Man I wanted to like this, I was obsessed with Pokemon Pinball RSE back in high school and I was really hoping this would be just as good. But between the weird angle of the board and the lack of bumpers, I felt like I had no control over the ball as every time I hit them upwards with the flippers, the ball would just ride along the edge of the board back down to the bottom, not hitting anything.

And like, listen. I'm not trying to say I'm good at pinball or that I know what I'm doing when I play. But half the fun I had with Pokemon Pinball RSE was like, messing around, watching the board evolve as you hit other things and activate things and seeing where your ball would get stuck and get a bunch of bonuses. Here I just felt like the boards (at least the grass one, in all honesty, I couldn't unlock anything past it) just felt so small and empty. Not fun to mess around with at all.

This is a pretty bad pinball game. The game clearly wants you to learn to actually play pinball, which is cool, but it wants you to control the ball pretty precisely from screen one. This ends up being a big ask in part because the ball physics feel off. Youll spend alot of time trying to hit a specific button to open the path to the next screen, losing your ball on that screen, then dropping you back to that previous screen to try and hit that button again. Its tedious and not particularly fun.

Game highlight: the visuals are charming and the opening cutscene is very funny.

Sadly the most overlooked and underrated mario spinoff.

I've gone back to this game so many times over the years.
The pinball can be wonky but it works when you get used to it.
The adventure of it all is a strangely unique concept. A few random games on older systems attempted the adventure pinball concept but this was the first mainstream attempt at nailing it down, and one of the very last.

Still an extremely unique idea that MORE than deserves a remake.