Pokémon Rumble Blast (3DS)

In the dungeon crawler genre, players fight through labyrinths filled with monsters and scavenge loot off their bodies that they’ll use to increase their strength over time. Pokémon Rumble Blast, also known as Super Pokémon Rumble in Europe and Australia, feels like a dungeon crawler in some ways, but rather than exploring dungeons you’re blitzing through them and the loot you grab isn’t equipment but instead brand new Pokémon you’ll swap in and use to fight. A much rapider approach to that style of play to be sure and one fitting for a handheld game that you can pop open and play quickly during some downtime, but unsurprisingly some of the appeal is lost when things are trimmed down to be so quick and simple.

Pokémon Rumble Blast has you playing as toy Pokémon, there being almost 650 unique monsters with special powers you can recruit and some even have varying forms to further diversify the offerings. The specific selection of creatures ties into the then-current mainline Pokémon games Pokémon Black and Pokémon White featuring all but a few of the monsters you can acquire in that game, but since they are rendered as simplified crank-powered metal toys here, they do look quite different from normal. A few creatures look a bit strange in this style, Hitmonlee’s focus on long legs erased as the toys all have very thin and pointy limbs and the polar bear Beartic is rendered in a quadrupedal form when usually its depicted standing on two legs, but for the most part you will be able to tell apart Pokémon at a glance that proves helpful since some of the battles can have huge groups of them descending upon you all at once. At worst you might mistake something like a Duosion for a Solosis, but that’s because it is the evolved form of the other and those two green creatures based on organic cells still fight in a similar manner.

You don’t play as a single Pokémon throughout Pokémon Rumble Blast, instead constantly swapping as you knock over toys and recruit them to your side. This does make for an oddity in the game’s story though. In the world of living Pokémon toys, Glowdrops help keep them healthy and safe from aggressive monsters like the rusted over Pokémon toys. However, a blue deer-like Pokémon known as Cobalion has begun to gather a force that is stealing the Glowdrops from towns all around this artificial world. You are tasked with stopping him, although early on it’s easy enough to glean he has good intentions for doing so. Luckily when you do learn the full extent of his plans you at least learn you weren’t trying to stop a good thing from happening and there’s some proper escalation in the stakes, but by the time you get so far you will likely have long abandoned whichever Pokémon you started the journey with. Characters will address you as if you are the same person rising up the ranks of local tournaments and stopping Cobalion’s forces, but there is perhaps an explanation given in the opening scenes where your 3DS Mii character is shown starting up the toy world so perhaps they recognize that common spark between controlled creatures. For the most part this story is one there to guide you to new locations and battles, although traveling to different towns at least exposes you to quite a few surprisingly excellent musical themes, the soundtrack generally quite good despite this being a spinoff game.

Battles in Pokémon Rumble Blast aren’t particularly demanding affairs. The player will guide one Pokémon at a time through short dungeons fighting whatever creatures they come across and depending on the Pokémon you’re playing as, your abilities can vary wildly. Each creature can only have two attacks max and many will only come with one, and while there is a power level ranking assigned to each Pokémon, choosing which one you want to play as isn’t always going to come down to picking the strongest monster because of those attacks. A strong Pokémon might have unreliable or weak attacks or you might be in a dungeon where your enemies will generally resist the damage you deal out, the usual type effectiveness formula found in Pokémon games still present here. Using a Water Pokémon in a lava filled environment will likely give you an edge, but usually you’re still going to swap out for something newer since new areas almost always have a significant enough bump in power level to justify the upgrade. Within that area some decisions might still come down to flexibility. That purple bulldog Pokémon Granbull might be your strongest technically, but its slow and weak Lick attack might not compare to the monstrous kangaroo Kangaskhan who has a pair of faster punching moves that means it can do more despite being technically weaker. The Pokémon toys being simple enough in their scope but still having some decisions to make beyond picking the one with the highest number works well for the rapid pace of the action, and while you will get far more toys than you’ll ever use and they rapidly become obsolete even in the span of a stage, there is some purpose to them beyond just trying to collect them all.

While you will only have one toy operating at a time, if it’s knocked out you are allowed to call in back-up a few times within a stage so your next strongest monsters will still find some use on occasion. While most of the action will be those Pokémon filled dungeons where you’re trying to knock over toys so you can collect and utilize them, some areas are instead battle tournaments or fights against boss characters where you might need more than just one strong character. Some tournaments are type-locked meaning you would be forced to use something like a Poison or Bug type and you might have to revisit a past dungeon to try and get a powerful enough one to assure the win. The Battle Royales are just free-for-alls where you try to be the last Pokémon standing, but later Team Battles and Charge Battles add the need to have some decent back-up. Team Battles still have you playing as only one toy, but you bring two others to fight alongside you. Making sure you have a competent trio can matter as you get into the late game fights, especially since if your toy falls you’ll swap control to one of your allies, but Charge Battles are unfortunately rather mindless. Most fighting in Pokémon Rumble Blast is about spacing your specific attacks properly and dodging your foes between dishing out blows, but Charge Battles just have an army of your strongest Pokémon toys charging towards other clusters of creatures, success determined first by how high your numbers are when added up and second by mashing a button a bunch. Charge Battles seem like the kind of thing that would try to make sure you were strong enough to progress to the next area but you need to clear the other dungeons in the current one to access such battles so they feel like rather weak additions that maybe exist just to ensure you don’t completely cull your tin toy ranks.

While you can carry hundreds and hundreds of toy Pokémon and you can swap them in during levels provided you’re not interrupted while the key winds up, there are some advantages to ridding yourself of unneeded Pokémon beyond just cleaning up the clutter. Exchange seven of one type of Pokémon and, if it can evolve, you’ll be given the evolved form of that Pokémon as a new toy. However, that toy will probably be fairly weak and being an evolved Pokémon doesn’t necessarily guarantee strength in Pokémon Rumble Blast, and when special abilities starting showing up more often, the vanilla evolved monster you got from the toy exchange will probably pale in comparison to them. Passive abilities can power up Pokémon toys considerably, a Healthy one for example having a passive healing factor when it’s otherwise hard to heal anywhere outside of town while a Snappy toy will be able to attack faster than usual. There are some negative abilities, but the churn of toys is so quick you’ll have grown accustomed to even the most powerful of Pokémon in terms of the franchise’s history being replaced by relatively humble creatures thanks to the way power comes from location in the story rather than significance in other games. While being able to briefly use a fairly underappreciated Pokémon like the heart-shaped fish Alomamola has its novelty, this churn also hurts the money system.

Most of your cash is meant to be spent on buying moves for your Pokémon, but the prices are surprisingly high and it’s likely you’ll not even use that Pokémon after you clear a dungeon or two. For tournaments or Team Battles you might be able to justify it since the difficulty will perhaps push you towards making sure your strongest aren’t burdened with bad moves, but the only other use for cash is the post-story content where again the prices are exorbitant. Money is earned passively from defeated toys as well as by exchanging away toys you don’t want to use anymore, but its relative low value makes it hard to be invested in trying to earn it and if it does feel required like in the post-game, then it feels like a slog to go through earlier levels to get the amount of cash needed to face more challenging foes. Returning to a level at least will cause new Pokémon to appear there though, but once you’ve run through the main story, the game doesn’t do too much to motivate continued play since it keeps many goals and new bits of content out of reach or dependent on random appearances like with the rare legendary creatures. Bosses are usually just bigger Pokémon toys and some are practically just the same as a normal toy but with a large health bar. A few more fearsome foes do arise with some attacks you actually need to learn to evade, but again they work better within the context of a normal level rather than as something to be sought out on its own like those legendary Pokémon.

THE VERDICT: Running through a single area in Pokémon Rumble Blast is often a quick burst of decent fun, the constant experimenting with new toys and attacks as you rapidly acquire increasingly better Pokémon a fine enough loop in small doses. A few boss fights and battle royales put in some moments with a bit more difficulty, but the action can still feel quite simple and things like the Charge Battles are barely interactive. Money is handled rather poorly and the post-game is too restrictive before doling out new content, but when going through the story there is a rapid pace that makes it easy to keep popping in to play a level or two to see which Pokémon you might recruit next.

And so, I give Pokémon Rumble Blast for 3DS…

An OKAY rating. Pokémon Rumble Blast avoids being too plain thanks to things like the special abilities and the way the wide variety of attacking moves can make or break a creature with a high power number, but because both you and the opposition often don’t have much variety to draw from per toy, it can boil down to charging forward, pressing attack over and over, and moving to the next pack of foes to do the same. Keeping healing scarce was wise to at least demand giving some foes some respect and it makes the battles and battle royales with a bit more punch to them actually demand a bit of thought and strategy, but mostly things are sustained by the toy churn. A bit like a fickle child you will be presented with a batch of new toys, you’ll play with them briefly, but soon have your attention drawn to a new set of toys and forget the old ones entirely, and the rewards for culling or curating your collection here are minimal.  There is some entertainment value in trying to figure out the right balance for who to use in the new batch you’ve acquired, but the payoff for managing them had to be small because the amount of factors to consider are often fairly limited and this is a decision you’ll be making frequently enough that drawing it out with complex variables would slow down a game that thrives on its snappiness. Running through an environment to see what’s new for you to grab is the biggest appeal of continued play and the bigger battles break it up so it won’t totally lose its luster, but it still can only go so far within the format the game chose even though that very format is what makes the speed of play work.

When you’re constantly acquiring new swords or sets of armor in a role-playing game you aren’t often changing what your character can do, you’re just making them perform better. This can allow their techniques to be more advanced and fights can have strategic considerations tied to your skills because they’re guaranteed. In a normal Pokémon game every creature has plenty of skills and battle options and your team composition all also serve as a broad set of options that you pit against another trainer’s chosen option set. Pokémon Rumble Blast has you changing your skills frequently and giving you very few with each change, so it has to maintain a level of simplicity since not much is guaranteed and your available options in a fight are quite limited. Pokémon Rumble Blast manages to make this work on some level but depth would have been necessary to draw more out of the battle system. It does seem more interested in frequent fast fights though, and in the same way a quick session of a match-3 puzzle game isn’t too demanding but still idly entertaining, Pokémon Rumble Blast makes that quick play style work for a Pokémon battle system.