Pokémon Black & White - Review

Between Truth and Ideals.

Back in 2010, Pokémon Black & White were a bit of a gamble for the series. After nearly 15 years, Game Freak decided the series needed a refresh and that the best way to do this was to break some conventions. The biggest of these? The Unova region is filled exclusively with brand-new Pokémon (until the post-game, that is). It was this aspect that irked Pokéfans back in the day. Being locked out of the 'classics' didn't sit well with many. It's why these games, even for all the interesting things they did, were a bit of a hard sell. Over time, however, gamers have come around to these titles. What were once the black Mareep are now considered to be something of a hidden Carbink.

That turnaround doesn’t really surprise me. Why? Because I liked these games from the start. Black & White hit the Netherlands the day before I would set off on holiday. Safe to say, the car ride was very pleasant with Pokémon White holding me company. I played the game so much that I finished it before school started back up again in the New Year. And you know what I did then? Deleted my save-file and went through the adventure all over again. That’s how much I liked it!

Whenever you go back to a game of your childhood that you loved so much, I find that you'll always come across plenty of issues you’ve forgotten about. As such, I was expecting to find lots of flaws with this most recent ‘for review’ playthrough. Nothing bad about that, it is what it is after all, but I was nonetheless surprised that by and large this didn’t happen. Yes, there are a couple of smaller issues, but that was it. This is a smooth ride from beginning to end, and probably the best game in the 'pre-gimmick' era.
Let’s talk about it.

The core of Pokémon Black & White's narrative is what it's always been for the series: to catch them all while taking on the 8 Gym Leaders of the region. It's the things around these elements, why you're doing all of this, that makes the story different than usual. 

Unova’s ‘evil team’ is one unlike any you’ve ever faced before. Team Plasma believes that humans catching and battling Pokémon is inherently cruel. Led by their leader, the young ‘N’, they seek to 'free' all Pokémon from their trainers. N hopes to achieve this by beating the Unova Region Champion with one of Unova's Legendary Dragon Pokémon by his side under the belief that this will sway the hearts and the minds of the people to release their Pokémon. With N taking an interest in you, he challenges you outright: if you manage to beat him in a 1-on-1 fight, he won't go through with his plan. Becoming the Champion yourself is thus no longer about proving you’re the best there ever was: it’s about stopping N.

Team Plasma holding a rally to convince people to release their Pokémon. That's your first meeting with them, which immediately tells you everything you need to know.

It's for these reasons that Black & White's plot stands out. Game Freak tackled the Donphan in the room by addressing, in a kid-friendly manner of course, the whole 'the series is basically about animals fighting' thing. It is never in doubt to what conclusion the story arrives at but I think it’s effective stuff, for the target audience, still.

Aside from this, the narrative does a couple of other notable things. The Gym Leaders are more involved with the plot, actively involving themselves with the rising threat of Team Plasma and the struggles your friends are having. Speaking of Cheren and Bianca, they have character arcs of their own; Cheren needs to learn that being strong isn't a goal in and of itself and Bianca learns to have more self-confidence. It’s not groundbreaking stuff but it’s more than previous games did with their rivals. Plus, I imagine that to little kids, these little tales might strike a chord with them. 

So, the story of Black & White is one of the most interesting Pokémon plots but it's not without flaws. As an adult, I found lots of the dialogue to be rather bland and forgettable. They pack a lot of humour into the lines of NPCs but I can’t say it hit. This is also a journey that’s very straightforward. There are very few of those diversions you’d find in the game before it. Finding some medicine for a seasick cruise ship captain, to name just one example. That keeps the pace up but also means there aren’t that many memorable or quirky moments here.

With the narrative talked about, let’s move on to the gameplay. Whereas previous generations each added some big things, such as new types or the physical/special split, Generation V doesn't have any one big thing to its name. No, Black & White focus more on the quality of life and presentation departments. Yes, we have the introduction of Triple and Rotation battles, in which you fight with 3 Pokémon at the same time, but there’s a reason those haven’t stuck around.

What we have here is a small but very welcoming changes, like to the TM's: they can now be used as many times as you like. It's a small change, but one that comes with some big consequences. Being able to use TM's over and over again helps so much in building your team by letting you experiment more freely with their movesets.

Some other changes that I very much appreciated, especially after Pokémon Diamond & Pearl, was the speed of battles. In the games of the previous generation, battles would crawl by. Be it because HP drained like it had all the time in the world, battles dragging on because of all the abilities and such that triggered or because you needed to grind so darn much. Here, the battles are sped up so you get to the actual fighting quicker and that they themselves are faster. The difficulty curve is much improved a well. I only really had to grind at the very end, at the Elite Four, which was a pretty cruel grind though. Even after my team got 10 levels that Hydreigon still took out half my team, but I digress.

They’ve also gone and made the battles more dynamic here, and thus more interesting. Pokémon's battle sprites are now fully animated, keep moving throughout the battle, and even showing different animations for things such as falling asleep. Dynamic camera angles, also used to great effect in the overworld, zoom, focus and pan to give battles that extra bit of flair.

The Cherubi on top? The battle music is now reactive. When your Pokémon's HP is low, the music gets faster and higher pitched to emphasise the danger you’re in. When your opponent is down to its last Pokémon, the music pumps up and just screams 'You can do it, you're almost there!'.

It’s for these reasons that I think this is where Pokémon battling was at its best before they started to mess with the formula with Mega Evolution, Z-Moves and the like. It’s that original core polished to near perfection before they decided to try their hand at introducing these big gimmicks that really changed up the dynamic of battles.

A glimpse at a triple battle. Neat in concept, but rather unwieldy in execution.

Now that we are talking about the music: the soundtrack of these games is great. It's very much Pokémon's take on Jazz, with lots of brass and trumpets that create a surprisingly energetic soundtrack. One that helps bring the Unova region to life. Explaining music isn't one of my strengths so I recommend anyone wanting to know more to look up some tracks on YouTube and experience them for yourself. The Opelucid City theme gets brought up a lot for a reason, though I'm more partial to the opening theme myself.

All right, let's grab that Tauros by the horns and tackle the Pokémon designs next. With 156 new Pokémon, Black & White introduced a lot of new creatures. Creatures that attracted a lot of ire from fans. Yes, Garbodor isn't pleasant looking but that's kind of the point. It’s meant to be a bit ugly looking, and it succeeds at that. A lot of the designs succeed at what they set out to do really, making them rather good designs in my opinion. It’s just that they aren’t quite what Pokémon fans were used to at the time.

This is where Creatures Inc. started experimenting more with what makes a Pokémon well, a Pokémon. Someone like Scolipede is a lot more angular and aggressive than we would've gotten before but that’s actually what catches the attention. Other highlights are Excadrill, Cofagrigus, Zoroark, Eelektross, Hydreigon and Ferrothorn. All Pokémon that people have really grown to like. So yeah, the designs here were more of an experiment than ever before, and that may have taken some time to get used to for some, but I believe time has proven they’re good Pokémon.

What is something that I don't like about the Pokémon themselves is how long it takes for them to evolve. Many Pokémon evolve very late, somewhere in level 40, 50 or even 60. Part of that pre-Elite Four grinding was to evolve my Pawniard into a kick-ass Bisharp so it would actually learn good moves - which meant it had to gain 13 levels. You can say that this gives some not fully evolved Pokémon more time to shine, but it also feels like your Pokémon take an eternity to grow.

It also feels like an eternity for you to see all of the Unova region, so to speak. Yes, the main adventure is pretty well paced and straightforward but that only brings you across about 2/3 of the entire region. There are always post-game exclusive areas in Pokémon games, places meant to challenge you, but I feel that Black & White overdo it by locking so much of its world map after beating the story. That’s a bit of a shame because I feel these places will go overlooked because of it. I know that the sequels, Pokémon Black 2 & White 2, explore these parts of Unova more thuroughly but that's not an excuse for them to go overlooked here, now is it?

As the first region based on a land other than Japan, Unova has a very different look and feel to it than regions that precede it. Yes, we still have very Pokémon like locations such as big forests, cave systems and such but the journey will also bring you across places the series hadn't tackled before. You walk over large metallic bridges that stretch over highways with cars driving by. You get to explore metropolitan areas and a series of cold storage warehouses. All done to make this game not just feel and look a bit like the Great US of A but to also make it feel different from what came before.

Also new? The seasons mechanic, the logical next step after the day/night cycle that was introduced way back when in Gold & Silver. The seasons will change every real-life month, each with a different look and effect. During Winter, for example, snow will block certain paths but open others while Ice-Type Pokémon are more plentiful. While neat in concept, the execution shows why this mechanic has not been attempted again. The different seasons are mostly just visual changes, which for spring and autumn aren't even that grand, but the gameplay effects rather minimal and arbitrary. 

Still, it’s all pretty to look at. Pokémon Diamond & Pearl introduced the whole '2D pixel art on 3D backgrounds' aesthetic but you could tell Game Freak was still new to this technique at the time. Certain things, like mountain textures, stood out because they didn’t mesh well with the character models. Even more noticeable was the whole 'screen tearing' thing that caused the faces of NPCs to get stretched out or compressed depending on where you stood. Not only are these things fixed but with those dynamic, more cinematic, camera angles this game is quite pretty to look at for its time. Running over Skyarrow Bridge and entering Castelia City for the first time was something to behold back in the day.

Believe it or not, but this was quite a bold camera angle for Pokémon game back in the day.

Conclusion

All these years later Pokémon Black & White remain great, though imperfect, games. These games did a lot of new things, from the soft-reboot of the Pokédex to the greater focus on story and character development and more. All of this resulted in a different, yet also still very much Pokémon, experience. It has its issues, such as the high evolution requirements and locking so much behind the post-game, but those are only small problems. Taking into account the well-done graphics, music and some much-needed polish, you have a package that was a bit controversial when it first launched, but has only gotten better with age. 

We live in a day and age in which getting your hands on a Nintendo DS is far from easy but if you are a Pokémon fan how has never played these titles, this is a chapter of the series' history you should experience.