The problems with Pokemon.

This was originally written in March 2010.

So the release of Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver is less than a month away, and i’m not exactly overcome with excitement. Partly it’s shadowed by the release of Final Fantasy 13, but mostly, Pokemon’s lost loads of it’s appeal recently. Still, the original Gold and Silver were my favourite Pokemon games ever so I’m actually planning to give these a chance.

The previous DS generation really annoyed me, mainly because of the confused way in which it was executed. One second you’re forced to use the buttons to navigate the map, and the next minute the ideal control system is the touch screen for battling. If they could’ve integrated an Animal Crossing DS style system of moving about with the touch screen it would’ve felt much more integrated, constantly putting the pen in and pulling it out gets pretty tedious pretty fast.

The new games look like they fix this issue to a point by using the touch screen for most menus, but from what I’ve heard they still use the buttons for navigation, so you still need to switch. This sounds pretty annoying, and makes you miss the days when there were only buttons available.

There was also a little mini-game where you could go underground to dig for things and meet people nearby who were also doing this. Now it does sound cool I’ll be honest, but what you can’t do is battle or trade with the people you meet, so in order to do that you have to go to the wireless bit of the Pokemon center. Effectively all they’ve done is cut the very small amount of people you’re likely to chance upon, while out and about, in half. If it was all integrated into one wireless lobby, you might stand a fighting chance of maybe meeting somebody random to battle or trade or dig with, but no, it’s all fragmented and messy.

The other way in which the first DS generation was flawed was it’s online play. Instead of being able to play live against a real opponent, you upload your team, and then download details of another person’s team to battle, so while you ARE battling someone else’s Pokemon, that person isn’t actually controlling them.

The skeptical (such as myself) may think that they did this to make their Wii game “Pokemon Battle Revolution” more appealing. You see, PBR was a seriously cheap cash in, it was battles, ALL battles, NOTHING BUT BATTLES. The single player mode consisted of nothing but long strings of long boring battles, and in exchange for these battles you get Pokecoupons. These can’t be exchanged for anything in the DS Pokemon games, and your Pokemon from those games can’t be leveled up, so once you’ve moved your Pokemon to the Wii you have nothing to do but improve the look of your character in the Wii game.

Now the one thing this game could have had going for it was it’s online play, LIVE online play with real players. The first true Pokemon online experience, awesome right? WRONG. You didn’t get any kind of reward for battling, apart from the “joy” of the battles themselves, not even Pokecoupons which might’ve made it bearable. The most annoying thing was the lack of any kind of ranking system, you could beat a LV100 Mewtwo with a LV 1 Ratata and the only people that would know about it would be you and the person you beat. Awful, pointless.

Hopefully this time they won’t have any terrible add-on games to peddle, so HOPEFULLY they’ll include real online play with actual rewards in the DS games. I’m not getting my hopes up though.



Another thing that confused me today was when I saw the box for Pokemon SoulSilver. As you may or may not know, the new games all come with a Pokewalker, a device similar to the Pokemon Picachu tamagotchi style thing from back in the day (which I had), which funnily enough had the ability to sync with Gold and Silver on the GBC. Anyway, it’s basically a Pokemon pedometer, or a Pokemeter if you will, haha… Fail…

This device can sync to the DS game, so you can move a Pokemon to the Pokewalker, and as you walk around you’ll be able to earn stuff for it and interact with it. Pretty awesome right? Well maybe for a console game, what I find weird is that they’re putting a portable device in with a portable game, meaning you’re being double portable’d.

On the box of the game it even says “Take your Pokemon with you! Pokewalker included!”. Now this confuses me, surely by the very nature of it being a DS game, your Pokemon are ALREADY with you? I’m not saying it’s not a cool idea, but much like various features in the first DS games, it doubles up on functionality.

Are Nintendo trying to make the DS less and less portable? The recent release of the DSi XL seems to back up this theory, with a focus on “sharing the experience”. All of the promo shots of the device show people crowding around the console in houses, NOT out and about. It’s weird, because they’re kind of making it collide with the supposed functionality of the Wii.

Are they trying to make the DS into a home device? Have they done market research which suggests that most people play their DS at home? Don’t people have time to play games on the go, would they rather have something passive such as the Pokewalker?

I hate not being told this kind of thing, having to figure it out for myself, expected to just accept these strange overlapping decisions. It really annoys me, it’s a lack of vision and it just piles on the useless gimmicks. Still, I think I’ll take the plunge, I guess you can’t expect perfection.