A Great Pokemon game but an average game
I myself, completely biased and self centered and all that bad stuff, would give this review a 4/5 maybe even a 4.5/5
I've always had a soft spot for pokemon, even though I've "outgrown" it and what not. My love for this recent installment is possibly due to the fact that I didn't play the games for a few years and therefore don't feel the pokemon gaming fatigue some people may now have. Thankfully I found this game fun regardless and found myself reminiscing about the old days of middle school and link cables and all the happier for it. The fact remains though that this franchise is becoming stale and therefore now has several flaws that hinder it's potential.
If you've played Silver then you've played this 90% of this game. Just like the box promises, Pokemon Heartgold and Soulsiver are remakes of their gameboy color ancestors. These reincarnations of Pokemon's heyday (in my opinion) are brought back to life with updated visuals thanks to the DS's capabilities. The graphics are definitely a plus. Even though the argument can still be made that it's the same game with better graphics, for those who played the old games this is like meeting up with an old friend.
The plot is entirely the same, to my knowledge, and like all pokemon games eventually stops and only leaves the option of going on a grindfest.
This is where the game, and the franchise, has it's flaws.
When this game first came out in earlier years, the fact that you could explore and older region after exploring the first was mind blowing and epic. Now, even though the game hasn't changed, the reaction certainly has and I found myself at the end of the plot with nothing to do. The only thing I could do was go catch more pokemon. But nowadays I had to ask myself, "to what purpose?" You can only catch all the pokemon with the purpose of... catching all the pokemon. You can go to the battle frontier and grind there to get battlepoints so that you can raise your pokemon so you can... catch more pokemon. Unfortunately the only other endgame option than catching all the pokemon is that you can fine tune and raise a team to become extremely beastly but, unless you play competitively or happen to have a group of friends who play the game just as equally, will find that you can only battle the whimpy trainers in the game and that's it.
The solution I see to this is to simply make the story/world larger. Make a main plot maybe that does go through the typical learning curve of going through all the towns and seeing newer and stronger pokemon but after that, keep the plot going and have it involve the whole world. Yea there's always the sinister crime syndicates trademark to all pokemon games but no one really pays much attention to them and personally I always found them as hassles that I needed to deal with so I could go kick Elite Four ass.
The idea behind pokemon still is a great one. They definitely have found the best formula "monster collecting/battling game." It's obvious because if we were literally playing a "halo 8" and it was practically cut and pastes of the halo games, people would drop the halo franchise quick as anything. Something is going right, but so much is going wrong and it's getting more apparent with each and every installment. The pokemon series can't keep recycling itself and ultimately needs to do some major rennovations, WHICH given the potential of the games doesn't seem quite hard. A few modernized features here and there and this game would truly be a glorious one and wouldn't need to be backed by a large following of Pokenerds to stay alive. Long rambling review aside, this game is fun if you are any kind of fan of pokemon. If you are then you can accept some of these flaws. If not then you will find these flaws glaring and hindering the gameplay experience
