Pokemon Platinum is the third game in the Generation IV Pokemon games, after Diamond and Pearl. It is in effect an enhanced update of those two games, with additional Pokemon, improved graphics, changed story elements and new environments to explore. Since it is a Pokemon game, Platinum has the predictable gameplay and plot, which is to say that they're both solid and easy to understand. You take the place of a beginner trainer, obtaining your first Pokemon (out of a choice of three) before journeying across Sinnoh. There are two main story arcs in the plot, the first one is as the player, you are travelling to each city to challenge all eight Gym Leaders in order to be eligible to compete in the Pokemon League. You aim to defeat the Elite Four and finally the Pokemon Champion to be crowned the Champion yourself. The other story arc is your frequent encounters with Team Galactic; they predictably are causing trouble and want to take over the world. A neat element is that you have a rival who starts out with you and will periodically challenge you, growing stronger along with you. You get to pick their name and this gives it a more personal touch. The biggest draw here is you get to carry six Pokemon with you at one time to participate in battles.
You encounter Pokemon in the wild, such as walking around in grass or in caves, and by weakening them, you are able to catch them. You can catch as many Pokemon as you like since you can store them away and retrieve when necessary. It is a turn-based system, with a paper, scissors, rock weakness system, such as fire is strong against grass, which is in turn strong against water. The many different types of attacks and Pokemon make the battles dynamic and encourage the player to pay attention. Pokemon earn experience and can level up, getting stronger in the process. For certain Pokemon, they will eventually evolve into a stronger form once they reach certain conditions. If you've played the previous Pokemon games then Platinum will feel right at home. It has better music than the GBA games and feels nostalgic. It has 2D graphics through which does not seem much of an improvement to the series and is probably the most disappointing aspect since the DS is capable of more. One of the really annoying things with Platinum is the high random encounter rates. You will take one or two steps and then a random encounter occurs. It's frustrating when you have to travel through a big patch of grass. You will end up gritting your teeth and deciding to just use an item to eliminate all random encounters towards the end of the game.
Even if you have the willpower to keep random encounters on, you'll come to realize that they do not provide good experience points at all and is a big waste of time. Platinum has a good balance of difficulty when you don't actively grind to level up your Pokemon as other Trainers you encounter and battle will have Pokemon whose level is about on par or higher than yours. This is true especially in the beginning of the game when you catch a full party of six Pokemon and need to alternate between them to level them up. Levelling up Pokemon eventually becomes easier with the introduction of Exp Share, but this only allows one other Pokemon to share the experience gain and is not recommended to use extensively and exclusively for a Pokemon to level up since they won't get the additional stat boosts that normal battles provide. Soon you'll come to realize that you are playing catch up against other Trainers as the experiences gained are low and enemy Trainers are four to five levels above you. Gym Leaders start to have a level gap of up to ten levels and this becomes ridiculous at the Elite Four and Pokemon Champion battles where they can be up to 17 levels above you. This forces you to grind to get your Pokemon to within the Level 55 to 60 range and have a chance of defeating the opponent without being killed in one shot.
It's unfortunate that the game ends up forcing you to spend hours of grinding at the end of the game since it has a slow pace already with waiting times for the animations to play, loading times and slow menus, it's ends up being the last straw and becoming annoying and waste of time. The fake difficulty with high levels, constant HP restore of opponents and an overabundant usage of confuse ray and paralyze attacks serves more to highlight the unfairness of the enemy AI more than anything since whenever an enemy uses an attack, it will work for them but when you try the same tactic, it will not work half the time. As touched upon, Platinum is bogged down by inefficient menus, especially item storage and item usage during battle. You have to trawl through various menus and slowly select the items you want, a more streamlined approach would have been appreciated. Platinum has all the staples of a Pokemon game including fishing and obtaining a bike for faster travel. It uses the second screen of the DS in an interesting way as you obtain a Poketech. This takes up the bottom screen and you can obtain apps during your travels, so you can have a hidden item radar detector, a screen showing the current health of your Pokemon, show the time, and more.
Another returning feature are Pokemon Contests where you compete in the beauty of your Pokemon and if it can impress judges. Perhaps the biggest and most touted new feature of Platinum is the Distortion World. This ends up being a massive disappointment since it's a boring maze puzzle in order to reach Giratina. Unfortunately, the Distortion World is short and as with some other Legendary Pokemon, Giratina has an absurdly low catch rate which makes it annoying as you chuck Pokeball after Pokeball in the hopes that the random number generation falls in your favor. Even after you become the Pokemon Champion, there is a wealth of post-game content including the return of the Battle Frontier, a place to battle to your heart's content. Furthermore, there's another smaller island to explore which will take up at least two to four hours with new Pokemon to catch plus new story content. All in all, the game has so many things to do that it will keep you busy for hours if you decide to complete it all. Overall, Pokemon Platinum serves more of the great Pokemon gameplay, with 210 Pokemon to encounter in the beginning plus more are introduced after the main story arc. While the plot is predictable and there are some annoying design choices, this is a fun game.
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