Why Pokémon Stadium is the most cut-throat environment in the world
Pokémon Stadium (2000)
Pokémon Stadium (2000)
I think it’s fair to say that the Pokémon series has garnered an awful lot of controversy over the past 30 years. If it wasn’t inducing seizures in children, it was promoting satanic rituals, or asking you to buy 50 games in order to catch ‘em all.
But in among all that, nobody ever really seemed to care that the franchise was essentially about pitting two cute animals into a fight to the finish with each other. You get the feeling that this wouldn’t fly in real life - it’s tough to think of anything more gritty and grisly than the real-life equivalent of dogfighting.
But it’s all there in the games. Breeding Pokémon in foul conditions, slaughtering those younglings whose genes won’t quite cut it, drugging up the best monster you have, and forcing it to battle almost from the moment it’s born. If it wins, great: you, the trainer, get the plaudits and cash, while the poor beast gets the abuse. If it loses… the slaughter begins anew.
As if trying to push the boundaries for getting away with this controversy, Game Freak and Nintendo saw fit to release a dedicated Pokémon battling simulator. The twee elements of the Game Boy games, exploring the grassy fields of Kanto and having a buddy-buddy adventure with your Pokémon, that was all gone out the window.
Now, the time for rigorous battle and serious competition had begun. Pokémon Stadium for Nintendo 64 is where the frivolities are put aside: dinner is over, the laughter subsides and the discussion turns to matters more serious. Everyone sits up, and suddenly it all becomes rather cold, forensic.
In Pokémon Stadium, you are faced with dozens of battles against very tough Pokémon, with mean stats. What are your own stats looking like? Is your Gengar the best of the best? What about your Mewtwo?
What about those hidden values that determine whether your Pokémon is a winner or not? The type of things that even the official players’ guides never tell you? What about your Pokémon’s moves? Type coverage? You can pick only 3 Pokémon for the battle out of your six on hand, so who do you pick? When do you switch them around?
You’re crazy if you think Pokémon is a simple battling game for children. Throwing your Charizard in against every single opponent in Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow and raising it to Level 100 after a few hours was all well and good, but that won’t wash here.
In Stadium, you’ve got several Cups and difficulty modes to get through - each of those Cups being gauntlets of eight trainers that you must beat consecutively, or face a game over. It’s pretty tough, and as you go on, the enemy Pokémon and AI keeps getting better and better.
So what do you counter them with? Well, in keeping with the Pokémon cashgrab theme, playing this game without having access to your own team from the Game Boy games is just about impossible. You can use Rental Pokémon, giving you access to 150 of the different species that existed at the time.
You’re wasting your time here though, because using these Rental critters is like having to resort to the communal PE gear or musical instruments you used to get in school: middle-of-the-road at best, utterly foul to behold at worst.
The fully evolved Pokémon tend to have weaker moves as well, which means they're held back right from the off. You’ll get a few Cup wins, sure. But soon, you’ll be swallowed up by Mr. Mime and his pals.
This makes the Transfer Pak just about necessary for getting the most out of Stadium. It's a big doohickey that you can stick into the back of your N64 controller, with a slot for your Game Boy Pokémon. The Transfer Pak pulls your game’s save-data through to the N64, including your Pokémon team.
A few problems here, though: in addition to weighing down the hell out of the controller, the Pak itself tended to be hugely sensitive, and you were buggered if anything was knocked loose during gameplay - it was straight to the error-handler screen for you. It might just have been my own Pak that was a bit of a hypochondriac, but I lost a whole savefile to this sensitivity, so tread lightly.
I should really hate Stadium for killing my data, but I was too busy being blown away. The chance to see your very own creatures in 3D was an incredible sell at the time. It was genuinely thrilling to have the Pokémon you caught and trained come to life and duke it out on the big screen, just as you always imagined.
With the Transfer Pak, you also have access to the GB Tower, which allowed you to play the Pokémon game on your TV, Super Game Boy style. You could even unlock 2x and 3x turbo options to speed up the grind, and that was a big selling point too - this was well before a lot of people knew about emulators and ROMs with fast-forward capabilities.
All 151 Pokémon of the time are given not only decent 3D models, but many unique animations as well. You won’t get that from Pokémon Let’s Go, and you're certainly not gonna get from any of the other recent Pokémon games either. Each monster also has a far nicer cry than the 8-bit efforts, and nicer again than Game Freak's ghastly attempts to gentrify their sounds from Generation VI onwards.
There’s a nifty soundtrack in this game as well, mostly remixes of the RBY games, although this is often drowned out by the infamously excitable announcer (voiced by Eric Stuart himself from the anime), screaming your Pokémon’s moves and getting properly caught up in the action.
You can hardly fail to get hyped up when you’ve used a mild move like Wing Attack, and the announcer starts passionately yelling “Whooaaaaa!” as if he's just seen all of his enemies evaporate at once in a colossal earthquake.
I have no proof, and it’s probably confirmation bias, but by golly are the AI and RNG in cahoots and out to get you in Stadium. Get hit by the ubiquitous Body Slam move and you are paralysed immediately. Forget about it being only a 30% chance to paralyse - it’s Chinatown.
And heaven forbid you get confused, paralysed, put to sleep, or even use a move that’s less than 100% accurate, because you simply will not believe how often the game will gleefully tell you that the move failed to connect. You will lose countless battles to this, you will rage, the Transfer Pak will come loose, your once-proud team will be lost to the memory ether, and you will cry.
No, the battles in this game just aren’t good for your blood pressure. But there isn’t much left beyond battling unfortunately, except probably the most fondly remembered part of the game: the nine minigames featured.
Play against Easy, Medium, Hard or Hyper AI, or go against three pals as you play Lickitung Buffet, Ekans Toss, Magikarp Splash and more. I’m making those names up, but you get the idea. They’re a lot more playable than they look, and they make a nice change from being ripped off by the computer AI.
At its heart, all Pokémon Stadium does is simulate Gen 1 battles, with a few of the sillier glitches cleaned up. There’s no massive bones about it, but the added functionality and juice it gives to the otherwise severely limited Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow is clear.
You can store many Pokémon on the N64 cartridge, win some uncatchable ones as rewards, trade Pokémon between games, store items, and more. Above all, it allows you to perform battles with proper rules, using correctly functioning moves, and against opponents with Pokémon higher than Level 65.
These are all features that pretty much became standard in future instalments. But at the time, the popularity of Pokémon’s first Generation was such that all of these benefits made Pokémon Stadium worth it. Which is just as well, because it means all them poor Rattatas and Pidgeys didn’t die for nothing.
26 April 2024