It's highly doubtful any RPG gamer will ever turn down a genuine Pokemon game, made even more so now that it is online.
STORYLINE:
Basically it's a repeat of the origanil plot with a tad bit of updating. You're a kid (boy or girl) that lives in a small little town in a world filled with little cool looking animals called Pokemon. Pokemon are basically caught and treated as pets (or slaves, depending on your point of veiw) that can be bought, traded, entered in competitions, or, of course, battled against each other. Anyway, your character, who was previously without Pokemon ends up getting one of three pokemon as a result of helping out a professor. As expected, your character wants to help out the professor document other pokemon and in the process work his way up to earning the title of pokemon master. Unfortunitally, your character also gets side tracked trying to stop a wacko cult bent of ruling the world. The story is still kinda lame as it pretty much copys the game before it. I'm sorry, but the team rocket clones wore thin after a while. However, in the end the story is trivial anyway, because no one has ever really play Pokemon because of it's plot. GAMEPLAY:
The gameplay at it's core hasn't changed too much, but as it was pretty flawless to begin with no one really minds. Basically, it's all about trading,catching, training and fighting pokemon. There are literally hundreds of the little guys out there to find, so the game's lure tends to be a little bit about collecting as well. As mentioned ealier, each game make you start small, with only one pokemon to battle with as you wander the wilds between towns. But soon you are able to by Pokeballs to capture wild Pokemon with (basically you weaken them with your Pokemon until the wild one is under a third of it's heath then you toss a ball to capture them). After that, the wild Pokemon is your to do with as you please. Each Pokemon gains experience and levels up like any RPG character, allowing you to swap out old moves for new ones as time goes on. You can adjust their stats through items, breed them, enter them in comeptions, trade them, and battle them. You can even upload Pokemon from the old games. It seems endless really. It's also very addictive, made even more so once you gather some freind codes and challenge each other online for multiplayer play. The only downside of it is the fact that you MUST go out of your way to collect freind codes in order to experiance most of the online play, which is pretty obnoxious if your dream was to battle random people on the other side of the globe. Still, if you know enough other people with the game that you can call up to play with than it's not so bad.
GRAPHICS:
The graphics have improved, but the game still looks and feels like the older versions. They added a 3D backdrop, more move animations, and Pokemon challenge poses, but it does nothing that would completely blow away anyone who was familiar with past games.
SOUND:
If the graphic seemed the same, than the sound seems like it hadn't changed at all. There are some new tunes, but most of it seems as it had been recycled for several generations.
COMMENTS:
The re is very little that could have been improved here, but there where a few things that were there. I loved the online thing, but, like I said, it doesn't exactly allow for "any anytime any place" senerio. I guess it was to provent young kids from being cussed at through their DS or witnessing questionable names that strange people will undoubtably name their Pokemon, but their are smarter ways of handling those types of problems, like simple taking away online chatting outside of collected freind codes for example. They didn't have limit entire gameplay with freind codes, just personal communication. Another thing that I thought was great was that ability to download your old pokemon! Unfortunately this was also limiting as you could only do so after to added every known pokemon in diamond and pearl to your pokedex and unlocked the "Pal Park". Even then you were only allowed to catch a certain number, I think 6, per cartrag. I think that it would have been more conveniant if the "Pal Park" was a starting feature that allowed the player to catch certian leveled wild Pokemon from the cartrage depending on gym badge and that only 6 spacific Pokemon could be downloaded from another cartrage per game. That way I wouldn't have to wait until I finished the entire game and there was nothing left to do before I got to train a Rattata again (yeah, you heard me, Pokemon fanatics, my first Pokemon that I favored all the way 99 without a single rare candy was a Rattata/Raticate.).