Welcome back once again to the Pokemon World. Not so long ago Cipher a group of evil trainers was turning pokemons in shadow pokemon so they can get stronger with their anger. Cipher has once again return for vengeance. One night when a boat was sailing through the seas a giant flying pokemon appears. That was actually Lugia! But Lugia was all black with red eyes. Then Lugia used a special beam taking the boat and disappears. Cipher was again responsible for all of this tragedy. Now your mission is to capture has much shadow pokemon you can to save them and find out what are Cipher's plans this time. The story is nothing too impressive but it sure adds some interesting stuff unlike Pokemon Colosseum.
Pokemon RPG's have always been all about their great turn based battle system and this installment is no exception of that. In most Pokemon battles you always have to use good strategy with each attack in order to wipe your foes easy. The turn based battle system consists of your pokemon having 4 different powers. Most of them are to attack strongly your opponent's pokemon but other special attacks can help you paralyze, freeze, burn and poison your opponent's pokemon. That's where all the strategy comes in. But now On Pokemon XD you have the shadow pokemon issue in which they don't remember all of their attacks quickly and start with shadow attacks. One of the issues is that sometimes your pokemon will get too angry and hits itself, but what you have to do is use the calling command and he will calm down and return to normal form. The thing is that you are losing one turn that could have made your opponent's pokemon die faster. But the biggest problem of Shadow pokemon is that they start with one move, and then when his dark bar keeps going down the more powers he will remember. So it can really sometimes mess up your strategy that way. While is possible to understand that they tried to bring a new idea, it just doesn't work very well with this game where attacking is a main objective in strategy.
Now Pokemon Colosseum didn't truly had puzzles and some true RPG elements to really make it feel RPG, but Pokemon XD tries to fix those things with a few puzzles here and there and more interesting exploration. Still the fact that you just choose a city and the characters goes by itself instead of going through the woods and other places to capture wild pokemon. This was mostly affected by introducing Shadow pokemon. There is definitely some side quests here tough, with different characters to talk with. However not many players would actually like to talk to all the villagers when is all reading so much text. You still have on the game your typical marts for buying poke balls and potions to cure your pokemon and the famous Pokemon Center is also there to cure all of your pokemon in your party.
Pokemon XD Gale of Darkness is overall a nice try on improving the sad gameplay that Pokemon Colosseum had. Shadow pokemon can be purify a bit faster, the battles require more strategy then last time and the story also has his nice twists around. But it all sadly comes down when they add Shadow pokemon and that really affects too much the gameplay engine of pokemon RPG's.
The visuals on the game are quite more impressive then before. The character models seem to have better details and less weird looks (you still have some creepy ones tough). The environment and atmosphere in most areas of the game have been improve for the best. Altough the pokemon models pretty much do not improve, but they really didn't look badeither before so no actual problems there. The graphics are certainly looking better overall but still needing work on those characters.
Now the audio is perhaps the only thing that most games right now do best. Pokemon XD offers that solid soundtrack that you can expect from the pokemon series. It still delivers that same pokemon orchestrated style. But the big problem with the audio is the lack of voiceovers in the game. Is really annoying because there is just too much text to read on the game and in order to really get more into an RPG is with voiceovers and Pokemon still doesn't want to deliver that yet. The sound effects are all perfect fitting nice with each attack, nothing crazy or unnecessary in the game. Nice quality overall on the audio department.
We know that most RPG titles are only play once or twice because they are sometimes too long or you just have no interest in playing the game again and Pokemon XD gale of darkness is a game of no interest to play again. The multiplayer features have been fixed quite a bit but you still have to either use your pokemon in the XD RPG or you GBA pokemons. You can't choose any pokemon you want like you could in Pokemon Stadium. In which totally ruins the experience because a lot of people don't own the GBA connector for the Gamecube and that not all pokemon are available on Pokemon XD singleplayer to use them for multiplayer.
In Overall Pokemon XD Gale of Darkness is a nice improvement of Pokemon Colosseum but in the end does not deliver the Pokemon RPG greatness that everyone loves. If you liked Pokemon Colosseum you will certainly enjoy this one, the rest should just ignore the title or just rent it if you have nothing to play right now. Hopefully Nintendo will give us a true RPG on the Revolution system.
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