Pocket Monsters Stadium

released on Aug 01, 1998

Pokémon Stadium (Japanese: ポケモンスタジアム, subtitled in English as Pocket Monsters' Stadium) is the first game of the Pokémon Stadium series. It was released exclusively in Japan. The game focuses mainly on battling. Upon start-up, the game asks if the player if they want to use the Pokémon in their Game Boy Game Pak. If not, only Battle Mode can be accessed.


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While going through the effort to finish the two sequels to this game, I naturally thought of this game as well. It’s a game that never came out in English, as it only has 40 Pokemon out of the original 151, and is otherwise very content light beyond just free battling. For many years I’d known about this game, but I’d actually always been under the impression that it had no single-player content to speak of at all. Imagine my surprise when, in my researching the other two Pokemon Stadium games, I found that this game does indeed have SOME content to it, and credits to reach! Given that this is a really easily found game for 100 yen, it was a pretty simple choice to run out and grab this so I could get to playing it once I was done with the other two (and it also gave me an extra good excuse to play through Yellow version to get the last few TMs I needed to create my super team for this game’s league~). I played through all four divisions of the the level 1~30 league, and I did it on real hardware. As with the other two Pokemon Stadium games, I can’t really say how long it took me to beat this. Sure, I made it through those four cups in only 3 or 4 hours, but I also used Pokemon from my copies of Green, Gold, and Yellow to win it, and that’s not counting all the time acquiring and training up those Pokemon. This is another one I just can’t really confidently give a “time to beat” for at all, unfortunately.

As with the two sequels to this game, there is no story to speak of with this game. It’s an even more simple version of its successor (the one that DID come out in English), lacking 111 Pokemon or even mini-games to speak of. What it does have are some neat tools for looking at your Pokemon if you insert your GameBoy Pokemon game via a Transfer Pak, a way to play those GB Pokemon games via an internal emulator, a free battle mode, and a small handful of single-player content. There are two tournaments, one with one division, and one with four, and actually beating either will get you the credits. The former is a level 50~55 league with the Nintendo Cup ’97 ruleset, but the trainers you’re facing in that are entirely teams based on the ’97 championship finalists, so I chose to do the other tournament instead. The other tournament being a cup that uses the Nintendo Cup ’98 rule set (only 33 Pokemon allowed and a level limit of 30).

That choice was made partly because I’m getting a little burned out on Pokemon stuff and partly because I’d yet to make a level 30s team, and that seemed like a neat challenge. But frankly, a more major reason I picked to do only this one was because this game has NO continues, unlike its sequels, so if you lose a match, you need to restart the WHOLE cup over again. Now, by a small miracle of luck (on top of all the effort I put into making my level 30s Alakazam, Jolteon, Tauros, Dugtrio, Starmie, and Exeggutor team as burly and mean as I could), I actually managed to go all four cups completely undefeated. This game does have rental Pokemon I could’ve used, but given the penalty for failure (and the small amount of actual content at play), it seemed more reasonable and fun to just make as mean a team as I could for this instead.

I had always written this game off as just an inferior version made totally obsolete by its immediate sequel, but I was very happy to have been proven wrong in that regard. Part of that is due to the later Pokemon Stadium lacking a four cup tournament that uses the ’98 Cup rule set, which makes this game an interesting oddity for that alone. However, the much bigger point of interest that I discovered is that, unlike the second Pokemon Stadium game, this game actually plays just like the Red & Green era GameBoy games do. Pokemon Stadium 2 starts making a lot of changes to Pokemon fix up bugs in the original GB games, and that ends up making it a weird sort of half-step between the first and second generation Pokemon games. This game, however, is JUST like the GameBoy games, warts and all. The biggest ones I noticed are that psychic types are immune to ghost moves and hyper beam doesn’t need a turn of recharge if it gets a kill or misses. They’re ultimately very small changes, but they’re things I encountered a lot in the second game and I was always second guessing whether or not the rules were actually like the games I trained these Pokemon up in in the first place. While it’s hardly a top-tier selling point, the rule set for this game’s battle system so closely mirroring the games you’d use to play it does make it a worthwhile addition to any Pokemaniac’s shelf alongside its two sequels.

Aesthetically, the game is really just a more simple Pokemon Stadium 2. The models are basically all the same, as are the animations, and there is only one battle field ever used for tournaments and such. The coolest part that I found that’s actually unique to this game is how the tournaments themselves are displayed. After winning a match and “getting a badge”, it actually affixes to an in-game hat your generic player model wears for the duration of that tournament! Not only that, but in the preview shot between you and the person you’re about to fight, it even still has the badges on your profile picture! It’s a very small thing, but it’s something I thought was cool enough to mention here x3

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a game I really easily could just not recommend at all, but it’s both so cheap and such a unique little game in its rule set that I think it’s still something cool for big Pokemon fans to check out. Mind you, this still has a lot less content to enjoy than its sequels, as we don’t even have all the Pokemon to play around in in free battle, let alone mini-games at all to play with friends. However, if you’re into competitive Pokemon battling and want a very unique single-player challenge, then this is something you might get a good deal of fun out of (if you’re willing to use a menu translation guide to navigate it, at least ^^;).

I played this game as practice before I prepare myself for my Pokemon Stadium GS playthrough.

It's just a battle sim like Battle Revolution but even more barebones with only rental mons if you don't have a GB attached all you can do is battle with rental mons which I imagine would get pretty boring pretty quick. Can't even use a model viewer without a gameboy game inserted.

I hope they didn't charge full price for this back in the day!