Pokemon Diamond/Pearl Review

The Pokémon series has had constant success since it was first released in Japan over 10 years ago in its four color glory on the classic Gameboy, with wikipedia boasting that the series has sold over 155 million units as of the end of 06 (before the US release of Diamond and Pearl). This is a pretty phenomenal achievement for a game that is viewed as a child’s game outside of Japan, even viewed alongside Mario’s whopping 193 million units shipped.

The Pokémon series has touched on many genres, but it’s always been an RPG at heart and the latest Diamond and Pearl games are no exception, the plot is really no more advanced from where the series originated so many years ago. You start you off as a kid in a small town, with no Pokémon or back history, you stumble onto a Pokémon or a Professor in the first 5 minutes of game play and set about becoming the top Pokémon trainer. Along the journey you’ll come across an evil gang, various other trainers and finish by defeating the gang and beating the Elite 4. Like I said this structure has never changed and as far as plot goes it’s like playing the same game over and over.

The graphics in Pokémon are not going to win any awards, the main game view is pretty enough, the pseudo 3d effect of buildings looks good and everything moves along nicely. Sadly the Battles haven’t been given any real ‘animation’ the Pokémon themselves are great sprites, but the graphical effects of the battles are not that much more advanced than the old D&D games when you’ll just see a few frames of animation of a skeleton taking a swipe at you. I’m not saying the graphics are bad, but I still look forward to the day when the battles become a little more like the arena in the Pokémon battle games that appear on the consoles.

The little tunes you find while walking around and getting into battles are catchy and memorable, a lot of been enhanced from the classic games and are still great to listen to. Each Pokémon has a unique cry, the amusing thing about this is that the originals 150 Gameboy Pokémon still have their grainy distorted sounds like they were coming out of the GB speaker. I’m sure this is on purpose, but much like the graphics, I want a little more, A few samples from the TV series would be great, I’d love to hear my star Pokémon scream "SCYTHER!!!" as she runs into battle.

All of this sounds terribly negative, and those of you who haven’t played the game before must be wondering why this game is so popular if nothings changed in 10 years and things look outdated for the DS. I’d love to be able to summarize this in just a few words, but the series doesn’t need a great story, graphics and sound to be a good game, the sheer amount of things to do keep the game interesting, the main plot is only a very small part of what the Pokémon series has to offer. Besides the battles you can involve your captured Pokémon in contests, such as beauty contests where you’ll have to use the attacks your Pokémon has learnt to dazzle the audience and draw their attention. There are many things to collect in the game, besides the Pokémon themselves (of which there is now 493), you can collect stickers for your Pokéballs, new phrases to say, ribbons, furniture, Pokémon accessories and I’m probably forgetting about even more. Collecting all of any of these things is no easy task (epically the Pokémon themselves) so you could spend an inordinate amount of time just doing these crazy little tasks.

After all is said and done it all comes down to getting the best team of Pokémon and making them tough, this is where the complexity of the game really shows. If your Pokémon doesn’t know a move that you’ll like to teach it, you can collect one of the many TMs and use it on the Pokémon, or perhaps you can breed your Pokémon with one that does know the move, then train the offspring! Although the game features 467 different moves each of your Pokémon can only know 4 at any one time this can require a hell of a lot of planning if you plan on making a winning team. To raise your star Pokémon’s stats you can feed it poffins, to get these you have to plant and pick berries, then put them in a berry mixer, but you can only feed it so many, so even more planning is needed here. Even once you have a tough high level Pokémon with all the right moves, he’s not going to be successful without a full team backing him/her/it up. Only 6 Pokémon can be with you at one time and a good mix of Pokémon can make or break your whole team. Each move can be one of 17 types, so can the Pokémon, there’s a very elaborate rock-paper-sissors game at play here, so unless you have a good mix you’ll quickly fall to a more dynamic team.

Finally one thing the new game does bring in is multi player, you can walk around together in the tunnels beneath the world and visit each others secret bases and play a capture the flag based game, this is only available locally DS to DS. The most important feature available here is the ability to trade and battle over Nintendo Wi-Fi, allowing you to upload your Pokémon onto the servers and await someone to trade with you. Using this you can easily trade with people all over the world, so there’s usually someone with what you are looking for. The battles however aren’t online, you’ll download someone’s uploaded team and then fight the team offline and upload the records. It would be nice to be able to battle over Wi-Fi in real time, but this a mode like this is more than welcome and offers a great challenge.

I’ve clocked 60-70 hours of game play so far, and I’m not about to stop yet, with so much left to do this is something that’s very easy to come back to and with Pokémon coming out for the Wii there’s even more reason to build up a good team. I’d recommend this to anyone who’s a fan of the previous games, or collection & RPGs in general, with the low price of DS games compared to the major consoles it really offers a lot of hours of enjoyment to your dollar

* Screenshots thanks to www.gamespot.com