawler doesn’t come up often, but that’s exactly what the latest release in the Pokemon franchise, Pokemon Rumble, is.  Gone are the deep involved storylines and leveling up of your favorite characters.  In its place is a quick, action packed fighter.

Pokemon Rumble’s concept is simple.  You play as toy pokemon that are attempting to be the best pokemon in the world.  The way to do this is to beat up all the other toy pokemon in a Battle Royale to be declared the champion.  At the beginning of the game you’re not strong enough to do this.  You must then travel to the six different themed worlds and collect more powerful pokemon.  When you have a pokemon that is a high enough strength to enter the Battle Royale you can attempt to be the champion for that rank.  The game features four different ranks to play through, C, B, A, and S.  Once you’ve defeated all the champions of those four ranks you are declared the Battle Royale Champion.  The game throws you into the central hub where you can access each of the levels, as well as buildings that can be used to learn new moves, recruit new pokemon or view your stats for your current playthrough.  You can even send your favorite pokemon to your Wii Remote and take them to a friend’s house to be used in their game. 

Each of the game’s six levels features Pokemon appropriately themed for that area.  The forest will have bug pokemon and grass pokemon.  The beach will have water themed pokemon and so on.  The game’s combat is faced paced and it’s essentially a button mashing brawler.  Every so often some of the toy pokemon that you fight will turn into a statue after being defeated.  You can then collect these and add them to your roster of available pokemon.  You can increase the odds of being able to collect them by performing attacks that will cause some sort of status effect such as sleep or paralyzation.  Each pokemon has two attacks that are performed with the 1 or 2 buttons on the remote and the d-pad controls movement.  I found though that the game played better by using the GameCube controller or Classic Controller for the analog stick to move through the environments.  These attacks are combined by an area of effect that represents the type of attack you used.  Poison attacks are accompanied by clouds of purple smoke, while claw attacks have slashes that appear in front of you.  It serves as a visual aid to determine how enemies, and yourself, will attack and any pokemon caught in that area is hit and will take damage.  That means that many times your attacks will hit multiple pokemon at once. 

The levels are also broken up into sections and after clearing all the enemy pokemon out you can jump off a trampoline at the end of the section to proceed to the next area.  At the end of the level you’ll confront a boss pokemon, which is essentially an oversized version of a pokemon that was wound too tight.  This will typically be an evolved form of one of the pokemon you faced previously in the level.  They will be guarded, however, by their lesser evolved forms and you’ll have to fight them while trying to take down the bigger foes.  You have three “lives” that you can use to get through the level meaning you can be knocked out three times.  This is fine for single player, but if you have multiple people playing you have to share those three lives and that can be frustrating at times.  If you’re current pokemon is about to be knocked out you can swap out with a quick button press, pick the new pokemon from your list of available ones and continue on.  You really have to be aware of your life meter and swap out often to keep from losing these lives. 

Visually speaking, Pokemon Rumble looks a lot like the previous WiiWare Pokemon release, Pokemon Ranch.  That is to say that they are cutesy, but blocky forms of the pokemon you remember.  That doesn’t mean that it’s ugly to look at, because it’s not.  It just resembles an early GameCube game in that department.  The levels themselves are sparsely populated as well, aside from the pokemon themselves there isn’t much, if anything that is found in the areas where you fight.  Each of the different levels is essentially a large room surrounded by some background pieces.  Mostly though there’s not a lot to look at.

For pokemon fans who love collecting there are 150 pokemon in the normal setting that you will encounter and have the ability to collect.  It will probably take multiple playthroughs to collect them all unless you become very good at dealing with status effects to knock them out.  After playing through normal you can move on to advanced where even more pokemon await.  There are just under 300 pokemon in total for the game.  There are many variations of each pokemon as well.  Some will have abilities before their name like Healthy or Hardy meaning they have abilities the normal versions of that monster do not so there’s plenty of collecting to be done if you want to catch ‘em all.

The action in Pokemon Rumble, while fast based is simple, but can be quite addicting.  If you’re a fan of brawlers this could be a game you’ll find very interesting.  Pokemon fans looking for something other than the RPGs, like arena brawlers, will also be interested in this title.  It took me just over four hours to finish the normal setting of Pokemon rumble and take down the champion.  After that there is an advanced setting that becomes very difficult.  You’ll really need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each pokemon to be successful in this harder setting and it will add another 4 to 5 hours of gameplay.  While the gameplay is simple, it’s a lot of fun to explore the worlds again and again to catch all the pokemon you have available. 

Final Score: 3/5 Average