I feel like there are two, sometimes not mutually exclusive experiences with this game: either this was your primary focus for the Pokemon TCG back in the day because the collection aspect dominated the competitive and the combination of the music and incredibly clever spritework to bring these illustrations to the Game Boy Color won your heart forever, or you recoil in agony every time you hear the coin flip sound effect in this game.

This game exists in an incredibly weird space where it wants to show you everything that the initial three sets of the TCG had to show off, but almost entirely ignores the meta to do so. Sure, there's one Rain Dance trainer and Ronald's mid-game deck vaguely resembles Haymaker, but there's a lot of very neat experimentation trying to show off the various playstyles and most of 'em aren't running four Oak four energy removals. Sure, lightning is a bit neutered as the TCG version of Electrode was too complicated to implement in the game, but the game's slow rollout of cards essentially forces you to play a version of the Pokemon TCG that never existed, the intentions of the card game made playable rather than what the meta eventually developed into. And if you avoid fiending for a Hitmonchan Turbo deck or whatever, that's pretty cool! I ended up going through this playthrough with a quick swap strategy themed around Butterfree, keeping a core of Scythers and Grimers to build up my little Caterpies, then having a zero-retreat monster who heals for 20 every turn and can whirlwind away bad match-ups while Muk camps on the bench, with some Tauros and Wigglytuff tossed in as catch-alls and Koffing to inflict status on walls. It was a fun little grab bag that swung between big damage and stall, would have crumbled immediately if the game threw more than a few Electabuzz at me, but was fun to let play out in a much slower-paced metagame!

The game does have the drawbacks of being on the Game Boy. It's rather slow, the enemy AI isn't sophisticated and can pretty easily be caught into patterns (they rarely think about the big picture of bench composition compared to finding the fastest way to kill whatever's in front of them now), and sometimes Chansey will succeed at Scrunch eight times in a row and kill five minutes. The onboarding process is... about as good as they could do for the time with a tutorial that explains the game well enough, but actual deck construction tips, like suggested energy/pokemon balance, come WAY after they should be useful. The game remains a fascinating relic of the TCG in a state where it never really existed, and is far more competent at celebrating its strengths than contemporaries like Yu-Gi-Oh Dark Duel Stories or even later GBA Yugiohs were doing for years. It's mostly a cute game that's just kinda fun at doin' what it wants. Nothin' wrong with that!