While the gameplay can be monotonous and irritating at times, the story, characters, and unique premise of this game left a mark on me as a child. Seeing a different side to the Pokemon world, and adapting that to be a puzzle adventure game was a creative and unique idea. It is just a shame that getting the creatures to help you requires endlessly circling the monster on the DS touchscreen. If there was some more variation to how you can obtain Pokemon, or if the Pokemon could stay as permanent friends you can call upon, this could easily be one of the best spinoffs in the whole franchise. I would recommend this game to any puzzle adventure enthusiasts.

It's a Pokémon game which means if you let it, it will waste your time. I cannot recommend playing this without an emulator even if you have a DS. The fast forward feature and save states will be your best friend. This game isn't difficult but it's extremely tedious. Text will take forever to scroll through, and Pokémon will have long attack animations. I cannot believe the patience I had as a kid to sit through some of this, it's egregious.

The flip side is that the hand eye coordination neurons in my brain activate from drawing circles around moving things. It is so simple yet extremely engaging. The tension that builds as you get close to drawing the final circle is palpable, but this can lead to exasperation. There were plenty of times where I swear I had it only to lose the capture. The Pokémon abilities you can use to augment your captures are varied in effectiveness but add a level of strategy to the game that otherwise would grow stale.

I'm mixed on this game.
It presents a good concept that can utilize the DS touchscreen very well. It also presents a unique setting that can be used for telling some unique story.
It is often fun and engaging.
However it suffers from some incredibly poor pacing at times. The overworld and level structure offers a ton of promise that is never delivered on properly. Mechanics for traversal and planning your team properly to balance traversal and capture abilities are rarely utilized.
There are some moments of incredibly poor ideas, like an escort mission where your little npc getting dived by an insect in a narrow corridor forces you to start over.
And the difficulty spikes in this game are intense, rarely have I seen such drastic and mandatory spikes.
Also awesome how the game has a quicksave function for saving anywhere, but it's that silly power down the system immediately quicksave. Why not just let us save anywhere then?

Idk, this game was really fun at times and has potential it fails to really utilize well.

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.

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.