Now don't get us wrong, but this review could easily have been very different. To tell you the truth, we're losing patience with Pokémon. It's Mario Party syndrome: practically the same game, year after year after year. The entire Pokemon rainbow - all the way from Red to Emerald - has been stubbornly 2D, resolutely basic, and always takes you on a stroll through a town followed by a wood, followed by a gym, followed by a cave, followed by another gym and... well, you'll know the rest, because you've walked it. Maybe twice. Maybe - God forbid - eight times!
Planet Pokémon
However, 12 years and 28 games since Professor Oak handed us a little blue water-dinosaur thing and sent us off into the tall grass, the Diamond and Pearl twinset seems like the Pokemon experience we've been waiting for all our lives. And it's thanks to the magic of invisible flying data. Japan's experiment with cellphone-enabled battling in Crystal didn't pay off; Ruby/Sapphire's GBA wireless adaptor
was too fiddly and restrictive. But now? These two gems abandon Ninty's usual
coyness over online play, and actually go beyond what we'd have hoped for. An entire planet of players united in proper battling and pokémon-swapping? Blimey.
gratifying cutscene every time our Naetoru CUTs a tree; and clicking zombie-like through the endlessly repeating messages of your average Pokébattle1 makes tussling with a railway ticket machine seem like riding a magical unicorn through a chocolate waterfall. Here's hoping it's just sheer stubbornness preventing Game Freak from fixing Pokemon's routinely tedious pace: otherwise we have to deal with the possibility that they're doing it on purpose to artificially lengthen play time. Which would make us very angry.
Diamond/Pearl's problems extend beyond just recycling game mechanics that were clunky even by the standards of 1989's wristwatch-brained Game Boy, mind. New features aren't helping speed things up either. All the animations and effects that you can't turn off add up to 12 seconds of what's essentially 'loading time' before every battle. Similarly, while big thumb-friendly touch screen controls make move selection that touch easier (geddit?), having to dig down through three menus to get to a Pokéball or HP revival kit got us chucked off the bus for yelling bad words.
The Same Look
Our biggest moan, though, is this: where's the new adventure? D/P's vaguely cel-shaded, sorta-3D sky-viewed villages are pretty. Ish. But the most exciting thing you'll have seen after the first six hours is a row of three wind turbines. It's 2006, and Pokémon Island is still a world of geometric forests, matchbox cities and shorelines animated as smoothly as a '50s stop-motion animation about a dancing robot. When we found ourselves facing a trudge up to the top storey of another pokémon burial tower, we almost wept. GameCube's Pokemon XD sucked us into a stunning world - pretty docks; sparkling towers; towns that melded wood and metal to atmospheric effect. So why are Kanto, Johto, Hoenn and now Shin'ou3 so uniformly dull?
Right, moaning over. Because, let's face it, Pokemon has still got it. Meeting, catching and battling pokémon is still some of the most fun you can have with your fingers, especially now DS's flip-close, flip-open ability makes it easy to dip in and out when you're on the move. There's still that terrifying fear as a rare, wild 'mon struggles to smash free from your Pokéball; there's that teeth-clenched victory swear-slick oozing from your mouth after squashing Gym Leader 3's Fire Pokémon
with your not-really-up-to-the-job Grass-based team... Game Freak still conjures that specialness that has us squinting at the DS through sleep-smeared eyes seconds after waking up in the morning. It is and has always been simply irresistible.