Pokemon Colosseum is bad, not sorry about it - Tama Hero

Make sure to watch the other videos in the Gen 3 Trilogy for the full story! PART 1: Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire - https://youtu.be/Ze8uhmeFt7A PART 2: Pokemon Fire Red and Leaf Green - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcLKCGGG340 PRELUDE TO PART 3: Pokemon's ORIGINAL National Dex Controversy - https://youtu.be/p9Y_ACiMmek

Things I have fond memories from Colosseum: 1)The fact that the bosses had actual strategies for their teams. 2)The plot twist that Evice was the actual evil leader instead of Nascour. 3) Mirror B. 4) The fact that your companion had the same name as me (well one letter away) 5)The wild west/ Dessert setting.

You showed incredible restraint with a thesis of "This game was designed to waste your time" and never going for the VERY low-hanging fruit that the battle animations are the longest in the series. They're comically long. You can feel yourself physically aging every time a Pokemon plays both its "take damage" and "faint" animations with each and every KO

I put an ungodly amount of hours into this game as a kid when it came out. Loved it

I never got to play it but as a kid I really wanted it lol

during this era especially for jrpgs total length was a major selling point and so many companies felt forced to bloat their games to certain degree because most of the consumers at that time were kids who couldn't afford many new games a year. I usually bought only 1 or 2 new games every year so at that time it was really important to me.

This was an excellent watch! Speaking as one of the few people who actually did own this game on release and enjoyed my time with it, I love this kind of good faith analysis to make make me rethink the mechanics from an adult perspective. I'll always look back fondly on Colosseum. It's a game that I used to bond with my family over as we muscled through the boss fights and I'll never get tired of its awesome soundtrack. Looking back though, it's crazy that I put up with that purification grind and it wasn't til now that I remembered how much of a slog that really was. Not many YouTubers can keep my attention for over an hour by voicing a differing opinion.

I used that exploit in Aagate Village every playthrough, I could never walk around for a million times like that. Though I still get your point on how doing that the normal way over and over would make you hate the game lol

I will say this as a diehard fan of both Colosseum and XD: these videos have really opened my eyes to a lot of the shady business practices and intentional missteps that Nintendo and GameFreak were committing even all the way back to when I was a kid: especially in terms of the rental debate, which I think is just SO petty that they would do all of that shit. Despite Colosseum being my favorite Pokemon game next to the Gen 5 games, I fully accept that it isn't perfect, it wasn't designed perfectly, there are things about it that even I don't like and that you touched on in this video and previous ones. I think your claims are 100% valid. I do believe that a good portion of your hatred for these games comes from the 100% mentality that you had while going through this: national dex for the other Gen 3 games included. Which is fine: I get it. It's immensely frustrating to put so much time and effort into a game you love, or truly want to love, and then having a giant slab of nothing shoved into your face. Super Mario Sunshine (conveniently also on Gamecube) is probably the biggest example of this. But I truly believe that, when not looking at these games from a completionist's point of view, these games are very, very good. I honestly do not like Sunshine, but even I'll admit that I had a lot of fun going through the worlds, spraying stuff, etc etc. Setting aside all the nostalgic bias I have for Colosseum and XD, what I like about it is that they at least tried to do something different. No, they did not hit every mark, I acknowledge that, but what this game (And XD by extension) do well, they do very, VERY well. The OST is iconic, the battle animations both sound and look great, there's memorable characters like Miror B. and Wes that people to this day still want to make a return in some shape or form, etc. The way that you played it (and likely the way the devs intended) where you continuously swapped out Shadows to purify all of them during the main game, I personally think that was the number 1 worst way to play this game. No blame on you for it, I can see your points as to how the devs seemed to have this in mind, which makes sense given they'd never made a Pokemon game before, but it was the wrong way to go about this. Planning ahead of time, knowing what Pokemon you want and sticking with them is definitely the way to go with playing this game, as it's always been with the other Pokemon games. It's fun to build Weather Teams in this game, it's fun to have a standard team, it's fun to use all three Legendary Beasts, it's just fun. I believe there's more flexibility here than you give it credit for despite the limited roster. You've probably heard this point many a time in Patreon chats and Discord chats, but the reason that I and others love this game (and XD), and why the games have the following that they do, is because they tried something different and have elements within them that we want to see in future games. The concept of stealing other people's Pokemon for the greater good is a great concept for teetering the line of good and evil. The battle animations look like they were given a damn about as opposed to nowadays where, for example, a pokemon does a one inch hop and they slap a PNG of a foot on the opponent to give the impression of them being kicked. Starting off as an adult--an adult CRIMINAL no less--is really cool and definitely beats being another 8 year old that somehow beats a crime organization by themselves with like 0 help at all (and I swear, if I get called a 'kid' in a derogatory fashion one more time in a Pokemon game I'm going to have a hernia. Get better writers, GameFreak.) Having Pokemon that are already raised in levels and have competent movesets is also great because it means you won't have to spend half an hour grinding, which was one of your biggest complaints about this game in particular... ...And above all else, these games are a legitimate challenge. You don't have rivals kissing the ground you walk on, rolling out the red carpet with clumps of Sacred Ash, Full Restores and Max Elixirs for you to snort up, you don't have incompetent gym leaders that only specialize in one type and are brought down by mashing A, and for the most part you don't walk into boss battles with obscenely overleveled Pokemon. If you fight all the trainers along the way and manage your team well, you'll be at a competent battle level to fight the Admins and other bosses, and you have to actually THINK about what you need to do to bring them down as opposed to mashing A. Is it better to 2 on 1 one Pokemon to keep it from attacking? Is it better to attack both Pokemon individually? Should I stop Miror B from setting up Rain Dance? Should I go after the Pokemon that Dakim uses that's going to fire off an Earthquake? Things like that add a lot of strategy, variance, and challenge that the newer games just straight up do not have. I mean sure you have the battle tower in BDSP, but when their answer for 'make a harder game' is to shove unfair bullshit into the postgame and call it a day, I don't really think that counts. The fact that Masuda just says "No, we'll never do another Colosseum game again, fuck off, hahaha", is just so soulless. What an absolute dick. Because why bother being innovative and actually giving a damn when you can release a game with trees from OOT and water that barely registers as a texture with the most braindead boss fights imaginable and animations that could be done better by first timers in Middle School and still make insane amounts of bank AND maintain your status as the Number 1 brand in the world? TL;DR: I fully accept these games aren't perfect, but I still love them, and they still hold elements within them that should have been carried over to the newer generations YEARS ago.

EDIT: My comment was poorly worded, my bad. I loved the game but could only think of one flaw with my experience, which was the grinding. I haven’t chosen to watch the whole video yet but I know Tama has other gripes with the game, including the main story, that I didn’t notice in my experience. I just know that playing the game 100% is important to reviewing the entire experience, and this game’s 100% completion is mmmmiserable. It would put one more additional bad mark on the game’s overall score AND just be a miserable experience for Tama in general, and if a game’s postgame was actually fun, this wouldn’t be a problem. ORIGINAL COMMENT: Okay, if you’ve been trying to 100% the game over and over and over, of course you’re gonna hate it, and I don’t say that in a mean way. I love it but it’s probably got the most painful XP grinding experience in the series. Completing it to 100% is pain, man. My sister ended up doing all the grinding for me (bless her) and we worked our way all the way up that mountain for her to unlock that Ho-Oh.

Ah, yes. The Legendary Ferrets. Furret, shiny Furret, and shadow Furret.

Imo you still can choose which Pokemon you can travel with on your journey, but you have to make sure to rebattle the trainers at Pyrite town consistently instead of training at Mt. Battle like a lot of people do. The money you will accumulate will give you perfume that you can use to purify each shadow Pokemon, and I found this method of purification and leveling up much, much faster than the other method of constantly swapping out each Pokemon to purify them. I think I only spent 2 hours max grinding out these battles to purify all of the shadow Pokemon by doing this whereas spending that time with battles would maybe let me purify only one or two legendary cats? You don't have to compromise who you want on your team with this workaround, it made the experience so much more tolerable when I discovered it, and I found using shadow Pokemon in battle with this method actually made the process slower because of them constantly going into hyper mode.

I've been playing through Colosseum recently (Not done yet, but I plan on completing it and transferring all the Pokémon) and these problems are definitely there. Purification takes a long time, Pyrite Cave is a chore to navigate through, and I never even beat the game as a kid because of the final boss rush. But even through my modern perspective, I still love the game and I have a lot of fun playing it.

I disagree but I also believe Colosseum could certainly be improved. Also the attack animation add a lot more character to the Pokémon that a lot of the games just don't have.

I like that you start at lvl 25 so you skip early-game tacklespamming. Battle animations and camera angles still look better than the modern games. It went hard when i was 4 years old, and I still like it despite its issues. I'm not thrilled to go through the lategame again though.

These shots of the GameCube and the TV look SO good, and there’s some pretty fun editing moments here. On a technical/craft level this is your best video.

Nothing is spookier for Halloween than an unpopular opinion on the internet. In all seriousness, I definitely feel like there are a lot of notable issues with Colosseum, caused by a combination of being developed by a team with no experience with Pokemon and a clear development crunch. But I still think the concept is really fun, rescuing pokemon from dirty criminals and rehabilitating them is a great idea for a story. You say in this video that Wes' motivation isn't really explained, but I definitely think it's likely he knew something was up with Team Snagem and defected to investigate further. Though you are right that stuff like that really is left to interpretation on the player's end, I actually like that fact. I like that he is a more hard-core and serious protagonist without being nearly as over the top as characters like Cloud or Shadow in Shadow the Hedgehog. Beyond the flashy explosions in the intro, what is actually edgy at all about Wes? He's running around Orre rescuing abused animals and getting all cuddly with them to make them friendlier. I think it's the rushed development that leads to the narrative blanks that aren't quite properly explored. But to me, the blanks did less to frustrate me and more to capture my imagination. This game got me thinking more about how the world of pokemon works than any other game, I think. It got me imaging things from a more adult perspective. And, quite frankly, as a kid, none of that mattered to me. I just saw 3D models of Ruby and Sapphire pokemon and got excited. I think I like this game a lot more as an adult than as a Kid because when I was a kid I remember just being frustrated that I had to beat the whole game just to see my pokemon in 3D like in Stadium.

One they I personally found is that colosseum was more akin to a typical rpg as there is a set list of members, and that the game is more enjoyable if not played as a typical Pokémon game and don’t connect to the GBA games (which sound a bit backwards)

I do at least think it’d be cool to have had the anime cover Orre. Also I think if we got a remake, I think a overhaul in some parts could be warranted. It’d be cool if a revist to Orre gave it a new side like giving it its own Grand Underground that had routes to travel to the locales without need to use a bike. Have it be recently discovered with people coming Orre to study what’s in this new massive underground region.

Tama, I’ve been watching you ever since JWittz featured you in the banned Pokémon games collab (holy crap almost 10 years???) and after watching the video, I want to say thank you for the content over the years even if it hasn’t been consistent since life happens after all. I hope you and Chaz are having a great married life together! As for the video overall after watching it completely, I admit I have a strong nostalgia for Colosseum/XD. I believe I was around 6 when I played this Colosseum and it was just a super cool concept that emphasized my love for Pokémon while playing through tons of hours in Ruby. Colosseum hasn’t aged gracefully over the years and while I don’t think it’s a terrible game to this day, your points are detailed and really gave me a great perspective on the criticism towards the game. And as someone who loves 4th gen, I really enjoy watching and listening to your critiques and see another Pokémon fan’s perspective. Please keep up the good work and I hope you have a great day! ❤️