Level Up: Pokemon Trading Card Game

Well another August is here and it’s time for a theme month. This year’s theme is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but it’s also inspired by one of CR’s shows on That Guy with the Glasses called Cheap Damage, where he looks at various table top, card and other kinds of games. Though I’m not expert in that field, I do remember playing some of the collectable games that were giant fads while growing up. And, what do you know; most of them were turned into video games! So this year I’m kicking off Cheap Dam-month with Pokemon Trading Card Game for the Game Boy Color.

The Pokemon Card Game is played with decks of 60 cards of 3 types: Pokemon, Trainer and Energy. The trainer cards allow you to do things that you can’t normally do on your turn. These include dealing more damage with your attack, drawing extra cards or healing your Pokemon, for example. You may use one per turn. The Pokemon are what you fight with. You need one Pokemon as your active and you can have up to 5 others on the bench to either be switched out or come in once the active Pokemon has been KO’d. The energy cards are used for the attacks: most attacks require you to “attach” a certain number of energy cards of a certain type (displayed next to the attack name) to a Pokemon. The white star is “normal” and any energy card can be used for it, while the others need an energy card of that matching symbol. Once your active Pokemon has enough energy on it, you can choose to attack once at the end of your turn. The opponent’s active Pokemon takes the damage indicated next to the attack, but a lot of attacks have additional effects, so be aware of its conditions. Once a Pokemon has more damage than HP, it is knocked out and it and all cards attached to it get discarded. The opponent who knocked out the Pokemon may take one of the “prize cards” set aside at the start of the match. A game is normally won when a player draws all of his prizes, but you can also win when your opponent has no more Pokemon on the field or when they cannot draw a card from their deck.

Of course, one of the biggest things about Pokemon is the fact that they evolve, and that has been implemented in the card game. You may only play down “basic Pokemon” (the first stage of any evolutionary line) in an empty slot. Once a turn, if you’re holding the evolved form of a Pokemon you have in your field, you may place it on top of that Pokemon. The evolved Pokemon keeps everything attached to the previous form, but is cured of attack effects and can no longer use the attacks of its last form. And though not every Pokemon has them, you should check your Pokemon’s weakness and resistance (which effects how much damage it may take), retreat cost (the amount of energy cards you much discard to switch your active Pokemon) and Pokemon power (which are free to use abilities).

Now, with all that said, the best thing about the Pokemon Trading Card Game video game is that everything I just said would also apply to the actual card game. So, if you’ve play it before, transitioning to this version should not be a problem (keeping in mind there have been many additions to the card game since this was published). It’s great how they were able to authentically recreate the experience.

Pokemon Tading Card Game is interesting when you think about it; it’s a video game version of a card game based off a video game. That being said, it’s a great recreation of a great card game that used inspiration from the video game really well, but knew when to take liberties. The basics are simple, and as you’ll play, you’ll learn how to balance a proper deck, what the better attacks are and how to adjust for your strategy. The problem is if you’re already familiar with the game, you might not get all that much game play out of it: I built 2 decks as quickly as I could and wiped the floor with everyone until the elite 4, and even then I just slightly edited one deck to win. The link cable feature could have offered good competitive play at the time, but if you had all the stuff for it, you probably had the actual cards. The best use of the game today is for anyone who wants to play the card game, but can’t find anyone around to play with or finds card collecting to be too expensive. The over world graphics look comparable to the first gen games and the recreation of the cards are almost flawless. The music is only alright though. Basically it’s a game that didn’t aim to do anything complicated and succeed beyond expectation. I give Pokemon Trading Card Game for the Game Boy Color 9 levels out of 10.