Simple puzzle games can be fun, especially when they involve something you love, like Pokemon. Actually the reason I played this was motivated by my wife. She’s probably a bigger Pokemon fan than me, which is saying something considering how many hours I’ve put into Pokemon Pinball on the GBC. We both got this game so we could play the co-op mode. We hadn’t seen the DS original, but it’s not really connected too closely anyway.

For example, the DS one had a plot with humans and stuff, whereas this one just has locations to catch Pokemon. Normally I’d prefer a plot, but in this case it’s fine, since we played together most of the time. It’s focused more on unlocking new areas and Pokemon, doing certain conditions to find rarer Pokemon and so on. They also seem to have refined the gameplay in this one from what I’ve heard. It’s quite satisfying to move your little icons around freely to set up massive combos, especially when it pays off in a big attack.

It does get super hard later on though. We probably wouldn’t have made it to the end if we hadn’t been doing it together. There must be something we’re missing about the pace of the game or something because trying to find some of the secret Pokemon or just finishing some later stages was really frustrating at times. It does seem better with two of us though.

To me the game appealed because it had really cute representations of all known Pokemon, all mixed up together, hanging out in the wild, and you could catch each one and use it yourself. The match-3 stuff gets its hooks in though. Yeah I dunno, there’s not much to say. A fun diversion.

Oh yes, one more thing, the title exhibits that annoying feature of differing between America and everyone else (not counting Japan). They experienced the phenomenon of the untranslated title, a whole nother beast entirely, like Ni no Kuni or Tomodachi Life, or even Katamari Damacy. I don’t think this game or the word in particular has the cultural cache to pull it off, but on the other hand as a title Pokemon Link is very bland. So I’m conflicted.