Pokemon colosseum is an odd one when compared to the rest of the franchise. With it being a spinoff it has a different way of doing things, the most notable things being it's double battle system, it's darker tone and it's difficulty.

There are multiple reasons as to why this game is hard. The first reason being the very limited pokemon pool with it being more than eight times smaller than the modern games which have around 400 in their base games. This makes it so that you're options for team buliding are quite limited. Combine that with a lot of the good TMs being quite hard to obtain it names for a very very limited team building experience.

Now even with this said you can build good teams and when you have a good team built the late game is one of my favourites in the franchise with every late game team having great team comps and tricky strategies making the majority of these battles engaging and sometimes nail bitingly close, the final battle being extremely difficult with the types of strategies that have been seen in the competitive scene over the years.

The other thing that this game is known is it's tone. Being darker than most of the other games and stealing pokemon instead of catching them, although even when to compared to other pokemon games I'd say there other with mature storylines. The story itself isn't too dissimilar from the evil team plots of the mainline games but the twist that the player character used to be apart of one of the evil teams and defected by blowing a hole in their base and stealing their most prized possession is a really cool one.

Coloseum is a lot more streamlined than most other pokemon games in both its exploration aswell getting rid off routes in favour of small town sections to keep the attention on the battling.

Overall pokemon colosseum is a flawed in some of its executions of its ideas but the design of the battles in this entry still makes this a satisfying to play unique entry in the pokemon series.

I feel like I share the same opinion that most do about this game. I'm shocked at how good it was.

The sound design was impeccable, im not the type of person to get chills often but in the final section of the game it legit scared me. The choice to have a very minimal soundtrack for a lot of the game really worked overall as when it did kick in it worked tremendously. the vibes were the best kind of awful with the sound design (and also art direction) really making this games vibe stand out.

Traversing the game was really fun which was surprising given how you really only have one jump and the bubble wand, but I think the main reason why it was so fun to traverse was the puzzles. The puzzles were the star imo, the tools you get given are all quite simple in their usage but when the puzzles that use combinations of your items were great. I genuinely cant think of a single way I could use any of the tools in a way that I hadn't used them in this game.

Now while I enjoyed my time with this game it wasn't perfect. The pacing could have been perfect but the telephone placements were a bit odd at times. The boss sections were hit or miss with the chameleon being my least favourite part of the entire game with the combination of it being an instakill and the lack of checkpoints around the first time you encounter it really killing the otherwise great pacing imo.

But overall I think its postive far outweigh its negatives and this game will (hopefully) be remembered for more than being Dunkey's first published game.