Chunsoft is best known for releasing dungeon hacks and only dungeon hacks. This isn’t the first licensed dungeon hack they’ve done either. They made the Torenko (Dragon Quest spinoff) dungeon hack for the SNES and PSX for example. Now they’ve taken on the license of yet another major RPG chain by giving us a massive Pokemon dungeon crawl.

This marks the last Pokemon game that will be released for the Game Boy Advance. It’s also quite a departure from the usual Pokemon style of RPG that has cluttered handhelds over the past decade. It’s well known that I am probably the biggest Pokemaniac in our respective industry, but even I gave Emerald a “mere” 6.5 as the formulas had become too repetitive and the stories too similar for my tastes. This is why the one-two punch of Dungeon and Ranger have been a source of hopeful optimism for me over the past few months. It’s that hope that new life will be breathed into the RPG branch of the franchise. Sure Pokemon has consistently added innovative and highly original spin offs to the series like Dash, Hey You Pikachu, Trozei, and Pokemon Channel, but the life and blood of Pokemon are the RPG’s. It’s nice to see Game Freak taking a chance and letting Chunsoft give a new RPG point of view a try. The question is whether or not Pokemon Mystery Dungeon lives up to the original greatness of the line, or if it’s as stale as the Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald games proved to be.

Let’s Review

1. Story

The game starts with you having to take a personality test. How you answer the questions determines which of sixteen starting Pokemon you will be. I really enjoyed this as it was a new way for you to determine your starting Pokemon instead of outright picking one. As well, this has always been one of my favorite RPG main character customizing gimmicks. Games like Ultima IV and Ogre Tactics: The Knight of Lodis did this, and both games are two of my favorite RPG’s ever.

After the personality test, you are allowed to choose a partner Pokemon. Your choices include every Pokemon that has ever been a starter in the previous RPG Pokemon games. Yes, that includes Pikachu. For this particular game I got Machop as my main Pokemon, which is good as the first boss is Skarmony (Steel/Flying) and out of all the starters, Machop is the best to deal with him. I also chose Mudkip as my secondary Pokemon because out of all the other starters his final evolution has two types that do not share the same weaknesses with Machop. Torchic is Fire Fighting and Bulbasaur is Grass/Poison, both of which are weak against Psychic, meaning if I teamed them with Machop, we’d be extra vulnerable.

The plot of the game is simple and yet refreshing. You turn out to be a human who has been turned into a Pokemon, yet you can’t remember how or even much of your life as a human. You’ve also been transported to a world where everyone is a Pokemon. They live in houses and run stores instead of being wild animals trained for cock-fighting as in the normal Pokemon RPG’s.

This particular world has been wracked with severe natural disasters recently. Earthquakes, thunderstorms, and a lot of Pokemon are worried and nervous. Your friend, whatever you chose, finds you unconscious in the forest and eventually tells you of his plan to form a rescue team: A group of Pokemon devoted to helping and protecting Pokemon. It’s kind of like being super heroes. You even pick you own team name.

Now, you’re not the only rescue team out there. There’s Team Meanies, led by Gengar, who are actually evil Pokemon posing as good guys in order to achieve…World Domination. Methinks Team Meanies should actually be called “The Thunderbolts,” but I digress. There is also Team Red, consisting of Alakazam, Charizard, and Tyranitar. Ouch. They’re the biggest, most famous rescue team, and are some of the only evolved Pokemon in the game. Indeed, for some strange reason, Pokemon haven’t been able to evolve for a while. That’s just one of the mysteries you’ll be solving in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon.

As I said, it’s been a long time since an RPG had a plot where the characters aren’t angst ridden Ziggy Stardust wanna-bes, or dark anti-heroes. Here you have a group of characters that just want to help their fellow Pokemon and figure out what’s making these disasters occur. It’s simple, yet the plot is heartwarming and reaffirming that reminds us of the days of games like Sakura Taisen and Shining Force, where you can save the world and still be happy at the same time.

PMD is definitely a step up from “Tween becomes the greatest Pokemon trainer and stops an international criminal syndicate” that the Pokemon RPG games have been shoehorned. It’s a breath of fresh air and while it may not be the best story released in a game this year, it’s certainly a good one that anyone can sit down and smile from. It’s fun and light hearted. Sometimes that’s all we need.

Story Rating: 7/10

2. Graphics

This GBA version fares better in this category than the DS version even though the graphics are the same. That’s because the game is quite impressive for a GBA game, but merely decent for a DS game.

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is quite vibrant and well detailed. The Pokemon look the best they ever have on the GBA, and the facial expressions are adorable and hilarious at times. Whenever I defeated a Gloom, the look it gives manages to make me laugh out loud every time.

The backgrounds of the game are beautiful as well. The friend’s area (where you teammates hang out) are by far the most detailed bits of the game and each one looks amazing. The inner dungeon working graphics are unique for each respective dungeon, but they are nice looking as well. They’re a little repetitive, but considering some dungeons are 99 levels long, things are bound to blur together at that rate.

My favorite thing is that the Pokemon actually FINALLY do their attacks in this game. You can see Machop do a Low Kick or a Karate Chop. Zigazoon actually headbutts its enemies. Magnamite shoots out a thunderbolt. It’s wonderful. A version of this happens in the N64 and Game Cube Pokemon games, but it’s like watching a high graphics version of Final Fantasy I where your character takes a step, swings his weapon, steps back, and the monster goes ow. Here we get full contact fighting and it’s a real treat.

Finally, when you turn on the game, you’re greeted to one of several full screen Pokemon “paintings” for lack of a better word. Each one is adorable, my favorite being Cubone looking at a Peliper stooping on his mailbox.

This is graphically the best Pokemon game for the GBA. It was as fun to watch as it was to play.

Graphics Rating: 8/10

3. Sound

The music for Pokemon Mystery Dungeon fits the game well, even if the music isn’t anywhere as catchy as the original Pokemon songs. The in-town music is serene and calm. The dungeon music tends to be a little bit spooky and ominous, but not too much as this is Pokemon after all. Boss music is also higher in tempo and more rushed, indicating urgency and importance.

Sound effects? Well, there’s not much there. Attacks have their own sound effects and for the most part, they are different from each other, but they’re still blurps and squeaks and other noises.

One odd note about this game: the music is very loud. Much louder than a normal GBA game, and that’s just a heads up. I tried this cart of three different GBA’s and where most GBA game’s I have the sound up on the halfway mark, this game was on minimal and still was just as loud! The same holds true for my import copy of Red Rescue team.

The music and sounds are a nice pairing with the action and story of the game, but a definite step down in the level of quality of the usual Pokemon music. I was surprised they didn’t remix the original traveling music for this game. Ah well, nothing’s ever perfect, is it?

Sound Rating: 6/10

4. Control and Gameplay

If you’ve never played a Chunsoft dungeon crawl before, here’s the basics. You take a step or action, then everything else in the dungeon takes a step or action. It’s like a cross between a turn based RPG and a tactical one. You don’t really notice this effect and it feels like a regular dungeon exploration scene, until you encounter some enemies it is. Sometimes this style of gameplay is really well done, as in Azure Dreams. Other times it’s pretty damn awful, as in Nightmare of Druaga. A lot has to do with the speed of the game, the AI of the computer, and the layout of the randomly generated dungeons.

Yes, randomly generated dungeons. This means everytime you go into a dungeon it will be different from the last time you entered it, in terms of layout and enemy/item locations. This can be annoying or it can add replayability to the game, depending on you particular tastes and opinions on the matter.

I’m happy to report that Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is one of the good dungeon crawls. The AI of the game is well done, with me only ever having one problem with one of my teammates in the entire game. Of course that one time was me escorting a really weak Pokemon through a powerful dungeon and he wanted to fight wild Pokemon instead of going the direction I was and he ended up dead. But hey, is there ever an RPG where you don’t question the actions of your AI controlled partners?

A lot of the game is very reminiscent of the usual Pokemon RPG’s. You level up, you can gain new moves by reaching higher levels or using TM’s (still only four per character), and you can gain new Pokemon to your team. With the latter you don’t use Pokeballs. Instead, you may defeat a wild Pokemon in combat and they may decide to join you, impressed by your strength and convictions. If you can get them out of the dungeon safely, they will join your team permanently. This is harder than it sounds as the wild Pokemon seem to gravitate right towards them. By the time I got to Zapdos (a boss in PMD) I had only recruited four new Pokemon to aid myself and Mudkip: a Magnemite, a Zigazoon, and two Yanmas. The others I had recruited didn’t make it out of their dungeons alive.

The game is quite solid in most respects with my only two issues involving the button for running is also the button for bringing up your menu, and sometimes the diagonal movement detection is off. Other than that this is probably the second best dungeon crawl I’ve played after Azure Dreams. The controls are solid, the AI is tight and challenging at times, and it’s always fun to check out new dungeons and see how different powers translate into this game. It also appears to be bug free. I can honestly say this is better than any of the Dungeon Crawls I’ve played by Chunsoft before and hope that whatever license they get next, they keep up this level of quality

Control and Gameplay Rating: 8/10

5. Replyability

Wow. Where to begin here? You can attempt to befriend all 380+ Pokemon in this game. You can try out the Ultimate Dungeon, which is literally the same format at Azure Dreams in the fact every time you go in, you are reset to level 1. You can perform unlimited rescue missions. You can even keep playing after the game has ended and perform quests and missions that were previously unavailable to you. There are specialized type based dungeons for you to level up in. There’s even the ability to have a friends team rescue your own if you are defeated or for you to be the rescuer! There is so much to do in this game, it’s not even funny. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon’s main story is about 25 hours long, but you can easily wrack up over a hundred hours just doing sidequests.

This game will keep you occupied for months. Even then you might not have a full roster of Poke-friends.

Replayability Rating: 10/10

6. Balance

The key to a Dungeon Crawl is simply leveling up enough so that you can take out the boss. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are or how clever your tactics are, if you spend a ton of time leveling up by running rescue quest after rescue quest, the main storyline missions will be a breeze. If you JUST whip through the storyline however, you’ll find it quite tough to progress through the game. Of course the obvious solution, if you want to maintain a degree of challenge, if to do a nice mix of both. That’s not really possible though. Basically this kills any balance the game really has. As well, if you just play to level up, you’ll quickly become bored with the game because you’ll be playing to munchkin and miss the whole point of it all.

Thankfully, this is where the Ultimate Dungeon comes into play. You have to start at level 1 and must make it through 100 levels. You can’t really munchkin this as you start at level one every time you enter, thus separating the skilled players from the power-gamers. As well, you can’t just wander through a single level of the dungeon and level up for hours, because your characters need to eat. If they don’t eat every so often they will faint and leave the dungeon. With a random assortment of items per level, there’s no guarantee you’ll get any food! Finally, if you spend too long on a level even with a full supply of food, a wind will come and whip you out of the dungeon. Again, this is the real challenge of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and it’s wonderful. Again, this is VERY similar to Azure Dreams.

The balance just isn’t there in the main game, and this is a general fault of most RPG’s, but the Ultimate Dungeon more than makes up for it.

Balance Rating: 5/10

7. Originality

For a Pokemon game, this is quite original and entertaining. The plot and gameplay is so different from any Pokemon game that came before it, it’s really show new life into the franchise. For a Chunsoft game though, it’s yet another dungeon crawl. All their games have almost the exact same engine and gameplay. The only thing really new here is the plot and the Pokemon aspects added in. This makes this a tough category to really review.

To rate this as simply a Chunsoft game, I’d have to give it a 3/10 due to the fact the every game they make is nearly the same and the only thing saving it are the mechanics brought in from the Game Freak Pokemon games. For a Pokemon game, it would get an 8/10 due to how wildly different this is and such a huge step for the franchise to take after a decade of making the same exact RPG in terms of plot and gameplay. He only fair thing to do is average the two scores.

Thankfully though, even if you’ve sat through everything from Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon to the GBA Eye of the Beholder remake, this game really does stand out from the average dungeon hack, as it manages to be quite entertaining and fresh. I feel the story has a lot to do with that.

Originality Rating: 5.5/10

8. Addictiveness

This weekend alone I put in 8.25 hours into Red Rescue Team. That doesn’t include time with the DS version or my original import version of RRT that I’ve had for a few months. This game is Pokecrack, So many familiar and beloved characters with new ways to use and interact with them. If you’re at all a Pokemon fan, you’re going to have a lot of fun with this, as it’s like rediscovering Pokemon all over again. Even the people I know who are apathetic to the series are leaving me comments like “WHY DO I LIKE THIS GAME SO MUCH???” You find yourself sucked in. With the various rescue missions and how quickly the dungeon levels go by, you’ll find yourself saying “Just one more dungeon, then it’s time to eat/sleep/shit/shower.” But of course we all know it’ll be four or five dungeons. This game is great at sucking you in. You’ll find yourself having favorites on your team, even if they’re not the strongest Pokemon, and just plain having a ball without any need to stop a hideously evil being beant on either taking over or blowing up the world.

If you play it, you’ll find yourself hard pressed to put it down. ‘Nuff said.

Addictiveness Rating: 8/10

9. Appeal Factor

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The average video game reviewer? They don’t get Pokemon. They’re the kind of person who needs blood and boobs in order to really get into a game. They’re the kind of person who tries to convince you they’re HARDCORE for owning hundreds of games, but spend nearly nothing on say, hygiene products. Okay, that’s mean. But the truth is, the people who work for video games sites and review products are not the typical Pokemon fan. A perfect example is Pokemon Channel. Most reviewers panned the game. I gave it an 8. And you know what? The large Pokemon fan base agreed with me. In a poll done by Pokemon Magazine a while back, Pokemon Channel was listed as the fifth most popular Pokemon game of all time. It’s not the reviewer’s fault that they don’t get Pokemon. Hell, I don’t get GTA or Devil May Cry. It’s the website or magazine’s fault for not hiring people with the knowledge base they need for certain game. In this case, it would be hiring someone that knows the Pokemon fanbase. That GETS the mindset of the average Pokemon fan and what they want in a game, whether they be 9 year old boy or 35 year old female Wall Street stockbroker.

So listen to me when I say this: The average American gamer doesn’t get turn-based dungeon crawling. It tends to be more of a genre of RPG the Japanese enjoy. I can’t think of the last one that sold well, or even the last one that wasn’t obscure as hell. This though? This is going to sell and be liked. A LOT. Why? It’s Pokemon, something the average American gamer does get and thoroughly loves even where the average American reviewer doesn’t get it and is almost indignant that his or her opinion is in the vast minority. It’s Beyond Good and Evil in reverse. And thankfully in both cases, the average American gamer realizes not to listen to the average American reviewer, because the instinctively know said reviewer is afraid to even like Pokemon because it’s cute. Gotta be hardcore! Hardcore like a 125 pound scrawny nerd that got wedgies in high school! Hardcore like a thirty year old with a massively receding who extent of “social interaction” is playing a MMORPG or getting on Xbox live instead of dealing with human beings face to face. HARDCORE! HAAAAARDCOOOOORE!

To the average American gamer: You’ll love the game. It’s characters use like doing all the things you’ve always wanted them to do. No humans, just cute monsters doing cute things with simplistic and yet addicting gameplay

To the average American game reviewer: Remember we ALL sometimes forget that our personal tastes are not in synch with the majority of gamers.

Appeal Factor: 7.5/10

10. Miscellaneous

This is the best Pokemon handheld game I’ve played since Crystal and/or Puzzle Challenge. Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald all got 6.5’s from me and Trozei got a 5.5. Pokemon Dungeon though has everything a Pokemaniac wants. It has the familiar trappings and characters. It has the ability to “catch ‘em all.” Then there are new variants to the game such as how you can interact with your friends through passwords and mailings. You can rescue you your friend’s teams, and be rescued in turn. You can attempt the Ultimate Dungeon, which is far more challenging than what we’ve seen in post beating the game Pokemon bonuses before.

Gone are the random battles that are the bane of most RPG gamer’s virtual lives. Enter fixed battles you can avoid. Gone are those pesky humans locking up their dueling beasties in airtight spheres. Enter houses and shops run by cute little monsters. This is definitely a Pokemon RPG that will appeal to those that preferred games like Pokemon Snap to the typical RPG fare Game freak has given us for a decade.

This is a very well made game, and the best thing is, we’ve still got Pokemon Ranger to come in just a few weeks. Trust me as a guy who has an import copy. It’s worth the wait.

Miscellaneous Rating: 8/10

The Scores
Story: 7/10
Graphics: 8/10
Sound: 6/10
Control & Gameplay: 8/10
Replayability: 10/10
Balance: 5/10
Originality: 5.5/10
Addictiveness: 8/10
Appeal Factor: 7/10
Miscellaneous: 8/10
Total Score 73/100
Final Score:7.5 VERY GOOD

Short Attention Span Summary
The best Pokemon game released on a hand held in roughly five years, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is sure to please long time fans and even win over some new coverts to the ever growing herd of Pokemaniacs. It’s certainly no Pokemon Crystal, but it’s a worthy contender to the throne. If you need one game to fill the dying gasp of your Game Boy Advance, let it be this one.

You’ve probably noticed by now that Liquidcross, Tom N and I have a thing for DSI Games. On August 21st, they released 5 new Game Boy Anthologies for a budget price of 15 bucks. In fact, here’s a list of what all they are releasing:

2005 Stuntman / V-Rally / Checkered Flag Game Boy Advance
2005 Pong / Asteroids / Yar’s Revenge Game Boy Advance
2005 Risk / Battleship / Clue Game Boy Advance (Reviewed by LC)
2005 Connect Four / Perfection / Trouble Game Boy Advance
2005 Centipede / Breakout / Warlords Game Boy Advance (Being reviewed right now!)
2005 Sorry! / Aggravation / Scrabble Junior Game Boy Advance
2005 Paperboy / Rampage Game Boy Advance (Reviewed by Tom N)
2005 Spy Hunter / Super Sprint Game Boy Advance
2005 Gauntlet / Rampart Game Boy Advance
2005 Marble Madness / Klax Game Boy Advance
2005 Board Game Classics Game Boy Advance
2005 Millipede / Super Breakout / Lunar Lander

I personally can’t wait for Marble Madness.Klax and portable Gauntlet.

See, the majority of IP Games are retrogamers. Especially me. We love the old classics and can still appreciate them for their gameplay, originality and FUN, whereas a lot of gamers just look towards graphics and to see if there are big breasted women in the game. it’s nice to see a publisher take classics, put them on one cart and sell them for cheap, in order to get them out to the public at large. Unlike say, Nintendo, who sells a single 8 bit game on a cart and charges twenty dollars for it.

I personally chose this collection because I really miss paddle or ball based games. Breakout and Warlords are old Atari games that required paddles controllers on the home version, and had a ball controller in the arcade. Centipede was similar. These games required a slightly different skill set one had with a joystick, and I was very interested in seeing how these games handled on a D pad. Plus I’m a Centipede whore. What can I say? It’s a shooter. I could put in a single quarter and play until I maxed out the possible high score. And it was nice to see, the first game I played on the GBA, I maxed out the high score to where the game shut itself off. Arcade perfect baby!

The question is, have these three games stood the test of time. There’s little in way of gameplay, and even less in terms of plot. But despite their age, can they still delight the modern gamer who likes dead hookers and the occasional fart joke in their 50$ DVD’s?

Let’s Review

1. Compilation & Modes

As there’s several games to review here, and little to no plot, let’s look at what each game does have to offer.

Centipede: The game of Centipede is simply a vertical shooter in which you blow up a giant centipede composed of many parts. When you shoot a section off, it turns into a mushroom which can block your shots, but also hinders the Centipede. If you shoot a segment of the Centipede that is neither the head nor the tail piece, it turns into two centipedes which you must now track down. The game is simply about surviving as long as you can, or until you get an Arcade Perfect score which ends the game anyway. Centipede offers three difficulty stages, although the only real difference is how many points give you an extra life. Still, it does give more of a challenge that one thinks.

Breakout: is simply you trying to smash every brick in a wall with a small ball that speeds up as it goes through the different layers. You have to ricochet the ball off your paddle to stay alive. If you miss hitting the ball, you lose a life. Again. Very simple. However, this version of Breakout offers FIVE gameplay modes in addition to normal play. You have Timed Mode, which is you breaking as many pieces as you can in a certain amount of time. You have Breakthru Mode, which means your ball never stops moving and can go through many pieces at once, instead of hitting one and then bouncing off. This also makes the ball go MUCH faster. There is steerable, where you can control what direction the ball flies off in. The fourth mode is Catch, where you can have the ball stick to your paddle by pressing and holding the A button. The fifth and final mode is invisible. With this mode, everything is invisible. Pretty obvious, right? You’re probably wondering how you can even play then. Well for a brief moment when the ball collides with a brick, everything lights up. It’s a true challenge for old school Breakout masters.

And the final twist? You can mix and match all of these modes together! You can have an invisible catch game. You can have a steerable breakthrough. You can have all five additional modes going at once. It’s a great way to bring new life to an old game!

Warlords: Warlords is the only game that isn’t a straight port from the Arcade. This version has new graphics and even some new gameplay. In Warlords, you play as one of four feuding Lords who seeks to control the entire Kingdom of…whatever. Each of you has set up castles and you are trying to breakthrough your opponents’ castle and have a ricocheting fireball (Also how you destroy the castle) hit the Lord inside.

In this updated version, after a certain amount of time, more fireballs will appear. The most I’ve had on at once is three, but trust me, more than one can be crazy hectic (and fun!). As well, instead of being a last man standing event like the original, this updated version of Warlords has you go to an entirely new battle with three new opponents and the game keeps going until you finally get killed. As well, there’s a score in this version, so you earn points for doing damage and outlasting your opponents.

There’s a multiplayer mode, and in fact, Warlords was one of (if not THE) first 4 person game. You need a GBA multitap to play it, and alas, I did not know of even a single other person to have this cart, much less 3. Still, Multiplayer Warlords is simple and a great deal of fun. In fact, if you have Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete for the PS1, you can unlock a Lunarized version of Warlords. Even back in 2000 when that came out, Lunar Warlords was one of the most fun games in my collection.

So overall, we have three games. Three classic games. Three VERY FUN classic games. For fifteen dollars. And each has more than one mode. Really, it’s like getting ten games for 15$, and you can’t beat a deal like that, eh? Already, this has become one of my favorite GBA games, and will always accompany me on road or plane trips. But I know they could have fit another 2-3 games on here without even trying. But why quibble?

Compilation and Modes Rating: 8/10

2. Graphics

Heh. Well, Breakout and Centipede are straight from the early 1980’s. And they are very ugly compared to today’s games. A 13 year old with minimal computer knowledge could make something more attractive.

Warlords however, has a pretty decent graphical improvement. it’s up to late NES/Early Genesis level graphics. That’s still pretty poor for a GBA game, but none of these games are about looks.

If Warlords hadn’t been updated visually, I’d have given this a 1 for looks. Instead, it gets a 2 as Warlords is worth a 5/10 alone.

Graphics Rating: 2/10

3. Sound

There’s no music to any of these games. it’s just sound affects. And those effects are generally bleeps, blurps, bloops, and the occasional noise of something being destroyed. Warlords is the best sound with the wings of a dragon fluttering (It’s where the fireballs come from) and the exploding noises. Centipede and Breakout however, has 2600 style noises, which aren’t bad, but even in their day, they weren’t really much to talk about.

Two of the games are arcade perfect, and it’s nice to here the sounds of yesteryear, but like graphics, this is one place where these games show their age,

Sound Rating: 3/10

4. Control and Gameplay

For Warlords and Breakout the controls are pretty simple You move the D pad and it moves your on screen paddle. You press the A button to hold the (Fire)ball. There’s nothing to it. Warlords is spot on, while Breakout does seem to have some collision detection issues. I’ve seen the ball hit my paddle but it register that the ball fell into the gap. And once where the ball hit my paddle and instead of going up, it went down at angle. That’s not supposed to happy under any stretch of the imagination. Although these faults are minor and happen rarely, it does make Breakout a bit depressing to play when this happens.

Centipede is again simple. The D pad moves your ship, and the A button lets you fire. Button mashing works MUCH better than holding the button down. Just like in the arcade and on the Atari 2600. WONDERFUL!

It’s hard to really talk controls here as this is as basic as basic gets. These games are synonymous with what fun gameplay is all about and inspired many games after it. Centipede launched MANY shooters, including it’s own sequel in Millipede. Warlords showed us that more than two player gaming can be addicting and fun. Breakout gave us well…super breakout and my beloved Arkanoid.

Aside from the occasional glitch in Breakout, these games are simple to learn, but will take you quite some time to master.

Control Rating: 8/10

5. Replayability

All three of these games will never play the same way twice. The AI in Warlords is pretty tight and challenging, even for those that could beat the original in their sleep. Centipede is like any shooter, where you keep playing until you can’t possibly get any better. Then you play some more. Breakout never ends, so again, it’s playing for the highest score you can get before the game ends itself.

The extra modes in Breakout, the difficulty levels in Centipede and the multiplayer in Warlords helps the game feel fresh even after you’ve played it for a while. But truthfully, you can really play each game for an hour and have a taste of what it will be like after playing the game for 20-30 hours. You’ll just simply get better at them.

Still, it will take you quite some practice to Arcade Perfect Centipede and Breakout. And there’s a reason these games are still revered 2 decades after their original release.

Replayability rating: 6/10

6. Balance

You can’t get better than these games in this category, if only because you’re playing against yourself in all of them. In Breakout, how you hit the ball affects where it will go, what it will hit, and where it will land. You have to understand angles and trajectory. Breakout was the early predecessor to all the physics engines we talk about today. Eventually, if you lose a life, it’s due to your only previous actions.

In Warlords the same is true, but then you add 3 CPU’s with pretty decent AI. The intelligence of the computer also seems to fluctuate. Sometimes you can’t get a hit on him. Sometimes it’s pretty dumb. And this goes for all three opponents. This means the game will also give you a random challenge. And since the game doesn’t end until you finally get beaten, Level 3 could actually be easier than level 1.

Centipede though. That’s the challenge. it’s a shooter after all. After you’ve played the game a million or so times, you learn the advantage of where to shoot the creepy crawlie so the mushroom is dropped in a strategically advantageous place for you and not the computer. It’s a lot of work to get good at Centipede, and where much worth it.

Two of the games are only as difficult as you let them be, while the third is a testament to the “shoot things and mash buttons” genre I love so much. No matter what your skill level or experience in gaming is, this GBA cart will always having something for you.

Balance Rating: 8/10

7. Originality

These three games have been ported all over the place. From the arcade to the 2600 to the Dreamcast to now the GBA, you can find these three games on just about any system. However, I don’t ever remember these three games ported together on one cart, or in a portable format. So that’s a nice touch.

They update to Warlord’s graphics and gameplay is enjoyable too, and even hardcore “don’t change it” old school fanatics will be happy here.

Originality Rating: 5/10

8. Addictiveness

These games may be simple, but they hook you in like a grappling hook laden tractor beam. You’ll be amazed at how drawn in you can be by a game where you only use one button and a D pad. Where all you do in two games is try and keep a ball away from your side of the screen like a soccer goalie.

And Centipede? Oh, it’s a shooter. You’ll either become so engrossed you’ll lose track of time, or you’ll get frustrated and quit right away.
This single cart contained a trinity of some of the best games Atari had to offer can last you for hours. And no matter how often you come back to it, the fun level will never decrease. These games never get old.

Addictiveness Rating: 7/10

9. Appeal Factor

This cart has been pretty much under the radar of everyone. No other gaming site has even mentioned it. So imagine how many casual gamers even know it exists!

Fans of classic gaming will really want to pick this up. These games are also great for younger gamers in regards to giving them a nice simple basic game to learn and to hone their hand to eye coordination with. Even older gamers will enjoy this. They just have to remember gameplay is more important than graphics. Sadly, that mindset is getting more and more scarce amongst gamers.

Still, for those who actually go looking for this and decide to buy it, I can’t imagine you NOT enjoying it.

Appeal Factor: 5/10

10. Miscellaneous

For 15 bucks, DSI has given us a heck of a deal. These games are fun, addicting, and timeless. I’m really happy to see compilations like this come out rather than 20-30$ for Castlevania on the GBA from Nintendo and Konami. The best way to keep the classics alive is to bundle them together on the cheap. And DSI has done a pretty good job with the cart I’m reviewing, and it looks like my fellow Kliq members agree.

This is one of the best GBA purchases I’ve made considering the dollar spent to fun had ratio.

Miscellaneous Rating: 7/10

THE SCORES

Compilation and Modes: 8/10
Graphics: 2/10
Sound: 3/10
Control & Gameplay: 8/10
Replayability: 6/10
Balance: 8/10
Originality: 5/10
Addictiveness: 7/10
Appeal: 5/10
Miscellaneous: 7/10

Overall Score: 59/100
FINAL SCORE: 6.0 (Above Average)

Short Attention Span Summary
It’s 15$. It’s three great games. Sure it may look and sound ugly, but beauty is after all, only skin deep.

We all know my two favorite genres in gaming are RPG and 2-D shooters. Last year my vote for Game of the Year was Gradius V. The year before that, I raved over Ikaruga. And before that, there were games like Mars Matris, Radiant Silver Run, the original R-Type, Gunbird, and on and on. I love 2D shooters. I will spend hours on Metal Slug and still be as wide eyed and addicted to it today as I was when I first got the game so many years ago.

And then there’s RPG’s. I Did 411mania and IP’s Top 30 RPG countdown last year, and that genre is a very close second for me in terms of fanboy level fanaticism. But in the end, RPG’s rarely if ever require hand to eye co-ordination. Especially Turn-Based RPG’s. And in the end, I find REAL shooters (not this pansy FPS crap) to be a much greater challenge than any RPG’s I’ve played.

So when I learned about six months ago that Namco was going to published an RPG where all the battles were 2D shooter battles, well…let’s just say the IP Games clubhouse needed a thorough cleaning from my inability to contain my joy.

The real question running through my brain like a gerbil on a habitrail was this: Could the two genres co-exist properly? How could they balance the two out and keep fans of both wildly different genres happy? Or would one in fact overpower the other.

The truth is, the game is a 2D shooter with RPG elements instead of an RPG with 2D shooter elements. I’d say the game is 65% shooter/35% RPG. The game’s RPG map wandering and experience system, all revolve around the shooting stages, and the random battles are so plentiful, you’ll be flying almost, if not MORE than you are walking.

The Question at the end of the day is “Is the game any bloody good?” And that’s what we’re here to find out.

Let’s Review

1. Story

The main character of Sigma Star Saga is Ian Wrecker. Ian is the last survivor of the Sigma Squadron, which is a group of fighter pilots. 60 years ago, an alien race named the Krill invaded Earth, boiled the oceans, and nearly destroyed the planet. Now they have returned. Ian managed to destroy a giant alien battleship, but at the cost of his partner’s lives.

Ian was then chosen by his commander office to spy on the Krill. With a fake history set up for him as a traitor to the Earth and jettisoned into space, Ian is forcibly enlisted by the Krill and begins working as a double agent, letting the United Earth Defense Force know what the Krill are up to.

During this time, Ian is linked with the Krill parasite, which allows him to speak Krillian and also fly their organic spaceships through a neural interface. Ian is also teamed up with a Krill female named Psyme, who makes Ice Queens look positively warm and cuddly.

As well, the more Ian becomes accepted and trusted by the aliens he has infiltrated, the more he learns that things aren’t as black and white as he thought. And that maybe…just maybe, he was working for the bad guys.

Sigma Star Story has easily the best story ever written for a 2D shooter. And even for an RPG, it’s amazingly good. None of the characters are cheap stereotypes. The dialogue is believable and well written. And unlike horribly over-rated games like Beyond Good and Evil that give you one nonsensical plot twist after another like something out of a badly done episode of Crash TV (Copyright Vince Russo), SSS never gives you an outright “So and so are good” and then changes back with little to no reason or depth behind the shift. Instead Sigma Star stays very low key throughout the entire game, with subtle comments and gray areas that leave it to you, the gamer, to decide which side you feel is right. And with 4 possible endings, you do actually influence the outcome of the war with your in game choices. SSS doesn’t leave you with a contrived or over the top ending or plot mish-mash. It instead focuses on the simple fact that in war, there are only winners and losers; not good and bad.

There’s really nothing I can say negative about the story. And although the plot does take away from me blowing things up in my ship, it really is quite good. My only complaint is that the plot involves a lot of running around space stations and back tracking with no XP gain, so it becomes a time waster. I’d rather have just had the plot be long and enjoyable cut scenes. But that’s just me.

In the end, SSS has one of the best plots out for any system currently available. I generally do not like Sci-Fi stories, but Sigma Star kept me highly entertained and curious a to what was going to happen next. If you like intrigue and even a touch of Sci-Fi blended with Noir, you’ll be quite happy sitting through this game. Even when you’re not shooting monsters down in your spacecraft.

Story Rating: 8/10

2. Graphics

Being that Sigma Star is a GBA game, it’s not likely to wow anyone graphically. That being said though, SSS is visually impressive for what it manages to pull off on with Nintendo’s portable processors.

There are a lot of different enemies throughout SSS, which many specific to one of the 8 worlds you will encounter. Some are your generic spaceships and giant monsters shooting out lasers from their mouths, but all are well rendered and look better than a lot of the shooters I’ve played on the PS1, and even quite a few that I own for the Dreamcast.

There’s also the mini and end bosses of each world. These are all quite nicely done, and some are even pretty original for the shooter genre. However most fall into shooter cliche. But we’re grading of visual appeal in this category, not originality. That comes later. And SSS destroys R-Type III (another recent 2D shooter for the GBA release) graphically.

The character designs in SSS are decent as well. Again, we’re not talking anything revolutionary, even for the GBA. But we do have some nice head shots of every character with lines in the game.

The background layouts of the game are my favorite visual aspect of SSS. They are highly detailed and even though you’ll be seeing the same few level designs to the point where you literally will memorize time, they’re still very well done and deserve some acknowledgement.

Overall, Sigma Star Saga is pretty to look at, although if you spend too much time critiquing the graphics, you will die a terrible, terrible death. The graphics are good, but nothing to write home about. Better than serviceable or mediocre, but there are better looking shooters and GBA games out there.

Graphics Rating: 7/10

3. Sound

I just need to blurt this out right now to finally get it out of my brain: Most of the music from the Forest Planet (Stage 1) in this game sounds like it was ripped from the 8 Man After OVA DVD.

Now that that’s out of the way, I have to say I really enjoyed the score to SSS. The music is catchy and sticks in your head, but doesn’t overwhelm or distract. In a game like a shooter, this is of vital importance. Your ears need to be tuned to the sound of bullets or lasers not the background tunes.

There’s no voice acting per say in S3, but there are tiny sound bites like a girl laughing to represent Psyme or grunts of “SIR!” amongst the Krill. This is neither bad nor good, just informing you that Sigma Star lack voice acting.

Sound effects are mediocre. They’re not bad. They’re just very much in the same vein as every other shooter out there. Some shooting sounds, some monster sounds, and some explosions. It’s what you get. And in spades. Really, if you’ve even played ONE shooter, you know what I’m talking about here.

Sound we have an excellent score, no voice acting, and mediocre sound effects. Really, for a shooter, I’ve always found Sound to be the least important aspect of the genre. WayForward had done a good job here though. Even if I do think the 8 Man After guys have a potential lawsuit brewing…

Sound Rating: 7/10

4. Control & Gameplay

Although the game is billed as a RPG/Shooter hybrid, the focus is primarily on the Shooter aspects. In the shooter battles, you earn experience by destroying enemies and collecting the blue globes they leave behind. No globes = no experience. As you gain more and more experience, you will find your ship can withstand more damage and also dish more out. Usually when you come to a world for the first time, you’ll be just trying to stay alive. By the time you leave that world, you should have gained at least 10 levels and are now dispatching those same enemies with ease. Each level does give a noticeable power-up, especially when you compare to playing the same random battle when you’re level 1 and when you’re level 31, which should occur when you go back to the Forest Planet in Chapter 3.

Outside of the shooting battles, you have a top down map in which you guide Wrecker across the world. Here you will occasionally shoot monsters, but you gain no experience from these. Instead you may randomly be awarded a health power up or a “Smart Bomb,” which destroys all enemies on the screen in shooter mode. These come in very handy when you journey to a world for the first time and give you a nice XP reward to boost your levels. Other than that though, the map meandering is really as “RPG” as the game gets outside of leveling up.

There’s also the random battle aspect of this game. I, as a rule, loathe random RPG battles. It’s a cheap way to elongate the play time of the game and generally irritate most gamers, unless you’re of the munchkin/power gaming variety. In SSS however, I don’t mind them as much. If only because I love shooter battles. However, due to the very tiny amount of random levels that the game chooses from for you, you will find yourself playing the same battle DOZENS of times. And the only thing changing is the ship you end up driving.

Ah yes, you caught that didn’t you. Different ships. You see, not only are their random battles, but in each battle, your craft will be chosen for you. The game explains this by saying the ships are organic and sentient and they summon you to pilot them when in danger. I can live with that. I can even live with the random ships because it really hones your skill as a shooter gamer, and forces you to adapt to a slower or more hair trigger plane.

However, after an hour of this game, you will have it indomitably stamped into your brain that fat things or tall things suck and should be destroyed. And god forbid something be fat AND tall. This is one true hate of Sigma Star. Not the demeaning of bigger people. I agree with that completely. What I hate is entering a random battle in a level I know, and I mean KNOW is designed for a small ship and ONLY a small ship (due to my having played the bloody level 25 times before in previous random battles) and being stuck with what I call “The Retarded Whale with Down Syndrome” ship. It’s slow. It’s weak. It maneuvers like an anvil. And there is no way it will be able to fit into certain parts of certain levels due to its sides. Meaning death is a certainty. And of course this thankfully rare combination occurs when you’re about half an hour away from the very rare save points in the game, meaning you’re about to lose some gameplay time. Not enough to make you jump up and down on the GBA hoping to grind it and the cart to dust, but just enough to annoy the crap out of you and defuse all enjoyment you’ve been having to that point.

And yes, this will happen to you several times throughout the game. And it proves that in theory the random battles + random ships was an excellent idea, but when the rare combo of doom occurs, it merely serves to inspire homicidal rage.

Aside from this massive annoyance, the game handles beautifully. The controls on all the ships (Save the Retarded Whale and its two slightly smaller and slightly faster behemoth cousins) are tight and respond beautifully. There’s one specific ship that moves at the drop of a hat. For long time shooter fans, this will quickly become your favorite. For people new to the genre, you’ll probably hate how quickly and extreme it responds to your slightest touch.

I’m not going to go through each of the craft options, but all are quite unique and less than 2 hours into the game you’ll be able to differentiate them and how good they are just by sight. Then you two will be swearing at the giant ships and will be able to understand my pain.

Overall the game plays beautifully. It’s merely the combo of levels designed only for the smaller ships while getting tagged with the large ships that makes you wonder how much this game got playtested. The RPG elements are a great idea in the shooter stages, but the man exploration merely serves to drag the game down. Except when your character is rewarded with a power up or a wonderful new weapon or bullet type for your craft. Sigma Star Saga isn’t up to the levels of the console or Arcade shooters, but it is quite good in its own right, and the problems this game does suffer from are merely annoying rather than completely disruptive.

Control & Gameplay Rating: 7/10

5. Replayability
This is actually tricky here. For hardcore shooter fans, there’s a ton of Replayability. After all the consummate shooter fan replays a 2D shooter countless times. Not to get all the endings. Not to unlock 100% of everything. But to simply get better at the game. A hardcore shooter fan makes up their own rules. How far can they get without continues! Using the worst weapon set or ship in the game. Getting a higher score. Things like that. And with 4 endings this is going to give a shooter fan even more reason to come back and play through Sigma. Then there’s the 10,000 possible weapon combinations. Yes. You read that right. Ten. Thousand. With 28 types each of cannons, bullets, and impacts, this may be a shooter fan’s dream come true. Well, aside from the random ships.

But in the end, the game is still going to be 95% the same.

For an RPG’er, the Replayability is a little different. You have the four endings, but you will have to play through the game four times in order to see them all. And I don’t think many straight RPG fans have the patience or skill to sit through 20 hours of shooting even ONCE, much less four times. But for the rare crossbreed fan like myself, the option is happily available.

I’m going to say Sigma Star Saga has average replay value for an RPG fan, as there are longer game with more less linear gameplay than this. For Shooter fans, this gives you a lot more options than you are used to. So I’d say it’d be a 9 for replay value if only because it’s MUCH longer than most shooters and offers more options (if not difficulty).

So let’s average it out and call it good, okay?

Replayability Rating: 7/10

6. Balance

And if ever there was an Achilles heel for this game, this would be it. Shooters are supposed to be hard. In fact, they’re almost universally considered the hardest genre. However in SSS, there is either no challenge whatsoever or there are battles you can only cheese your way out of.

Let me explain. The hardest battles you will have in the game are the first and last stages in each chapter respectively. The first battle is because your ship is woefully underpowered for the chapter. If SSS played anything like a normal shooter, this would be no problem. You’d just dodge a lot. However, the only way to end a level is this game, is to kill a certain number of enemies. So in this case, you’ll be using a lot of smart bombs to clear the stage. The last battle of the stage is hard only because it’s so long. The law of averages catches up to you here.

However the bosses (and randomly occurring minibosses) are so easy, it’s pathetic. I’d be willing to wager that these are the easiest bosses in all of shooterdom. I realize the shooter aspects are a bit dumbed down for the stereotypical RPG gamer, but no 2D shooter fan is going to find challenge in this game, save for when you first come to a world. That or well the “your ship is too big for the level you are on” screw up occurs.

My biggest problem are the lack of save spots. Having minimal save spots or ones only in certain locations was fine back in say…the days of 8 bit or 16 bit gaming. Now there’s no reason for that kind of crap. Especially when there’s generally 3 save spots to a world, and all are amazingly far apart from each other. When you are given one of those random big ships, you’re going to be hit. There’s no way around it. And it would be nice to be able to save more frequently rather than lose an hour of gameplay simply because the random ship you were given can’t make it past the floating bluffs in a level.

Really, this is one of the worst shooters ever in terms of balance. The game is a cakewalk. I realize that this is probably to get new people (mainly RPG’ers) to embraced the all but defunct (in the US) 2D shooter genre. But it would have been nice to have a difficulty setting like in other action RPGS like Dark Alliance. I’m afraid the easiness of this game may turn off shooter fans, yet it will still probably be too difficult for the non-shooter fans.

SSS would have greatly balanced from having the first stage of each world being lighter and easier to get gamers used to what is to come, rather than have it being the hardest stage of the entire chapter. A nice gradual climb towards harder gameplay would probably keep more people interested in the game longer than they will be.

And more save spots damn it. Nothing annoys me more than having to back track in an RPG or god help me a SHOOTER to save my game. Especially when most shooters have an autosave option.

The rest of the review may be glowing, but this one bit can and probably will break the game for most people.

Balance Rating: 3/10

7. Originality

I can’t think of any other RPG/Shooter Hybrids at all. There’s tons of 2D Action RPG’s I can think of, but truly Sigma Star Saga is the first of its kind and does a pretty darn good job of blending two genres together. Sure it’s heavier on the Shooter aspects than the RPG ones, but the Shooter element had to be the more dominant, if only because that’s the battle gameplay. The story is well scripted and does on excellent job of keeping RPG fans entertained, even if they’re more used to picking an option out of a menu than darting and weaving.

Sigma Star Saga is one of the few games I can say is amazingly original in this day and age. Sure it rehashes some recycled bits from the shooter genre, but it’s hard not considering everything that’s been put out for this line of gaming since Asteroids. Aside from clinging to a few trappings, SSS proves that originality is far from dead. it’s truly an Occam’s Razor in action.

Originality Rating: 9/10

8. Addictiveness

This is a toughie. There were points were I would be very VERY into this game, forsaking pretty much everything else because I had been sucked in. Then I got a giant ship of lemming like doom and would watch 45 minutes of gameplay go up in smoke simply because there was so save spot anywhere near by. And that would disgust me so much, I’d turn the game off for the day and loathe the thought of going back to it. I developed a very strong love/hate relationship with SSS, and I’m a shooter fanatic. God knows that for people who aren’t as crazy about the genre as me, that the relationship fostered was probably more hate/hate. Especially with the ol’ turn based RPG aficionados.

I can’t believe how much better the game would score in a few categories if only the random battles and save spots had been thought out a bit more. But in the end some bad planning really does spoil the fun value of SSS in a lot of ways. NO ONE likes to replay an hour of gaming simply because they couldn’t get to a save spot. It’s a game killer. And SSS has this in spades. It’s too bad too, because aside from this one gigantic flaw o’ doom, the rest of the game sinks its claws into you and won’t let go.

Addictiveness Rating: 5/10

9. Appeal Factor

Hmm. This is hard. Shooters are pretty underwhelming in terms of sales here in the US. It’s not a very popular genre. While one can say there are a good deal of shooter fans who also play RPG’s, the reverse is less true. A lot of RPG gamers are not shooter fans. And your average casual RPG-aholic will be lacking the skills to play even this, which is a very dumbed down shooter. That’s not a knock on RPG’s or RPG fans. Hell, I love RPG’s. But turn based and tactical RPG’s are NOT games that hone your joystick skills. Action RPG’s yes, but not in the same way at all.

WayForward has done an amazing job of blending the two genres together. The real question is whether or not the two fanbases can blend together. And somehow, I just don’t see a Treasure fan being able to resist beating the tar out of a SquareEnix Squall/Tidus slash fan fiction writer.

For the rest of you, this really is “Baby’s First 2D shooter.” It’s much longer than most shooters, and it’s also easier. So this is probably the game that will help one decided if this is the genre they want to really start paying attention to or not.

I enjoy this game a lot (aside from certain annoyances…), but I’m probably in the distinct minority.

Appeal Factor: 4/10

10. Miscellaneous

I love shooters. Just keep on making them, and I will keep on buying them. And I am very happy to have a 20 hour shooter. Especially one I have to play 4 times to beat, with two endings only unlockable in New Game+ mode. I’m just ecstatic to have seen WayForward attempt this game genre combination. Sure there are some flaws, and some game killing flaws, but this was a first attempt. And a fine attempt it was.

The overall package is something I’d highly recommend to people looking to see if they would enjoy shooters. You’re getting 20 hours of gameplay for thirty bucks here, instead of shilling out that same kind of money for a game that lasts 1-5 hours like most shooters. it’s easier for a newbie to the genre to justify the gameplay length with SSS than with say…the vastly superior Gradius V that should be owned by everyone with a PS2.

Sigma Star does pale compared to most shooters, especially ones that you can find still today for the PS2 or Dreamcast. But in a drought of shooters this year, it’s more than enjoyed.

I’m hoping that this game does cause a lot of people to branch out and try a new genre, especially one as rewarding and challenging as 2D shooters, but it probably won’t.

Miscellaneous Rating: 6/10

The Scores:

Overall Score: 63/100
FINAL SCORE: 6.5 (FAIR)

Short Attention Span Summary
Sigma Star Saga is neither a great RPG, nor a good shooter. However it is an above average mix of the two genres. An excellent first attempt, this fusion of my two favorite genres can only get better with each passing attempt. I really hope this is not a one shot by WayForward, as I would love to see more Shooter RPG’s. Where Jade Empire was an overrated RPG with some simplified shooter levels, SSS is a Simplified shooter with some RPG elements. I’d still recommend this over Jade Empire any day (even though I gave Jade Empire a 7) for shooter fans, but even they may be disappointed.

Yes, it has taken me two weeks to write this review? Why? Because I hate this game that much. Riviera is in Wrestlemania XXI, CIMA: The Enemy and Nightmare of Druaga territory of bad.

I have the unfortunate fate of having played through Riviera twice. Long long ago, back in 2002, people would ask me, “Hey Alex, why did the Wonderswan fail?” And I would hand them my copy of Riviera shuddering all the way. I was not at all impressed with the game back then. It was mediocre at best. And that would be if I was in a really nice mood because Pokemon became real and they all decided to live with me and Electronic Arts lost the exclusive license to NFL video games.

Professional decorum prevents me from using the descriptive language I would have to verbalize in order to say what I thought of it on a normal day.

But then Atlus, my beloved Atlus, announced they were bringing the remake over here. I raised an eyebrow. But then I saw the graphics. WOW! It didn’t even look like the same game! It was by far the best looking game I’d seen on the GBA EVER. It has cut scenes. PSX quality graphics! And I was promised voice acting. Because I am generally blindly loyal to Atlus save for awful games like Samurai Western and that bass fishing thing they published, I agreed to review it. In my head I pictures a happy review about how horrid Riviera was on the WSC and comparing it to the totally awesome and tubular to the max remake Atlus had brought over with their wisdom and insight into quality RPG’ing.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Man was I wrong. Wowie Zowie was I wrong. And what’s worse, after this new version of Riviera, I hate the game even more. We’re talking Final Fantasy 8 levels of loathing and wishing the developers would have frozen plane feces land on their noggins. Every day. For eternity.

Why does this game anger me so much? Because it’s pretty much the GBA’s equivalent of FFVII. Amazing graphics and sound, and fecal matter everywhere else. The game has a plot that is nauseatingly bad to begin with, and the American translators dumb the game down so much that I almost couldn’t make it past the first hour due to the inane dialogue. The controls, gameplay, and every little thing about this game is annoying awful in everyway, but because it’s PRETTY, we’ve got the idiocy of the lowest common denominator effect coming into play. The average gamer is floored by the looks and thus negates the most important part of the game. You know, PLAYING it. Ugh. And reading the reviews out there already has just disheartened me to the already amazingly across the board awful quality of reviews out there nowadays.

Riviera is awful. VERY AWFUL. And I will now go into every single detail why. Do not buy this game. Kick your friends for buying this game. Develop a time machine and beg the Wonderswan development team who originally came up with Riviera to make something else. Set fire to the homes of those who brought this game over. Steal their children and pets until they write a letter of apology for bringing this game stateside. Let the streets flow with the blood of all those responsible!

Sheesh. I’m kidding. I dislike the game. But not to that level. Besides, it’s just my opinion. I’m sure lots of other people can enjoy it. I mean, people managed to find games like Flatout or Tomb Raider 4 worth their hard earned cash and some even enjoyed them! Me? I think Riviera is a worthless cart with little to no redeeming value. I am saddened I agreed to review Riviera and that this game typifies everything I despise about gaming today. Again though, this review is just my opinion and is not meant to be taken as the word of God or anything. But of course, since I am the Showstoppa, some of you will. ;-)

Let’s Review

1. Story

Here’s an idea? Who wants a plot of Angels vs Demons with good barely winning and having to look up the gods of evil only to fall comatose immediately afterwards? You do? Great! What if we add some amazingly erroneous Norse mythology language and terms? You’re still excited, right? Well then, what if we add Angels and constant “Who is good? Who is bad?” plot swerves until you are wondering if this game was designed by Vince Russo and Ed Ferrera? And to top it all off, how about some of the worst characterization you will ever see in a video game, including some downright bloody terrible translation that reads like a Dick and Jane novel? Seriously people, even a mentally handicapped person would find the repetitive dialogue and downright awful styling of the writing of this game to be both beneath them and contemptuous.

As I said earlier, if you can get past the first HOUR of this game, congradu-f*cking-lations! You are able to stomach garbage far better than I. The dialogue flows like this.

Main Character: Hello. I am a retard! Watch as every phrase I say makes you, the player, instantly dislike me!

Less Stupid Angel: ……. I am dark and emo.

And I wish to god I was exaggerating here for comic effect. But this is the stripped down cyclical nature of the first hour’s dialogue until…MAJOR PLOT SWERVE THAT YOU ARE HIT OVER THE HEAD WITH SUCH DEMEANING COMMENTARY THAT YOU CAN’T MISS IT! It is by far the worst hour of gaming I can remember. WMXXI was better, and that game’s story was “You are a sweaty man. Hit this other sweaty man with a steel chair and lay on top of him. Repeat for 20 hours.”

The core plot is Angels of Asgard and Demons of Utgard (which is so not even remotely close to Norse mythology it makes this folklorist weep tears of pain) The good guys won by creating Dark Angels at the cost of their existence…which the game instantly contradicts itself by then saying the Gods fought alongside the “grim angels” to finally defeat the demons. Where your opening demo/plot explanation contradicts itself a paragraph in, there’s a problem. The Gods seal away the demons and leave a core of 7 wise humans to rule humanity wisely.

BUM BUM BUM! And if you don’t see how the plot is going just from the demo, you should never ever be allowed near an RPG again.

Yes! The demons wake up! And two new grim angels are created! But how? All the Gods are dead? Plot screw up #2 and we haven’t actually STARTED THE GAME YET!

The Grim Angels are commanded to head to Midgard/Riviera. Don’t worry about the name switching! The game will happily go into an amazingly bad bit of dialogue in that first hour about it, repeating itself like an American tourist screaming loudly and slowly at a Frenchmen in hopes he can get directions to the nearest KFC.

Eventually at the end of this hour of “Beverly Hillbillies with Religious Symbolism: THE RPG,” you get your first of many annoying plot swerves. You encounter a mute enemy that seems to have holy powers. Yet Hector of the Magi commands you to attack her. Again you are hit over the head with what is obviously to come. The translators lack both subtlety and the concept of FORESHADOWING. Suddenly the main character, Ein, disappears and Hector and the other Angel (Ledah) assume he is dead and keep on with their plan to activate the “Retribution Device” which will destroy all demons, along with Riviera. But it’s okay, because Hector has told the Angels Riviera is nothing but a land of sin and evil. Purge purge purge!

SWERVE AGAIN!

Ein is not dead. He wakes up on Riviera, where he is mistaken for a Sprite (basically humans). It turns out the Sprites are sweet and loveable! Not evil at all. Is Hector a liar? Is he evil? Who knows? Ein has amnesia and greatly reduced stats! And he’s slightly less idiotic, probably because he doesn’t have the self-esteem depleting duo on his case anymore.

And so Ein sets out to save what he was once going to destroy. Oooh! Irony!

What’s sad is the dialogue gets only marginally better. Again, it’s written like some horrible Archie comic gone wrong with dialogue no one would ever say in real life. You do often gets dialogue choices to say to your teammates in an attempt to be a fourth rate dating sim, but there’s almost only two choices, and the right one is painfully obvious. Unless you want the characters to hate you or you are blind, you’ll always be able to pick the safe one easily. If you want an RPG/Dating Sim mix, there’s Star Ocean 2, Sakura Taisen, and Thousand Arms. All are superior games in every way.

None of the characters are likeable. Especially Lina who talks in the third person and is given pabulum to spew out. I do not remember a single instance where I enjoyed any of the writing. I only remember a constant stream of nausea. It’s every single Japanese RPG character stereotype on the planet.

I am aghast at people somehow enjoying the writing for this game. It’s one of the worst I have ever encountered in my 2 decades of playing video games. That first hour, as I have already said, is the worst written bit of gaming I am quite sure I have ever played.

Vile, awful plot. And the translators should hang their head in shames of the job they did.

Jesus. 4 pages of bile and I could keep going. Let’s just leave it as the plot is cliche, it’s badly written and plotted. It tries to be clever but ends up only pathetic. There are literally 100 games out just for this generation of systems I could name with better plots than this. Run far away from Riviera if you like a good story.

Shame on you Atlus. You of ALL companies should know better.

Story Rating: 1/10

2. Graphics

ON THE OTHER HAND…

Riviera is by far the most beautiful game I have ever seen on the GBA. This game looks better than some PS1 games. The quick full screen anime scenes, the character designs, everything about this game’s graphics is sheer brilliance.

Although a lot of the monster designs are repetitive, what they do have here is brilliant. There’s very little that won’t impress you considering this is the GBA.

The backgrounds are excellent as well. There’s a lot of detail put into them, even on simple things most gamers would completely ignore. Things like the moon and the night sky. The flapping of a bat’s wings. Shadowing and lighting effects. Things like that.

The four female characters who join your team all have a distinct look, even if they are still laden in RPG stereotypes. Cierra is by far my favorite.

If you’re a graphics whore with a Game Boy Advance, then you’ll want to snatch up Riviera immediately.

In every way that the plot of Riviera is craptastical, the graphics will make you stare in disbelief at what a GBA is capable of. You will walk away impressed. VERY impressed.

Graphics Rating: 10/10

3. Sound

I still can’t believe it. A ton of voice acting on a GBA cart. Excellent voice acting at that, even if the dialogue is rubbish. How they can get the vocals onto this game, yet Game Freak refuses to let Pikachu say well…”Pikachu,” is beyond me.

I’ve seen some voice acting before on the GBA. Mainly games like Lunar Legend. But not to this quality. And especially not at this quantity. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like a console game where you’ll be hearing consistent voices speaking for large portions of the game. The commentary will be limited to in-battle only. But there is still more voice acting in this game than any three other GBA carts put together. And that deserves some respect. Again, Riviera is amazingly impressive in this regard. And the voice acting is top notch to boot, giving it some more well earned points.

The score is excellent too. It’s again, one of the best on the GBA. The music fits each aspect of the game perfectly, from in town exploration, to spooky dungeon crawling, to the battle hymns. Riviera is aurally brilliant. It’s just too bad that if you’re an on the go gamer like myself, often times you can’t have the volume, nor can you wear headphones for various reasons. And it’s a pity, because the auditory aspects of Riviera are one of the best qualities of the game.

Rivera’s the electronic equivalent of an attractive woman who works as a phone sex operator but has the intellect of a gopher with a concussion.

Sound Rating: 10/10

4. Control/Gameplay

Ready for a mood swing back to me being foaming at the mouth ENRAGED with this game? Good! Because it’s time to point out why I think this has some of the worst gameplay ever.

Imagine you had a game that took all the things even Final Fantasy and Ogre BATTLE fanboys hated about those games, left out all the good stuff, and then pureed them together? Guess what? You have the battle engine of Riviera.

You have a game with annoying long special attacks you can’t cycle through. You have to watch the entire thing. Remember how annoying FF7 or 8 got after the billionth time you watched that summon attack? It’s like that here!

You have battles where you have to pick and choose items before hand (but only four!) and use only those in battle. However, like Ogre Battle, you don’t really get to pick who you will attack as most of the attacks are random. And of course that usually means they will overkill a dying enemy instead of go after the really powerful jerk one you wanted to hit. I hate that in a game. It’s an RPG. There shouldn’t be any of this random attack crap. I can’t see in any battle ever in the history of fiction or reality where some character would go “I’m going to blinding hit something now. Wheee!” However unlike Ogre Battle, Riviera lacks all the quality aspects of that game, such as a good plot, reputation management, having to watch and control armies, and so on.

What else needs to be berated? Oh! The dungeon crawling aspects. The game feels like Super Mario 1. There’s levels and then tons of stages. You’ll see things like Stage: 1-5 or 2-4 or 3-who cares? I keep expecting to see a badly pixilated mushroom saying, “We’re sorry Ein, but the princess is in another castle.” And because battles are MAINLY fixed, the running back and forth rewards you with absolutely nothing.

Notice I said MAINLY. You see, the designers of the game decided to make it so you could have practice battles with random monsters whenever you wanted. Basically Riviera is the dream come true for all those sad little Gygaxian roleplayers who run around for hours getting into battles so their characters can be maxed out by the time the game is only a quarter through because they somehow think it’s macho or cool to run through a game without having any challenge because they decided to cheese. This is amazingly lame, and sadly, the game all but forces you to have to go through this due to the amazingly messed up difficulty scale monsters are placed on. One battle will be super easy, the next will be appalling hard. No rhyme or reason. And especially no warning. Any game that tacks on play length by pretty much forcing you to do “random” battles is asinine.

Then there’s the leveling up system. You don’t gain levels in Riviera. You gain skills. By using certain weapons enough times, you get rewarded by new skills and stat points as well. However sometimes the stat gains make no sense. “Wow. I used a Scythe and gained a skill from that. Why am I getting a ton of magic for that, but only one point to my strength?” There’s no real explanation of why certain weapons give you certain abilities. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Just an odd thing. An explanation would be nice. This does of course mean you will get new items and use them instantly and exclusively in a desperate attempt to gain stats. And this also means a LOT of practice battles because using these new weapons are the only way your characters will get more power. After a dozen battles and all you have are spider webs and Triffid droppings, happiness will no longer be an option for you.

Weapons are an interesting aspect of this game. Like Koudelka, you have only a certain amount of uses with each weapon before they shatter. Of course, it doesn’t matter as there are plenty of chests for you to open and gain new items from. So it’s just a matter of hitting the buttom for your random reward on something you don’t already have.

You can also hold only a limited number of items, and you’ll get one after almost every battle, so you will be discarding a lot. And again, because new items = new skills, you’ll be hoarding weapons and not keeping things you probably should need like Potions, because you’ll wonder if there will ever be the chance to get certain weapons again. Yay paranoia!

There’s also a point system that rewards you for each battle. You collect a score and a letter rating for each battle. Depending on how you do, you get extra points in your TP Gauge. This leads to one of the more original ideas in the game: The Look Mode. Entering Look Mode gives you options on the screen for what you can examine. But to do so you have to give up a TP point. When you run out of points, you can’t examine anything. This is an interesting idea in theory, but in practice it is utterly useless, for you will almost always get a battle rating of A, B, or S (if you kill enemies with special moves). This will max your TP gauge, thus making the whole idea irrelevant. I had maybe one battle that ended with a C. 95% of the battles ended for me with a B or S.

Finally, the only aspect of the engine left to examine is the Street Fighter/King of Fighters Super Special bar both you and your enemies have. They fill up from attacking or being hit. For the enemy their bar goes down a bit when they use normal attacks, but it can also only go up to 1 level. Your side can max out their super special bar to 3. These allow you to use massively powerful attacks and eventually the shallow nature of the gameplay reveals itself as it becomes both you and the computer just dicking around until the bar has filled enough for you to do one of these attacks. The game becomes amazingly boring and repetitive after you realize every battle follows the same format of “Use new items to get a skill/super attack/repeat.” It requires no thought or skill at all to play this game

Last, but most hated is the stupid timing tests the game has at some points. Sometimes it is a rhythm based test. Other times it is an equally annoying “mash buttons in a specific order with little to no time” test. Passing these tests gets you objects or points, Failing equaling a big chunk of damage. Hurrah. They are not fun. They are not challenging. They are simply annoying mood breakers that probably sounded like an interesting change of pace to the developers, but do nothing to make the game better. Only stupider.

This my friends, is Riviera. The gameplay consists of a great deal of suck combined with a lot of ideas that sounded good in somebody’s head or on paper, but have little to no effect on actual gameplay and often times are amazingly useless. It is simple, it is shallow, it is annoying, it is repetitive, and it is boring. If you can somehow find enjoyment in any of this, please, enlighten me. Because I will happily give you a LIST of games that manage to do the things Riviera tries to, but does them better. There’s nothing Riviera does right, and only a few things it does even half assed.

If I hadn’t had to play through this game I’d have stopped at about the ten hour mark and sold this thing on Ebay. Hmm, I probably still can…

Control/Gameplay Rating: 3/10

5. Replayability

Riviera, thanks to the dating sim aspects, has roughly half a dozen endings, all based on relationships with the other members of Ein’s team. There’s also a lot of unlockables such as audio and visual clips. There’s also some extra stuff to allow you to continue playing after the game is “over.”

There’s also going back to get new weapons or skills you might have missed out on before, or some paths you didn’t take the first time around. Although in regards to the latter, I don’t see how, considering it’s almost impossible to make a more linear game than this one…

If you’re an anal-retentive completist, Riviera holds a decent amount of replay value. Although god knows how you’d be able to stomach the game more than once. But hey, if you somehow enjoy this game, you’ll get many many hours out of it. But once you’ve seen the half dozen or so endings, there’s nothing left.

Replayability Rating: 6/10

6. Balance

Yeah…umm. Another amazingly low score here. Battles are either super easy or super insane with difficultly that you will survive, but just barely. The game rewards you with “Practice Battles” which allows you to power up and just cheese through the whole game, which I suppose was the developers way of offsetting the “If you don’t, you will die terribly” aspect that occurs if you refuse to use this tactic.

As well, on the off chance you DO die, the game gives you the chance to restart the battle with your characters at full health and recovering any lost items, but the CPU opponents are weakened both in health and damage. Wow! It’s like unlimited continues in an RPG! I can’t begin to tell you how much I hate this? You REWARD a player who can’t somehow get through a shallow game based on nothing but a “Fill up my meter first” concept? Yes! let’s reward crappy players by not forcing them to rethink their previously failed tactics. Let’s make the game even easier for them!

Ugh. Ugh ugh and triple ugh. That right there is one of the worst ideas for an RPG ever. I’m just not going to talk about it anymore because I don’t think I can rationally. And I’ve gone so many pages without swearing too.

There is no balance to this game. This game is totally out of whack in this regard and it disappoints me to no end. Riviera’s remake has only been physical, while all the things that made me hate the original version of the game are still intact. And I think that makes me hate it even more. I mean, I’m a very pretty man, but at least there’s substance behind me. :-P

So yes, if you do practice battles the game is pathetically easy. If you don’t, you will use a lot of naughty four letter words one can not say on America television. Just another aspect of everything that is wrong with this game.

Balance Rating: 1/10

7. Originality

Let’s see. Is there anything new? Cliche characters, Cliche plot, aspects of games taken from Shenmue to Ogre Battle, a 2D fighter’s special bar, the shallowest dating sim aspect to a game I have ever seen that actually includes one, and that’s about it.

Oh wait! A look system that doesn’t really work! And a bizarre but interesting way of “leveling up.”

That’s it. That is the two tiny miniscule bits of the game that hold any level of originality. And of course the game is also a remake, which would usually lose a game points in this category, but it’s rock bottom in this regard anyway.

If you’ve played one RPG, you’ve played some part of Riviera. Hell, if you’ve played one RPG, you’ve most likely played a BETTER game than Riviera.

Originality Rating: 1/10

8. Addictiveness

Umm…you guys aren’t REALLY going to make me discuss this aspect, are you? I’m ten pages in! I think my answer to this is self evident!

Oh, fine. You heartless slave driving bastards.

It took me two weeks to review this game. Anyone who saw me playing this game heard lots of bitching and moaning and complaining. And way too much profanity. And I’m usually Mr. happy upbeat optimism incarnate…not that you could tell from this review.

After that first hour of gaming, I never wanted to play this game again. But I kept going. And hated every filthy minute of it.

The game was pretty, but that was it. I’ve already beaten the storyline and translation with a cartload of dead horses, so I won’t repeat myself there.

I don’t remember the last time I had such a hard time getting through a game due to sheer suckiness. WM XXI, which got a 2.5 from me was more fun than this, and that’s because I wrote up the review as if I was possessed by the Macho Man Randy Savage! Who am I going to do that with here? Ein? I’m sorry, the review would then consisted of “Duh. Me am smrt.” Lina? No, Referring to one’s self in the third person would be annoying. Just not as annoying as Riviera. Jedah? The review would be mainly “……..”

I’ve played some terrible games with some fun qualities before. Riviera is a beautiful game that simply hideous when it comes down to the meat and heart of the game.

Trust me on this, this game is good for mindless time killing and nothing more. If only because the manual is what you’ll end up using for toilet paper.

Addictiveness: 1/10

9. Appeal Factor

Okay. Here’s the thing. I realize I’m in the minority here. I realize that on gamerankings, there are 12 reviews of the game, with Riviera getting an average of 8.0. That’s a high score indeed, meaning a lot of reviewers love this game. I’d be curious to see if those reviewers are also fans of Final Fantasy games or to look at how most of them focus sheer on the shallow things like looks and sound and ignore the majority of the engine problems and the horrid story. Or how many actually went to their junior prom.

I’m kidding! My tongue was firmly in my cheek with that last paragraph. Aside from the reviewers who are praising this game, the people I’ve actually talked to that play games simply for fun have all had the same problems I have, but not to the fanatical degree of psychotic rage I do. The highest score I’ve heard anyone would give this game that isn’t a reviewer is a 6. This leads me to two conclusions.

1. This game, in fact, does appeal to the fans of Final fantasy style games of style over substance.

2. This game appeals for Hardcore RPG fanboys who will generally buy anything from a certain publisher value name brand over quality.

And don’t get me wrong. There’s hardly an Atlus USA or Atlus Japan title I haven’t owned at some point. Heck Atlus Japan sent me a ton of neat collectables when Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment got put through the marketing wringer back over there. I can easily fit into column two most of the time.

There’s also a third conclusion, that is most likely the correct answer. The game appeals to a good amount of people…just not me. And that happens. There are some games I just don’t get. I have never understood the Appeal of any Final Fantasy game. I never understood why people bought Tomb Raider. I didn’t get the love for Beyond Good & Evil. I was mystified that people had fun with CIMA: The Enemy. But these are all games that got a lot of praise or sold a lot of copies. It happens. No two people have the same exact tastes. And I just happened to have been stuck with a game that rubbed me the wrong way. More the pity for it and Atlus if this is the case.

So I’m going to be nice here and give Riviera the benefit of the doubt and give it a 6/10 here even though if we went on my opinion ONLY it’d be getting a 1/10 in this category.

That’s the key. Being objective and being able to look beyond one’s own point of view. I’m a critic. A reviewer. And objective even when I want to be a fanboy or give a game a low score because I want emotion to override rationality.

Be happy, because without this or the jaw dropping graphics and sound level of this game, it’d be getting a 2-2.5 easily. These three categories have pretty much doubled this games overall score. Heh. Just imagine what I’d be giving the Wonderswan version.

Appeal Factor: 6/10

10. Miscellaneous

There’s a few unlockables. There’s some extra endings. But in the end, there’s just no quality to this game. There’s no heart. It was poorly designed with the only energy being placed towards graphics and sound. Yes, this is the best the little GBA has ever seen. But I am always incensed when the engine and the play control are what get ignored in favour of making the game give a good first impression and a lousy second to infinite impression.

I didn’t enjoy a single aspect of this game. And the unlockables did nothing for me. Wow! CG screens and sound/score clips. Just what I needed! A reminder of exactly why I HATE this game.

People, listen to me. With the next gen of gaming upon us, all we are hearing is talk of graphics. With the DS and PSP we are saying good bye to the last vestige of 2D gaming with good graphics and even better gameplay and saying hello to awesome graphics but dismal gameplay. There was a time when a game could look like ass and still be one of the most fun things you would ever play. Dragon Warrior 7 for example. Or Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis. Adventure for the Atari 2600! These are FUN games that don’t look like much, even in their console’s day in the sun. But they were still wonderful amazing addictive super FUN games.

Riviera hits home for me in the same way Square-Enix has made me ill over the last few years with how bad Final Fantasy has gotten with each successive game. This horrible lowering the bar for gaming has now spread to the Game Boy Advance, which has been a lock for excellent RPG’s and it scares me that reviewers would give a game I find to be absolutely crap such high scores. The GBA is the home to Pokemon! To Knight of Lodis! To Shining Force! To Phantasy Star Collection! To Lunar Legends! I could keep going on and on, but there are literally dozens of better RPG’s out there for this system. Go for those. Not for this. Ignore the hype and save yourself thirty bucks. If you have to buy it, go to the secondary market and get it used for a fraction of the actual cost.

Spend your money supporting quality, not something that simply looks and sounds nice.

There. I’m done ranting.

Miscellaneous: 3/10

The Scores
Story: 1
Graphics: 10
Sound: 10
Gameplay/Control: 3
Replayability: 6
Balance: 1
Originality: 1
Addictiveness: 1
Appeal Factor: 6
Miscellaneous: 3
Overall Score: 4.2
Final Score: 4.0 (poor)

Short Attention Span Summary
By far one of the worst games I have ever played. I find Riviera to be a 2 trick pony. It looks and sounds good, but everything else is an awful experience and I want those double digits of hours of my life back so that I can spend them doing something less painful. Like eating plutonium or urinating on an electric fence. The game has a much higher score than I feel it deserves, but the numbers don’t lie. This is a poor game. And I can’t wait to unload my copy on some poor sucker who actually wants it.

Okay. I’m worried about the future of Pokemon. Game Freak appears to be hitting “Street Fighter 2″ Mentality by releasing rehash after rehash with little to no improvements now. And Emerald has officially ticked me off.

This isn’t the first time Game Freak has remixed a Pokemon game. Pokemon Red & Blue came out in Feb 1996, a little over 9 years ago. Pokemon Yellow came out 2.5 years later. But there were major changes. You got Pikachu as your starter, and the original three starters were all obtainable in the game. They introduced the tameness concept. They completely redid the graphics of all 151 Pokemon. They added digitized speech. They made the game harder, they remixed who you would fight in battles and switched around Gym leader Pokemon, and the plot followed the cartoon more closely. Pokemon Yellow, for all intents and purposes was a very different game from Red and Blue (and Green if you were in Japan). And this was acceptable.

Pokemon Silver and Gold came out a year later in 1999. Although the plot was still basically “Small child conquers 8 gyms and becomes Pokemon master,” it was a vast improvement over the original games. You could breed Pokemon, they had genders, they introduced a phone system and rematches. They added dates and times, new pokemon, and after you beat the game, you could hit the land RGBY was set in and fight all those gym leaders too, and finally a battle with Ash (red) Ketchum himself. Very nicely done. Sure, they rehashed the plot, but the game was radically different thanks to all the improvements and additions.

Then came Crystal. Crystal was a GBC version of the G/S games. Crystal came out in at the very end of 2000/or July/August of 2001 in the States. Crystal is considered by Pokemon fanatics to be the best version of the game. Even though it’s a rehash? Why? Again we have improved graphics, the ability to play as a girl instead of a boy. They added a new level to the phone system to where you could get items and not just battles. The plot was drastically reworked to feature the Legendary Dogs/Cats (There’s debate here), Pokemon were finally ANIMATED, and it was nice to see the game focus on something other than “ten year old boy becomes Pokemon master,” which was still in the game.

Note this was now the FOURTH Pokemon game to focus on this plot.

Ruby and Sapphire hit in November 2002. My gal pal at the time ensured it would arrive on our UK doorstep (where I was living at the time) and I was excited because I was so pumped for a game that would be even better than Crystal.

What did I get? I got double battles. Well that was cool. I also got…Pokemon Beauty contests? Okay? I guess that’s different and interesting. But all the advances made in Gold and Silver and Crystal were gone. Good Bye Phone. Good bye Animated Pokemons. Good bye Pokemon coming out at certain times and at certain days. The end result was a game that neither used the GBA’s ability to its full potential, but a game that was on par with RGBY. Yellow and the GSC series were superior in every way. So talk about a major disappointment. And once again we had a focus on a small ten year old boy become a the master of all Pokemon. FIFTH GAME IN A ROW. Annoyed? Oh yes.

Fire Red and Leaf Green came out in Jan, 2004, or Sept 04 for America. A year and two months later. It was a remake of Fire Red/Leaf green with R/S graphics. I could live with this, even though it was now the sixth game in a row with the same plot on the GBA. It was superior to R/S because it got rid of the beauty contests and I was willing to accept it needed to be released so that people could get the Kanto Pokemon since Game Freak could make R/S compatible with the old carts. And people wanted those Pokemon back. Plus I was willing to overlook the 35$ price tag because both FR and LG came with a wireless adapter which was a 20$ value. They also improved the original games in every way, added some more depth to the plot, made certain quests and bosses harder and gave you a few nice presents after you beat the game. I was so happy with this game because R/S was such a letdown.

Now we have Emerald. The SEVENTH game in a row using the same plot. And in truth all Emerald is, is a game where they added all the stuff that should have been in R/S in the first place and a bunch of hokey gimmick battles you can access AFTER you have beaten the game. With a $35 dollar price tag. When LG, FR, R and S are all widely available. And without a wireless adapter.

And that’s it for me. There’s no innovation, no originality, no anything about Emerald that made this game need to be made. Oh what’s that? You can get Mew, Lugia, and Celebi in this game? Not without Nintendo’s help.

But the big kicker for me is this. In RGBY, there were 4 games. You only needed two to get all the Pokemon. That’s a 40-60 dollar investment. Liveable.

Then came G/S/C. You needed 4 carts for that. Or three if you had a RGBY cart with all 150 Pokemon saved on it. That was a total cost of 60-90 dollars. Okay, again, tolerable.

Then with the GBA games, you could no longer use your old RGBY or GSC carts to upload to the new games. This meant that in order to get all the Pokemon you would need a copy of Ruby, a Copy of Sapphire, a copy of Fire Red and a Copy of Leaf Green to “catch them all.” Plus the price for Pokemon games went up to 35 smackeroos here. That’s 140$ right there. But wait! You also needed to buy a 50$ Game Cube game in order to get all the Pokemon. That’s $190 total price tag now. And then you still learned there were some Pokemon you couldn’t get and thus you had to wait for the 35$ Emerald to truly, utterly have a complete Pokedex. That’s $225. Or an investment SIX TIMES larger than the amount you needed to complete a 150 Pokemon Pokedex 9 years ago. And that doesn’t include whatever little things Nintendo is going to make you do for the tickets needed to access the ultra rares.

Am I really, truly the only person that sees a problem with this? Jesus, I love Pokemon. I’m a damn fanatic over it. You would be frightened to know all the Pokemon cheesy things I own. Hell, when Burger King did their Pokemon: The First Movie Promotion, their web site listed me as the first person in the bloody country to get all the toys. Pokemon is one of my favorite franchises of all time. And even I’m getting pissed at Game Freak churning the same product again and again. I swear if Diamond and Pearl ONCE AGAIN feature a ten year old kid, 8 gyms, and the same exact plot, that is it for me. I’m done with the franchise. And don’t tell me what with the amount of money involved to get these games, that it’s a child oriented series.

Game Freak, take a good long look at Poke Coliseum. All the trappings we know and love, but without any of the rehash. Original plot, characters, setting, everything. Try something like that for once. Pokemon saved Nintendo’s butt. It still outsells damn near ever series ever made. It’s the most successfully marketed video game of all time. It blows away Mario, Sonic, GTA, whatever you want to name in terms of spin off merchandise and profit margin. Even with all the sad pathetic gamers out there calling it kiddee or lame because it’s cute, it still has been consistently in the top five selling video games every year for a DECADE now. And this is the series supposedly burning out? Holy crap, most games wish they were plummeting like this. Pokemon officially joined Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy and Megaten as the four big RPG franchises in Japan, and it’s easily debatable that Pokemon is doing better than any of the three that have been around since the NES days in terms of merchandise/profitability/etc etc.

Nintendo and Game Freak, Pokemon majorly saved your asses in a lot of ways over the past ten years and made you both a lot of money. It’s a series endearing to tens of millions of people. Don’t take that love some many gamers have given you, and crap all over it like you’ve done with Emerald. Because they will eventually revolt when you try resting on your past accomplishments. Ask Sega and SNK how they’re holding up. Oh Wait, that’s right. You’ll have to ask Sammy and Playmore now, won’t you?

Right. Three pages of disgruntled ranting. Let’s review the game now. And be surprised, for all my anger over the lack of originality and rehashing the same bloody plot, Pokemon Emerald is a pretty decent game.

Let’s Review

1. Story

Okay. You’re a ten year old boy who seeks to become the greatest Pokemon Master ever. You get help from a Professor Oak. No wait. I mean Professor Elm. No sorry, It’s Professor BIRCH this time, who gives you a choice of three Pokemon (Fire/Grass/Water). You set out to get all 8 gym badges and then take on the Elite 4, but along the way an evil villainous organization know as Team Rocket does some dastardly things and you get involved to stop them.

Oh wait. In Emerald it’s Team Magma and Aqua. Two teams instead of one. OOOH! DEPTH!

And this is pretty much the entire game. That’s it. Yes some minor changes have been made by making the Fire and Water starters gain a second type in their second and third evolutions, and they pulled a GCS by having a final secret boss hidden away with level 70 Pokemon. This boss was the original Pokemon Champion in R/S. Truthfully, it would have been a lot cooler to have had it be Ash again. No one cares about Stephen. They also took the 8th Gym Leader and made him the new Pokemon Champion and just stuck yet another water Pokemon master as that gym leader. When Pikachu can take down the Pokemon Champion practically by himself, we have a problem folks.

Look, the plot was great in simplicity in 1996. It was acceptable and quite good with GCS as they added so much to it, and basically gave you two games in one. R/S was a letdown as it was the whole three strikes rule. Fire Red and Leaf Green, it was acceptable as it was a remake. Can’t really change the plot in a remake without purists going nuts. And that gives Emerald a bit of “Get out of Jail Free” card here as well as it is a remake of R/S.

But it’s gotten old. It’s gotten cliche. It’s gotten blah. It’s still a good plot in practice, but time and going to the well once to often have lowered it to Mediocrity. It’s just like my complaints about a certain other turn based RPG series that has had the same plot of angsty slightly androgynous quasi-anti-hero saving the world from a supreme evil and gathering friends along the way.

Something new next time. PLEASE.

Story Rating: 5/10

2. Graphics

Okay, let me enter fanboy mode for a second.

OH MY GOD! The Pokemon are animated again! Look at Mudkip’s little dance when he pops out of the Pokeball! So cute! I love him! All so happy and cheery and cuddly. And Pikachu! Oh god, I love him so! MUST. HUG. PIKACHU.

Not let me slip back into reviewer mode.

Umm…why was this not in R/S? I am very thankful for animated Pokemon again as it made Crystal amazingly delightful, but considering it was done back in 2000, why did it take 5 years and some change to put it back in, especially on a cart that could handle more graphically?

Look, it’s good. And it’s a huge improvement over R/S if only because it was static graphics in that game, but there’s no excuse why R/S was only half the game GCS was.

The Pokemon look better than ever, and it’s a treat to see each new one pop out and do their thing. It makes the game feel a little more fresh.

Outside the battles, the graphics are typical turn based RPG with lots of random battle fare. And by this I mean underwhelming and below what a system can do, but this is pretty much a complaint with every turn based RPG I can think of, save games made by Sacnoth. They’re okay, but decidedly vanilla for what the GBA can do.

In other words, in battle, Pokemon have never looked better. And the character designs are some of the best graphics I’ve seen on the GBA. If you have Emerald, you’ll want to upload every Pokemon you have onto this cart so you can see their animations. But everything else is mediocre. And Mediocre and Awesome average out to simply good.

Graphics Rating: 7/10

3. Sound

The music of Pokemon Emerald is the same as all Pokemon music. It’s simple midis that are amazingly catchy and fun. They are vibrant, peppy, upbeat and wonderful. And I often catch myself humming them hours after the game has been turned off. Sometimes they stick in my head for days.

But then there are the voices. We still have digitized squawks and crackles and squeaks instead of say, oh, the actual Pokemon voices. Come on people. Pokemon Yellow had Pikachu saying over a dozen different things. And that cart was able to hold a fraction of what a GBA cart could. Not to mention the fact, Emerald is about half the game in length that GCS was. Is it really that hard to fit some tiny one word wav files on the cart? No. it’s not. Take the voices from the cartoon. Have Pikachu say “Pika Pika” again. It’s cute, it’s what Pokemon fans have wanted since day one. Try listening to them for once.

Man I hate the weird electronic chittering. I didn’t mind it for the first two gens, but there’s no reason this should still be occurring.

Pokemon has the best score out of most cart games ever made. But please, please of please, get rid of the voices and take a hint from your 6 year old GB game and add some Poke-voiceovers.

Sound Rating: 8/10

4. Control and Gameplay

Pokemon has one of the best turn based engines of all time. It’s simple and yet so deep, it’s impossible to truly master. You have Hundreds of Pokemon, each which can learn dozen of moves, but yet you can only ever have 4 of those moves at any one time. Amazing levels of strategy and customization here.

There’s also the stretched out version of Rock/Paper/Scissors Gameplay. There are 17 types of Pokemon, some are strong against other types, while weak against another. Take Ice Pokemon for example. They are strong against grass, ground, flying, and dragon, but weak against fire, water, other ice Pokemon, and steel types. You can also have Pokemon with two types which creates some interesting combinations, and a lot of Pokemon can learn moves out side their normal range. A Blaziken (fire/fighting type) can have a fire move, a fighting move, an electric move, and a rock move. These four moves would allow you to be strong against ten types of Pokemon instead of just six if it stuck to only fire and fighting moves.

The gameplay is deeper than any other turn based system I can think of. It gives you more options than a lot of my favorite games in this genre aside from the Persona series.

R/S/E have also added the concept of double battles. Think “Texas Tornado” style tag team wrestling matches where all four wrestlers are in the ring at the same time until one team is beaten. Again, it adds a level of strategy and since some moves now affect one pokemon, two pokemon, or all pokemon in play, you have to think about what you’re doing in these battles. It also creates more of an emphasis on defensive moves or stat boosting moves.

The core of Pokemon is finding what 6 Pokemon work best for you, what 4 moves you should give them, and will you stick with the same Pokemon constantly, or have a vast array to switch to at any given time. Pound for pound, Pokemon still maintains the best turn based engine I can think of. In this regard I can understand why Nintendo and Game Freak are loathe to change anything. If it ain’t broke, why fix it, right?

Poke Col. That’s why. Same engine, totally original everything else.

Control and Gameplay: 10/10

5. Replayability

This is the puzzler. On one hand, Pokemon never ends. Get enough friends into it, and you can play forever against them, making teams and tournaments. The game never ends and since every Pokemon in different in terms of stats, personality and so on, you can keep catching and playing for an eternity.

The flipside is you can only have one save per game, and very few people want to lose their progress since it takes forever to get anywhere in the game. I mean, if you have a Pokedex of 258 Pokemon, do you really want to start from scratch and go through the same linear plot just to try new Pokemon, when you can do that by catching ones in the game you already have and leveling them up?

It’s the double edged sword of once you start a game, you really don’t ever start a new one, unless you want to buy a new cart, or have Pokemon Box which is a very recent invention.

And that’s what earns this game a thumbs in the middle from me. On one hand it’s infinite. On the other, there’s only one game you can ever play and you’re loathe to ever start over.

Replayability Rating:5/10

6. Balance

Although the customization and playability in Pokemon Emerald is vast, the game still manages to be shockingly easy. I’ve never lost a single Pokemon battle against the computer once since the days of RGB, and Emerald keeps it going. The AI is spotty and often times you’ll see the computer use a move that can’t hurt you or that is the second part of a combo without doing the first part. It’s truly bizarre.

As well, since the gym leaders and Elite Four always focus on one type of Pokemon while all gamers have a wide mix, it’s super simple to defeat them. No challenge at all. Especially at this point of the game. After a nigh decade of Pokemon gaming, everyone should know what type beats another type. The challenge in the story mode, thanks to a nonstop rehashing, is nil.

There are two things saving this category. The first is the addition of the new gimmick battles, as they take a slight bit of time to get used to. But once you learn the gimmick, the battles are still easy thanks to the AI. Let’s look at all the Battle Frontier gimmicks, shall we?

1. Battle Factory. The gimmick? You have to you random Pokemon against the computer’s random Pokemon. Well, since you don’t know what the computer has anyway unless you buy a strategy guide, this is more just a big handicapped against you. GOOD. It means there’s actually some thinking involved. You actually have to be good at the game instead of using rote memorization. However, you do get to choose your Pokemon from a random selection, so it comes down to picking the Pokemon you know have the most type advantages. This is probably the hardest challenge, but after your first set of seven battles, it’s cake.

2. Battle Dome. It’s a 16 man single elimination tournament. Ho hum. Next.

3. Battle Pike. It’s a choose your own adventure pathway. Again, no real challenge, and aside from the Boss’ Shuckle, which newer players may not be familiar with, there’s no challenge. Here’s a hint for it. Use a Pokemon with a Water, Rock, Steel, or Poison move. It dies quickly.

4. Battle Arena. It’s a Set KO challenge. You have three turns to knock out your opponent’s Pokemon and it goes to a draw. Should not be a challenge by the time you get to this event. Especially as there’s a Battle Tent early on in the game that uses these rules.

5. Battle Palace. You choose your Pokemon, but they use their “instincts” to battle. If you want a truly easy way around this, use Pokemon only with fighting moves so you don’t have to see them use say, defense curl 12 times in a row. This is also the only other challenge you’ll have as it’s you at a disadvantage where the computer just plays like a computer. The Boss is easy. An Electric Pokemon and a Fighting Pokemon takes out its 3 Pokemon team.

6. Battle Pyramid. Ooh, It’s dark and you can’t see what you’re doing until you beat a trainer. Then with each trainer you beat, you get some more light. No real challenge. The Boss uses all three Regi-Pokemon, which are VERY easy to beat. One Word: Metagross.

7. Battle Tower. Done that been there since in every game since Crystal. Ho hum yet again. Next.

There’s a little innovation with some of these, but the only challenge that ever comes up are when you play the battles where you don’t have total control over your team. Basing a game on luck and chance is not a challenge. It’s merely playing the possibilities. And since you can’t access the Battle Frontier until after you’ve beaten the game, there’s no way you should have much of a challenge here.

For people new to Pokemon or coming back to it after a while, those gamers might actually be in for a test.

But no, the real saving grace of this category is the second aspect: Player vs Player battles and mini games. When you have to actually play against another human being and their Pokemon Army, then things spice up. No team is unbeatable. No set of moves is infallible. Player vs Player is the one thing Pokemon does better than any other game on the planet.

But again, with all things considered, we’ve got another thumbs in the middle.

Balance Rating: 5/10

7. Originality.

Okay. 5 of the seven Battle Frontier ideas are original. Oh wait no, the Pyramid was done as a Gym battle before. Sofour out of the seven challenges are actually new. And for the rest of the game? It’s all stuff that was in earlier Pokemon games that they inexplicably left OUT of Ruby and Sapphire.

Pokemon Emerald is a rehash of a rehash. It’s a, “Hey! Remember those things we could do a generation ago and we left out of the last games? Well now they are back! Give us 5$ more than you would a normal GBA game for us doing what we should have done in the first place. Plus it’s been 5 years so it all FEELS new, rather than actually having done any true innovation. YAY!.”

Sod off. Stop the redundancy. There’s no reason to pick up this over a lot of other Pokemon options.

Originality: 3/10

8. Addictiveness

Pokemon is the only game I’ve ever played that makes Obsessive Compulsive Disorder seem fun. So many Pokemon to get. And get two of each so they can breed and make you baby Pokemon. Oh! Fight lots of battles for lots of money so you can buy Power-Ups and TM’s!

What can I say? A good deal of this has to do with the cute factor and baby Pokemon, and the fact that instead of just mindlessly collecting things, you’re collecting playable RPG characters to customize. That really helps a lot.

Most people will get hooked on this game for the same reasons everyone gets hooked on Pokemon games. It’s a decent game. The Problem comes for those of us who have played through Ruby and Sapphire. There’s no real thrill out of playing Emerald except for watching the Pokemon jiggle around on the screen. Same for those of us who have played every Pokemon RPG out there. R/S were the worst Pokemon games out there, and Emerald is just rehashing that game. The others are more fun, more interesting, and more addicting. Emerald is still good in terms of being hard to turn the game off, but it’s a shadow of the other, better version out there. I went out and started a game of Fire Red after Emerald just to wash the unclean off me and remember why I love Pokemon so very much.

But again, if you’ve been out of the Poke-Loop for a while, you’ll find this game rewarding in this aspect.

Addictiveness rating: 8/10

9. Appeal Factor

Look, Pokemon’s one of the best RPG franchises of all time. It’s one of the best franchises period. Aside from the GBA games, Pokemon is constantly reinventing itself. We’ve had pinball games, photography games, puzzle games, trading card games, we’ve had Pokemon Channel, Pokemon Box, Pokemon Coliseum, and more. Pokemon is usually very original and innovative, and most of all it is FUN. A lot of FUN.

The only people who can’t appreciate Pokemon are the sad pathetic gamers out there that give gaming a bad stereotype. The ones who run out and buy the next Tomb Raider or whatever game has big titty women on the screen. The ones who prefer graphics over gameplay. Or the ones that won’t play a game because it is cute and they have to maintain some messed up digital machismo. People that call Pokemon “for kids only” either haven’t played the games, or are amazingly dim