Note: This is a review of the Japanese version of Pokemon Dash.

When the Nintendo DS launch titles for Japan were announced, some people applauded Nintendo for having a Pokémon title among them. Sadly, that praise was undeserved, because Pokémon Dash is a hollow, unentertaining shell of a game. Imagine, if you will, a hollow Easter bunny, filled not with marshmallow or caramel, but deadly scorpions. That's pretty much the feeling I got from playing Pokémon Dash. It looks like Pokémon and it sounds like Pokémon, but beyond that cute gloss is a game that obviously had little to no thought put into its development.

"Piika pika! PI-KAAAAA!" The game starts off with a Nintendo 64-esque 3D Pikachu standing in front of you, demanding to be played with. (The game actually will not let you start unless you first play with Pikachu a little bit.) In a segment that I can't help but think of as being stolen from Mario 64, you can grab hold of certain parts of his snuggly yellow body with the stylus and drag them around the screen, all while Pikachu makes electric moans of ecstasy. Once the game decides that you've had enough Pikachu lovin', you can start the game and begin the "Regular GP" mode, starting with the "Green Cup." (There are five "Cups" in the GP modes, each with its own world map, but they all play almost exactly the same.)

The game's dynamic works like this: On a top-down map, you (Pikachu) and five other Pokémon run yourselves ragged from Pokéball-shaped checkpoint to checkpoint. Sometimes, however, your next checkpoint will be on another island, blocked out by a wall, mud, lava, whatever, and you will have to grab a bunch of balloons in order to fly over there. With a thunderous "Pika-pikaaaaa!" everyone's favorite yellow rat will ascend to the heavens, and from an aerial view of the map redolent of PilotWings, you must find the next checkpoint (the top DS screen will be displaying its surroundings) and then descend to it. If you descend too fast onto hard ground, Pikachu will be knocked out, and you will have to draw frantic circles around him on the DS touch screen in order to revive him. I feel no shame in saying that hearing Pikachu's delirious, painful "piiiiiikaaaa" during these fits was the most enjoyment I got out of playing this game.

The "touchy aspect" of this game is in its running controls - you control Pikachu by dragging the stylus across the screen in the direction that you want Pikachu to go. You have to keep doing this over and over again to make him keep going, which is not an altogether bad control scheme but did make me a little bit afraid of scratching the hell out of my touch screen. The top screen displays race statistics (who's in what place), as well as a map. Kind of.

You see, this is the most frustrating part of Pokémon Dash. This map shows where the next checkpoint is in relation to the other checkpoints and your current position. What it doesn't show you is an actual map of your surroundings. Thus, you have no idea whether there is an obstacle blocking your path, whether there's a path across that obstacle further down the road, or whether you need to start looking for balloons to get across it. Thus, you will spend lots of time wandering about the map, trying to figure out how to get to the next checkpoint, watching your rank drop down to last place, while everyone else seems to know the map by heart. I would say that a good half of the races absolutely require you to have played through them once before so that you know how to get to each checkpoint. Add this to the fact that once you actually do figure out how to get to each checkpoint, the game becomes ludicrously easy (to be fair, there is an unlockable "Hard GP" after the regular one has been completed), and you have all the makings of a game that isn't fun to play.

After getting first place on each of the five Cups in Regular GP (which you will probably do your very first time through), the "Special Cup" is unlocked. In this mode, you insert a GBA Pokémon cartridge into the GBA port, and Dash will download your Pokédex and allow you to play on maps shaped like the Pokémon in your collection. I wish I could say that this is fun, but it isn't. The maps are, pixel-for-pixel, the character graphics in the GBA Pokémon games, which translates into "really ugly, blocky maps." The only time you can even see what they're supposed to be is from the aerial view, which is where you'll be all the time, because the nature of the maps (not laid out logically or playably, but simply dependent on the character graphic's pixel color) makes it pretty much impossible to get from one checkpoint to another without using the balloons. It honestly looks like something that somebody threw together in a day, and while I guess it's cool that they did it at all, it isn't really all that much fun.

In fact, I think that's what Pokémon Dash comes down to. Is it cool that Nintendo had a Pokémon title at launch? Sure. But is it actually worth your money and time? Not at all. Not by a long shot. I'm not terribly picky about video games, genres, or target audiences. I have exactly one expectation from a game: it should be, on some level, fun to play. Pokémon Dash fails at this most basic of tests, and I can't in good faith recommend it to anyone. (Of course, if you really want to find out first-hand, you can always import a copy from Lik-Sang, our importers of choice.)