Let’s Get Ready to Rumble - Pokemon Rumble

By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman

As a fan of the Pokemon series I was eagerly awaiting the release of Pokemon Rumble to Wiiware. While it stands as a fun and addictive arcade styled Pokemon spin-off game, it’s not without its faults.

Pokemon Rumble is a basically a Gauntlet-esque game set in the Pokemon universe. You control an autonomous toy pokemon, killing (or knocking out) hordes of other pokemon toys in various linear “dungeons.” The game is heavily loot based, as you collect coins from felled pokemon and are even able to recruit downed pokemon with some luck and/or skill. Though a large element of the game, the dungeon crawling is not your main goal; by collecting a strong enough pokemon, you then unlock the Battle Royale. The Battle Royale is essentially an every “’mon” for itself arena battle, consisting of about 60 pokemon. Winning the Battle Royale moves you up in rank and the process begins anew.

"This game actually had a neat screen capture function built in... However, every picture you take with it has this stupid copyright stamp at the bottom."

On paper the game can be seen as very repetitive and boring. However, the Pokemon element makes the game incredibly addictive. Not only is there the classic draw of “catching ‘em all,” but the ability to replay levels with different pokemon and different builds adds a lot to the fun and replayability. The fact that you have 250+ pokemon available to you (all 150 from the classic Red, Blue, Yellow versions and 100 from Pearl, Diamond, Platinum) along with all their potential moves gives you a whole slew of options in terms of play style.

"Everytime I see a poliwag/whirl/wrath I think of Josh and this weird poliwhirl costume he had back in college."

Sadly, everything’s not all good with this game. The fact that your playing with pokemon sets up several problems (within the game, I’d rather not go into explaining what’s wrong with playing with pokemon toys as an adult). The first being how it’s basically a cop out not to include a sort of function to import your DS/GBA pokemon. The function wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to implement considering: Nintendo has developed a codex to allow the DS and the Wii to communicate and the people who made Pokemon Rumble also made Pokemon Ranch (which has the every pokemon available modeled) and use the same 3-D models.

Another cop out that’s used by the pokemon toy concept is the fact that there are no leveling or experience gains. While there’s level scaling that happens as you progress through the dungeons, your individual pokemon will never become stronger than the level you caught them at. This is annoying and frustrating considering you’ll need to recatch or rebreed a particular species you liked at the appropriate level and you’ll also have to rebuy the moves for each new pokemon.

"The end of each dungeon always yields a large amount of loot."

Speaking of moves the move trainer in the game is also a bit unfair. Your only method of learning new moves is through a move dispenser that teaches a move at random. Higher ranked dispensers have the potential to distribute better moves (for a higher price). This in itself wouldn’t be a problem except high ranking dispensers also contain all the moves from lower ranked machines, it’s annoying when you get shoddy moves at a premium price when you could have gotten them for near nothing 2 tiers down (and yes, this happens quite a bit in the game).

The graphics in the game are fair. Despite the fact that the character models look awful, as they’re the same models from a poorly construed pokemon filing system; they actually look passable scaled down and viewed from a bird’s eye view. However, you’ll sometimes cringe at the sight of even the cutest pokemon when you see their models in the status screen or when you’re shown the pokemon you’ve caught at the end of each dungeon.

"I'll admit, some of the models done in this stupid style make certain pokemon look cuter than normal."

The audio is pretty good, but will get annoying. Considering there’s only 6 different types of dungeon (each based on a logical grouping of pokemon types), the soundtrack doesn’t stretch very far. While I really liked the fight music from silent forest and wind valley (or something), they eventually got to me enough where I had to put my own music on over the in-game tracks.

"Yes, there are bosses at the end of each dungeon."

I have to say this is the perfect game to play while drunk. The game is simple enough where you don’t have keep track of too much stuff at any given moment (though in terms of building pokemon and move combos, there’s a bit to think about) and being drunk kind of helps out if you need to replay a map multiple times to get capture a rare pokemon.

All in all Pokemon Rumble is an addictive little game that’s well worth the 1500 Wii point ($15) asking price. So far I’ve played the game for over 25 hours (with one of my first play sessions lasting over 10 hours) and am nowhere near collecting everything. The game is teeming with value.

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