Pokemon Tower Defense Walkthrough/Wiki
Introduction: I Choose You!
A Little Info About Everything Pi's, Ka's and Chu's!
For those of you not familiar with the series, Pokemon is shorthand for the words Pocket Monsters in Japanese. The game (and the animated series that followed it) is created by the folks at Nintendo. Basically, it is a JRPG where the lead character makes use of monsters to do combat with other monsters.
The idea of the game is that you can capture Pokemon and keep them as "fighting pets", basically, you make them stronger, train them and have them compete in sanctioned tournaments. The Pokemon storyline revolves around a young kid who becomes a Pokemon trainer and aspires to get all the Pokemon in the world. And for those of you wondering about animal cruelty, the series has found its way around that issue by stating combat is never fatal, though it is pretty obvious that the creatures dish out and take a lot of pain.
All the Pokemon are depicted as cute adorable creatures, even the big dinosaur looking ones are designed with sparkly eyes. Also, Pokemon can only make sounds that are composed of the syllables of their names. Hence, a Jigglypuff can only say the syllables ji, gli, and puff (in any order), and regardless of the species, Pokemon are able to understand each other and of course, will follow any human command. Okay, now that we have gotten that out of the way, on to the game itself!
First off, fans of the series will be quite happy to see some of Cerulean's most famous citizens appearing in this game in their original Gameboy looks. There are plenty of scenes where key people act totally out of character, but you will be laughing at the events so much that it will not matter at all. In case you are wondering, the story is set in a fictional timeline many years after the events of the first game for the Gameboy.
How it Plays
Pokemon Tower Defense brings together two elements: first, from the tower defense genre, the concept of creating defenses against attacking waves of enemies (later in the game, this takes an even more interesting innovation). And from the original Pokemon titles, this TD game brings in the concept of catching new monsters and leveling them up to make them more powerful - and even further than that, you can "evolve" a monster into a higher breed of its type (a caterpillar type monster would turn into something akin to a butterfly - to be specific, Caterpies turn into Butterfrees - though they do go through a middle phase known as a Metapod).
The tower defense part of the game plays like this, you have a maximum of 6 Pokemon to bring into battle, during which, you must assign any number of the six into designated defensive positions in the field (sometimes, there are more than six slots to choose from, some maps will limit the number you can deploy at any given time). Once they are in position, the Pokemon will attack any enemies that pass by as long as they are within the attack range. In this mode, the Pokemons basically serve as the tower part of tower defense.
It is up to the player to determine how each Pokemon attacks. Each Pokemon can learn up to 4 different attacks at any time, and depending on your preference, the Pokemon will use a specific attack. This chosen attack can be changed at any time during combat. To learn new skills, a Pokemon must defeat enough enemies to earn the necessary experience points for leveling up. Once you have reached the maximum of four skills and learn a new one, you will have the option of choosing a skill to overwrite or choosing not to learn the new skill.
Choosing the skill (or attack) of a Pokemon is very crucial. Charmander, a fire breathing Pokemon has a fire breathing projectile attack that is very powerful and also has a chance of igniting enemies on fire. However, some Pokemon are resistant to fire attacks, when facing these, poor Charmander is pretty weak. It would be better to switch to one of his non-elemental physical attacks instead. This requirement of being able to keep track of various Pokemon strengths and weaknesses will determine how well you will fare in many battles. While it is possible to keep farming certain stages for plenty of experience points, the most efficient way to win is to actually know which kinds of attacks are more effective in defeating certain enemies.
Not Newbie Friendly
If you are new to the Pokemon scene - stop, and take a while to read up on the series and learn about the various kinds of Pokemon. The game is intricate and is loyal to many of the gameplay elements of the original Pokemon game. Knowing the types of attacks, resistances and leveling trees of the different pokemon will certainly put you at an advantage. If you feel that you are finding it hard to start out try asking for the help of a younger relative or neighbor - most kids are actually quite familiar with the various Pokemon types and are able to identify just by sight and more importantly, are able to recite stats as if they had a PokeDex installed in their brains.
More importantly, there are over a hundred Pokemon - with new ones being added with almost every other game. That said, the devs behind Pokemon TD are super big fans of the series, so expect to have new Pokemon being added to the game on a constant basis (yes, this game has plenty of updates, which is great since it also means that bugs and performance issues are minimal).
The last issue why this game is not friendly to those new to Pokemon? It requires time as an investment. That being said, if all you have been looking for is a quick way to pass the time, then there are plenty of other fun tower defense titles that you can turn to. But if you are a Pokemon fan who has mastered almost every single version of the game that has been released, then this game might just be the perfect thing for you to indulge in - new gameplay, familiar Pokemons and your favorite characters behaving in weird, yet humorous ways.
On Catching New Pokemon
As we said, you will have to position your Pokemon on various defensive hotspots. You start out with only one Pokemon and the game's tutorial will teach you how to use the Pokeball to catch more (you bring an enemy's health bar down enough that it turns red, then you drag the PokeBall-that large red/white ball on the lower right of the screen to your target). If you can catch the desired target, the ball will open up. If it stays closed, it means that you may not catch that creature in that particular stage (it happens).
The important thing here is to slow down the battle - which means pressing the 1x speed. While you can win battles easily when sped up, the timing of using the PokeBall is pretty crucial, since the target may accidentally get attacked by your Pokemon while you are still preparing the ball.
On the topic of creatures you cannot capture - these are often the Pokemon types that appear with large big blue bars. These guys are not only tough and hard to bring down, but they also cannot be captured. Simply keep hitting these ones with attacks of their weakness attribute to send them out of your way as soon as possible. Why not consult more of our pokemon wiki guides below...