My first experience playing Pokémon was Pokémon Platinum for the Nintendo DS a couple of years ago. I couldn’t put it down and played it for hours at a time for several weeks. I would play until my Pokémon were nice and strong and were nearly invincible (or so I thought at the time). I used strategy; remembered which Pokémon worked better in battle against other Pokémon; and carefully picked which ones to develop and grow. Through hard work and a lot of play time, I made it to the last bosses, thinking I was going to beat the game but only to discover my Pokémon were in fact pretty weak and I was no match for my opponents. After several attempts and hours of frustration, I gave up and had not played since. I knew the only way to win was to keep building up my Pokémon to become stronger and balanced and I just didn’t feel like going back to the other levels and roam around to do that.
Years later, I am handed Pokémon Rumble Blast for the Nintendo 3DS and told it’s not like the traditional turn-based Pokémon that I came to love and hate. It’s not turn-based and instead is more like a real-time, action game in 3D. My interest was piqued and gave it a shot but after playing several hours of it, found myself wasting more time on it than I thought I would.
In Pokémon Rumble Blast, you play as a Pokémon in search of the disappearing Glowdrops. These Glowdrops heal Pokémon and someone has taken them for their own evil purposes. At the start of each play, you begin in a town where you can heal your Pokémon, buy powers, play with a friend, warp to other areas, or release Pokémon you catch. After you leave the town, you travel around a map and enter battle areas such as a forest or lake. A typical stage would involve you entering an area and then encountering about a dozen (and sometimes more) enemy Pokémon. As you defeat them in real-time (often by either pressing one of two attack buttons), they turn into coins or Pokémon items to collect. The coins can then be used to purchase more powers for your Pokémon, while the Pokémon you collect can be used for future battles. At the end of each level, you fight a boss that you must defeat in order to complete the stage. The enemies and the bosses progressively become more difficult as you play but so do the Pokémon you collect as well.
Since the game is for the 3DS, the game is split between the top screen displaying the action above while the bottom screen shows the map below. You can click another button to show the character’s different attributes but it really doesn’t tell you that much other than the moves they have; the defence and attack level; and their number of hit points. A disappointment is that despite being exclusively for the 3DS, there is no touch feature of the bottom screen and players must use the control pad and the four buttons to play.
One of the core elements to any Pokémon game is the ability to switch between your monsters especially when you are taking too much damage or you find another Pokémon is more effective against a particular opponent in battle over another. If your Pokémon faints from taking too much damage, you must switch to another Pokémon and continue playing until you’re healed (by returning to town and become healed with Glowdrops or receiving a healing item) or lose all 3 of your lives and restart at your last save point in the nearest town with your Pokémon intact.
That being said, switching characters in this game makes this game very easy to beat your enemies. Traditionally in other Pokémon games, you may have about 8 slots to carry your Pokémon to use in battles, which makes you really think which ones to bring with you. In doing so, one must often consider having a strong balanced team of Pokémon while also developing weaker Pokémon that may evolve to become stronger down the road. Because of this, I really became reluctant in letting some of my Pokémon go because it took time to develop them yet I know I can’t keep all of them.
In Pokémon Rumble Blast, I had no trouble getting rid of my Pokémon for several reasons. Firstly, you collect a lot of them as you encounter a lot of enemies in the stages you play. In a single stage alone, you may defeat about 50 Pokémon and therefore collect about 5 Pokémon in a span about 5 minutes. By the end of a stage, it’s not unusual for you to have about half a dozen Pokémon to use later. However, considering the frequency and rate of collection and the continuous increase in power of the monsters you collect, you find yourself letting go of your Pokémon on a regular basis in exchange for coins in town. Otherwise, you could easily find yourself with hundreds of Pokémon to sort later on, all with different abilities, levels, hit points, and powers. And because I constantly get stronger and stronger Pokémon, I can easily give up my previous Pokémon since I know I’ll just end up finding another fairly easily. Furthermore, there does not appear to be any leveling up of the Pokémon that you do use other than purchasing powers for them throughout the game. However, because the Pokémon you collect is so frequent, there really isn’t much benefit in spending much money on these new powers as (again) I will probably find a stronger Pokémon shortly down the road anyways. It’s as if the developers wanted you to continuously give up Pokémon and not bother keeping your old ones.
Battling Pokémon is fairly straightforward. If your Pokémon is strong enough, you simply aim it to the nearest enemy and keep pressing your attack button until they faint (often with about 2 to 3 hits) whether the attack is a close or distant attack. In fact, if you time your attacks well and don’t become surrounded, you can probably go through a whole level unscathed. The bosses are not much of a challenge either as they are essentially over-sized Pokémon that slowly rotate on an axis while attempting to hit you with a large attack. Meanwhile, smaller Pokémon are also attacking you but they are more of a nuisance than anything. Furthermore, if you have a well-stocked reserve of Pokémon and are able to switch in time, there really isn’t much of a reason for you to lose against the bosses. The game becomes quite repetitive as you travel around and are constantly collecting more Pokémon.
Despite the easy play, the lack of strategy, shallow story line, easy controls, and constant change-up of characters, I found myself playing this game a lot longer than I thought I would. The gameplay is mindless yet I still wanted to collect as many new Pokémon as possible (they tell you how many are available to collect and of those how many you have caught already). I also get a sense of satisfaction in destroying enemies en-masse with a single hit from my newly caught monster and then sort out the ones to keep or which ones to discard later.
An interesting feature of this game is the ability to fight other players using the Street Pass where if you come across another person who plays this game, your Pokémon will fight their Pokémon. Codes can also be earned from encountering hot spots at certain locations like Best Buy which you can enter and then unlock potential Pokémon to catch later. This adds to some interesting aspects of the game and my curiosity on what I can find later in the game, but wasn’t enough to hold my interest for long.
When I started a new game, I saw the introductory movie using the 3D feature of the 3DS and was impressed. I thought, “Wow, this looks pretty good. I hope the game looks as good as the movie does.” Unfortunately, those clips are the strongest graphics in the game and the rest of the game’s graphics didn’t quite measure up as I hoped. Don’t get me wrong; the graphics are far from ugly. I was only hoping that the developers would have used the 3D feature of the 3DS to its potential in order for the graphics to really pop. Instead, they only added a little depth to a game that is already made in a 3D perspective (in contrast to the typical 2D Pokémon game). There wasn’t a significant difference between playing this game with the 3D feature turned on and off. In fact, you might be better off leaving it off to save some battery life.
However, the game doesn’t look bad, especially in battles. The developers were able to add some decent effects such as lights bursting as you beat multiple enemies at once or when the slow-mo and close up of defeating a stage boss. While the immediate surface of the game you walk on is fairly basic and a little jagged around the edges, the backgrounds of the stages are well drawn and definitely give the appropriate vibe to the stage you are in. The Pokémon look like they were cel-shaded and seem to be on the kid friendly side but they’re cute and unique.
The sound for this was well done with lots of classical instruments being used along with some rock. It really can get pretty dramatic and it sounds like they used a full orchestra for this game. In fact, the music is probably the strongest aspect of this game. The sound effects are not bad either but then again, they are not very complex either as the game doesn’t really involve a lot of stuff happening at once. Some audio narration may have added a little more to the game but considering there isn’t much of a story anyways, there probably wouldn’t have been a lot to say.
Overall, Pokémon Rumble Blast is an easy game that really lacks depth compared to its predecessors. It does not offer the challenge or strategy like we have seen in previous Pokémon games. Instead we get mindless entertainment, which is the opposite of what this series is about. Even if you set that aside and looked at it from an action game perspective, the game is still too repetitive and offers little incentive to continue playing as there is no upgrading other than the plentiful monsters you catch, use and quickly toss away. The game also does not take full advantage of what the 3DS has to offer and instead could easily be played on the DS. Not to mention, when you consider the games price tag, this Pokémon game could be considered over-priced. Bottom line, fans of the series or those simply looking for a decent action game on the 3DS this holiday season will likely be disappointed with Rumble Blast.
