today, i'm going to tell you about the game that could have been. i'm pretty sure not many of you have played it.
the pokemon rumble series.
(disclaimer: i'm going to only be reviewing rumble blast, because that's the only one i have. idk what they fixed after that)
this series takes a different take on battling: your pokemon can move around freely (no grid or anything) with the circle pad, and you have 2 attacks that you can use with the a and b buttons. it gives you a view from above. the objective is simple: beat all the pokemon in the dungeon. rewards include money and some of the pokemon you defeat along the way (they drop randomly, mystery dungeon style). recruited pokemon have two random attacks from their movepool in most cases, with a failsafe built in to make sure it has a way to deal damage.
all things considered, it's a pretty fun game. the plot isn't pmd level but it's pretty decent nonetheless, and the dungeons can be fun to run through with different mons and their moves. something that can be frustrating but also cool is that type matchups hold almost no weight, so you can use the same mon in pretty much any dungeon of its level.
but really, the main game does leave you wanting more. the system the game has where your mons have no way of getting stronger (meaning that you need to catch more powerful ones to keep up with the curve) is cool because it encouraged you to try different stuff, but you really do start to want a "main party" at some point. and thus we arrive at the postgame.
the postgame sets all the dungeons on the same level, meaning that you can get any mon you like and still keep up with the curve. this level can be increased using...
money.
that's right. the postgame is basically one giant money grind.
it starts out small, but it gets out of control pretty quickly. i'm currently on the second to last one, and it costs 10 million pokedollars. in context, each dungeon run provides about 50,000. this is not ok. i'm pretty sure the last one is like 50 million or something absurd like that
did they add in systems to help you get money fast? yes, they did. but let's take a closer look at them:
the battle locale is a pretty neat idea. in it, you get thrown into a random dungeon with only a rattata. the goal is to outmaneuver and recruit foes to help you beat the boss. if you win, you get a cash bonus on top of the money from the dungeon (which increases when you complete more dungeons consecutively). it's kind of luck based depending on what dungeon you get (factory is almost impossible from my experience) but it really is a true test of dungeon skill.
the only problem? it doesn't keep up with the world rank's increasing demand. in my case, you need six consecutive wins to even double your earnings. it shouldn't be like that because i want a reason not to quickly destroy every dungeon with all my legendary mons
the upper levels of the last town contain something called the ex team battles. these are pretty cool because they keep up with the world ranks–the higher the rank, the more powerful mons you can get, the higher level team battles you can take on, the more money you get. i can handle team battle ex 5, which gives an impressive 200,000 pokedollars per run. it's really repetitive though because unlike normal dungeon runs you're just facing the same guys over and over again
besides the team battle, there's another option in the upper levels: the battle royale. let's talk about the battle royale
it starts you off in the center of a bunch of mons. you'd think all the mons would immediately charge at you, but that would be too predictable. in addition to attacking you, they also attack each other.
this basically takes any skill you could have accumulated through playing this game and throws it out the window. the battle royales in the story are manageable because the mons mainly just tackle each other, but you can tell that they hand picked the guys for the postgame ones. there's chandelures spamming infernos everywhere that are extremely easy to run into, night slash bisharps with a deceptively short charge time, and of course the kool-aid man of pokemon, zekrom, charging all the way across the screen out of nowhere with bolt strike.
there is a time limit. i have lost in last mon situations i should have won because my mon didn't do enough damage in a short enough amount of time. you can pick up 3 second time bonuses from defeated pokemon, but you have to run into the fray to grab them or they disappear after like 5 seconds.
the final boss in the story is a complete pushover if you beat the guy before him. that's a shame because the final boss theme is actually so good but it only lasts for like 30 seconds because you've probably won by then. i've heard rumors that the same music plays for arceus but man i don't have enough money to fight that guy yet
that music isn't the only good thing about this game, either. it has a toy model for every single mon, it has some nice scenery, and it actually adapts nearly every move to its combat style (dragon tail causes the user to charge forward in a curve, knocking away any mons in its path; razor wind creates a temporary ring around the user that deals damage to any foe that touches it; entry hazards deal ranged damage to foes
behind the user). but ultimately, the game is held back so much by all these flaws, meaning that few people actually bought it and got to appreciate this stuff. i still pick it up sometimes because it's fun, but it's not really something you can focus on for more than about a week.
thanks for reading