Yet another game in the highly popular Pokemon series.

The gameplay is, sorry to say, not much different then the past games in the series. But is that a bad thing? Not necessarily. It might be for hard-core Pokemon fans but for normal-- I mean, other people (No offense to hard-core fans) it's a good game, and hard-core players should be pleased too as long as they're not expecting tons of new features. But for people who have never never played one before I'll explain.


my mom lives there

It's a role-playing game about, of course, Pokemon. You face off against these "team magma" "team galactic" or whoever, depending on what game you get, and they go trying to steal everyone's pokemon or rule the world or whatever; EEEEEEEEVIL stuff.
You're trying to stop them, as well as earning badges in Gym battles against different Gym leaders who have different kinds of Pokemon. Some pokemanz (forgive me) are weaker to others; like Fire > Ice, Water > Fire, Water > Stone and so forth. As you go on, you'll learn new attacks for your pokemon and they'll get higher in level (maximum lvl 100) and end up going against the Pokemon League.

Even when you finish that there's still so much to do. There's alot of areas, alot of rare pokemon (and pokemon that are only in a certain version of the game) side-quests, and items.
The game took a handheld turn and is now 3D, but nothing like what you see on the Gamecube. The scenery is in 3D now and character movement is animated. The game overall looks great. The sound is decent, but if you've played the GBA Pokemon games you'll recognize alot of noises that haven't been edited at all for the new game and they sound just like they do on the GBA, which for the DS is a little odd. That part seems a little rushed; is it that hard to get some guy to go ERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR or whatever in front of a microphone? It's no big deal though.


A new item to fill in the usually useless bottom-screen.

The game actually doesn't have much touch-screen support, surprisingly. I'm sure most people expected the controls to be like Animal Crossing: Wild World but it's not; it's controlled with the D-pad and other buttons. There are some things you can do with the touch screen, but it's really kind of pointless; it's just menus, and once you're done in the menu you'll just be putting the stylus back to use the D-pad, then in the next battle you're reaching for the stylus again and you'll get a bit tired of doing that.

The game is, relative to the other games, kinda easy. Unless you're rushing through the game you'll probably have Pokemon about 10 levels above what your next Gym leader's Pokemon has. There are some challenges though, like you going through the Team Galactic HQ; you'll continuously lose alot of health, try to find some potions and saving constantly and moving on to the next battle, only to have like 5 more coming up. You'll still get probably 24+ hours into the game if you're just playing the campaign, even more if you're trying to complete everything which will take a long long time. Every game in the series seems to be very addicting; I remember playing Ruby/Sapphire with friends over 1-2 years after I got the game. I still do on occasion and have over 80 hours on my file. That's why handheld Pokemon games are pretty must-have in my book.

Don't be discouraged by the difficulty though, there are many challenges in the game; eventually you'll be trying to catch legendary pokemon and you'll probably think it's impossible until you catch it. A thing Nintendo seems to have mastered is the difficulty actually; the Pokemon series isn't too hard and not too easy.
There's WiFi features for this game, and it's pretty cool. I had fun getting pwned by a few people here; there's also voice chat when you're playing online. You can't turn that off unfortunately - sometimes I'd rather not talk to people (microphones make me sound nerdy, not that I'm not a nerd). But it's alright, it is pretty fun when people aren't busting into your room asking you who you're talking to and the person way across the country giggles like nuts because he/she hears it. But you can also trade Pokemon over Wifi which is a neat feature. It's everything you'd be able to do while sitting around playing this with friends in your living room, minus the beer. O KRUD MA PARENTS ARE HOME

Unfortunately you can only play WiFi with friends. You do need a friend code. It's a bit stupid for Nintendo to keep doing that; sure it keeps 40 year old cussalots away from small children but if they're gonna make it a online game there should be a option to turn chatting off. I don't know any other WiFi games for the DS who have chat (besides for friends), why can't they just copy that? XD
There's also a number of new Pokemon in the game and some new items, but I won't spoil that.

Alot of people think the Pokemon series is kiddy, but that's not true. It is kid friendly, but what Nintendo game isn't? They do a good job of keeping it friendly but not too friendly that it pushes older players away from buying it.

Overall I can't resist giving it a 9. It's too addicting and well-done to go lower then that, but there could have been some improvements.