In anticipation of the upcoming Pokemon White I've been playing Soulsilver fairly religiously. There is a certain satisfaction to be gained by having a perfectly and carefully raised Dragonite laying waste to all my opponents like a vengeful god on insolent villagers.
The gameplay in this game is virtually identical to all of its predecessors, minus a few graphical upgrades. The battle animations look a little better but it still looks like every pokemon has an epileptic fit before chundering all over the unsuspecting foe.
Soulsilver is to Silver what FireRed is to Red; upgraded, prettier, and largely a complete waste of time as it's the same damn game! The addition of the controlling stylus does nothing to improve the gameplay nor does the subtraction of the slot machines make it more wholesome. In it's marvellously absurd wisdom Nintendo decided that gambling avatars made for poor moral examples all while forcing your newly abducted animals to fight and kill for your amusement. In Soulsilver, I beat the divine-protector of the ocean currents into submission and forced it to fly me around the place while it was unconscious. The ethical implications may be somewhat of a wash is all I'm saying.
I have one major gripe with this title, and that is the ridiculous amount of difficulty there is in capturing certain pokemon. I've never liked the stupidly small chance you had to capture the legendaries in the earlier ones - supposedly even after reducing Zapdos to 1 health, confusing it, making it paralyzed and lowering all of its stats as far as they can go and still I only have a 5% chance of catching it with my ultra ball.
All the coolest pokemon require retarded amounts of time and effort to acquire and by that stage, game fatigue has set in and I want to just finish.For example, Lucario is pretty rad being a dark/steel type and looks awesome but requires literally 120 real days AFTER beating the big 4 to capture a Riolu, which then takes like 200 000 steps to evolve through happiness. Mood strikes as being the most contradictory of status requirements, as my personal happiness is inversely proportional to that of my pokemon. Oddly walking around with a level 1 pokemon for days on end makes me crazy with murderous rage rather than entertained.
I think it was a good move to allow for roaming legendaries - makes them difficult to catch without being artificially hard; tactics rather than attrition is required to get them. They still aren't worth getting however as they still have that hair-tearingly frustrating quality of having a 5% catch rate.
There isn't any point in doing the "other" measures of your pokemons' abilities: the dance contest, speed contest and beauty contests seem to be the only reason why you need a stylus and they add nothing to the game. Doing the contests won't improve their stats and won't improve any other battle quality.
Ultimately I have to conclude that it was worth the $70 price tag when I bought it as I'm still playing it and I've poured more than 200+ hours into it. Any game that I'm still play a year after purchase is worth it. Why it makes me spend 175 of those hours walking around with baby pokemon is beyond me though.
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