Cute attempt at showing off the prowess of the Nintendo DS as a gaming device, with some smoke and mirrors to hide its limitations. The core of the game revolves around the adaptation of the Pokémon mainline gameplay loop in order to accomodate the introduction of the touch screen and stylus. The gameplay loop revolves around monster capturing, an offshoot of monster collecting from the main series. Pokémon are captured with the only intention of temporarily using their abilities to remove obstacles and then releasing them back to freedom.

What Ranger shines in is putting Pokémon at the center of the game. I think the mainline games have always made some mistakes in how they create an experience centered around Pokèmons, for example the exclusivity of starters leading to them having way too much staying power on your team and thus heavily affecting team composition in absence of incentives to rotate team members, or how Pokémon are observable only in tall grass. These things have been worked on slowly through generations, but Ranger took and reworked them immediately in a pleasant and rational way. Pokémon are now visible on screen during travels and a capture starts on touch; no more tall grass. The gameplay only involves player vs pokemon through the stylus, pokémon do not and cannot fight each other here. Pokémon are modelled and animated through splendid sprite work, and all have curious and neat individual animations. Pokémon are also coherent with their descriptions and stated behaviours and thus feel like proper and diverse living beings. Always a big fan of letting creatures be creatures.

In general though this level of precision in Pokémon interaction comes at the expense of most other things affecting the game. This is a small game. The main story can be finished in roughly 10 hours, while total completion of the regional pokédex might take 15 hours. The world of the game in particular is quite small. There are just 4 cities and only an handful of other locations. There are little tricks that make the game seem slightly larger than it is: for example, the camera is oddly centered on and close by the player character to create an illusory sense of breatdh of environment. Although cities are just an handful of houses and exploration involves three or four screens of walking at best, this give the illusion that exploration takes just a couple seconds longer than expected and hides, best it can, the map's general weakness. Pokémon capture sessions also take place in rather uninspired stages, which also feel comically small because the Pokémon you are trying to capture can and will run past the borders of the screen, where you cannot reach them. From a gameplay perspective, this is a fine concession to the cpu in order to even the odds against your capture possibilities, but from an experience perspective, this all leads to the game being played as if looking through a microscope. That same microscope is used for the plot of the game, a sufficiently competent work decorated with mildly entertaining and goofy characters, but nothing to write home about.

Post Edit: One thing I completely forgot to mention with respect to gameplay choices and tricks that try to manipulate your perception of the breatdh of the game: you cannot run in this game. This is small, but it's also been seriously bugging me during the whole 10 hours of gameplay I had. Running and faster-than-walking travel is somewhat of a staple in Pokémon games, through the running shoes and the bicycles. Here you get nothing of the sort. Although your walking speed is solid and brisk, it seems tailored to the small enviornments I've talked about. I don't know if I should have a legitimate expectation of being able to run in any RPG Pokémon game (take for example the Mystery Dungeon games), but I can't deny I had a few moments where I really wished I was faster. And in relation to the little world of the game, I realize if I were going any faster the game would undeniably become excessively short and unsatisftying.

Pokemon Ranger is really a game for me that reminded that nostalgia is indeed not enough to sway my opinion strongly enough to completely warp everything about how I perceive games, because despite having played through this a ton as a kid, this was a pretty awful experience on the whole when I came back to it. I tend to be appreciative of the spin off games for Pokemon for the way they'll feel as if they take the core ideas and setting of the franchise and then have it go in a lot of unique directions that provide the series with a great deal of multifaceted identity, especially when looking at things like the Mystery Dungeon games which show that such creatures can be depicted in ways that feel far more like a fantasy adventure. The issue is that this isn't really what Pokemon Ranger does, instead feeling incredibly similar at its core of how things are presented, just with a few keywords switched around (pokeballs are now stylers for example) that ultimately affect nothing in a tangible way. This of course becomes an even bigger problem when factoring in the fact that as a spin off, the scope and quantity of unnecessary, but always cool and charming extra detail is missing thanks to it obviously not quite getting the same amount of time or budget put into it and leading to an experience that feels both anaemic and horribly bloated.

The biggest way in which this game horribly fails for me is the way that the levels are designed to be simultaneously needlessly convoluted, yet unflinchingly simplistic for the most part. Levels will feel akin to mazes with the amount of branching paths and dead ends, yet there almost never feels like there's an actual point to any of these. The majority of the time, these extra paths feel more like a poor attempt at padding out the game than anything of note, with the total lack of rewarding exploration making it feel like most stages would just be better if they were straight lines. Even the idea of the area hazards that you need to clear with specific Pokemon feels woefully underutilised, with so many of these being trivialised thanks to the fact that the answers to these puzzles/obstacles tend to be placed about 10 seconds away. Having this whole system used in only the most basic of ways that doesn't end up encouraging exploration or even basic problem solving instead transforms this concept into more of a time waster than anything else. There were clearly some attempts to mitigate this through the extra obstacles placed around that would often require a bit more thorough an exploration to get through, but after going through a couple of them and realising that it just holds another Pokemon, they quickly feel wholly pointless.

While the idea of having to do a bit of light puzzle solving to get through and find a specific pokemon you can't find anywhere else sounds cool enough, due to the way that Pokemon in this game just work as a one time power that disappears the moment you leave the area anyway, often having capabilities that you can find elsewhere in the stage, it feels like there's no point. The simplistic way in which Pokemon are handled in the game strips them of a lot of personality and distinctiveness. In the mainline titles the small differences you could see between even those that were practically identical would end up contributing to a stronger sense of identity in battle, but here it's more akin to having a bunch of options that are functionally the same but just look a bit different, and when a game manages to falter at making Pokemon feel entirely lifeless, that's when you know something's gone seriously wrong.

The core gameplay loop with the capturing is also a bit too simplistic to really provide any sense of variation to how the player should approach a situation. Due to having to capture in one go without ever lifting the stylus from the screen, the strategy for almost every encounter boils down to waiting for their attack animation to end and then drawing circles around them as fast as possible before they use it again. Even the majority of the boss encounters play out like this, with the only real difference being that the game makes the more difficult fights feel endlessly tedious and/or frustrating as opposed to forcing you to changing anything about how you approach these situations. No matter how scary the enemy looks, it all just boils down to waiting a tiny bit and then going crazy. The screen destroying potential through this being the central mechanic is also a bit of an iffy choice for me, as it feels like common sense to me to not design a game around a fast motion like this that could very easily scratch up the screen. Also while I never really play these games for the story I will say that the plot here is about as painfully generic as one of these games could get and there isn't a single character that has even a basic sense of fun personality or flair which just makes the whole experience an even more painful time.

It's really unfortunate that a game I loved so much in my childhood ended up turning out like this, but I guess it happens sometimes. I'll probably end up playing the 2nd game in this series later because I know that they did revamp the battle system slightly to make is a more well wounded experience that could allow for additional layers of complexity, but this honestly was one of the most painfully insipid gaming experiences I've had in quite a while and not even the appeal of the world of Pokemon could save this at all from being impossible to justify doing anything but the absolute bare minimum to experience this. On the plus side, at least it's mercifully short...

I think the spritework and animations in this game are very well-done, but the core gameplay loop's simplicity doesn't justify the length of this game. I didn't get far into it before it became really obvious that they didn't have many ideas of how to progress the plotline.

I dunno. I do think that the sheer existence of this spinoff's premise adds a lot to the Pokemon universe, and that that's great- but as a whole, it just feels kinda half-baked.

Also fuck whoever thought to make the unskippable tutorial sequences span that much of the game. I figured everything out before I was told about any of it, why do minutes of my time need to be wasted explaining every minute detail? I get they make these for kids, but no kid is THAT dense, sheesh.

The best game i hope i never play again. One of my favorite games from my childhood, i would go through it again and again, probably at least a dozen times throughout the years. However, now grown up with large adult meat hands, twiddling a stick around a 3 inch screen sounds miserable. Regardless, the game itself is such a unqiue and fun look at the pokemon universe, temporarily recruiting pokemon to help solve puzzles and catch other pokemon. Evil teams arent exactly a new idea in pokemon, but the Go Rock Squad stands among some of the most amusing, and many of their lines stick in my head to this day.

This game is fucking sick if you've ever wanted to draw circles and grind your touch screen to dust. Been many years since I played this but the plot was basically some people start shredding guitar and you have to hire wild Pokemon to cut down trees so you can stop them from doing that. I can't stress enough that the gameplay entirely consists of drawing circles. This game was fine when I was very young but nowadays I can't say much good about it. I guess the pixel art is nice. Play Mystery Dungeon or Conquest if you want a Pokemon spinoff that doesn't suck ass.