You may -and it’s an outside chance, certainly- be familiar with the success-ravening behemoth that is Pokémon. Should you cautiously thrust your head out from the confines of your urine-smelling hermit-cave, you’ll discover that these guys have permeated popular culture to an extent rivaled only by Harry Potter, Justin Bieber and other irritating little celebrity ballaches.
The deft mix of accessibility and deceptive combat depth has encouraged all ages to indulge in the sport of kings (to wit: coercing lumpen mutated wildlife to pummel the groins of other lumpen mutated wildlife), and it is also this very quality that has earned this specific entry in the series the not-even-remotely-coveted Game of the Week award.
Pokémon Pearl was released for the DS in 2007. As is the wont of the series, it was joined by a negligible-differences-so-as-to-promote-trading (and extra cashtacular for Nintendo, of course. They’ve got to pay the bribe Satan demands to allow them to shove all their unsold Virtual Boys into that Underworld landfill somehow, after all) companion piece, Pokémon Diamond. Neither of which troubled to lend any befuddling Da Vinci Code-esque plot twists to the familiar poké-premise, of course.
Our protagonist’s sprite has changed a little, the names and the geography of the towns are new, but otherwise paradigms remain distinctly un-shifted here. Fans have long grown accustomed to the interchangable ‘bad guy teams’ (which come in Rocket, Magma, Plasma and Galactic varieties, to name but a few), town treks and pain-in-the-posterior rivals that are an integral part of every installment in this RPG franchise.
But let’s not mock Pokémon’s steadfast aversion to change, like the mocking mocksters of mock that we are. Pearl did lend a few substantial additions to the formula, mainly to the battle mechanics. Now, attacks would be split into physical, special or status categories, on a move-by-move basis (instead of ‘all ground attacks are physical’ and so forth). It also utilised the Nintendo Wi-fi connection to enable handheld online battle-age without ludicrous cables or chunky Game Boy. Huzzah!
Most pertinently, though, Pokémon Pearl was my introduction to competitive battling. Shenanigans with EVs, IVs, pokémon natures and breeding and suchlike opens the true potential of these simplistic-looking titles, and accounts for the several hundred hours of gameplay I eked out of Pearl. The games are remarkable because they are as strategically nuanced as you wish them to be, and there’ll always be a place in my crusty heart for this edition for teaching me so.
Source of images: pokemon.wikia.com
Source:
http://www.gamingsurvival.com/2013/05/18/game-of-the-week-pokemon-pearl/