It's great, but a little rough around the edges, gale of darkness improved most of its shortcomings though. Colosseum had fairly competent ai that actually took advantage of the doubles format with things like rain dance+thunder. The roster of shadow pokemon is limited but once you've purified them you can trade with rse and use whatever team you want, but the initial limitations makes you consider strategies you might not have ran with before and while a lot of it is johto shitmon you'd be surprised what bros they turn out to be when you learn to work with them. The region is based on Arizona so it's mostly desert but it's nice to see a coherent region where the towns all have their own aesthetic personality yet still feel connected. The story and the snagging pokemon instead of catching your own in the wild were pretty unique for pokemon games especially at the time, and the sequel is actually a direct sequel like BW2. You can only save at the PCs so it does get annoying having to backtrack sometimes, the graphics are pretty dated - hell a lot of the npc models look significantly worse than your player and sidekick, and the battles are a bit slow(probably like gen 4/5 slow, it's been a while so I don't remember exactly) but the pokemon animations are pretty good for the time. I'd really like to see what the devs could have done after whst they learned from the 1st and 2nd with a 3rd game in the series on the wii instead of battle revolution which was just a battle sim with character customization, really nice but really slow animations, and a very obnoxious announcer.
