i've only played the old game on the 3DS (super pokemon rumble?? i forget the name) which i enjoyed, but im not liking the $$$ thing on this game, hopefully it's easily avoidable
Played it for a little while today, pretty darn fun. So far getting jewels to progress in the game hasn't been too hard, plus you get quite a few levels for each hot air balloon you buy.
I just realized what some of the sounds were from: Pokemon Ranch. Spent a while trying to get my head around why these sounds were familiar. Especially the sounds when you press R on favoriting balloons.
I downloaded it today, and it's a really good free-to-play game! I was actually sort of excited for it after its announcement in the Nintendo Direct since I enjoyed Rumble Blast, and i'm glad to see that it's a pretty good free-to-play game. It's still annoying how I have to save up diamonds over time and then I can use them to do more in the game (i'm not going to buy any diamonds with real money in this game), but I still like it. It works well as a free-to-play game since you can play it in small bits and get benefits with streetpass/spotpass. Also, it's WAY better than Pokemon Shuffle, in my opinion. Shuffle got really boring really fast, and it had WAY too many tutorials when you first started.
I thought that the sound effects were from Pokemon Channel on the GameCube. As soon as I heard them, I immediately remembered them from Pokemon Channel. I never played Pokemon Ranch, but I guess they also used the sound effects from Channel in Pokemon Ranch.