Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Fans of this channel are no doubt familiar with my award-winning coverage of Pokemon
Rumble, Nintendo’s weird clockwork brawler thing that hit the WiiWare service a couple
years ago to little to no fanfare. Alright, by “Award-winning” I mean “Eric awarded
me a hamburger after I gave him money and he was going to get burgers anyway.” But
it felt good at the time. Pokemon Rumble was all about low-res, kinda blocky representations
of Pokemon doing what they do best: beating each other up, with more simplistic, action-based
mechanics. It didn’t exactly set the world on fire. But perhaps it wasn’t the fault
of the interpretation. Let’s give it another try.
Pokemon Rumble was, despite its rather novel design, alarmingly linear and shallow. You
start with a Rattata, you collect other Pokemon as you rumble throughout six stages, each
one you find seems a little stronger than the last one, and then you do a Battle Royale
and you win. That’s pretty much all there was. Blast takes that as its baseline, but
proceeds to build a much different experience with the tools given: Now instead of an enclosed
plaza, you have a world to roam, NPCs to interact with, and a quest to complete: Retrieve the
health-restoring Glowdrops from the shady characters what absconded with them. It’s
this new framing device that gives the game a bit more appeal, since it’s no longer
about playing with Pokemon in a new format, but completing a new form of adventure with
strange mechanics.
The combat itself feels like Pokemon as seen through a fun-house mirror. How it looks depends
on where you’re standing. If you think the standard Pokemon gameplay boils down to “take
turns, hit your opponent,” you’re going to think Rumble Blast is a step forward by
allowing you to move about the field of battle, alternate between short- and long-range attacks,
and all sorts of other improvements. It’s a very active and fast-paced experience. On
the other hand, if you know that it takes 136 speed EVs to allow Ninetails to outspeed
Toxicroak, you’re likely going to find issues all over this version. While type hierarchy
plays a significant role, and is crucial to dominating late-game play, certain aspects
have been changed in the interest of fairness, even if you swear up and down that your Spearow
shouldn’t get hit by Earthquake. I know it’s not supposed to happen like that. But
it does. Each Pokemon you collect has room for two techniques, which can be changed by
interacting with the distressingly-random gumball-machine like structures in each town.
Aside from the lack of invulnerabilities (again, for the sake of fairness), the game recognizes
concepts such as Same Type Attack Bonus (or STAB), and includes all the attacks of the
original game, in one form or another. Rumble Blast has its own set of abilities, though,
which interact better with its own brand of combat. These aren’t intrinsic to any particular
Pokemon, but can be found randomly on befriended units starting in chapter three.
I can appreciate building from the rather lackluster Wii version, but Rumble Blast seems
to have engaged in some outright theft in this case. The music is lifted directly from
the original, though the much-longer quest proceeds to supplant it with its own respectable
- if samey - soundtrack. The vast majority of the sound effects are the cries of the
Pokemon themselves, all 646 that Nintendo have recognized, so no Keldeo, Meloetta, or
Genesect for you. Yes, you can actually collect ‘em all, as opposed to Rumble which only
featured the first and fourth generations of Pokemon. So. More plot, more Pokemon, more
reason to actually play. Just don’t get a key-winding cramp.