Review HolyField 2/5 · Dec 13, 2022
Disheartening
Pokemon Stadium is incredibly difficult to interface with as a form of entertainment. It lopsidedly juggles three identities, a Party Game, a technical accessory, and a joyless single player gauntlet. It makes unjustifiable demands without providing authentic accomplishment.
The hotseat, team drafting multiplayer is good. For any fan, at any point in their life, this is the archetypal Pokemon multiplayer …
Pokemon Stadium is incredibly difficult to interface with as a form of entertainment. It lopsidedly juggles three identities, a Party Game, a technical accessory, and a joyless single player gauntlet. It makes unjustifiable demands without providing authentic accomplishment.
The hotseat, team drafting multiplayer is good. For any fan, at any point in their life, this is the archetypal Pokemon multiplayer experience. From memory, link cable battling in the core games was rare. Stadium instead was the common ground of Pokemon battling. The team building has an hour or two of variety, goofy teams, mad comebacks, playful jeering and victory streaks.
The charming mini games are unexceptional save that they are the apparent selling point. The 9 occupy half or more the marketing imagery for Stadium. The standouts are the Lickitung and Metapod games, which surpass carnival standards.
These two modes are whimsical and easily digested, and to everyone I know, they ARE Pokemon Stadium. Despite that, they are about 5% of the content on the cart; sufficient for socialites to reshare its 2-odd hours of content. For those misguided or lonely enough to explore further you'll find little return.
For utility, Stadium integrates with your Gameboy save files, the next step in the franchise's connectivity thesis past the link cable. There's even an incredibly lacking photography mode which uses none of the expressive animations!
What's more? Stadium is a companion tool for the lonely fan. It may reward you with some Pokemon you couldn't collect without trading, but even this disappoints. Red and Blue were intended to be social experience, but Stadium is a large, home console title. Why refuse to let players complete their Pokedex or catch Mew, the one thing the handhelds couldn't do? A grotesque echo through the franchise that you can never experience everything.
You can get Surfing Pikachu, though, the mascot of Stadium's memory. A celebrated prize that ties Stadium in to Pokemon's 'living world'.
No sane person would ever unlock Surfing Pikachu.
There are 242 Battles in Stadium's single player. That's around 20 hours of pure combat without losses, which can cost you up to 30 Minutes and are more than frequent depending on your time investment.
Stadium is impossible without a handheld game. The roster of 'rental' monsters is curated per mode, depriving you of tools your opponents have. Halfway in, you'll be brute forcing retries. Once a handheld link is involved, there is no standard for what constitutes difficulty.
Brass Tax here: I utilized emulation to design my teams. I picked my roster, my moves, and self-policed my own stats. Using impossibly good Pokemon and playing very well, the last quarter of the game is still filled with unmistakably unfair scenarios. Despite my tools, the AI's stats were still even better.
Training a team in the classic fashion, assuming complete (and unintended) knowledge of the engine, could take 250 Hours to build. Mewtwo is sometimes a valuable crutch, but most likely, you would need to continue refining, extending the time cost into the uncountable. The rationale bends around and soon the brute force rental method quickly looks far more efficient.
Stadium highlights the gap between Pokemon, the adventure series, and Pokemon, the combat simulation engine. Stadium pressurizes you until you are too good at Generation 1 gameplay, abandon your favorites, grasp at any material or external advantages, and leave its wonderful worlds and exploration behind as you grind alone battle after battle long after you turned the announcer off. Your reward is one last cup, where you can again abuse Mewtwo and carry through a dead weight Pikachu to play a Pokemon Yellow minigame.
Nintendo famously did not release Super Mario Bros 2 outside of Japan because it was 'too difficult for Western audiences'. Our Pokemon Stadium is itself an easier revision of a tool for masochism. What good is on this cart could only be reasonably given away. Playing it to the end may have ruined what fun I would ever get from playing it again with others.
