Colosseum is the “idea guy” Pokémon game; it’s made up of a ton of really cool concepts that tragically are just not executed well at all. On paper, this should be everything I’ve ever wanted out of Pokémon: trainers employing creative tactics, a focus on double battles, a real sense of investment in the Pokémon you choose to raise, and a darker tone with some creative worldbuilding, but it’s all just so slapdash and half-assed in its execution that the whole thing just comes crashing down under its own weight.
If you’re going to gesture at a more serious tone and deeper thematic weight, I think you have something of an obligation to at least try to follow through and explore your themes. Colosseum paints a picture of a borderline dystopian Pokémon region, so desolate and polluted that wild Pokémon have stopped appearing altogether. There’s tons of potential for exploring a real environmentalist message here, but instead the game chooses to focus on Cipher and Team Snagem (which really did not need to be two separate entities, let’s be real) and the whole Shadow Pokémon shtick. It isn’t incompatible with the ideas put forth by the setting, there’s vague parallels in the whole man v. nature aspect, but it doesn’t actually tie meaningfully to the interesting parts of the worldbuilding, and it’s mostly used to tell the same basic story about treating animals with empathy that the first two generations told in fewer words and that Black and White would go on to tell better and with more thematic poignancy.
Entwined with this is an effort to make a somewhat morally grey protagonist: Wes is a former member of Team Snagem and is implied to have done some pretty shady stuff in the past. Only problem is, he’s still a silent protagonist for some fucking reason. There’s a scene towards the start where a character is briefly shocked at the revelation of his former loyalties and then immediately ascribes valiant motivations to him which he is unable to confirm, deny, or elaborate on in any capacity, and then the issue is never brought up again. It’s incredibly jarring and immediately sets the expectation that character motivations aren’t worth getting invested in because they won’t be explored on any level, an expectation that proves accurate throughout the rest of the game.
Colosseum’s gameplay doesn’t fare much better. The double battle focus is an amazing idea on paper; I love the breadth of tactics that it enables and I love that the opponents’ usage of doubles-specific tactics makes support moves actually worth using in a singleplayer Pokémon game, but realistically it just doesn’t come up much except in a couple genuinely pretty cool fights. Moreover, the actual battles themselves are agonizingly slow. The animations make the ones in Xenogears seem restrained in comparison and it’s not uncommon to go more than a minute without actually getting to do any meaningful input.
Having to catch Pokémon during trainer battles is also interesting in theory, but in practice, the fact that the shadows always come out last just makes accidentally critting and killing one, or getting RNG-fucked and having it kill itself with Shadow Rush, massively more frustrating than it needed to be. The decision to either redo the entire abominably slow battle or give up on catching the Pokémon in question until postgame isn’t one that ever feels good to make, and it’s unavoidable often enough to be a very serious frustration with the game as a whole.
This would all be a bit more forgivable if there were meaningful things to do outside of battle, like how the contemporaneous mainline games have some light exploration and puzzle elements, but Colosseum is basically just a huge ass gauntlet of interminable trainer fights. Money is tight enough that it’s worth avoiding using healing items unnecessarily, but walking back to heal after every battle is an absolute slog because the healing and save stations are exceedingly sparse. This would make sense in a game where there’s a degree of risk to backtracking, but there are no random encounters here and very rarely are you forced to rebattle trainers you’ve already defeated after leaving and coming back. As a result, the backtracking just feels like an enormous waste of time, and the multiple hours you end up spending in the same dungeons start to really take their toll by the midgame. The lack of visual variety within each dungeon doesn’t help, either; even just a little bit more diverse set dressing would have been greatly appreciated.
God help you if you want to purify all of the Shadow Pokémon and catch Ho-oh, by the way. The purification process is fine for just playing through the story, and I didn’t have any issues purifying the ones I was interested in using, but because the process is so drawn-out and convoluted, trying to purify all of them is a colossal pain in the ass and is easily one of the grindiest and most tedious tasks in the entire franchise, which, considering what franchise we’re talking about here, is saying something.
Credit where it’s due, I really like how limited the Pokémon selection is here. I’ve always been a fan of how the Kanto and Unova games limit you to less than ~100 options (accounting for multi-stage evolutions) and this game is even more restrictive. Limitation breeds creativity, and I ended up using a few Pokémon that I’d never even think about touching in a traditional mainline game with a wider selection. It’s just a shame the rest of the game is such a middling experience at best.
I still want to play the game that Colosseum could have been. The sequel, XD: Gale of Darkness, which I spent much more time with growing up, is better in nearly every way, but it’s also less ambitious. It gives up some of Colosseum’s lofty goals to achieve something more in line with the mainline games, and while the end product is a lot better, I still think there’s a great game hiding somewhere within Colosseum. It’s buried under a cavalcade of poor decisions and failed execution, but damn does it sound amazing.
