Kenri reviews Pokemon Rumble
One can only assume that Pokemon Rumble came about from a meeting between some Nintendo higher-ups and the team that worked on My Pokemon Ranch, the previous Pokemon WiiWare title. And the meeting would have gone something like: "Hey, is there a way we reuse those same super-deformed Pokemon models in a game people might actually want to play?" "Sure, we can slap something together." Thus Pokemon Rumble was born, and I can say without hyperbole that it's Ambrella's best effort yet. The biggest competition may be Hey You, Pikachu! but it's still a step in the right direction.
In Pokemon Rumble, you play as any of the first 151 or last 107 Pokemon - the ones that made their debut in Red/Blue and Diamond/Pearl - and navigate through small courses filled with enemy Pokemon, striking them down with impunity as you go. Making only about half of the total 493 Pokemon playable might seem like a cop-out, and it is, but again, it is a huge step in the right direction from, say, Pokemon Dash, an earlier Ambrella effort with a grand total of a single playable character. The gameplay rests somewhere between a beat-'em-up and a hack-and-slash; if you're looking for an RPG, or even a game with RPG elements, now would be the time to start searching for a different game. Each Pokemon can wield a maximum of two moves, which does seem restricting. Luckily, there is a very large total movepool in the game, so the chances are slim that you'll ever even see all the game's different attacks, much less use them all. This does allow for some degree of customization, but you should realize that most of the game will come down to hammering the button that controls your main attack - raining fiery death, or watery death, or leafy death, or what have you - while occasionally using a utility move. You could field two death-bringing moves or two utility moves, but the former is rather pointless as you'll always default to the attack that's better, and the latter will lead to your early and unfortunate death. On the plus side, if one Pokemon is defeated, you can switch to another one, only being kicked out of a course after three losses. You can also circumvent this by switching on the fly to a Pokemon with full health, though this takes time and isn't feasible during the middle of battle.
The game contains a six courses, all of which have some obvious elemental theme that hints towards which Pokemon will reside within. The factory suspended over pools of molten metal will obviously contain Fire and Electric Pokemon, the cave is going to contain Rock Pokemon, the beach will contain Water Pokemon, et cetera. As you move through these courses, battling Pokemon, you will occasionally find that a defeated Pokemon remains on the field rather than vanishing. This is your cue to pick it up, adding it to your pool of playable Pokemon. Because each Pokemon has a Power stat, and because this stat cannot ever be changed, collecting new and stronger Pokemon is the only way to succeed in the game at large. On the positive side, this means that you are forced to use many different Pokemon throughout the game. On the negative side, this also means that a Pokemon you put a lot of work into getting the correct moves for will be relevant for, at most, about an hour. Also on the negative side, this means that progressing through the game is entirely dependant on being lucky enough to obtain strong Pokemon - and unlike in the main Pokemon titles, there's no easy way to increase your chances of recruiting any given Pokemon. Rumble would have greatly benefited from allowing some form of leveling up, especially in the later levels when the game stops being quite easy.
At the end of each course you will face a giant-sized boss. These bosses can also be recruited, but in general it's a waste of time. Each lobby area contains a Pokemon lottery and a move lottery. Spending money (obtained from defeated Pokemon) at the Pokemon lottery rewards you with a random Pokemon - which is very, very likely to be a boss of one of the areas accessible from the current lobby. The move lottery is the only way, short of recruiting a new Pokemon, to get the moves you want. At first, these seem novel; eventually, one will be reduced to cursing the random number generator that forced them to throw away all of their money for useless Pokemon/moves.
Obtaining a Pokemon with a high power is the only way to unlock the Battle Royale, where you will face a large number of Pokemon in a closed arena. Defeat enough of these Pokemon and you will face the Battle Royale's bosses; luckily, the bosses here are normal sized. Unlike in regular levels, during the Battle Royale, you can only switch Pokemon when your current Pokemon is defeated. If you defeat the Battle Royale, you will move up to the next rank's lobby. You start in the C-rank lobby, move up to B, A, and S, then do it all over again the in the more difficult Advanced Mode. Each rank holds different Pokemon, and the two sets of Pokemon (those from Red/Blue and those from Diamond/Pearl) are mostly localized in the Normal and Advanced Modes, respectively. Beating the Advanced Mode will unlock the EX Mode, a single lobby with a four-part Battle Royale. It's here that the game becomes much, much harder: the six courses can contain any Pokemon from any previous rank's course of that type, all at a much higher Power than before. The Battle Royale itself ceases to be a Battle Royale and becomes closer to "let's everybody team up on the human player". Don't think that your character will make up for its numbers disadvantage in strength, either: nearly every opponent here is outright stronger than you are. It quickly becomes apparent after attempting the progressively harder stages of the EX Battle Royale - thankfully, you don't have to do them all at once - that the game simply does not have a difficulty level between "not challenging whatsoever" and "how is this supposed to be doable". It's also here that the time limit - which can be extended by defeating Pokemon, in an attempt to make you play aggressively - becomes a problem for the first time, and it's here that the vast majority of Pokemon and moves become outright useless. The EX Mode is so at odds with the rest of the game that it really seems like it couldn't have been intentionally made this way: either they just didn't care, or were forced to release the game early, or something. If the mindless repetition of going through basically the same stages a minimum of 48 times didn't make you ragequit (boredquit?), the EX Mode very well might.
Don't think that these flaws can be made up for in, say, graphics, music, or story, either. The story doesn't even qualify as an excuse plot: it starts out with you playing as Rattata, a weak toy Pokemon in a world where toy Pokemon come to life and battle for some unknown reason, that wants to challenge the Battle Royale. It manages to fit through the doors despite not having enough Power to qualify, but is quickly defeated and decides to recruit stronger Pokemon to help. If, for example, the game let you level up, this plot would actually make sense. Instead, the player will probably end up releasing this Rattata within the first fifteen minutes of gameplay. Don't worry: it's never mentioned again, and in fact there is no plot whatsoever from that point onward.
The game's music is decent enough to not drive you up a wall, but at no point is it something a person would voluntarily listen to outside the game. It's also not memorable in the least. Sound effects fare a bit better and might be one of the best (or, should I say, technically correct) aspects of the game. Solid hits sound like solid hits, electricity makes a zapping sound; it doesn't stand out, but that's totally okay when dealing with sound effects. Graphics, as previously mentioned, reuse the super-deformed models from My Pokemon Ranch. The name of this style - that is, super-deformed - should tell you everything about why it's used in downloadable games and why some people don't like it. There's nothing really wrong with it, but it does seem more lazy for a game like this than in something like My Pokemon Ranch, which is less a game than an application. During very crowded battles, it can also be confusing. Is that blue blob a Poliwhirl, or a Poliwrath? Who knows? Luckily, the environments look much better. Unfortunately, they are also reused, over and over again, as mentioned previously. There's also no way to interact with any environment, which means that the details exist basically just to taunt the player. Would you like to use a Flying Pokemon to perch on the top of a tree? Can't do that. Would you like to just hide behind the tree? Can't do that, either - all the trees are behind impassable waist-high ledges.
There's some more factor to consider, and that's price. Normally, price is a non-factor. A person might find a game on sale, or used, or some such. In a downloadable game, not so much. And Pokemon Rumble costs $15, which is approaching the upper limits of how much can be charged for a downloadable game without causing riots. Strictly speaking, this game is simply not worth what it is being charged for. More specifically, a game like Shadow Complex on the 360 has the same pricetag, and that game has things like legitimate production values, balanced difficulty, and gameplay that never becomes repetitive or tedious. If you are a huge Pokemon fan and if you are in the mood for mindless hack-and-slash/beat-'em-up gameplay, you could do worse than to buy this game. If you don't like Pokemon or are a fan of gameplay with actual depth, it should be immediately obvious to sit this one out.
Kenri of the Yuri is just this guy who writes silly things, sometimes. He is profoundly embarrassed about a good 60-70% of the stuff he's written. You might know him better as your friendly neighborhood Level 43: Editor. View his or her author page or author profile.
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