There was a Zelda game available for the Wii at launch, and fans of the system didn’t have to wait too long for a Mario title to make it to the system.  What was missing though?  A Pokemon game!  That oversight is remedied with Pokemon Battle Revolution, the first on-line game for the Wii in the US.  With a legion of fans and a line of successful games behind it, Battle Revolution had my vote for being one of the most talked about Wii games for the second half of 2007.  It turns out that I wasn’t totally wrong, it is being talked about, but the main topic of discussion is how disappointing it is.  This game is similar to Pokemon Stadium except that it takes a huge step backwards, removing a lot of the content that the N64 game had.  Even with the added on-line play, the game quickly becomes repetitive, and if you don’t have Pokemon Diamond or Pearl for the Nintendo DS, there’s really not a lot of reason to own this game.

Gameplay:

I have to admit that I like the Pokemon series of games for Nintendo’s handheld devices.  They are great entry level RPG games and they have an ingenious goal:  to catch and train pokemon.  Making your pokemon level up and evolve really adds a lot of playability to these games and is the secret of their continued success.

Pokemon Battle Revolution isn’t an RPG game however.  There’s actually no story are even much of a goal to achieve.  Instead of trying to catch Pokemon and make them more powerful, you’re given a set a six of pre-trained creatures to begin with and sent off to do battle is a series of gyms on the island of Poketopia.  As the game starts you have your choice between two trainers who have their own set of Pokemon, one male and one female, and to get more you have to defeat gym bosses which will also unlock new gyms.  Players enter a gym where they select the Pokemon that will battle.  This is a turn based game, like all the other Pokemon battle systems, and at the beginning of each round a player can chose to fight or switch Pokemon and chose one of four attacks if they decide to use the active Pokemon for that round.  After the action has been entered the round plays out on the screen and the damage from attacks assessed.  The two fighters never actually interact however.  A Pokemon will take a few steps forward and unleash it’s attack then the screen cuts to the defender who is shown in a generic ‘reeling from the blow’ shot as a giant slash or teeth marks are superimposed on the screen.  When a Pokemon’s energy reaches zero it’s knocked out and when all of a trainer’s fighters are KO’ed the match is over.

Unfortunately that’s about all there is to the game.  Battle- win or lose- repeat.  Your Pokemon don’t gain strength or level-up from winning battles and the only reward is money which you can use to buy new clothes to change your trainer’s appearance.  Gone are the mini-games that made Pokemon Stadium so much fun and the ability to play the handheld game on your TV screen.  Hell, you can’t even pick your own starting Pokemon as you could in Stadium.  What were they thinking?  Playing this game as it comes out of the box gets very monotonous in a rather short period of time.

Wait!  You can connect this game to a Nintendo DS that has Pokemon Diamond or Pearl and transfer the animals that you’ve caught in that game over to the console.¹  Now you’re talking.  This makes the game a bit more interesting, and there’s some actual strategy involved (though granted not a lot.)  Transferring Pokemon from the DS to the Wii is easy and painless and afterwards you’ll have you’re collection of fighters from the handheld game available to kick some tail on the Wii.  You can pick you six ‘battle’ Pokemon from among the list that you import, balancing strength with flexibility and making sure you have a wide variety of types to exploit every weakness that your opponent has.  This makes the play a bit more fun and exciting.  The only thing is that you have to be pretty far alone in Diamond or Pearl in order to be competitive.  The gyms in Battle Revolution start at level 30 and go up from there.  Entering with a cadre of level 20-25 Pokemon isn’t going to help you much.

The on-line play is exactly the same as in the regular game.  With your starter Pokemon or with six you’ve imported from a DS, you enter a stadium and wait for a match.  (You can also set up battles with friends by exchanging ‘friend passes’.)   If you only have the starter Pokemon however, you’re likely to get your clock cleaned.

Battling on-line is fun and is a bit of a challenge since you encounter a wider variety of Pokemon.  Also the on-line players don’t make silly mistakes (usually) like the early gym opponents do.  The problem with it, like the game, is that it gets dull after a while.  There’s no reason to keep fighting or any goal to reach.  That brings me to this game’s fatal flaw:  There is no leader board.  You don’t get points or any recognition for demolishing ten trainers in a row, which is too bad.  Imagine if they did do this and implemented it right:  You could be crowned Gym Leader of your city or area, or become the strongest trainer in your state.  It would add a lot to this game if you were battling to be the best Pokemon player in the world.  After all, that’s the goal in the role playing games.

Graphics:

The graphics, while not bad, are pretty underwhelming.  The trainer characters were rendered well, but they all look pretty much alike.  The CGI surfaces all look pretty flat too; they could have used more texture on both the trainers and the Pokemon themselves.  The 3D Pokemon look nice, but are still a bit too angular and look more like something someone designed on a computer screen than a real creature.  On my 37” LCD aliasing was a pretty big problem, with the lines in the backgrounds shimmering as the camera panned across them and the diagonal lines on the trainers themselves having a very pronounced stair step effect.

Audio:

The audio portion of the game was just as bad as the game itself.  Sonically, the game did have a little impact, but not a lot.  During a few attacks there was some forceful noise, but that generally wasn’t the case.  The Pokemon themselves don’t say their names like they do in the animated show, which is unfortunate.  They just give a generic sounding roar when they attack.  If that wasn’t bed enough, the announcer is horrible.  He has a very few phrases that get repeated over and over and quickly become very monotonous.  The best part of this game is the fact that you can turn his comments off.

Conclusion:

Overall, this is was a missed opportunity.   Being the first on-line Wii game, I was expecting more.  As it stands, this game feels just like a demo.  You can only start with six pre-selected Pokemon, they have removed the mini games, and there aren’t any real goals aside from unlocking gyms or buying clothes.  (No, I’m not kidding, in this videogame you’re rewarded with money that you can use to buy clothes.)  The game is really made as an accessory to Pokemon Diamond and Pearl for the Nintendo DS.  If you have one of those games and are fairly far along, importing your Pokemon into the game makes it more fun and enjoyable, but only for so long.  This would be a good Rental in that case, since it is nice to see the big 3D creatures fighting it out, at least for a little while.  If you don’t have one of those recent hand-held Pokemon games, forget buying this.  You’ll soon tire of it and wish that you’d spent the money on something else.
 

1)  The gameplay was so poor on the stand alone game that I went out and bought Pokemon Pearl.  I couldn’t in all conscience review this game without testing the import feature and I’m glad that I did.  The game is much less mind-numbing when you have more Pokemon to choose from.