Pokemon Box: A Quick Review by TR Rose

You've seen it hyped in the Players' Guides, but you've not seen it in stores. What is Pokemon Box?

PR answer: a way for trainers to do mass transports of Pokemon between versions, and store lots more creatures than any GB game's PC will allow. A necessity for serious breeders and trainers.

Cynical answer: a way for the Pokemon empire to milk players for an extra $20.

If you've played Pokemon and traded with a friend, you know that each trade takes time. And you have to be carrying the tradable Pokemon with you to conduct the trade. This is -much- easier now than in the old R/B days, but it's still not as easy as it could be. Enter Pokemon Box, the Pokemon Center, NY exclusive that lets you grab and dump as many Pokemon as you want from your Game Boy cartridge's PC Boxes into GameCube Boxes (saved on the included Memory Card). You can then hook up another Game Boy game, and drag and drop the critters into Boxes from there, all through the convenience of your TV set.

You also get some goofy little features to display your trained Pokemon.

Pros:

• You can play Ruby/Sapphire (but not FireRed/LeafGreen) on your TV set
  
  
• Create a "stage" using "pieces" of your actual Pokemon. All this does is make a little display with pictures of the Pokemon you've trained, on customized stands, with the music you select.
  
  
• Operates like a Windows desktop. Easy to use, and completely visual. Extremely quick to transfer critters.
  
  
• More PC Box wallpapers than ever before, and tons of Boxes. You'll never run out of storage, no matter how many Pokemon you catch.
  
  
• "Comes with everything you see here" - Pokemon Box GC disc, GC to GBA cable, 59-block Memory Card. You supply the GBA and Pokemon game.
  
  
• Bonus! The first time you plug a game into Pokemon Box, Bridgette will give you a Pokemon Egg. This Egg will hatch into a (female?) Swablu that knows False Swipe, a move that it can never learn otherwise. That's one Egg per GB game - when I hooked up Sapphire and LeafGreen to PKBox, I got 2 eggs in total.

Cons:

• Pokemon transferred between games via Pokemon Box will not evolve since this isn't an actual "trade" - so trading through this method won't get you a Gengar, Machamp, Alakazam, or Golem. Same goes for held-item evolvers.
  
  
• You can only hook up ONE Game Boy at a time. Which means you have to dump from one game, save, turn off, then boot up with a different game to get the Pokemon.
  
  
• The "stage" feature is useless. I found it a waste of memory - you see flat images of your Pokemon on 3D stands on a 3D stage. It would have been nicer with 3D Pokemon. Better yet, we should have gotten something like a 3D Trophy Room that displays your Ribbons, Hall of Fame Pokemon, etc.
  
  
• Why can't we play FR/LG on the TV? Or is that being saved for "Pokemon Box 2"?
  
  
• Is anyone really going to store their Pokemon collection on a Game Cube memory card where you can't train them?
  
  
• You don't need this. It's a convenience, nothing more. Of course, this is great if you're the only gamer in your house and need to transfer Pokemon between Ru/Sa and FR/LG and you don't want to deal with the middleman of Pokemon Colosseum. $20 is cheaper than buying a whole new Game Boy and Link Cable.

TR Rose's Final Review: Meh. Like I said above, this is just a convenience. If you really like Pokemon, and have a bunch of different versions to trade between, and you've got 20 bucks burning a hole in your pocket, then go for it. But the False Swiping Swablu isn't worth $20. Neither is the great-on-paper, boring-in-reality stage feature. In summary, "Meh."

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