Thanks to the cartoon series, the Pokemon games have always had a rather undeserved reputation for being games for children. While the mechanics of the games have always been easy to understand, winning the game relies on tactics. When Pokemon Stadium came out it got a rather deserved lack-luster welcome. While being able to port your strange collection to the N64 and battle them on the big screen was appealing, there really wasn't much of a lasting game underneath that. Pokemon Colosseum corrects many of the problems that the Stadium games had and ramps up the difficulty, leaving Pokemon fans with a better reason to play than just to see their favorites in polygons.
The core of all the Pokemon games is collecting bizarre creatures and having them fight each other for your amusement and maybe the occasional furthering of the plot. Over time both the creatures and the plot have grown even more bizarre. Many of the new pokemon have more eclectic and unusual designs, preferring sharp angles and thinness over the previous cute and cuddly designs. The plot of the thankfully available Story Mode has you playing a boy and girl duo that has to steal pokemon from other trainers and "open their hearts" so they can be happy again.
Each of these unhappy pokemon, called Shadow Pokemon, only have one attack after you capture them, as well as a bar that tells you how close you are to opening their hearts. This sounds easy, but that single attack also recoils and hurts your pokemon, and you can easily lose progress on your bar. Adding to the difficulty is the tendency of Shadow Pokemon to enter Hyper Mode and stop responding to commands. You have a call command that can pull them back to their senses but this takes time, time that your enemy is using to hit that pokemon and make it more likely to go into Hyper Mode again. This will leave you relying on your starting two pokemon to finish off battles in the first stages of the game.
Story Mode is basically the same as what you encounter in the handheld versions of Pokemon. You travel from town to town fighting random people who apparently sit around all day just itching for a fight. For multiplayer you have the option of using the pokemon you have caught and trained in Pokemon Colosseum or you can transfer characters from the handheld versions using a link cable.
Visually, Pokemon Colosseum feels a little bland. The pokemon all look pretty good, and they have some nice animation, but they still do not actually interact with one other. An attack is launched by one and the other recoils, but nothing really touches each other. The arenas you fight in are both bland and have some pretty ugly textures. There is also not a great deal of sound in the game. Your pokemon are often deathly silent, and the same attack sound effects are used multiple times. The game's music also often doesn't seem to fit quite right with what is going on on-screen. In general the presentation feels a little off or incomplete.
This game is not an evolution in the Pokemon franchise. It keeps everything that is familiar about the handheld games and ports it over to the Gamecube, bringing the monsters people are so familiar with alive in a different format. It represents a great improvement over Pokemon Stadium by actually offering some compelling single player play. With a higher difficulty level and some presentation quirks, Pokemon Colosseum is a great game for the Pokemon veteran and not such a great choice for someone just now getting into the games.
