My Pokemon Special Demo Thoughts

The other day, one of the the awesome Treehouse people on twitter was giving away Pokemon Special Demo codes. I'm not a Pokemon fan but I thought I'd like to try the demo & write about it. I had never really played a regular Pokemon game before (I'd played the Pokemon dungeon demo but didn't like it).

For me, it was the name Pokemon, plus the anime' graphics (I'm not an anime fan) that always turned me off of the Pokemon franchise.

So what do I think of the demo?
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The Pokemon Special demo has really good 3D. I was impressed. BUT...

The 3D is only on during the flying scene & during battles (and its not always on during battle).

When you're just walking around town or the dungeons, the 3D turns off. I don't get this at all. I think the graphics in this game would look so much better with 3D always on. Is the actual game like this? If so, thats pretty lame in my opinion.

The regular graphics (without 3D) are alright. Like I mentioned before, I'm not an anime fan so the graphical style didn't wow me.

Gameplay wise, the town exploration in the demo is pretty limited. You can't go into any of the houses, you can talk to people but they don't really give you advice or help you in any way. I'm not even sure why the town is really included in the demo.

The battles are turn-based and I kind of liked them. It was neat that you can switch out Pokemon during battle. Mega Evolutions seemed like a cool feature too. I only got to see pokeballs a little but that seemed like an interesting addition. The battles weren't anything out of the ordinary for rpgs but that was fine. It was definitely the part of the demo I liked the most.

I actually had more fun with the demo than I thought I would. It didn't make me want to run out and buy one of the Pokemon games though. I still didn't care for the graphical style, found the town boring, and honestly the dialogue was cringe inducing. Its not a bad game though. I may want to revisit the demo again sometime.