Chances are no matter what myself or any other critic says regarding this game, Pokemon Battle Revolution is going to sell undeserved millions; and will just be one other product that adds to the hundreds of Pokemon related items that brainwash little children to make them force their mommies and daddies to waste money on Pokemania.
The original Pokemon Stadium on the N64 was better than this. So was its sequel. So was Coliseum for the Gamecube. For God’s sake, even Hey You Pikachu may have given off more enjoyment for me. (Okay I’m kidding, that game was just too bad to be consider more "fun" than anything.) Pokemon Battle Revolution is simply a bad and noticeably cheap game. While the concept of 3D Pokemon battles was fun ten or so years ago, the battle system of Pokemon has just turned into something so overly tedious that it has even become the most yawn inducing parts of the handheld RPGs, let alone an entire game structured around them.
The whole purpose of battling on the handheld games is to level up your Pokemon more than defeating your opponent. The problem with PBR, though, and all of its predecessors is that there is no leveling up or exploring. Hence, the entire purpose of the game is to battle aimlessly, with only the goal of beating all the trainers in your path. Some may be yearning to see how their team lights up in a 3D polygonal view, but I must stress that only a Pokemon die-hard can find any sort of lasting appeal from that viewpoint. If you don’t have a party from the DS adventures or even possess Diamond or Pearl, buying this game is not only a waste of hard-earned money, but a waste of playtime with your Wii. Essentially, Pokemon: Battle Revolution is a console add-on to a handheld game…and does that sound all that appealing for fifty dollars?
As stated, there is no real progression in this game, so all that is presented is a stream of meaningless battles and the game’s amazing ability to become stale extraordinarily fast. While the game does assist you with items and money that can be transferred to your DS experience, none of it has any meaning to the actual game itself. It also shows how the whole series has declined since its debut on the N64. The original Pokemon Stadium made its handheld counterparts feel like add-ons to the game, but Battle Revolution has a vice-versa effect. Instead the game comes off more as a peripheral for Diamond and Pearl, rather than seeming like a single unified package. This also means that you won’t be able to receive any enjoyment from the game if you missed out on the handheld RPGs — but I doubt any of this game’s potential buyers have.
The crowning jewel of PBR was supposed to be that it would be the first of all the titles in the Wii library to feature Nintendo’s Wifi service. I was hoping that perhaps this game would finally open the Wii into the online world in a simple and efficient manner similar to the way Diamond and Pearl managed to do. Indeed, it does break the ice between WiFi and the Wii, but in probably least interactive way possible. Thanks to Nintendo, the Friend Code system is in full blast for the Wii’s first jump into the digital world, meaning no sense of interaction with opponents at all. Instead, you simply search for a battle and find someone wandering about like yourself, or you just simply lag out from the session all together due to some kind of weird bug which I doubt they will bother to have patched. When you finally get into a match, you will have absolutely no communication with your opponent, so the difference between him and a computer isn’t really all that recognizable.
Not only that, but there is no statistic sheet or ranking system to help you see where you stack up to others around the world, so no sense of reward is present when you do actually win a battle. How is a game that models itself around becoming the very best even hold true to that when there is no way to look up if you truly are? I said in my D&P review Nintendo needs to get it’s online system capabilities down and offer some kind of decent multiplayer experience; seeing that PBR is going to sell millions I wonder if they really have plans for fixing or debugging their system at all.
Overall, Pokemon Battle Revolution isn’t a full video game experience. It is simply a 3D projection of its DS counterparts, which in every way are far, far superior. The most tedious aspect of Diamond and Pearl’s gameplay was that the game’s battles seemed too sluggish when compared to the rest of the adventure based gameplay, which had a much faster pace. Pokemon Battle Revolution is based around that same old boring system, meaning all you’ll be doing is playing prettier versions of the same, boring, battle system you likely grew sick of on the DS. At least when Pokemon Stadium arose on the N64, it offered some kind of plot and mini-game setup, giving players something to battle for. It’s painfully obvious, though, that Pokemon Battle Revolution is just Nintendo’s way of producing a quick buck, and the game flaunts this at you constantly, mocking the fact you even purchased it.
