Pokemon Advance (Game Boy Advance)

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Pokemon Advance
(Game Boy Advance)

Released:
Japan: November 2002
USA: Early 2003

It's inevitable that a new Nintendo system would feature a new Pokemon game, so it comes to no surprise that those little pocket monsters will grace the screen of Nintendo's 32-bit system. The title, tentively titled "Pocket Monsters Advance" will come in two varieties, much like its predecessors.

The game will feature 100 new pokemon to add to the existing 251 creatures. Some of the pokemon made their debut in the TV anime (Kakureon), some in the fourth mini-movie (Whaleko and Ruriri), and some in the fifth mini-movie (Barubito and Sonano). The game will feature new leading characters (a boy and a girl) and a new professor, Odamaki-Hakase.

***Warning: Here's where the objective game review ends and the ranting begins***

Unfortunately, the game looks to be more of the same. I heard that at one point, the producer of the games stated that he wanted to re-invent the next line of games because he realized that Nintendo can't keep chruning out "more of the same." Well, I guess they threw that idea out the window. Now granted, we really can't form an opinion of the game until we play it, but the preliminary glance doesn't look good.

Let's see...graphics-wise, it sucks. It's really just the Gold/Silver/Crystal graphics engine with more color. Really, that's about it. The characters look to be the same size, and the buildings and whatnot look to be shaped the same way. After seeing what the Game Boy Advance can do with Golden Sun (which is basically the Final Fantasy 7 for the Game Boy Advance), it's really disappointing to see such shoddy graphics. The battles also look to be the same format--same perspective (from behind your pokemon), same four menu commands, it's all the same.

Hopefully, Nintendo will prove me wrong. Hopefully they'll create a new Pokemon game innovative enough so that it's not just "more of the same" the way Gold/Silver/Crystal were.

Pocket Monsters was not created by me. It was created by Satoshi Tajiri and the crew at TV-Tokyo. Pokemon is (c) Game Freak, Nintendo, 4Kids Productions, Hasbro, Bandai, and a ton of other companies. When you have a popular anime like Pokemon, lots of people own it so it's impossible to list every company who owns a piece of Pokemon. No infringement of copyrights is meant by the creation of the web site. All images were gotten from official websites (Nintendo, TV-Tokyo, etc.) unless otherwise noted (I don't steal images from other sites!).