Nintendo has released one additional game for the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack’s Nintendo GameCube – Nintendo Classics app. Let’s have a look!

Here’s what I thought of this game:

Nintendo GameCube – Nintendo Classics

It’s odd that we’re getting this game before Pokemon Colosseum, since this is a sequel to Pokemon Colosseum that reuses the prior game’s assets. I admit I’m often so charmed by the mainline Pokemon series formula in a way that helps me to overlook the flaws of individual games, but here it’s really hard to see that charm. The character designs are ugly and the characters themselves are annoying, the story is cookie-cutter and boring, the music is mediocre at best, there’s tons of tedious fetch questing, and this game completely lacks many of the quality-of-life improvements we’ve grown used to in the series in recent years.

However, on top of all of those flaws, Pokemon XD removes a lot of the “catching” of prior games, replacing it with a new “snag” mechanic that has you basically stealing Pokemon from other characters… but only specific ones, at specific times. While potentially interesting, this is far more limiting than the usual catching mechanic, removing one of the core mechanics of the franchise. Instead of “Gotta Catch ‘Em All”, this feels more like “Gotta’ Catch the Ones We Decide You Can Catch When We Feel Like It”.

As a result, this feels like someone mangled the standard mainline Pokemon formula into something decidedly worse, and I think that anyone with an interest in Pokemon on Nintendo Switch 2 would have already gotten one of the multiple other mainline Pokemon games on the platform, all of which are worlds better than this despite their flaws.

Suffice it to say, I’m not thrilled with this addition to Nintendo Switch Online this month.

tl;dr – The Nintendo GameCube app on Nintendo Switch 2 gets Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness this month, and this game plays like a pale shadow of other mainline Pokemon games – more restrictive, with ugly annoying characters, a dull story, and reused assets from Pokemon Colosseum. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a bad game, it is far from a great one.

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