Pokemon Black and White: Review

by Emily Clarke on April 7, 2011

I’ve already written quite a few articles about Pokemon and here finally is my review of Pokemon Black and White. I’ve only got as far as the Pokemon League but I’m thinking that’s far enough to get a fair gist of the game. If you are planning on getting this game and haven’t yet, be aware I won’t spoil the story that much, but I might go into a bit of detail to start with. For the first few towns, this will sound like a walk-through with opinions but I’ll tone that down as I go.

With a slightly different start and some pre-named character friends, I chose my Snivy, messed up my room battling and embarked upon my new little adventure as if I was eight again and had my Gameboy back. So expectant was I that this would be a Pokemon game like any other that I pootled through the catching tutorial with a patient smile and vowed to catch one of everything as I moaned to myself about how silly the new Pokemon looked .

I decided the battle animations were awesome. I still uphold that, it feels like a natural addition to the game and it brings it to life a little bit. The part of me that wrote my last article was just getting irritated with the fact that while the professor is a woman, she happens to be a young pretty woman. It’s here that you meet the bad guys of the game,Team Plasma – they took me a little by surprise. You know how it’s kind of a quirk of the franchise that everyone always says it’s like cutified cock fighting? That’s kind of Team Plasma’s angle. This guy tells you about how Pokemon are enslaved and made to do the trainer’s bidding (in so many words) and I was a bit taken aback. Was there a crazy twist I was missing? The characters were talking in bad-guy language about working for a lord or something – I somehow doubted it.

After a little story section which explained that Team Plasma really is evil, I breezed into the first gym cockily with my starter Pokemon and a couple of introductory normal types. One of three leaders fights you, depending on the starter Pokemon you chose. I laughed at their puny efforts… and totally failed like a loser. I stopped, scratched my head, and wandered around the town. I quickly realized that I’d managed to skip a trainer who hands you a Monkey Pokemon that is strong against your starter Pokemon’s weak type, if you follow me. So feeling like an idiot I won and continued on my way.

So far I hadn’t really seen any Pokemon that instantly made its way to my inner list of awesome Pokemon. That was until I came across this bad boy.

I mean look at that thing! Sure it looks like a happy mole or something, but its evolution looks like this.

Also, the thing has three claws on each hand (guess what I called it) okay I’ll shut up now. Finding Wolverine-the-Drilbur (I am fully aware that I am beyond the realms of sad and nerdy thank you very much) actually brings me to a point. The rare Pokemon have a little animation on the ground to show you where they are which I think is rather neat. Grass wobbles and in caves there’s a little dust cloud. You can also find items like that in caves.

So then I was in Pokemon-mode. The game had had it’s few surprises and I ran on, found a few new Pokemon I could be bothered to catch (as always I got bored of catching-them-all very quickly) and generally played the game like I always do. Next on the list of awesome-things-about-this-game is Random Weather. It can be sunny one day and rainy the next which is nice. I don’t think everywhere in the game can rain, there are places with puddles and sometimes it rains. Still, I kept going as if this wasn’t much of a novelty and pretended I wasn’t that impressed.

Then I got to the big city. Fine, alright, this game is quite a bit different. It took me ages to get to grips with it. It’s very weird. It’s not like we don’t see games with changing camera angles every other place, it’s just weird when it happens to Pokemon. It didn’t feel like Pokemon for a day or so. Still, the change is nice and it’s a novelty for longer then the other changes because it feels bigger.

In the town after that, you meet these little buggers. The ‘Emolga’.

See that? It looks like a bog standard ‘cute’ Pokemon right? With the circles on it’s cheeks and the happy face? Yeah. It’s Flying/Electric type and pure evil. It took me ages to get that gym beaten. I had to go back and train my rock type. Me! With a rock type! I don’t do rock type! Well I didn’t anyway. Cyclops-the-‘Roggenrola’ (I know right?) beat the whole damn gym with one move and became a permanent member of the team. I am sad enough to get attached to them when things like that happen.

There are a few other little quirky features of this game that are quite sweet, but once you get used to them all it does feel like a Pokemon game. Which is what it should feel like. It feels upgraded I guess, and that’s a good thing. The rest of the game (up until the Pokemon League which I am yet to defeat) went quite well. I only had a problem with it because I am lazy and can’t be bothered to train my Pokemon much past actually putting them up against other trainers. That is the only reason I found some of the gyms hard. What? I can’t grind, I am not a grinder. I also like that you don’t get the main Legendary Pokemon until after the Elite Four because it always threw off my party. There’d always be that moment where you have to decide which team member to replace.

Anecdote time. When I got to the Pokemon League after having traversed Victory Road, I had two low health Pokemon and was imagining my little avatar panting and needing a drink and a rest or whatever Pokemon people run on. I stumbled (artistic license) through the door and ran forwards. I looked up from the screen, and when I looked down, some Veteran sprite was talking to me. I suddenly had visions of it being like that bit in Batman Begins where Bruce climbs the mountain at the beginning and Liam Neeson starts beating him up. ‘Death does not wait for you to be ready!’ Ahem. But no, he was just telling me to be sure I was ready to fight the Elite Four, which of course I wasn’t.

On the subject of new and awesome stuff in this game, I have to mention the C-Gear. This is a wireless interface that lets you connect with another player wherever you are in the game, instead of making you use one of the rooms upstairs in a Pokemon center. Ignoring how much that sounded like a euphemism, it means you are freed from the time it usually takes to drop everything you are doing in order to share Pokemon or battles with someone else. As for time, the battles and trading are amazingly fast now, you don’t have time to sneeze before the swapping animation is over, compared to the wasted time my friends and I spent just last year swapping between HeartGold and Soulsilver. We were swapping Pokemon with cheat cartridge master balls attached so I expect we deserved it.

Another new feature is the Dream World. There are little missions you can do with your friends by appearing in their world as a person with an amusing run animation or a first gen Pokemon. It’s amusing but I haven’t yet worked out if the missions turn into anything other than ‘Give them this’ or ‘have a mini battle’. The internet tells me there will be extra features in the dreamworld some time this month.

So, new stuff that got on my nerves. The first thing was the pink. I don’t have anything against pink. I am wearing pink PJ’s right now. Shocking pink though makes me think of these really awful trainers I used to own and all manner of cheap and nasty girly toys. It made me want to have chosen to play as a guy. At first it was fine, but the colour sort of ground on my eyes after a few hours. It got increasingly annoying. Your bag is pink. The C-Gear gives girls hearts as the default pattern. I changed it very quickly. Even the bike is pink! Anyway, small potatoes. This is silly of me but I really miss the Pokemon at the front of the party following you around in the over-world. It annoyed some people, but it could have been an option at least.

On the subject of the young lady professor, I decided to shut up and take what I can get. At least it is a lady. I would say something meaningful about the tiny shorts the female avatar wears and the action she does when she throws her Pokemon into battle but strangely, I’m not overly bothered about it.

So yes. Very good game, interesting Team (with a stupid name as always) the world is pretty and changes every month which is something I’m yet to see, and I pledge to get a second Emolga so that I can spam Volt switch and swap out a hundred times like the gym leader did. I will be that horrible person.

On a final note, I have Pokemon White so I haven’t encountered Rotation Battles in-game yet, but I’ve played them in multiplayer and they are really awesome; especially since normal battles are hard to play with another human because of the fact that people constantly switch to their stronger Pokemon and it slows the battle. You have to play it to really see what I mean, but you have to guess which of the three Pokemon your opponent is going to switch to and it’s much harder and more fun. They automatically level to 50 too which is good.