As one might expect, this game improves the audio and graphical presentation quality by several notches. The moving Pokemon sprites, makes the designs look better than they do in static pictures. Every time I run into a new Pokemon, I've spent a lot of time just watching them perform their various idle animations routines for the novelty of it all. That being said though, I'm only three hours into the game, and the "ugly-mon" seem to be grouped at the later stages.
On the music side: when you're losing a battle, the music changes to reflect that. Cool touch.
This title clearly takes place in the US - not China (as one potential map proposal put it) - because of the overt American symbolism. Cowboy and Indian trainers for one thing. There's also the unmistakable - yet painfully cliche - American patriotism in people's dialog. There's also American cliched slang... one random trainer says "yo bro" during his intro.
