Hey Pokemaniacs, remember when we used to collect Pokemon cards, trade them with our friends, and participate in card battles? I sure do! In light of the Pokemon games’ massive success, companies began marketing it to hell and back, making and selling all sorts of tie-in toys, games, and cards to further make money off the franchise. In 1998, someone had the bright idea to turn the then newly born tabletop paper card game…into a video game. Yeah, so weird, right? But the game turned out to be pretty decent for what it was, and I remember playing and liking it as a kid. For a time, the game was available on the 3DS Virtual Console, which has now been shut down, but as of now, it’s available on Nintendo Switch Online as part of its GameBoy library, so you don’t need to worry about physical cartridges running out of internal battery power and losing all of your progress. But how does the game fare as a video game? Well…not that great.
For one, the story…or what little of it there is, is really thin and barebones. Basically, you play as a character (Who looks eerily like Ash in some ways) who strives to collect the fabled legendary Pokemon cards. You go around dueling various elemental gyms, collecting cards, earning medals, and occasionally dueling your rival Ronald (Who is totally not a Gary rip-off! What are you talking about?). That’s…pretty much it. Most of the gameplay consists of you challenging people to card duels and earning new cards when you win. Basically the main Pokemon games but without the actual Pokemon or fighting an evil organization. If you play your cards right (Get it?), you can beat this game in a little over two hours tops, that’s how short and barebones it is. The plot is little more than a simple fetch quest, and as a result of that, the characters, or what little you see of them, are really bland and static, never changing even a little bit, with the exception of Ronald, and even then, his character arc is really predictable and hits all the same beats as others like him have gone through. So I wouldn’t recommend playing this game for an emotionally charged story or three-dimensional characters, because you won’t find them here.
What Pokemon TCG does offer is some relatively fun, if woefully predictable gameplay. You collect cards and make your own decks. Because there’s a good variety of cards in-game, there’s no shortage of strategies you can come up with, like a badass Pokemon deck that specializes in dealing tons of damage, or a heavy defense based deck that utilizes Pokemon with high HP pools and trainer cards that can really change the outcome of a battle, like healing your whole team’s injuries or returning a Pokemon to your hand to use for later. Basically, while the game’s story and battle mechanics are nothing special, you get to decide the difficulty in how you go about defeating your foes. But the game does expect you to constantly re-battle certain NPCs if you want to earn enough cards to win against the gym leaders. There are even some cards you can’t get unless you utilize the link cable features and connect with a friend.
Furthermore, the graphics were pretty cool for GameBoy Color standards at the time. The important NPCs all have distinct designs in terms of sprites while the rest of them aren’t so (Hell, some NPCs are just recolored protagonist sprites from Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow!), but the ones you’re able to duel against all have nice, detailed in-game portraits that are eerily but charmingly reminiscent of the Pokemon anime. One thing I always found weird was that the sprites never seemed to stop walking or moving even as they were just standing around. I don’t know if that was a result of hardware limitations or lack of storage space, but to me that was just odd. Plus, the game manages to recreate the portraits of the actual Pokemon cards as best they could, even keeping the holographic sparkles when necessary, and those definitely looked great, if a little static.
So…yeah, there isn’t really much to this game. It’s not bad by any means, but it’s based on an actual card game, with very little in terms of story and characters. Thankfully, Hudson Soft, the company that developed this, seemed to realize how barebones this was and eventually made a sequel game, Pokemon TCG 2, also for the GameBoy Color, with several times more content in terms of both story, characters, and in-game cards and strategies, really improving and building on what Pokemon Trading Card Game already established. Unfortunately, because it was released near the end of the GameBoy Color’s life cycle, it was never released outside of Japan. But some dedicated fans made a fan translation of it, and I happen to own a bootleg cartridge of said game. I ought to give that a review some time as well, as I really liked it. But as it is, while it’s nothing special, Pokemon Trading Card Game for the GameBoy Color is a nice little time killer and a nice product of times gone by.
