Great disappointment or greatest disappointment?
You start the game and get to see the title screen. Now of course a flashy intro doesn't determine how good a game is, but even the first Pokémon Stadium already featured the fanservice goodness known as a game intro, so there's the first disappointment. Anyway, you press any button and continue to the main menu. Three options: Options. Options allows you to change controls and that's about it. Multiplayer. Multiplayer is for DS owners only (so there's no way you're gonna duke it out with random friends and random pokemon). Most of the time there are no friends around with a copy of D/P so you won't use this feature a whole lot. In previous games you could select pokemon you didn't actually train, which wasn't as fun as battling others with a respectable Pokemon savefile, but at least threw a fully functioning multiplayer feature into the mix.
Adventure. You're on an airplane. Suddenly a nautical version of Las Vegas emerges from the horizon: you have just arrived in Pokétopia, the world where PBR takes place. Then a nice-looking counterlady appears, who explains to you how the game works: enter in cups, get money, pimp your character's looks. Because you don't want to fight with absolutely useless Pokemon you're gonna want to import your monsters from D/P. Yes, you'll get a preset party of Pokemon if you don't have the game, so no democracy here. But hey, why would you buy the game anyway if you don't even have Diamond or Pearl?
So you start out battling, and you see the island once again. Pick the only tournament that allows you to use imported Pokemon, start making mince meat out of other trainers (they SUCK) and after defeating the first leader, you're pretty much done playing this game. Really. No free roaming adventure, no minigames, no other greatness found in any other Stadium series game. Just battles. Repetitive battles. You've seen it all.
I have absolutely no idea what the developers were thinking when leaving out the minigames, pokéschool, pokélab, gym leader castle or anything that made the previous "Stadiums" worth your while. There's really nothing to do in this game. It doesn't look bad, but animations, formula and commentary of the battles are at N64-level. Compared to consoles we now have (most notably the PS3), the graphics still look cheap so you won't ever gasp in awe, though how the game looks is still the best thing about it. In other words: the original Pokémon Stadium is a better game. Not only at the time, but even in this day and age. Now search on Gamespot for the original Stadium review and you'll see that wasn't such a great game either, even at the time.
So there you have it: the game that has the most "FAIL" written al over it in about 3 years. Stadiums were always a welcome addition to the complete Pocket Monster experience, but even the greatest fans should stay away from Pokémon Battle Revolution. It fails to make the 4th generation of Pokémon RPG's the best one. Considering how Pokémon Stadium 2 was much more fun, the best gen for now is the 2nd. End of story