Pokémon Dash! Review

Pokémon has been a very popular franchise for some time now. We’ve seen Pokémon games for all Nintendo systems since it has been released and nearly all of them sold in the millions of copies worldwide. It is Pokémon that boosted the GameBoy’s sales worldwide and so it was just normal for Nintendo to bring the series to GameBoy Advance, and now to Nintendo DS.

This game, though, is not an RPG. Instead, we get a racing game featuring everyone’s favorite yellow electric mouse, Pikachu! This isn’t the first time Nintendo has released a non-RPG Pokémon game, as they have released Pokémon Snap on the Nintendo64, a game in which you had to take pictures of all of your favorite Pokémon. While it may sound dumb at first, the concept was well executed and the game was surprisingly enjoyable. Unfortunately, Pokémon Dash! isn’t as enjoyable.

First of all, this game was available at the Japanese launch of the system and it shows that the game was rushed, or at least I hope it was considering how boring it is. The presentation of the game is poor with a 3D model of Pikachu on the main title screen that you can play with, just like you could with Mario’s face in Mario 64 DS. Then, you get a very simple menu where you pick what races you want to do. Everything looks dated and you get the feeling Nintendo could have done much better than this. I know it’s just a menu but we are used to more polished menus, so they could have worked on the presentation a little bit more. Just take a look at Feel The Magic’s menus, for example. They are all animated and colorful and it makes you want to play the game. Given how much content the developers had to work with here I’m surprised they couldn’t do any better.

The gameplay isn’t any better either! You and 5 other Pokémon race around a big map, going from checkpoint to checkpoint until you reach the last one. You move Pikachu around by rubbing the screen in the direction you want to go, and the faster you rub, the faster you’ll go. Of course, you won’t just run around as you’ll need to fly to go from island to island to reach some checkpoints. You can find balloon pads on the map and when you get to those, little icons will appear on the sides of the screen. When you rub those icons up, Pikachu will elevate itself in the skies and you can move him around wherever you want and when you want to jump off to do a little bit of skydiving, you rub the icons down. Pikachu will be coming down slowly as he has 3 balloons attached to his back, but you can hit those with the stylus and they’ll pop, making him fall to the ground very fast if you’ve pop all 3 simultaneously.

Since there are various terrains in the game, there are various special abilities that you can acquire to make you go faster. For example, if you pick the fire skill, you’ll be able to walk over lava to reach some checkpoints. Another one will make you go through forests faster while another one makes you walk over water. That means that you’ll need to use a little bit of strategy in the game in order to win, but the game isn’t all that difficult.