A crutch on its own and only serves as life support to its DS relatives
Gameplay 6/10: Your goal is simple, to become the greatest pokemon trainer on the island. You go around fighting trainers with a few mixed in events. In past games the presentation of this was acceptable because elements like leveleling up your pokemon or catching more pokemon and many times a good storyline were added in to create a fun RPG style game . However, in this most recent outing, most of those elements have been removed to just leave plain and dull battling. I will admit that this game has 2 impressive features: its the 1st Wii game to have DS connectivity and its the 1st Wii game with online play. With this being said, its only reason to try this game as it cannot stand on its own as a solid game. When you begin you are given random trainer cards with basic pokemon to fight all your battles, you are able to trade and upgrade these rental passes but its not always for the best. With the Ds you can bring all your well trained pokemon from Diamond or Pearl ( whatever version you have) and use them in your own customized pass but this doesnt escape the fact that you will be doing the same thing over and over again. When you clear colleseums, you will earn points as well as unlock more colleseums. Without the Ds, these are praticully pointless. You can buy new accesories to stylize your trainer but this serves as their only use rather than being an extra. Using the Ds makes these points worthwhile as you buy special hard to obtaina items that you may send back to your Ds game. Wi-fi is also nice because you can battle against trainers around the world but only comes to use if you have a DS. Theres just not enough content to keep you interested for long unless your planning to get everything out of Diamond or Pearl.
Graphics 9/10: There are moments when this game can be fun, and it does help that the pokemon look their best during these moments. The colleseums have very nice lighting affects as well as some of the best graphcis seen on the Wii. Many of the pokemon look impressive and so do their attacks. Some pokemon can use some fine tuning but seems to be reasonalbe with the fact that the creators had to bring 493 different creatures to the 3D life as well as hundreds of attacks with much of it looking stunning.
Sound 6/10/ The music is decent with some enjoyable tunes but are usually silenced by attacking sounds, crowds and the announcer talking. The announcer is an interesting addition to the pokemon seires as it really sounds like an event with some emotion, but after a while you'll start thinking in your head maybe he could be quiet now as he gets rather annoying.
With the 2 special features, its at least worth a rent providing a decent experience as well as benifits for the DS versions, but with just the game alone you'll find that isnt the pokemon that many fans fell in love with.