This game is mostly the same thing as Pokémon Red/Blue, so I’m treating this as if it’s the first Pokémon game. With that being said, I’ve got to give it credit for launching maybe the most successful gaming franchise of all time. Having 151 unique Pokémon in the very first game is extremely impressive in my opinion. For the most part, this game has aged very well for a Gameboy game. The gameplay stands well today, and though the sound and visuals are worse than the future games, I can easily forgive that for how old it is. There is one major negative about this game though that makes it very tough to play today. It’s extremely slow. I played this game on Delta so I played at accelerated speed but when I tried to play at normal speed I just couldn’t. At accelerated speed, this game is a lot of fun and is downright addicting. However, this game in it’s original state is grueling and I would not play it that way.

This game maintains all the good from Pokémon Colosseum and greatly improves all of the bad aspects. You can now save at any time, shadow moves no longer hurt the Pokémon using them, purifying Pokémon is much faster and the purify chamber makes it so much easier to purify all of the shadow Pokémon you catch. The ending is 100x better and more climactic than Colosseum and the final battle is great. There's a lot that's still the same as Colosseum, like many of the locations are reused which is a bit lame. There are more Pokémon to use and a better selection overall, though the distribution isn't very good as you get most of them (especially the coolest/best ones) in the last part of the game. This game is so much better than Colosseum in the most important ways, and I would recommend everyone just skip over Colosseum and play this game only. Objectively, this game probably doesn't deserve such a high score, but I just have so much love and nostalgia for it. This is my favorite Pokémon game and one of my personal favorite games of all time.

This game does some things very well. The character designs are fantastic and creative. There is some interesting lore that both sets the foundation for the game and is also directly interlinked with the quests you complete and the characters you interact with. The voice acting is mostly really good, but Shepard’s is awful which really throws off every scene since he’s the main protagonist. The good parts kept me fairly interested throughout, but the game also gets most of the core aspects wrong. First, the worlds are completely uninteresting and barren except for the few markers on the map, which themselves are the same across every planet. The gameplay is just fine, but I dislike the UI and the slowness of switching weapons/using abilities. The loot system is honestly just a burden. It got annoying clearing out my inventory and comparing every new gun I picked up to the guns I had equipped. The story is pretty good, I didn’t have any major gripes. However, this game does that typical annoying thing where the dialogue choices you choose are often nothing like what Shepard actually says. 90% of the time I thought I accidentally picked the wrong one. The experience was still fairly enjoyable in the end, mostly because I enjoy games where you get to pick from an ensemble of characters to team up with. However, I think this game is objectively pretty bad and I’m surprised the reviews are so high.