Pros: the first fully 3d pokemon, can download new Pokemon to GBA
Cons: limited on the number of Pokemon, battle is limited to cityies and trainers.
The bottom line: yeap any body who's enjoyed battling with Pikachu on the GBA has been dreaming of this, but it could have been done better.
I got the game Pokemon Coliseum last year when I saw it on sale. Since I hadn’t quite gotten through the Sapphire version of the game I decided to get it so I could fix the bug that was in the Sapphire game. If you got a fairly early version of Sapphire or Ruby and you haven’t gotten this game yet you might notice that Berry Trees don’t grow right. Connecting to this game will fix the glitch.

Is Pokemon Coliseum the game that a lot of Pokemaniacs wanted, the first 3d fully RPG Pokemon game. Or will this turn to be a nightmare and what about the people looking for the strategy and unique rules that the original Pokemon Stadium games for the N64 laid out. Well while neither of these two modes in the game are terrible it’s so easy to see that they could have been better.

Story.
Your name is Wes and you live in an Orre region, a region in the Pokemon world that looks like it’s a bit of a rip off Planet Gunsmoke from Trigun. You belong to the team rocket group of the area called Team Snaggum, but you have decided to turn over a new leaf with a considerable sized bang. You take an experimental snag machine that let’s you steal other peoples Pokemon and then blow up your teams base. A little bit later you discover there is a new organization called Cipher that is out to take over the Orre region with vicious shadow Pokemon. Luckily Wes bumps into a Misty wanabe girl called Yuki who can see the shadow Pokemon so you’re off to steal all these nasty Shadow Pokemon from team Cipher.

The plot’s pretty basic and doesn’t evolved much after the first 15 minute, besides a interesting plot devolvement hear or there it’s a pretty basic plot of stopping the bad guys in what ever evil hideout they build and stealing there Shadow Pokemon.

Graphics.
The graphics in this game aren’t that great. The outside environments are sort of bland looking. With the exception of a few areas except pretty much dusty desert environments. There are exceptions where there is a water area town and a green mountainous town but besides that there pretty much the same environments. I just wish I could have seen more then desert.

Has for battles go the first 250 pretty much keep there same sprites and animation from the first two Pokemon stadiums. There just smoother out more and are free from there rough edges seen on the N64. The newer 100 or so Pokemon introduced in the Ruby and Sapphire version are made 3d just has well has the first 250. These 3d sprites of Pokemon are what a lot of people liked about Stadium and there done fairly well and Pokemaniacs will be pleased.

They also took the time to draw in the trainers during the battle so while Wes will be taking up the screen in the background for the battles in the story mode. If you connect a game boy game in for the stadium battle modes you will see your character from the GBA game battle in the background.
The bad news is that the special effects for the attacks have been downgraded and a lot of attacks now just don’t share the same animation but the same special effect. Confusion and Psychic attack for example now look pretty much exactly the same. I was expecting better battle special effects from the N64 seeing the step up to the next generation console.

Sound.
Plenty of remixed Pokemon song tracks that we have all heard from before. If you like them then you won’t mind most of the music. Some of the new music for some of the towns are fairly catchy, I liked the theme for Phyrite town it reminded me a mid of some of the music heard in the Midgar areas of FF7.

Has for the VA, there are none which is a major blow to this game. While the main character never speaks is ok but not having Yuki speak in a voice, or any of the Pokemon voices from the TV series is a big blow. It’s awfully lazy of Nintendo not to include voices in a lot of there games.

Gameplay.
Ok the game play in both modes are good but there both bare bones. First I’ll go with the main story mode. The idea is to explore towns that have been taken over by Cipher and clear them and there stadium from the Cipher agents and there administrators. While there are plenty of puzzle solving has well has going around to talk to everybody so you do have free freedom explore these towns and look for people. You will also be able to purchase Pokeballs, potions, and other items to help you on your quest so in that respect it is like your GBA Pokemon games.

However there is a hitch you can’t battle wild Pokemon, only Pokemon trainers that you meet and want to do battle with you. You’ll always battle with two on two battles and this of course draws the fights out a lot long then they should be. Has you battle with any regular Pokemon they will gain EXP and level up and eventually evolve. There are plenty of battles and coliseums to battle through to get EXP so getting stuck with a low level Pokemon because there is no one to battle won’t be a problem. However the problem comes in the area of catching and then purifying Shadow Pokemon.

You see you can’t just grab any Pokemon that a trainer use, Yuki has to identified it has a shadow Pokemon before you can make a grab. You then have to weaken it without knocking it out, and then use a Pokeball to snag them. Once snag the Pokemon becomes yours but there is also a catch. The shadow Pokemon has a closed heart and only knows one move a weak take down move called Shadow Rush. And when Shadow Rush is done it either attacks the enemy Pokemon and then looses some health itself or it goes into hyper mode. Hyper mode is the same has swagger basically, it becomes insanely powerful but it becomes confuse. If Wes calls its name during battle and wastes a move the Pokemon will return to normal and some of its shadow bar will go down. Has the bar goes down it will regain some of its moves. But it won’t regain all of them in till Wes get’s the shadow bar completely down to zero and takes it to ancient ruin in Yuki's village. It won’t become a regular Pokemon till then, and what makes Shadow Pokemon even worse is that they don’t gain EXP like normal. Rather it’s stockpiled when they earn it; they can’t level up or evolve while there in a Shadow Pokemon form. Once there purified they gain all the EXP that they have earn fighting has shadow Pokemon and level up a whole lot.

Of course this becomes a major pain in the butt every time you capture a new Pokemon that you would like to use in your group. Because before you can use it fully you have to run it several times through coliseum battles before it becomes purified and you can actually really use it.

On top of that no wild Pokemon and just shadow Pokemon only rules make the selection of Pokmeon extremely limited to boot, if you loose a powerful Shadow Pokemon you might make the game even more difficult because you can’t just look in more brush for another Pokemon.

It’s not all bad though once you beat team Cipher main leader you can trade purified shadow Pokemon to the GBA Pokemon games.

Battle mode.
This mode is basically just like the Stadium games for the N64. You battle through various coliseums each with a level 50 or 100 level Pokemon set. You can use the Pokemon you capture in the main story mode, or you can link up a GBA version of the game and upload a team from there. You battle in either double or single battle through each stadium and when you win you get battle which can be used to purchase rare items that can be downloaded to the GBA game.

The problem with the game is that there are only level restrictions of 50 or 100. There are no special rules like only small Pokemon can battle, or unevolved Pokemon, just these two power levels are used. It makes the game extremely basic.

Next is the mt battle 100 you climb a mountain and every 10 trainers gives you an option of quitting and getting the amount of battle points you received from there, or risk defeat and continue on. If you beat all 100 trainers in this mode you get a lot of points to spend but that’s basically it.

Final Recommendation.
Pokemon Coliseum could have been a great RPG game, or a great stadium game. But Nintendo try to cut corners and combine the games. What happens is we get mediocre versions of both modes. Being extremely limited in how to catch and use Pokemon in story mode, and not having enough modes in how to battle in the main stadium mode. If you’re into the Pokemon games though there will be enough to keep you interested though, especially being able to download a lot of the Pokemon that came from the Gold and Silver versions to your GBA Pokemon game packs.