If the card game itself was fleshed out a bit more this would be a more enjoyable experience.
First off they don't introduce you to the game well, they do tell you the basics of the card game itself, but they don't really tell you how to make another deck and basically you are on your own when it come's to that, and you are going to need to modify your deck or make a new deck altogether because that's the best way to beat the gym leaders themselves, and that brings me to my next major flaws in this game, I made a deck for each gym and made each one to match the weakness of each gym, but for some reason I would either get a ton of energy's or a ton of evolution cards, and I would never get any bench cards and the gym leader would beat me because of it, and other times I would get just bench cards and no energy's and I know I evened most of the cards out so either your character is freaking retarded and doesn't know how to shuffle properly or the AI in this game is off. Another thing that just pissed the crap out of me on this one is the way resistance is put into this game, the whole game basically follows that of the Pokemon series most weakness are the same as the Blue and Red series however that's not all true because while water Pokemon are weak against grass, in the regular Pokemon rules they are not in the card game instead only the fighting type Pokemon on this one are while the water types are not. Are you serious! why can't there be two weaknesses. Then this comes too my next flaw of the game many people complain that the first generation of Pokemon are cheap due to the fact that psychic types only have one weakness and are way over stated, well they tried to fix that in this game but made an even bigger mess off it, ghost Pokemon are now considered to be psychic Pokemon in this game and you guessed it only weak against other psychic Pokemon what a mess! and you want to hear the worst part about it, is that normal Pokemon are resistant to them are you serious! in the regular game it was the other way around. This just doesn't make sense you are telling me that the rock Pokemon in this game aren't resistance to electricity yet the normal type are resistant to psychic are you kidding me! what a joke!
The battles in this game can be so sporadic in this game there either too easy because the trainer only gets one Pokemon too battle with or you get the other side of the coin where you get absolutely nothing and he gets all he needs and you lose right off the bat and that's another flaw because it makes the game mostly luck based. Another thing that just really gets to me about this game is the Energy Removal cards sure some can be useful but the trainers use them when they don't really need to use them like when I have a weak Pokemon that only does ten damage with one energy card and they have some big strong Pokemon with lots of health, they just take it away there is no strategy to this because in a couple of turns they would just knock this Pokemon out anyways so basically there doing it just to be a jerk about it, like ha ha take that you dumb $h!t ha ha. There's also parts of the game where when its your opponents turn as they are using certain cards for their strategy it will say that they are thinking and that's fine and understandable but there were certain other opponents that would think for literally ten seconds every turn to end the turn without even doing anything which makes for another AI quirk.
Overall I don't hate this game even though I mostly named all of it's flaws through the whole review without naming anything good, but I will name some good things, the music is really good, and while I do think the card game is kind of broken I still do have some fun when I play through them,and it's just got this charm that makes me like it maybe it's just because I really liked this game as a kid. if you like the original Pokemon games you might not have the same satisfaction as you would with this game but it is a game worth picking up if you want to play it just for fun.