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Pokemon: Soul Silver: Reviews

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Game Score: 6/10

A 10 year old game for a 20 year old console with slight improvements... That's the eleventh time that's happened... But who's keeping count, anyway? In this haze of Pokemon games that are up to 95% exactly similar to one another (save 3% for added areas and Pokemon, and 2% for whether you carry your berries in a pocket or a pouch), many fans consider the second verse of this series to be the best. That's why this remake has been highly anticipated - I mean, they've practically remade the original eleven times already, the hope of something new should have died off a long time ago. I'll save you the time - This is Pokemon Silver with slightly better everything. Graphics, sound and you now get running shoes. Yeah, all improved. If you were going to play a Pokemon game anyway, might as well go with this one, because it is quite possibly the best in the series. Kind of like a blueberry that's just slightly bigger and bluer than the rest, but once it's in your mouth there's really no difference unless you're a huge fan of blueberries. If that is all that you need to know, then please go somewhere else because this doesn't concern you. If not, proceed...

Let me start by saying that I am no longer a fan of Pokemon. I have never seen a franchise milked so badly and with such intensity, it puts Capcoms and Friday the 13ths combined shame to shame. It's like they have poor Pikachu strung up in a cellar somewhere, completely malnourished and hanging from the ceiling in chains. Then Nintendo comes into the cellar and says "We just released a new console. You know what that means, right?" as they put a bucket under Pikachu and shut off the surveillance cameras. OK, fine, when the first game came out I was really into it, but back then a particularly red balloon would've grabbed my attention for a week. I was 9 years old. Anyway, I can't live with the series has so much potential, and it is being wasted by Gamefreak moving forward in evolution at the speed of an asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping. But since my opinions hardly matter outside of the realms of dreamland, let's break this down into a somewhat objective view of the game. And instead of going bananas over amazing features such as letting one of the 500 Pokemon learn a different attack than earlier, I’ll be looking at exactly what this game is and has to offer.

Gameplay

The game has you exploring the world of Pokemon in a typical RPG fashion, meaning that you can just barely move at the speed of a crippled worm. That is, until you get the "running shoes" that increases your speed, but gives your character the navigation of a blind worm. Poor worms... They get no break in life, and this game really shows you by putting you in their shoes for once. Seriously, is diagonal such a strange concept? It's that place between up and left, often where you want to go but can't because you're stuck to a restrictive grid system. But to be fair, a lot of RPGs suffer from tedious exploration, it's all the other stuff that makes up for it! In this game you fight Pokemon, catch them, have the ones you caught fight other Pokemon and... Yeah, that's it. Apart from one or two minigames that are as useless for your game progression as they are 'mini', that is all that you are going to do in this game. Luckily, there are a whole lot of critters to fight and catch. Unluckily, you have but one way of doing it - An extremely simplistic and restrictive battle system that BEGS for improvement.

First of all, there is no actual "battle" in this game, but merely a series of endurance tests to see how long you and your Pokemon last. Instead of ever fighting equally strong opponents, you'll be facing 50 weak fools in each area and finally someone slightly stronger whose hopes of victory relies completely on the fact that you ran out of PP (essentially ammo for the attacks) by wasting them on the goons beforehand. One dungeon, two dungeons with this concept... Fine. This is THE WHOLE GAME. All the "battles" except for one or two unimportant ones for each quarter of the map is going to be one-on-one, so even though you have a team of a maximum of 6 different Pokemon only one of them is going to see any action at a time.
When fighting you need to forget EVERYTHING about strategic thinking. There's more strategic thinking in Pong. Every strategy that does not involve hitting the enemy hard and fast is going to make you kill yourself in the endless endurance tests this game throws at you. If you know that the enemy is weak against an element that you have an attack of, feel free to use it. That's it. There's a joke that it's so easy that you could "beat it in your sleep", but in this case it's actually true! If you fall asleep with a finger pressing down the top left of the screen (thereby activating an attack), you win! Period! Just put a Wall-E figurine as a weight on the lower screen and you can literally watch him beat Pokemon SoulSilver! Your only prayer of maybe activating a single braincell when playing this game is if you're fighting a human player, who will most likely be cheating, rude, way too good or all of the above. Especially that last one, uh... Before the "all of the above" is tedious, because most people spend literally weeks calculating formulas and putting in enough effort to find the cure for Cancer had it been used properly into making a great team that laughs at anything you throw at it. Urk.

But if you're just looking for a casual way of passing time that is just slightly less dull than watching extra moist paint dry (and only half as rewarding), it's fine. And there is actually a reward at the end of the game in the shape of an actual competent opponent, the name of which I won't mention so that it doesn't spoil anything but mostly because it's stupid. So while the gameplay could use some serious restructuring, we all know THAT's not going to happen. This is Pokemon, after all, we couldn't get them to stop making use choose between three starters if we threatened to blow up Earth with orbital lasers.

Story

The story is horrendous. I don't think a homeless person could write a plot this bad, even if their last ham sandwich depended on it. The story is the same as the original, the prequel, the sequel, the sequel of the sequel and most of the spin-offs. Simply put - Gotta Catch 'em All, which is stupid because most people have already done so, some several times! How long do we have to do this stuff!? What, for another diploma? Gee, thanks, I just spent the last three weeks trying to get a Tauros that kept fleeing in the Safari Zone, traveled 10 miles to a mall to stand in a long grueling line with people carrying ripening cheese in their pockets to get Mewfour and bought three versions of the same game for the 5th time, and YOU GIVE ME A BLOODY SHEET OF PAPER!? No. Just... No. What happened back then must never be repeated. Apart form that, you also have to travel the continent while fighting gyms, running errands and sabotaging the workings of a criminal organization. None of these are in the least bit intriguing, seeing how that's exactly what you have done if you have ever played another Pokemon game before, and even then it wasn't interesting. The people have less personality than a dried up eraser. The Pokemon even less. Everything and everybody in this game is just an emotionless tool used to thrust you into some more fighting. I've sympathized more with cardboard cut-outs where the edges were ragged and generally sloppily cut. It's like an episode of the Twilight Zone, where everybody is completely happy, robots or happy robots.
The plot is crammed so full with ridiculous concepts, unexplainable mysteries and avoided explanations that a summarization of it it could only be done justice with this question: Why anything? Forget nitpicking about how you could possibly store them on computers, why they all want to kill you but when you catch them they immediately become your best friends and why a 10-year old kid has to bring down large criminal associations while the police is some kind of optical illusion, let's just gather them all into one gigantic box marked 'denial'.

But the story isn't the point of this game, and thankfully so. Besides, when compared to the rest of the games in this series one might actually say that this one has the best story out of all of them. When you've explored the map in the game you're faced with the shadow of an indication toward the roommate of a twist, which just baaaaarely puts it over the edge. To summarize, just see the plot of this game as an episode of Barbapapa - He's a blob, he lives in a house with his blob family and nobody's asking any questions. EVER.

Graphics/Sound

This is where the game really shines. Or not. To be fair, the graphics look pretty good in the sense that it's like a touched up version of the original with the Pokemon and characters looking like they're supposed to in a nice anime style. The problem lies in the design of the game itself. By being unable to change the camera to look at something besides the dull ground, the background in battles being white emptiness with the occasional vertical line of color, the most visually impressive thing that you're going to see is the sprite of a Pokemon, and it's not moving. Now, the DS isn't up to par with the Xbox 360, but I've seen it show some pretty nice looking stuff. Showing still images was possible on the original Game Boy, which happens to be MORE THAN 20 YEARS OLD! There's a slight 3-D effect on houses and such, but since you can't change the camera angle you wouldn't be able to tell. The battle animations look pretty good though, but when I think about it... Not really. A couple of leaves flying around or some bright lights, it's like they're saying "HAHA! We can do colors on handheld consoles now!". Take a look at Golden Sun, it was one of the first games for the GBA with attacks that look twice as good as anything this game has to offer. Of course, look at Final Fantasy Tactics A2 and know that it could have been a whole lot worse as well. Alla in all, nothing interesting or special.

The sound is where the game really shines, and this time I'm serious! Well... OK, not really. I wanted to be, but I just can't. The music from the original has been remixed very well. These aren't the typical predictable synthesizers and mindless drums commonly heard in games nowadays... This is actually some pretty complicated stuff! Not too far away from progressive rock, either. The music is constantly exciting and new and never really feels like its repeating itself, which brings a more fluid pace to the game. One glaring issues though - The original songs weren't all that good. Sure, they were cool the first time, but not strong enough to carry the endless amounts of fighting in this game. The once exciting battle theme quickly becomes associated with the repetitive battle system, and soon you'll be cranking up Howard Stern or good music to spare you the mental anguish. When you get to a new place you'll want to plug in those headphones again, though... Because hearing the songs once or twice is fine.

Play Time/Replayability

This is a thorny one. If you want to complete the game it's going to last you a long time, maybe around 20 hours. If you're going to catch all the Pokemon, this game is going to last even longer, maybe up to 80 hours. If you're going to start playing online while visiting forums to discuss which strategy applies best against fighting Mr. Mime when all you really have to do is hit him hard and watch him die, this game will outlast YOU. But all of this is kind of like playing Mario Clash to level 99... I mean, you COULD do it, and it would take a long time, but shouldn't you be out doing something more productive with your time, like learning stuff? Or why not play a game that's actually has something new and fun to offer? And forget replayability, there's only one save on this cartridge. Meaning that if you want to restart the game, say goodbye to every Pokemon you ever caught and trained. This was understandable during the Game Boy era, but this is the bloody DS. Super Mario DS had four saves. Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin had six saves. Final Fantasy Tactics, a very complicated game with tons of information crammed into at least had two saves. The only reason for this is so that you'll buy the other versions of the game! Heck, give us codes or something! Maybe we can't type in the 9000 lines it would require, but let us send it to our computers via wireless mode or something... You can't just have one possible save slot in a game like this! It's completely unacceptable! I'd give the replayability score a MINUS because of this, because it actually discourages you from ever replaying this game! How mean!

Final Recommendation

So in conclusion, this game is not really bad in any way, but it's not good either. It's like a void of enjoyment, keeping your attention until you snap out of it and realize that you just spent two hours doing what a somewhat slow 2-year old could have done just as well. Like I said, it's a slightly better Pokemon Silver. If you have played Pokemon Silver before, then you know exactly what you're getting. If you have played Pokemon before, then you ALSO know exactly what you're getting. If not, you should definitively give it a try before buying, because the first 10 minutes of the game is going to be exactly like the following 10 hours. And much like shoes that glow in the dark, they're fun for about 10 seconds before you realize what an empty form of enjoyment it is and go read a book. Or in my case, go read all the angry responses I get for sharing my taste in games. I happen to like them good, and occasionally spicy. Remember that this review is made from a somewhat objective point of view - I would have given it 2/10 in the sense that this is the eleventh version of the same game and I am so very sick of it, 8/10 because it's a better version of a game that I loved in my childhood, and finally 6/10 when compared to all the other games for the DS. And to be fair, this is the exact same review as for Pokemon HeartGold, which is not my fault bu the fault of the creators for releasing two versions of the same game!