Feels like a D/P add-on, but still pretty fun... except for the pointless limitations
Now to business.
Finally, the first online Wii game is here! The floodgates are open for all of our favourite games to be playable against people around the world! And what better series to do this than Pokemon, which spawned an almost worldwide craze for a few years? Well... they could've done it a bit better.
First of all, the menu is annoying to get around. The "guide" person who explains everything at the start of the game WILL explain everything, whether you want her to or not. It literally gives you an option to listen or not listen, and if you choose not to, she will STILL tell you. Make sure you save afterward, as well, because if you don't, she will do it again. Second of all, where are the rental pokemon?! In Pokemon Stadium 1 and 2, they had a list of almost every character (all except for the Legendary ones) that you could borrow at any time. Not this time around... as I said before, they just give you 6 guys and tell you to have at 'er. To make this worse, one of the coliseum ranks has the condition that you HAVE to use this pass. It feels like a demo in this aspect of the game... buy the full version to get access to all the other guys. The problem? You just BOUGHT the full version!
Thirdly, the pass system itself. I understand the usefulness of having a pre-set team that you can choose from, but... why force you to? In Stadium, you could register your team for quick use, and the process was very quick. In this one, you HAVE to register a team (or it won't let you use them), you have to select them by navigating through all of the PC boxes (ie. choose Box 1, choose your character, review your character, select the character) which is a very tedious process, and you can only have 3 passes to choose from at a given time. Once again, a seemingly intentional limitation - they force you to do this by design.
Finally, the 2-player battles. They give you the helpful option of using 1 remote and passing it off to the other person, or using 2 to minimize hassle. With the 1-remote setup, you take turns choosing your characters at the start, then you take turns attacking. In this case, you can understand why they do this; you only have one controller. The confusing thing is that they STILL do it when you have 2 controllers... you just don't have to pass it over. You literally have to wait for player 1 to choose the characters before player 2 can have any controller input. Why? I don't know.
The only good thing about the game is the battles. The graphics are outstanding (for the Wii, at least), the sound is great, and there are more animations. Still... you'd think that there would be a little more to a 50 dollar game, huh?