Kerric said:
I have a question for experienced player/parents: my nine year old daughter loves the pokemon cartoon, and has stuffed pokemon animals. However, she has never played any pokemon game, and is not that good at video games (especially those that require dexterity). Would you recommend getting this game? Would an earlier version be better? What hardware would you recommend? We only play PC games in our house and a few Wii games. She likes designing Spore creatures and playing some games on Andkon, but has little other gaming experience.
Thanks for any advice you can give!
I'm not a parent, but I have been playing Pokemon since my parents gave me Red version some 15 years ago so I'll see if I can answer your questions.
As far as requiring dexterity, that is basically a non-issue with any Pokemon game. All the battles are turned based with you selecting moves from a menu. Outside of battle there is really nothing that requires any use of reflexes or timing, just walking around the world and interacting with things.
All the games follow the easy to learn, hard to master school of video games so really anyone can play them. Despite the large adult fan base, they are still primary made with children as the target audience, so I wouldn't expect your daughter to have any trouble.
I don't think there would be really any difference between getting this, or any of the DS versions in terms if being any easier to play. The things I would keep in mind is that the older games aren't compatible with the newer ones for trading and battling so if she has friends who play she can't interact with them. Also the new games have a feature when you can play with the Pokemon like a virtual pet, scratch them, feed them stuff like that which may be appealing to your daughter.
Finally as far as hardware if you do not have a 3DS and you want the new games you can get a 2DS for a fair bit cheaper. It just doesn't have the 3D function which isn't an issue with X and Y as only the battles can be seen in 3D and it isn't an impressive effect anyway.
That's pretty much all I can think of. I hope that I helped. If you have any specific questions don't be afraid to ask.