Pokemon Colosseum is a huge disapointment, as it does not deliver what a pokemon RPG should be
Pokemon as always been about turn based battles and this is no exception. You will start with Espeon and Umbreon as your first 2 Pokemon. Moving on we all know that in the gba games you go to wild grass to capture different types of Pokemon and the challenge was to catch them all. Well, in this one you have the shadow Pokemon. They are Pokemon that have been suffering by bad trainers, so you must steal them from the enemy with poke balls and then train them well enough to vanish there shadow away. A Girl that you rescue will help you identify which Pokemon is covered by the shadows, how does she do it? No idea.
The thing is that when you capture one shadow pokemon, they only have one move until there anger from the shadows goes down and you will be able to have more attacks for the pokemon. When there anger is over. you take them to a temple to vanish there darkness and make it a normal Pokemon. Unfortunately, it's really difficult to fight with just one attack so eventually you will be using most of the time in the game Espeon and Umbreon that you received in the first place in there natural form. You can get a flute to vanish only one Pokemon from the shadows fast, but you only do it once.
In the gameboy games you needed to walk or go in a bicycle to other cities. In this game you go in a vehicle that is like a car but you only choose where to go and you will see a cinematic of him in the car, and that's it. The game doesn't even feature that much of puzzles, it's more battling and listening to the story. And even worst the game is quite short of about 5 hours. The cities are not even interesting to look around. They are not like in the Gameboy games that you get some special tickets, contests and stuff like that. Everything is basically fighting with strategy and snagging shadow Pokemon. And the battling does not help the game because of the limited amount of pokemon to choose from and no special attacks.
The backgrounds are sometimes nice to look at. They are fresh and detailed some sand and grass places. But, the characters look so weird starting with the character you play as. Why does he have a white line on his face? The villains are so dumb that you never taken them seriously. One of them is a dancer, another one is some strange woman with the weirdest dress. They didn't really work on the characters well enough to be memorable in a good way. The special effects in the attacks of the pokemon isn't that much impressive even if the pokemon do look nice, I wish that considering the gamecube is more powerful then N64 it would truly show it in the characters. The only nice graphics are the backgrounds, villages.
The music sounds very digital and pretty cool as usual of pokemon, but, it gets repetitive when you are fighting. Also when you are just walking around, they sound too simple and boring in the villages and such. It is suppose to be an RPG, so where are the voiceovers? There is none. Voiceovers in RPG's are important so you can get more into the game's story and not read, and read, and read. Sound effects are pretty good but any game can do good sound effects, I guess.
Pokemon Stadium gave you the chance to choose any Pokemon you want in multiplayer and in single player, but they also let you use Pokemon from red, yellow and blue or silver and gold version. Colosseum let's you play with the Pokemon in your ruby or sapphire and that's about it and you need the gba link cable that is not included in the game. Or you can use the Pokemon you captured in the game, which is not saying much. This feels sometimes impossible to play, because if you or your friend doesn't have a gba link cable you can't play with good pokemons. The single player mode does not deliver any interest in replaying it after you finish it, you just won't want to keep playing. Clearly they focused more on the singleplayer but still delivered what seems to be a rushed game.
Colosseum is hard to recommend to an old Pokemon fan like me. Just rent it first to see if you can live with the idea of shadow pokemon. While Colosseum brings some interesting ideas of shadow Pokemon in terms of story, it just feels unnecessary.