Top 5 overrated video games of all time – Part 3

By: Jason McCarthy

  |   September 12th, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

3. Pokémon

I know adding the immensely popular role-playing franchise will get me cussed by a lot of gamers who have had spent countless hours on their Game Boy collecting pokémons , training them and then using them to fight other trainers.

The concept behind the game is very nice and I admit it is tailor-made to become addictive. The very desire to collect as many pokémons as possible and the satisfaction attained with the addition of each new fighter to your arsenal is a strong enough drive for a player to ignore other activities and spend hours playing this game.

Saying that Pokémon is not a good game would be really unfair, since the first title in the franchise came out in the 90s and majority of the games during the time were rather simple and relied heavily on their addictiveness instead of graphics and story. No, I have not forgotten about the Super Nintendo RPGs. This is why I used the word “majority” instead of “all.”

You must be wondering why I have Pokémon in the overrated list and that too at the No.3 spot when all I’m doing is praising it.

Like all other games in the list, the popular Nintendo RPG is not a bad game. However, it hardly comes off as the best in the business.

Being a core gamer who has spent more than half his life tasting the different flavours of gaming that the world had to offer, I must say that Pokémon failed to strike me as a game that can be regarded as great.

While the Game Boy version can be excused, the more recent versions of the game for Nintendo just did not have the sort of graphics that one expects considering the advancement in technology. Even the graphics of mobile games is better than the one offered in this game.

It seems that the developer is completely focused on the gameplay and therefore ignoring the other elements of the game.

The gameplay itself is good, maybe great, but it is not something that comes off as unique and fresh anymore. The same formula is being used over and over again with the excuse that it is what the fans want. It is the responsibility of the developer to innovate and introduce fresh experience into the market instead of throwing the same old ideas with the excuse that it is selling well.

Pokémon needs plenty of improvements. A better storyline is needed, graphic enhancements are a must, the very characters around which the whole game revolves need to be given more depth instead of being presented as mere fighting machines.

All the positive reviews and the popularity of the game only bring one word to my mind, overrated.

Disclaimer: the views and opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the editorial policy of Wishfree.com.