You can tell Christmas is over as the news just won’t stop coming. Hot on the heals of Heart Gold and Soul Silver’s European release date being announced, leaked scans from this months CoroCoro magazine has revealed details of a new Pokémon Ranger game to be released this year.
Titled ‘Pokémon Ranger – Tracks of Light’ the game returns to the popular Ranger format of ‘capturing’ Pokémon with the stylus to assist you in solving problems and tasks. Set in a new region ‘Oblivia’ and against a new bad guy team called the ‘Pokémon Nappers’ the 3rd installment to the Ranger series sees several new additions to the game play. PokéAssists will now send a Pokémon out to help fight the pokemon you’re up against, but will flee when they take damage. You will be able to ride on the backs of several Pokemon, including the legendary dogs, Raikou, Entai and Suicine. Brand new is the ability to call certain Pokemon by drawing a special symbol, current known symbols are for Eevee and Croagunk.
Edit: We now know that the ability to call the Pokémon to your aid will be an add on function to your styler, though how you learn symbols for various Pokémon is not mentioned. You will be able to call the legendary dog’s via this method though, helpful since riding on them will get you past various obsitcals, like Suicune will run down a river or Entai will jump from cliff to cliff. Your partner Pokémon will be a Pichu (who seems increadibly popular with gamefreak at the moment). The Pichu is carrying around a blue Ukulele (like a small guitar if you didn’t know), although why it is nobody seems to know.
New to the Ranger games will be a Multiplayer mode, although its not clear if it will be Wi-Fi or just local wireless (most likely the latter, unfortunatly). Up to 4 players will be able to take part in special missions, and you’ll have to work together in order to capture Pokémon, as you will have to connect the lines that your friends drawn if you want to successfully capture a Pokémon.
Speaking of Special Missions, straight away as the game is released, a download mission will be available that will allow you to obtain a Deoxys, one that will be transferable to your Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, Heart Gold or Soul Silver carts. There is something special about the Deoxys you will get, but that wont be revealed until next month.
According to CoroCoro, the game is scheduled for release on 6th March 2010, with a Demo apearing at DS download Stations and via the Wii Channel in Japan at the end of this month (29th Jan to be exact). Pokémon Sunday in Japan was due to have some news in their game section this week (they teased it last week with a big question mark) nothing big was made about it at the time as they’ve done this in the past and not revealed anything special or new (one time, they reveaed Magikarp… seriously, has ANYBODY not heard about Magikarp). However, with this news from CoroCoro, it means that this will likely be the special feature on Pokémon Sunday. Hopefully they’ll have something new to mention, or at the very least have some video footage.
That’s all we have for now, We’ll bring you more as soon as we know about it