Game review: Pokemon Platinum

Pokemon Platinum, the latest release in the line of Pokemon games and the third standard Pokemon RPG game on the Nintendo DS, following the incredibly successful Diamond and Pearl games. As with past generations of Pokemon games, once the new generation duo games are released, a third expansion version is made using the same basic story and gameplay but with a handful of new features. Platinum is the “extended version” of the Diamond and Pearl adventures, just like Yellow, Crystal, and Emerald were to their respective generations…

Unfortunately, as of my writing this I haven’t yet beaten the Elite Four in Platinum (I just arrived at Sunnyshore City) so I haven’t had a chance to check out the new Battle Frontier or even the new Wi-fi mini-games. If I have time, I’ll add to this review later on. But for now I think I’ve played enough of Platinum to write a somewhat decent review anyway =)

Since I’ve already written two reviews of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, one for the Japanese version and one for the US version, I’m only gonna focus on the unique Platinum features in this review. First to note is that all the pokemon in the Sinnoh-Dex have new sprites. As a whole, I think most are improvements. Some, such as Empoleon, Purugly, Buizel, and Luxray look a lot more dynamic and animated than their previous sprites where they were just kinda “standing there.” But others just simply aren’t as good, like Starly and Duskull who are facing away from their opponents ~_^ But as a whole, I think most of the sprites look better or at least just as good as the D&P ones. But what’s really awesome is now all the pokemon back-sprites (the sprites that appear when you’re using the pokemon in battle, when the pokemon’s back is facing you) are now animated! This is really a nice new enhancement and it’s making me want to trade over all my pokemon from Diamond just to see what their new back-sprites look like ^_^ The graphics and design of many of the cities and routes have been given a “face lift” too.

A few of the notable additions to Platinum; the Sinnoh-Dex has expanded to 210 pokemon. A handful of pokemon have had their list of learned attacks tweaked, and of course, Platinum has a bunch of exclusive pokemon that cannot be obtained in D&P, most appealing are Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres. And as most of us know, Giratina, Shaymin, and Rotom can change forms in Platinum. Although I haven’t gotten to that point yet, it certainly is an interesting feature. I hope we’ll see different forms of other pokemon in future games =) A few of the gyms have been upgraded with new puzzles too.

One of the most unique features of Platinum is the Distortion World. This strange parallel world where Giratina dwells has a very creative design and was a lot of fun to figure out. With no items or pokemon (besides Giratina of course) to be had, it’s all about solving the puzzle of navigating your way through the maze to Giratina at the end. Platinum makes full use of the DS’s 3D capabilities in the Distortion World – not only can you walk on the side, you can also defy gravity and walk upside down! It was a lot of fun trying to figure my way through the Distortion World, though Giratina was a bit of a pain to capture =P Apparently you can only go back to the Distortion world one more time after this so enjoy it while you can!

Now that I’ve played through most of the main storyline of Platinum, I think that it has one of the best of any pokemon game. We went from the generic, selfish goals of Team Rocket to the more interesting and less villainous goals of Team Galactic. In fact, Team Galactic believes their goals are for a holistically good purpose rather than just for selfish reasons, which already brings in the gray areas you don’t often see in typical villains. Plus, when Cyrus was rambling on about the “vagueness of the spirit” and how its imperfection causes so much strife in the world, and when Cynthia argues against him, saying the spirit allows joy and compassion to be felt, I couldn’t believe I was playing a game aimed just at little kids. I really felt like the storyline involving Team Galactic was a lot more sophisticated than previous Pokemon generations and I couldn’t help but think that the creators had us older players in mind when they put it together.

The feature I’m most anxious about in Platinum is the Battle Frontier. Before D&P, Emerald was my favorite Pokemon game, mostly because of the Battle Frontier. Even after you complete the game or your Poke-Dex, there’s always new things to do with the Battle Frontier because you can keep bringing in different teams of pokemon with different strategies to battle in the Frontier so its never the same. I’m especially looking forward to bringing in all my migrated pokemon from Sapphire, Emerald, and other previous games and seeing how they’ll do in the Platinum Battle Frontier XD

Well, that’s about all I have to say about Platinum for now. To sum things up, it’s almost the same as D&P except with a bunch of new features and some slight changes in the storyline and pokemon. If you enjoyed D&P and want to play an enhanced version of that adventure, or if you’re just a big-time fan like me who has to play all the new Pokemon games with new features, then I can definitely recommend Platinum =) I might not be able to, but if I can I’ll update this post if I have anything more to say once I get further in the game. Also, I only mentioned a few of the changes and additions in Platinum on this post. For a complete list, as well as tons of other info, check out the Platinum page on the ever famous Pokemon site, Serebii.net.

Note: please do not use comments on this post as a Q&A forum. This happened a lot with my D&P reviews so if you’re going to leave a comment, please only discuss things related to this post or other general Platinum stuff – don’t ask questions about how to get through certain parts of the game or if anyone wants to battle/trade with you. If you leave a comment like this, it will probably be deleted. There are plenty of Pokemon forums out there for those kinds of things!

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  1. AerenCarter says:

    I dont normally comment on blogs, but your post, Game review: Pokemon Platinum | 毎日アニメ夢 , was well written and made me want to read more of your work. Well done and keep it up.

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