Well it's... marginally better than a 1/5 I guess?
Trozei is the arcade puzzle spinoff of Pokemon, and it's the 2nd Pokemon game released on DS, after Pokemon Dash. The goal is to align 4 or more Pokemon in a row. then align 3 or more Pokemon in a row immediately after that to start Trozei Chance, where you can then combo clear Pokemon simply by touching two of the same species together and hopefully clear the screen for that juicy point bonus. This continues until you clear the stage by clearing more than the threshold listed above, and any caught Pokemon are added to the Dex. You're also told in advance of opportunities to catch rare Pokemon that will sometimes drop, but you'll need to gather Ditto by clearing 3 or more of the same species at a time during Trozei chance to catch those (and there's no real incentive or reward to finishing the Dex...).
It's fun enough to begin with (and it's pretty hard to mess up an arcade puzzler), but the game really starts feeling like an endurance test with some of the boss fights that will begin throwing rocks your way (which you must clear with Dittos, nothing else will do) and love to black out the screen so you have to make do with silhouettes to get clears and light the screen back up. These later levels have thresholds in the several hundreds, and you'll need to stay extremely vigilant and patient because having your screen fill up quickly will mean that you'll be sent back to the beginning and have to grind all over again.
Now like I said, it's pretty hard to fuck this up: the arcade puzzler works on creating a simple yet engaging gameplay loop, and the colorful Pokemon pixel art + the funky tunes are great! The story's pretty forgettable admittingly, but you won't mind too much. That said, there's one giant dumb design decision in all this; once you clear the final boss, you are immediately transported to hard mode and your map progress reset (wanted to play old levels for practice/rare mons? Too bad!), with no way to go back to normal mode unless you reset your save data. Goddamnit Pokemon Company, why is every Pokemon spinoff game released in the 2000s that I've played this year somehow crippled by dumb design choices that made it past Q & A?
Needless to say, I think Pokemon Trozei is at least serviceable; if you just like the core gameplay loop, I think endless mode will provide a fun enough experience, and there's some cool multiplayer interactivity in the form of "espionage" and other agent missions if you know of asucker friend that's also willing to play this alongside you for some reason. I remain baffled that they couldn't even be bothered to have an option to switch between difficulties after beating the game, but I suppose that's just par for the course during this era. A shame that Trozei hasn't aged as well as when I first laid my eyes upon it at the Pokemon 15th anniversary mall events, but I'm sure I'll get used to this wave of disappointment of spoiling my Pokemon childhood ramblings. Eventually.
Trozei is the arcade puzzle spinoff of Pokemon, and it's the 2nd Pokemon game released on DS, after Pokemon Dash. The goal is to align 4 or more Pokemon in a row. then align 3 or more Pokemon in a row immediately after that to start Trozei Chance, where you can then combo clear Pokemon simply by touching two of the same species together and hopefully clear the screen for that juicy point bonus. This continues until you clear the stage by clearing more than the threshold listed above, and any caught Pokemon are added to the Dex. You're also told in advance of opportunities to catch rare Pokemon that will sometimes drop, but you'll need to gather Ditto by clearing 3 or more of the same species at a time during Trozei chance to catch those (and there's no real incentive or reward to finishing the Dex...).
It's fun enough to begin with (and it's pretty hard to mess up an arcade puzzler), but the game really starts feeling like an endurance test with some of the boss fights that will begin throwing rocks your way (which you must clear with Dittos, nothing else will do) and love to black out the screen so you have to make do with silhouettes to get clears and light the screen back up. These later levels have thresholds in the several hundreds, and you'll need to stay extremely vigilant and patient because having your screen fill up quickly will mean that you'll be sent back to the beginning and have to grind all over again.
Now like I said, it's pretty hard to fuck this up: the arcade puzzler works on creating a simple yet engaging gameplay loop, and the colorful Pokemon pixel art + the funky tunes are great! The story's pretty forgettable admittingly, but you won't mind too much. That said, there's one giant dumb design decision in all this; once you clear the final boss, you are immediately transported to hard mode and your map progress reset (wanted to play old levels for practice/rare mons? Too bad!), with no way to go back to normal mode unless you reset your save data. Goddamnit Pokemon Company, why is every Pokemon spinoff game released in the 2000s that I've played this year somehow crippled by dumb design choices that made it past Q & A?
Needless to say, I think Pokemon Trozei is at least serviceable; if you just like the core gameplay loop, I think endless mode will provide a fun enough experience, and there's some cool multiplayer interactivity in the form of "espionage" and other agent missions if you know of a