Seems like a major task to turn an expandable, customizable card game into a faithful video game, eh? (Remember how dummied down Magic: The Gathering - Battlemage was?) Well, it's a lot easier when the game is as straight-forward as Pokemon.
Pokemon Trading Card Game is an exact reproduction of the wildly popular paper-and-glass-beads card game... mixed in with a little of the rpg stylings of the first generation of Game Boy Pokemon games, Red, Blue and Yellow. Once again, you'll enter the land of pokemon with nothing and have to earn your way up the ranks to become a master.
I'm glad to see that TCG expands the world a little by side-stepping the traditional characters. Prof. Oak, Brock and Misty are not included here... although you do have to step through 8 Club Leaders and 4 Grand Masters to win the game. Also included is the ever-present Rival, or whom I've come to call the Jerk. The Jerk - just as in Red, Blue or Yellow - taunts your progress and vows to beat you. You won't win the game until you've put the smackdown on the Jerk.
Dueling against the club members will get you booster packs, so you're constantly collecting cards to enhance your decks. Interestingly, you don't lose anything if you don't win a duel, so there's nothing to lose by playing everyone you see. You can have 4 customized decks active at a time, and the game does a great job of building decks for you if you can't create your own. You're only limited by the cards you've gathered.
It's important to remember the weaknesses and resistance of your decks. Choosing the right deck for the duel is just as important as choosing the right cards for the deck. It's a whole lot easier to tackle the Grass Club Leader with a fire pokemon deck, for example. It may seem sneaky, but you'll have plenty of chances to lose when you go against the Grand Masters or the Challenge Machine.
TCG contains all the cards from the first Base set and the two expansion sets, Jungle and Fossil. Plus a great selection of promo cards, both real and imagined. Beating the Grand Masters (and your Rival) will get you four prized cards: the Legendary versions of Moltres, Articuno, Zapdos and Dragonite. Being nice to club members will often result in unexpected rewards, like the promo Mewtwo you can get after beating the Science Club Leader. After going all the way through the game once, I've only collected half of the promo cards... so there's a lot of dueling and trading to do before you can catch 'em all.
Naturally, you can link up with a friend to play or trade cards. TCG goes one step further and encourages gaming with the Card Pop feature. Using the infra-red port, you and a friend can Card Pop to each generate a rare card. Several cards are only available via Card Pop, and you can only Card Pop once with any given person.
As for actual gameplay, TCG allows for ultimate replayability if you continue to collect cards and build your own decks. The duels themselves go very fast... I average about 10 minutes per match. The menus are easy to use and lend themselves to efficient reading. Unfortunately, there is no "undo" option, so if you place the wrong card by mistake, it's stuck there. So watch what you're doing! The other big drag here (and what keeps this from being a 5 star game) is that once you've gone all the way to the top, there's little else to do. You can go around and duel the club leaders/grand masters again, or run through Mason's Challenge Machine... but the Challenge Machine is nothing but a randomized assortment of the leaders/masters anyway. The tournament is rarely open, so if you missed your chance to enter before you conquer the game, good luck entering afterwards. Also, I could really use an interactive trading feature, so you could trade cards with the club leaders... instead of constantly having to duel for more boosters.
But you can always count on Nintendo to support their own weird peripherals. If you have a Game Boy Printer, you can print out your decks, card lists... and the cards themselves. If you want to try playing the "real" card game with your unique Game Boy cards, print them out and stick them to extra energy cards. Now you can use Legendary Moltres or that weird-ass Imakuni? card! Hurm, with a lot of GB paper, you wouldn't need to actually buy real pokemon cards...
I found TCG much less tedious than the Red, Blue and Yellow games, if only because the battles are more involved. Still, it would have been nice to see more animation of the pokemon themselves... instead of the motionless pics of the original card artwork. Plus, it's great to push collection-happy kids into actually playing the card game.
