Pokémon Dash (DS)

The Pokémon series is brimming with potential for a racing game. So many of its weird and wonderful creatures are specifically designed around their speed, there being plenty of eligible creatures to use whether the race is on land, underwater, or even in the sky. The flaming horse Rapidash, the speedy cicada Ninjask, the serpentine dragon Dragonair… it would not be hard to construct a wish list of Pokémon that could appear in such a game, and when the time came to make a racer in the series in the form of Pokémon Dash… you are only able to play as series mascot Pikachu.

We’re not exactly off to the best of starts here.

If we’re willing to ignore the wasted potential though and try to meet the game on what it’s trying to achieve, Pokémon Dash is still a racing game that involves various creatures from its history up to the time of its release, they just make up your opponents rather than a playable cast. Regardless of what species they are they are all of equal speed though, meaning the bipedal fire chicken Blaziken is no faster than the chubby water mouse Marill, but considering you aren’t able to select the other Pokémon, it’s perhaps for the best that everyone is equal in speed and skill. There are no special abilities to be used in Pokémon Dash, most of the gameplay focused solely on the act of getting Pikachu to his destinations as fast as possible by swiping on the DS’s bottom screen repeatedly with the stylus. Unnecessarily gimmicky, movement is made difficult due to the constant need to sustain speed by sliding your stylus across the screen over and over, and since the human wrist is not capable of perfect robotic precision, Pikachu will sometimes encounter slight variances in movement based on the game not picking up a swipe or believing your latest swipe was at more of an angle than the previous one. There is no real benefit to this control method over a more traditional button-based input, and since it remains the control method throughout the whole experience, its issues and repetitive design will wear on the player quickly even though it doesn’t take too long to clear all the content on offer in Pokémon Dash.

There are five cups with five tracks each on offer, the player able to play them across three different difficulty settings. The lowest difficulty, Regular GP, is certainly meant to be accessible for younger players, the AI opponents not exactly skilled at navigating the course and the player able to find shortcuts and other means to get ahead of them even when they’re being somewhat competent. Their simplicity makes this mode more about learning the tracks in the first place, that knowledge being critical to success in the abruptly harder Hard GP and Expert GP. Their names are certainly an indication they are meant to be much more difficult but the steep shift is glaring. You don’t need to place first in every race to win at least, the player earning points based on their placement in each race of a cup and able to win so long as no one else outscores them. In these more difficult GPs though, the AI seems to almost always follow the optimal path, one Pokémon will usually always be out in front in every race to make outscoring them harder, and they seem to perfectly avoid course hazards even when it seems like they should be facing the same issues you do.

Rather than structuring itself like a normal racing game where you go around a clearly defined course, Pokémon Dash’s tracks all rely on a checkpoint system that is deliberately designed to not be straightforward. A map on the top screen will give you some indication of what’s in the nearby area, but for the most part, to find the upcoming checkpoint you need to hit, you have to rely on arrows pointing out from Pikachu to tell you where to go. However, the tracks all take place on islands, almost all of them reaching a point where its either necessary or heavily encouraged to take to the skies to fly over water or pass over areas that would slow you down. Taking to the air requires balloons, and while they are marked on the map if they are nearby, the arrows will only tell you the direction the next checkpoint is, meaning at some points you might have to go far off the beaten path to find balloons and then head up into the air. From your aerial view in a hot air balloon you no longer get to see the hint arrows, and many tracks end up being quite large and easy to lose track of where a destination might be. The top screen does include an image of where the next marker is located although unless you’re replaying a course you wouldn’t know where to find it on sight alone. Dropping down isn’t straightforward either. As you drop out of your hot air balloon, you’ll need to ensure you don’t land in a forest since that will shoot you back up into the air, landing on certain ground types will daze Pikachu and requires rapid scratching of the screen to shake off the dizziness, and it seems wind influences your drift down to attempt to disrupt a safe landing.

So much of Pokémon Dash isn’t about the dashing so much as heading up into your balloon and finding a landing spot before scurrying over to the checkpoint to repeat the process. The hot air balloon isn’t very interesting or enjoyable, especially since it makes it hard to gauge what your opponents are up to while they’re flying about as well, and with the need to take weird routes to checkpoints or use other methods like riding a Lapras across water or using boost items to cross terrain that would slow you down, it can often feel like every racer is just doing their own thing instead of competing. There is no way to interfere with each other so it’s essentially everyone doing a simultaneous time trial, but Expert GP decides to take this already chaotic and poorly executed racing style and throw out even more of the structure. The checkpoints during regular play need to be done in a particular order, but Expert GP allows the racers to do them in any order they deem fit, their run coming to an end once all have been triggered. Naturally the AI opponents already know excellent routes and don’t struggle one bit, but a player would require a lot of familiarity with a course to get around these large tracks focused on flying around more than running. Very few have obvious routes laid out since checkpoints are often haphazardly placed to encourage hot air balloon travel, and while you can try to copy an opponent’s route and retrying a race is completely free, it’s a tedious process less about skill and more about memorization and avoiding annoyances.

Despite the awful controls and race designs, the tracks do have some decent variation and unique structures. There are levels based around snow, deserts, lava, and mud, there are chains of small islands, big forest filled tracks, ones shaped like Pokemon such as a heart-shaped Luvdisc Island or one resembling the electric mouse Pikachu’s face. Some have ledges, others have thin strips of land, and a few even have falls to watch out for, but since navigation is always tied to furious stylus swiping and the hot air balloon, a lot of the track design is either best flown over or unable to really test your ability to maneuver to avoid overtaxing the weird controls.

Besides the expected multiplayer (where everyone is of course still Pikachu) and a time attack mode where you try to complete courses with the best time possible, the game does feature an incredibly interesting idea in the form of hundreds of bonus tracks that can be unlocked by having a main series Pokémon game in your DS’s GBA slot. By reading which Pokémon you have in games like Pokémon Ruby Version or Pokémon Leaf Green Version, you can construct your own cup made up of courses that convert those creatures’ sprites into race tracks. Since there are only so many terrain types in Pokémon Dash and the monsters come in a variety of colors, sometimes the game will make these flat courses into weird mishmashes of surface types, especially with more complex creatures or ones with unique shading. Big Pokémon like the rock snake Onix are turned into enormous levels littered with random terrain and where the checkpoint placement feels more random than the already pretty poor placement found in the game’s normal tracks, but simpler and smaller creatures can be turned into less chaotic tracks. Unfortunately, despite letting you convert all 386 Pokémon available at the time as well as their additional forms like all the letter shapes the creature Unown can take, these courses are definitely more of a novelty than a way of getting decent gameplay out of Pokémon Dash, especially since they are all limited by a timer that is tied to how strong that Pokémon is in the game they’re drawn from. This means that you can make a race track that is nearly impossible if they’re too weak, and having to train a creature just to make their race course version slightly less awful isn’t a very exciting prospect.

THE VERDICT: On the one hand, Pokémon Dash is surprisingly ambitious with its ability to turn any Pokémon into a race course, even though those courses often turn out too directionless in design to be enjoyed. On the other, Pokémon Dash limits the player to playing as only Pikachu, forces them to use an awful control style in the form of the constant touch screen swiping, and the races themselves are mostly dependent on flying around in hot air balloons and hoping you know the courses well enough to defeat the AI’s optimization on the higher difficulties. A bit of a cakewalk on easy, the game feels like it never finds an adequate rhythm, and while the course design can be decent at times, too much of the game is about poorly placed checkpoints that undermine both the tracks and any real sense that you’re in race rather than a mad chaotic scramble.

And so, I give Pokémon Dash for Nintendo DS…

A TERRIBLE rating. Pokémon Dash could have easily pleased some kids if it had just slapped the recognizable creatures of the series into a traditional racing game, but it decided to get strange and experimental with its design and nothing worked out in its favor. The hot air balloons that get relied on so heavily lead to the action constantly starting and stopping and the course design gets deemphasized by their presence, and while you do spend some time scurrying across the ground, the potential of the many hazards is reduced both by how often you are better off flying around them and by the fact your control method means the most they can do is slow you down if you don’t have the right terrain boost active. Even if you were only allowed to use Pikachu, Pokémon Dash could have at least been mediocre if it stuck to traditional and easily read track design, but instead checkpoints are scattered about and tackled in strange orders, and when the Expert GP comes in with its free form design, outdoing the computer controlled opponents who already know a good path becomes a chore. As if it needed to be said, an option to control Pikachu normally instead of with constant screen scratching could alleviate some of the irritation a player will experience, and if there was more of a focus on expert movement instead of trying to wrangle your screen swipes and flying trips, then it might be a racing game where completing a course felt tied more to skill than memorizing what’s necessary or spotting the right power-ups and routes on a map.

The novelty of the sprite conversion is what made me heavily interested in Pokémon Dash even though I was fairly certain it wouldn’t be smooth at all. I had expected something like racing around the border of a Pokémon sprite though, not the awful scrambling across mishmashes of terrain types as the game struggles to adjust pixel art into massive island tracks. Even this most interesting aspect of Pokémon Dash ends up being a letdown, this title both failing to capture the thrill of a racing game and dropping the ball on providing the varied appeal of the Pokémon series.