This unique puzzle title has its shortcomings, but it's sure to please puzzle geeks and Pokemon fans alike.
One such game was Pokemon Puzzle League, a challenging puzzle game which was designed skinned for fanservice for fans of the anime, but under that childish exterior was an intense strategy-based puzzle game opening its arms to players. The game plays much like Bejeweled and somewhat like Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. You have to arrange the colored blocks and get three together to get rid of them. Like Bejeweled. But like Dr. R's, you have to do this in combos or in links bigger than 3 so you can throw blocks into your opponent's dungeon and make theirs fill up to the top to "defeat" them. This basic gameplay element is just the cover of a huge arrangement of possibilities with strategies you can come up with on a whim.
To add the pressure, the blocks rise up gradually from the bottom, allowing you to make those combos you need when there's more blocks, but also giving you that feeling of necessity to pull off something so the blocks don't rise too far, to the top. Finding this balance between what's too low and what's too high is part of the magic of the gameplay, and can even cause a break of sweat, something Pokemon games aren't known for. This type of gameplay shows where puzzles can shine if more elements are combined and flow like they do in this game.
There's a touch of story in this game, and while it works, it's not really needed, but it does keep with the pace of the game and so it's not too much of a turn-off. You play as Ash Ketchum, with his Pokemon being Pikachu, Squirtle, and Bulbasaur. So for those of you who hate all of Ash's adventures after the "good old days", don't fret, this game was release before those days were over. You have to go through the Indigo League and challenge the various gym leaders, and each difficulty level opens more of the full game to be played. It's not until Super Hard, the final difficulty, in which you actually get to fight Mewtwo, the final level of the game. And as expected each level is harder and harder, providing more of a challenge and putting your puzzle skills to the test. In fact the latest levels of the harder difficulties and much of the entirety of the Super Hard difficulty can push you to muster everything in you arsenal that you can think up to win.
But the gameplay does have a few small stumbles. Firstly, the main attraction is obviously main "story" which I described. There's also a few other modes, including a puzzle-creation mode, where you can make a puzzle to solve (and even make unsolveable puzzles if you really wanted), and marathon mode where you just keep putting together blocks until you can't do it, as well as a clear point mode where you need to just to clear blocks to a certain line. All of these are worth at least one try, but none of them are worth too much going back to unless you finish the story mode and have nothing else to do and still want to get more out of this game. That, honestly, is unlikely, that you'll play too long after the main story, but those modes are easily a do-able option if you're tired of story mode.
Music in this game is something I can't really give much praise for. There's lyric-less remixes of the popular songs from the anime here, tuned differently for different levels, and they're given a feel to match the one you're facing in the story, or the mode you're doing. This music isn't really awe-inspiring, but the cutesy tunes do help the flow of the game continue smoothly and at the very least it's there to listen to while trying to drown out the annoying voice work. Speaking of which, the worst part of the game, is the voice work. It's chopped up, and you here random phrases that are tiresome after the first few levels. If they don't force you to put the controller down and turn the system off, they'll be the biggest pothole you run over on an otherwise smooth road this game is. It's not even the fact it's 4Kids doing the voice work, even, it's mostly how often the same phrases are grunted out by the same 10 characters over and over and the Pokemon making the same yells over and over that just gets old very fast. But aside from the voice work there's not too much to complain about sound-wise.
Graphics are akin to the anime. The backdrops used are pretty nice and colorful but don't warrant much notice, they're just kinda there. And while all the character and Pokemon art looks decent and passable, the block quality sadly is poor. Even though it's an N64 game, the blocks have graphical quality just on par with the SNES, which is really sad considering this game's on a 3D-capable system, the blocks which were the only animated part of the gameplay ought to have been touched up on. These graphics are really far from the N64's full power and if you had the capability to you could probably run 10 copies of this game all at once without much of a problem.
Overall, Pokemon Puzzle League shines with its gameplay, with a lot of strategy on harder difficulties able to push you like few other puzzles of the era. Graphics are passable for a puzzle game but are well below par for an N64 game. Music is decent and moves the game along well enough but voicework absolutely destroys the game in the story mode at times.
Gameplay: 10/10
Graphics: 5/10
Sound: 6/10
Story: 5/10
Replay Value: 7.5/10
Overall: 7.8