Collection essentials #563 & #564: Pokémon Colosseum (GC) & Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness

For the first two generations of Pokémon, we got the “Pokémon Stadium” titles. These cool games let us play with our monsters in full 3D, providing a bunch of challenging content, useful tools for organizing and managing our Pokémon, and even throwing in bonus multiplayer minigames. Fans like me figured they would make a game like that on the GameCube for the third generation. For better or worse, they only “sort of” did.

We actually got…not one, but two 3D connect-to-Game-Boy GameCube Pokémon games for the third generation. The first one, Colosseum, came out in early 2004 in America. You would think from the name that it is a Stadium successor, but it’s apparent very quickly that this game is doing its own thing. It does allow you to connect your Game Boy Advance titles and has some tournaments to enter with your own Pokémon similar to those found in the Stadium titles. However, there’s much less of that sort of thing on offer here, and no longer any “rental” Pokémon to play with, and no bonus minigames.

The main focus this time is in a mode that the Stadium games completely lacked is a “story” mode, an entirely original single-player adventure. I was one of many kids back in the day who clamored for a fully-3D Pokémon adventure, so making such a game made sense. However, Colosseum is pretty different from the mainline Game Boy titles in various ways. Now, it does have the same turn-based battle system of the Game Boy games, and you can even trade Pokémon from there onto the GBA Pokémon games. But you’re not a 10-year-old kid living with his mom who’s about to embark on an adventure and catch a bunch of Pokémon in the tall grass outside of town. Instead, you play as a protagonist named Wes who’s a little older and is fighting to thwart the plans of Team Snagem as they try to steal Pokémon. Colosseum doesn’t have any “random battles” with wild Pokémon. All the game’s battles are “trainer battles” instead…but with a couple twists.

You CAN catch Pokémon in this game, but rather than finding them in the wild, you must instead rescue “shadow Pokémon” when battling their captors. As an enemy trainer sends out a shadow Pokémon, you can try to catch it like a wild Pokémon in the mainline games. The developers decided it shouldn’t be that easy, though, as in order for shadow Pokémon to become normal they must be “purified” by walking around with them and using them in battle. Before purification, they are very limited in what they can do. This can be a little tedious and is one knock a lot of people have against the game.

One positive spin this game brings, though, is that every battle in the game’s story is a “double battle”. This means two Pokémon fight at once rather than just one. The GBA titles had occasional double battles, but most are still the traditional one-on-one style. I think it was a great idea to have a spinoff game dedicated to “doubles.” It really is quite a different way to play, and tends to require more strategy than simply clicking the button of the strongest attack that hits the enemy’s weakness. 

Generation 3 of Pokémon is when the number of Pokémon was getting rather large, up to 386, so Nintendo didn’t want to cram them all into one game. So one selling point of Colosseum is that it’s the easiest way in Gen 3 to get most of the “Johto” Pokémon originally introduced in Gold and Silver. Most of the shadow Pokémon you find are of the Gen 2 variety, and there are ways to get them in GBA titles too, but it can be FAR more difficult and/or tedious to do so.

There are certainly some things to like about Colosseum, but unfortunately it is a pretty flawed game. The fact that the shadow Pokémon are fixed means that there’s not a whole lot of variety possible in repeat playthroughs, unlike the mainline Pokémon games. The story is nothing to write home about. The areas are mostly linear and uninteresting, and when facing corridors with nothing but enemy trainers you’ll be incentivized to keep tediously backtracking to heal and/or access the PC. The difficulty is rather uneven, prone to a surprise spike at times. I do like a challenge, but this can frustrate many players.

But a big sin of Colosseum, to me, is that very much has a “low-budget” feel. This was perhaps the first Pokémon game to have this issue, and is something that unfortunately still happens to this day. It seems strange that, with a franchise as incredibly successful as Pokémon, the developers of the games often seem like they just don’t have much money with which to polish and perfect their games. There are various ways this game feels “cheaper” than the Stadium titles. For one, there’s no announcer in any mode. In Stadium, the cries of the Pokémon were reimagined based on their sounds in the original Game Boy titles, with much higher sound quality, but in Colosseum, the Pokémon just lazily use each Pokémon’s Game Boy cry and it sounds awful. Animations are sometimes lazier too; for example, when flying types use the move “Fly” and are suspended in midair, sometimes the camera will cut to them in midair with their “standing” animation which looks unnatural and awkward, something that did not happen in Stadium. The Stadium games felt like they were made with love and attention to details like this, while Colosseum feels rushed and sloppily put together. Yeah, this sort of thing doesn’t affect gameplay, but part of the appeal of these 3D Pokémon titles back then in the first place was that you got to see all your favorite Pokémon in awesome 3D, but with Colosseum it doesn’t feel quite as awesome.

Pokémon XD, released in 2005, is a direct sequel to Colosseum. You play as a different protagonist who lives in the same region, and despite taking place a few years later, shadow Pokémon are once again appearing, and our protagonist goes on a quest to thwart the ones responsible. XD is similar to Colosseum in a lot of ways, but there are some changes to give it a bit more polish. For example, purifying shadow Pokémon is made much less of a pain. It is possible to catch wild Pokémon, though only a limited number in very specific circumstances. Everything is now contained in the story mode, rather than offering separate modes for those who want to connect their GBA and jump right into competitive battles. XD is pretty fun, though it suffers from being altogether too easy in my opinion.

As for my personal history, as you probably know, I was one of the kids who got swallowed up in “Pokémania” when the franchise was new. But by the third generation, my zest for Pokémon was certainly a little less than it had been. And when Colosseum released to unexciting reviews, I didn’t see it as something I really needed to play, at least not right away. I wound up picking up and playing these games in the early 2010s as GameStop was selling their GameCube stock for cheap. Playing them was an important component in my quest to complete the Pokédex in Generation 3. I certainly had fun with them, though I also wasn’t terribly upset that I had waited a long time to play them.

Colosseum and XD are interesting games to look back on. They are pretty flawed, but there are some things about them I admire. To this day they are the only official Pokémon titles with the main series’ battle system, but focusing on double battles specifically, and I think that’s really cool. I’m not sure Nintendo will ever do something like that again. As an old-school Pokémon fan, these games aren’t among my favorites, but they’re still fun and unique enough for me to consider them essentials in my collection.