It's not even nostalgia kicking in here, they had a really good idea for a game and ran with it. It's a game purposefully designed for a touchscreen, and it's a lot of fun. While the gameplay is just drawing circles at most, they actually give you a wide range of fun mechanics to help you out during that game. It's definitely not fleshed out as much as it could be, but they were def in their experimental bag w this one. The fact that pokemon can just help you draw circles better is cool and makes you want to collect more mons.

They need to make this a mobile game. If someone from nintendo reads this, you need to make a mobile gacha game based around the pokemon ranger core mechanic. You will make millions. I'll send a check when I see the game announcement.

was gonna play the sequel when apple finally let emulators onto the app store, but i decided to try the first one instead.

- the core concept is solid, but the fun just isn’t there
- partner assists that would spawn under the line (grass for example) felt useless
- tedious boss fights. charizard in particular made me put the game down
- story and characters are paper thin

there is something to this though. hoping my nostalgia for the sequel isn’t misplaced!

I really enjoy this game and would play more if I wasn't concerned about destroying my phone screen and stylus.

It's repetitive but I find the core mechanic so engaging that it really doesn't matter and it does a good job of scattering secrets across the map which makes it thrilling to stumble on a random Venusaur in a cave.

Good game, keen to play the sequels sometime

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.

NOTA: 7,5

CONSOLA: Nintendo DSi

SPANISH / No me esperaba que fuera a ser tan divertido. Había momentos en que me cagaba en todo, sobre todo con el Steelix.
Aún así, me lo pasé bien y para los siguientes que voy :)

ENGLISH / I wasn't expecting it to be so fun. There were moments where I was getting furious, especially with Steelix.
Other than that, I still had a great time and I´ll eventually get to the other two games :)

quite a fun spin-off of the main Pokémon series. The sprites look amazing, even better than the mainline games, but it suffers from "first in the series" syndrome, there are some incredibly hard catches (Salamance drove me insane) due to not yet having implemented the "fill up bar" mechanic that is found in later installments. The story is passable (though it made me giggle a little with some of the writing, which is rare from pokemon games) and even though the game boils down to just spinning circles in your DS screen, it still finds cool ways to innovate on that single mechanic with the various assists.
Overall, I had quite a lot of with the game, my main issues are the repetitiveness that surges after a while due to the game being still very simple , the plot not being as explored as it could've been and the mechanics not aging the best.
Still , if anyone is interested, I really recommned trying these spin offs! Maybe don't start with this one, but if you do, have patience and go with the mindset that some parts will feel pretty outdated.

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.