Natalie Rambles About Pokémon Black and White

Because it’s the 30th Anniversary of Pokémon and Missy kept asking me to do this…

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Table of Contents:

• Part 01: Pokémon – Rebooted
• Part 02: Grow Up and See The World
• Part 03: The Political Prowess of Team Plasma
• Part 04: Where The Story Falters
• Part 05: A Bold New Era
• Part 06: The Unova Pokédex
• Part 07: The EXP Problem
• Part 08: The Unova Journey
• Part 09: TM Distribution
• Part 10: I Was Originally Going to Play Pokémon JetBlack
• Part 11: The Pursuit of Balance
• Conclusion: I Love Pokémon Black and White, but Wish They Were Better

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Part 01: Pokémon – Rebooted

Forgive me for beginning this retrospective with a historic indulgence, but I simply must lay out the context per my own purview.

During the mid to late 2000s, the Pokémon series was in an odd spot. The series had an unprecedented decade long run where it dominated in merchandise, TV, animated movies, trading cards, and of course the games as a central pillar. While competitors like Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh! were lapsing in popularity as people began growing out of them, Pokémon was easily transcending to a new generation of kids. Plenty of people started with Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald on GBA and only knew of the series’ beginnings via the remakes FireRed and LeafGreen. Even younger fans just knew the series from the DS incarnations of Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, HeartGold, and SoulSilver.

Pokémon had proven itself to be an institution, beyond just a fad, and with this new comfort, Game Freak wanted to do something bolder with the next entry. Not something that redefined the series, its gameplay, or its systems, but tried to create a Pokémon game without any returning Pokémon. A truly bold decision that could have represented a make-or-break situation for the series, testing the mettle of its brand, the designers’ skills, and giving Game Freak an opportunity to rebalance a LOT of things. Sure, one could argue that this was sorta attempted with the RSE titles, but a clean 33% of Pokémon in those games were familiar faces, and the ensuing generation was arguably about bringing back old Pokémon. God, trading between the GameCube games and GBA games was just a nightmare.

When Pokémon Black and White were revealed, there was plenty reason to be impressed with them. The barely 3D environments of the prior titles were given extra depth and oomph, with giant 3D bridges, cities, and some environments that ditched copy-pasted trees and cave tilesets. Character sprites now scaled with a location-based camera system to make better use of the hardware— do things that you couldn’t do on a 2D system. Battles were spiced up with animated ragdoll sprites that, while controversial in some circles, have proven to be a favorite element of Pokémon creators and enthusiasts.

Though, the make-or-break feature was largely the designs. Ones that were often subject to intense backlash, but at this point, as a high schooler who went through their own stint of losing interest in the series, I had accepted this as being cyclical. Yeah, yeah, the trash bag, ice cream cone, and gear Pokémon are all silly concepts. But y’all are trying to tell me that Diglett is peak design? Shut your mouth.

However, they also aspired to do more with its story. RSE attempted to tell an environmentalist story, one centrally about maintaining balance in nature, acknowledging the importance of our world, and how people’s avarice can lead to climate devastation. DPPt built upon the underlying mythology of the series. Establishing a proper creation myth and telling a story of a disenfranchised man trying to remake the world in his image, or at least escape to a world that makes sense to him. While Black and White’s story is considerably more character centric and clearly about a broader theme. It’s about the balance of power in the world of Pokémon, the bonds between trainers and their Pokémon as companions, and finding even ground between truth and ideals. All of which is very JRPG of its era, but represents a maturity of concepts and gives the narrative more teeth.

Rather than celebrate this shift, it was met with a more mixed reception. Critically lauded as per usual, and selling well by all accounts, other than prior premiere Pokémon games. However, the very online fanbase found no shortage of things to whine about it. Thus leading Game Freak to reassess their future plans. Communications from the Teraleak assert that Game Freak was immediately disappointed with online reactions to the game in September 2010, and chose to pivot their plans for future titles. They shortened Generation V from the established 4 year cycle to just 3 years, deciding that the next game would focus heavily on nostalgia to get back exiting fans. This ultimately led to Pokémon X and Y, and I have a whole Ramble talking about the game’s merits, missteps, and shortcomings.

In retrospect, Black and White— and their sequels— are seen as some of the best games in the series. A claim that I agreed with, as I considered Pokémon Black my favorite in the series from 2011 to 2022, when it was dethroned by my beloved Arceus. Now, going back to these games 15 years after I initially played them, I have far more mixed thoughts on them. Partially due to my more matured way of playing these games, future games in the series changing how I view Pokémon, and my ability to better appreciate what it was aiming to do narratively.

As you can assuredly tell by the excessive length of this TWO PART article, I have a LOT of thoughts on this game.

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Part 02: Grow Up and See The World

Pokémon Black and White has a clear theme that it regularly imposes upon the player. Acknowledging different perspectives and expanding one’s worldview. With every major beat of the game’s story circles back to this load-bearing pillar in some way. We see this with the game’s opening, as before the protagonist has the opportunity to leave their bedroom they are greeted by their childhood friends, about to begin a journey, together, with the expressed goal of seeing the world.

While this sounds familiar, it is remarkably different from what came before it. Kanto and Johto just treat the act of going out as a thing you are expected to do. Hoenn is about a new kid who just moved in being thrust into a journey. Sinnoh is about two kids who get handed, or snag, a pair of Pokémon through happenstance. But Black and White is explicitly about a group of friends going on a journey across their homeland for various reasons. Broadly surmised as self-discovery, for these adolescents to figure out what they want to do and who they want to be in this world of Pokémon.

These two friends, Cheren and Bianca are probably the best “rival” characters in the series, because they aren’t rivals. They are people the protagonist is journeying with. If Pokémon were a traditional RPG, they would be party members, co-protagonists with mutual goals who help drive the events of the plot and speak for the silent protagonist. With each offering a different perspective.

Cheren is analytical, determined, intrinsically motivated, goal oriented and wishes to understand the world on a practical and mechanical level. He wants to be the best he can be, but he’s also not rude or a jerk about it. The protagonist is his friend, he wishes to compare his admirable progress against their miraculous progress, and continues to strive for the best, aiming to become an ideal trainer. However, as he adventures, as he sees more of the world, he reflects on this desire and what he wants. Why does he want strength, how will he use it, and what does he plan on doing after becoming a champion level trainer? All questions the game urges the player to ask for themself. Why are they playing this game, what are they getting out of it, and how do their goals align with the goals of the protagonists?

The player’s goals are, naturally, open-ended. However, all of Cheren’s answers are made clear in the subsequent game, where he eventually chooses the path of academics and teaching the art of Pokémon battles to others, adopting the role of a gym leader.

Bianca, by comparison, is a lot flightier and extrinsically motivated. She likes Pokémon, but is not a great battler and is more here for the adventure. The opportunity to see more places, form connections, and gain meaningful experiences. She’s not as regimented, a bit clumsy, and is neither as adept nor skillful as either of her companions. Yet she still carries on for her own reasons, uses what power she has to protect people, and assists them whenever she can. She ends the story with a renewed love of the world and Pokémon, yet similarly pursues academics, becoming her professor’s assistant, letting her study the world in a way that does not involve the rigor, competition, and math of battle.

I find their characterization and arcs to be very clean and complimentary. Especially after X and Y attempted to expand upon this with their expanded 5 person Scooby Gang, yet proceeded to nearly halve the amount of relevant scenes and battles. And I even appreciate it after Legends: Z-A delivered some of the best characters in the series as, well, Cheren and Bianca are more ingrained into the broader story.

Throughout their entire journey across Unova, through main cutscenes, through NPC conversations, the game constantly imposes the player to soak in the world around them. Taking in different perspectives, learning about why people view things the way they do, and understanding both sides of an argument. Its message is that one should maintain an open mind, question preconceptions, and acknowledge the breadth and diversity of the world at large to make oneself a better, stronger person. A great message in general, and an especially admirable one for a title targeting such a wide and impressionable audience.

To facilitate this, they also made Unova the most diverse region thus far. While it starts tranquil enough in a humdrum forest town, the game really opens up after the player crosses Skyarrow Bridge into Castelia City, the bustling urban heart of the region. One whose demands can be seen and felt throughout the rest of the region. Route 4, to the north of Castelia, is a desert with the ruins of a prior civilization, yet the demands of industry see these ruins being partitions, possibly destroyed. Not out of avarice, but through the demands of civilization, dictating that there needs to be roads connecting the entire region.

The entertainment capital of Nimbasa City that reveals that people do play regular sports in Pokémon world. There is an airport that, while far away from the city center, imposes real infrastructure upon this world in a way that I find fitting. The main dungeons aren’t just random caves, but areas for mining, and harvesting resources, full of workers doing their jobs and only taking a quick break to battle. Sure, Chargestone Cave is fantastical with its floating electric rocks, but I love how Twist Mountain is just a rock quarry that tries to balance both the demands of industry and the need to maintain the natural habitat of Pokémon.

Every city has their own building styles. Every location has some hook or gimmick to make them seem unique or memorable. And the character of each location is only enhanced by the soundtrack, delivering some of the catchiest town themes in the series.

After criticisms of gym leaders just being people who stand in rooms all day and don’t do much of anything, Black and White make a conscious effort to give every gym leader a job and a role in society overall. Restaurant owners and chefs. Historian and museum owner. An acclaimed artist who actively goes after injustice. A fashionista who… also helps run a theme park, I guess. A Texas oil tycoon who fancies himself a cowboy when he’s just a CEO. A pilot who runs a small airfield, presumably travels the world, and somehow finds time for gym battles. A genre film star who gets a more involved role in the sequel games. And a… politician or child, depending on your version.

Pretty much all of them have some agency over the plot— except the chefs, they don’t exist outside of their tutorial restaurant. While the Elite Four are… basically fancy statues. Which is still a step-up for the series. They used to be middling statues!

The elements of its story, of its setting, feel cohesive in a way that I found remarkable upon revisiting this game. So many things feed into each other without obscuring or obfuscating something else, and these ideals feed so well into Pokémon as a series that it’s an almost obvious fit in retrospect.

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Part 03: The Political Prowess of Team Plasma

…Then there is Team Plasma. While I was never a fan of their complete nonsense name, is easily the most well-thought-out team in the series. Team Plasma’s stated goal is to liberate Pokémon. To free them from the shackles of Poké Balls, allow them to self-actualize, and pursue their own desires, even if it means separating the human and Pokémon world. A radical idea that has at least some basis and rational thought behind it. Pokémon are autonomous conscious beings with their own thoughts and feelings, and depending on the species can display intelligence far beyond that of a domesticated dog. Choosing to capture them, subjugate them to battle, and work for humans while only being compensated with food/shelter can sound pretty immoral if given the right affect.

Their presence, their underlying argument, encourages players to think critically about this world, about the status quo, and the feelings of the Pokémon themselves. What is the actual reality of this world, the underlying truth? How should it function, under what ideals? Is there actually any systematic subjection at play here, or do Pokémon like it? Naturally, the game does not go as far as it could, as it is ultimately a product of a multibillion dollar corporation, and it needs to keep things palatable to kids. The idea is at least entertained. The people of Unova express doubt and concern over the established order, and the members of Team Plasma have a wide variety of different reasons for pursuing their goals.

Some crave the power of structure and freedom to steal, abuse and throw their weight around, wanting power to make them feel good. People who are too dumb to be cops and not principled enough to be anything more than grunts. Some were caught in the hubbub and joined out of a matter of hype and social pressure, not really questioning things too deeply, and going with the flow, as many genres of person wanton do. Some see the truth espoused by the organization beyond its facade or ideals, and want to be part of a new world order. While others fully and utterly believe the ideals as truths, thinking that, while their methods might need some work, these ideals are solid and should justify any action. After all, it is for a good reason. All of which are perspectives you see in any type of authority-driven political organization.

All of which is preface to N. I think that N is the most interesting character in the entire series. He is such a curious individual with an immense gift and an upbringing that forged him into a unique individual with a perspective so different it’s hard to understand. Orphaned by his parents, he was raised among Pokémon in the wilderness before being abducted by Team Plasma who, recognizing his gifts, proceeded to groom him into their king. With instruction by his father figure, Ghetsis, and (barely existant) mother figures Anthea and Concordia, he was given a curated and limited education, denied a normal upbringing, and only allowed to be form bonds with abused Pokémon.

At the start of the game, N firmly believes that the world can be divided in black and white, that humans are all abusers, Pokémon need salvation, and that it is his birthright to save them through any means necessary. That coexistence is impossible with such a long lineage of domination. And that while Pokémon may be used to further his goal of liberation, it will be a final transgression, necessary to usher in a glorious world. He does want what is best for the world, but in his hunger for change, he is willing to destroy everything.

This may seem like a hyperbolic and unrealistic background, but I’d argue that it has always been pertinent and is even more pronounced today. Across the world, there are probably a growing number of people just like N. The rise in homeschooling and school vouchers across America allows students skirt past public schools in favor of a biased and limited education. The politicization of education, in general, is doing wonders to skew the minds of impressionable kids.

Spiteful and frightful parents are denying their children the opportunity to engage with others, to even know those they share a local community with. All with the goal of socially isolating them, of denying them different views until their views are crystallized into something that cannot be changed without shattering them. It’s something encouraged by the Alt Right, and something that has only become a broader societal problem with the rise in online propaganda disguised as education.

People like N, who have great gifts but are denied the opportunity to set their own desires, can be limited by many things. However, one of the most common and insidious is the parents. A lot of parents, even in the modern era, view their children as property, as tools, and raise them to further their interests, denying them self-actualization via… the methods I just described. It’s a real, subtle, evil that is so extreme nowadays that it’s hard to even parody it. Which is part of the reason why I find Ghetsis to be the most compelling antagonist in the series.

Ghetsis is a real piece of shit. His goal is overtly to claim all Pokémon, all power in this world, for himself. To destroy the concept of unity and connections, to render people not part of a broader society, but a collection of strangers without a common reference point and with neither the means nor knowledge of how to fight back. He is not trying to accumulate capital, or reshape the world, or make his own little isolation chamber. He just wants the power to dominate because he believes his own hype, that he should be the real king of all.

Rather than abstain subtlety from the start, Ghetsis presents himself as arguing in good faith. When really all he was doing was advocating for a societal reform that would benefit him and him alone. He is no different from a billionaire arguing for tax cuts and austerity. He is no different from a politician claiming that militarized police and arrest quotas will make neighborhoods safer. He is a man who believes that his freedom is wholly unique and supplants the freedom and will of others.

Ghetsis is scum, because he scarily resembles the antagonists of reality. He is a deceiver, he is an abuser, he is a groomer, he manipulates those with great gifts, indoctrinates them into an ideology designed to keep them subservient, and insults their very humanity if they dare to defy him. I HATE Ghetsis so much, because he is barely different from the cabal of White Supremacist patriarchal billionaire pedophiles who are hellbent on maintaining their societal dominance.

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Part 04: Where The Story Falters

As those 2,000 plus words should illustrate, I REALLY like the story of Black and White. But there are certain elements about it that rub me the wrong way. Most of these are more mechanical, but I do want to add to what I said about Team Plasma.

I have been taking a very political lens in analyzing its goals and perspectives, because it’s often so overt It’s not even subtext, it’s just text. And also because I find the game’s political perspective… to be very much shaded by the era it was made in.

The story’s themes and message are particularly resonant to the ideals and themes I saw populate culture going on at the time and were an underlying through line across my education. Tolerance, coexistence, neoliberal optimism about the future if we all band together. A push for accepting other people even if they have different political opinions. There was a rise in gesturing towards progressive politics while seldom ever implementing them. Just giving them enough lip service to placate the masses with the idea that things were getting better when they, materially, were not. Well, beyond growing cultural acceptance and a few level W’s, like all of those countries that legalized gay marriage. (Not Japan though, thanks America.)

However, as we saw— at least those who are my age and older— it’s not a good idea to let anybody have a seat at the table of discourse. Not all perspectives are worth listening to. Some people are just evil, are just bad, and will use the disguise of debate to further their own goals. The game somewhat acknowledges this with Ghetsis’s reveal during the final hour of the game, but the situation around Team Plasma presents him as a bad apple. A founder who went too far. While presenting the organization as something with good ideas and dignity. When… no. Team Plasma is a terrorist organization.

Team Plasma was explicitly a few key presses away from destroying the Pokémon storage system and causing a mass panic event across the entire region. They stole Pokémon, enslaved Pokémon to build their castle, held impromptu rallies across the entire region, and engaged in a laundry list of crimes. You cannot go a town without these guys butting in somewhere. Does that mean they weren’t worth listening to and NONE of their ideas worth engaging with? …No. Yet the fact that they are given as much sway and lenience, that the organization even exists in its sequel, is a questionable choice. People who actively try to harm innocents do not have perspectives worth listening to. Any organization responsible for half of the bad crap Team Plasma got up to ought to be abolished, with their leaders imprisoned.

I don’t even believe in jail in most instances, but for a group who conspired to harm an entire nation, and nearly achieved their goals? It’s either that or calling out a firing squad on its leaders. Just the leaders though.

Next, let’s address a technical problem that I’ve really never hammered home in my years of yapping about Pokémon games. The main Pokémon games often don’t have enough space to display a damn sentence at once. Simply put, the games only allow themselves to display two lines of text when characters are speaking. This is fine for most pieces of dialogue, but not all of them. A lot of story relevant dialogue is spread out over more than two lines, and in order to read the later half, you need to remove the first (and sometimes second) line from the screen. This makes the dialogue harder to read and grasp, as you are not able to fully read a sentence at once. I don’t think this is an issue that people would consciously notice, but as someone who is weird about how text is presented, this really diminishes the reading experience. Same with how text speed is managed.

Pokémon games have had variable text speed since their inception, but it’s always had this peculiar gulf between medium and fast speeds. Either the text moves slower than I can read it, making even routine actions, like interacting with random NPCs, feel like a burden. Or the text goes by very quickly, in a way that practically encourages a non-speed-reader player to mash forward to the next line.

I dunno, maybe I’m just spoiled by the ability to set text speeds in visual novels and their girthy dialog boxes, but this just struck me as a deeply suboptimal reading experience. And no, older games did not just “do this.” Look at an old Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy game, ya dingus! I’ll concede and say this was more common on Game Boy, but this isn’t a Game Boy game. This is a DS game. And Pokémon is still doing this crap in its Switch games. It is just a bad way to present a story, and if the story is poorly presented, people will think it’s a bad story.

I also cannot discuss the themes of Black and White without acknowledging its online features. Communication is a pillar of Pokémon, and Black and White aimed to take that to a new level with constant online connectivity via the C-Gear feature. Via the Dream World where people could raise and acquire new Pokémon and myriad items. And through in-game locations designed around the idea of players connecting, meeting each other passively. Places where people could enjoy a shared digital world, slap on a new form, and share perspectives… in their own limited way. Or, at least, that’s how I think it worked.

You see, Black and White came out before I had Wi-Fi in my house, and as an eMac user, I just assumed this was a Windows only feature. Plus, while I liked Pokémon, I was not as invested in the series as I once was and did not want to muck around with some web service. So I cannot regale you with tales of how great it was to be part of one shared world. Besides, that whole shared worlds concept was already going to be limited by the six months it took for the games to be localized.

I said this before with Pokémon X and Y, but the concept of people playing a Pokémon game together, sharing an online layer of reality, and navigating it using the bottom screen of the DS was brilliant. The sense of being surrounded by others, even if it was superficial, does a lot to sell the themes these games are founded on. The problem is that this core element of the game, this mechanical extension of its narrative, only got to last a few years before service started being dismantled in 2014.

This loss leaves the games inherently lesser than they were before, mechanically limited, with a feature that has been broken for a decade. Staring at players in the face whenever they look at the bottom screen outside of menus. It makes the game feel empty, reminds them that they are playing this game alone, and that the prime version of this game will not and cannot ever be achieved again.

The loss of these features weakens the story and… weakens the game as a whole.

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Part 05: A Bold New Era

Next, let’s move onto the mechanics. Pokémon Black and White are landmark entries in the series that did much to change the underlying math of Pokémon and how the games are played. The entire roster of Pokémon before the postgame is all new to create a fresh experience for new and old players alike, while giving Game Freak the opportunity to balance a new region. The battle system was reworked to something that feels revolutionary after the static sprites of Gen IV games, with animated sprites and semi-3D environments. The game is generally forgiving, with infinite use TMs, small opponent team sizes, and well-placed solutions to most major battles in the game. The EXP distribution is WAY more generous to make grinding easier. And the experience is linear, streamlined, and largely faster.

There are a lot of changes to make this game feel fresh after what came before it and, at the time, it felt like a major step forward in terms of quality of life features and presentation. In retrospect however, many of its purported goals are undermined or at odds with each other. Questionable minor decisions add up to create an experience that felt too uneven for my liking. If I were to catalog the things that I wish were different without being transformative… I would end up with a full game design document for a ROM hack.

Don’t get it twisted now. There are a lot of things that Black and White get right, but the devil’s in the details, and whoever came up with the details of this game was on something strong.

…Not strong as in something good, as in something that inhibits their ability to— ah screw it. Next section!

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Part 06: The Unova Pokédex

The Unova Pokédex is probably the most questionable out of the entire series. Not in terms of Pokémon designs, but its weird attempts at achieving balance.

Not to bury the lead, but I’ve actually prepared a supplemental article where I analyze every Unovan Pokémon evolutionary line usable in Black and White, assessing how useful they would be in the campaign, what they can contribute, and the investment required to incorporate them into a team. In doing this, I have reached several conclusions about the Unova Pokédex, and… they are not particularly nuanced or new.

Black and White represent a transitional stage between the scattershot learnsets of Pokémon in early generations and the more heavily curated learnsets they have in modern games. While some Pokémon learn moves at a good steady pace, a lot of them learn moves way too late to be useful in the main campaign, or just don’t naturally learn them at all. You might think that this Pokémon could or should learn a move, but no, it turns out that was a change in a subsequent generation.

Pokémon evolution levels in this game are just out of control. Stage one Pokémon across the board are pretty weak in Unova, and they largely take longer to evolve than what feels appropriate. Unova has the lowest level cap of any region in the series other than the Johto titles, with final boss’s ace only being level 54, yet it clearly has some of the highest level up requirements for evolution.

Basic Pokémon found at level 19 won’t evolve until level 34 or 39. Pokémon found when you finally get access to Surf will be found at level 25 but won’t evolve until they reach level 40. There are only 25 Pokémon that evolve past level 43, and 10 of them are from Unova. There are other times when Pokémon don’t evolve until stupidly late, like Muk at level 38 and Dragalge at level 48, but it is CONSTANTLY a thing in Unova. 43 Pokémon don’t evolve until after level 30. The second highest are Gen III Pokémon, where 25 don’t evolve until after level 30. The average evolution level of all Gen V Pokémon is 35.6. I can spit facts for an hour. But no matter what stats I spit out, it looks awful.

Furthermore, as a Pokédex, Unova is a very strangely organized collection of critters. Especially if you ignore the unobtainable Zorua/Zoroark and all legendaries, bringing the usable Pokémon down to 143 Pokémon dex. This is comparable to Kanto and the original Sinnoh Pokédex, yet there is a diversity problem in the available Pokémon, with certain types being over or underrepresented and oodles of mono types. Which is generally fine, but can make it harder to fill in gaps in one’s team. Let me just go over some fun statistics I noticed:

• The most common type is Grass with 19 Pokemon. 10 of which are mono Grass types, in a region where Grass type does not have a lot of good matchups
• The second most common type is Bug at 17, which is just kind of insane on the face of it.
• The third most common type is Water at a mere 16, leading to pretty significant Water shortages in many playthroughs.
• There are only 11 Fighting types, two are part of the Tepig line, 7 are mono Fighting, and the other line is the Scraggy line.
• There are 10 mono Psychic types and 3 Psychic/Flying types, with no additional psychic types except for Zen Mode Darmanitan.
• There are only 6 Ice types, and all of them lack a secondary type, making this the worst showing for the Ice type in series history… except for Hoenn, maybe.

It’s clear to me that Game Freak was emphasizing design over type diversity, but without existing Pokémon to plug into this game, certain types have a dearth of options. They have just enough to facilitate a wide number of team compositions. However, accounting for how many of these Pokémon are starters, sub-starters, version exclusives, difficult to use, and late game Pokémon, the pool of useful Pokémon feels a lot smaller than it should be. It’s not as bad as the Staraptor, Luxray, Roserade, and Floatzel homogeny of the Sinnoh games, but there are definitely avenues for optimization that just weren’t taken.

I also want to make a note on Pokémon distribution before I leave. I can see what the developers were aiming for… but I think they were being WAY too conservative. Starting out, the tutorial area and first gym are highly limited with their roster of available Pokémon, just consisting of the starters, the elemental monkeys, Lillipup, Patrat, Purrloin, and Munna. Types are only slightly a factor here, and the player is not expected to acknowledge them until they take on the gym leader with their monkey friend. Then the game opens up with more types. Flying, Rock, Electric, Water, and Fighting. Before introducing Bug and Grass. It’s all very deliberately trying to introduce the type chart to the player without ever just giving them a type chart.

Unfortunately, dishing out Pokémon so slowly leads to many Pokémon appearing too late in the game to be useful additions to one’s team. There are eight non-legendary evolutionary lines that cannot be obtained until after defeating the seventh gym. Which is higher than pretty much any game before this. Hoenn had three— Clampearl, Relicanth, and Beldum. Sinnoh had none. Kanto had none, because Kanto. Kalos had no new Pokémon after that— plenty of oldies though. This is a problem unique to Unova.

It’s a flawed distribution system that compounds with other issues to make a game where you don’t want to experiment with new Pokémon, and where you want to plan things out in advance. It is not a game for casual spontaneous play. Instead, it pretty much expects you to go through the game with an external resource in hand. Otherwise, you’re going to spend a lot of time building up a Pokémon… and not have much to show for it. Because Pokémon in this game are an investment. Not as much as in certain earlier games. (Looking at you, Johto.) But getting your hands on good Pokémon is a problem… and so is EXP.

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Part 07: The EXP Problem

The Pokémon games are arguably the densest turn-based RPGs ever created, and by extension, its balance as an RPG is kind of all over the place. There are countless different ways to play the game between movesets, party members, and specific strategies that players wish to employ. Yet every game also is balanced and structured as a mostly linear RPG, where the player is expected to achieve certain feats at certain points to keep up with the challenges demanded by the game.

The player should be level X at point Y, and that is commonly recognized by the level of the gym leader’s highest level Pokémon, dictating what it means to be or to not be “overleveled.” The game expects the player to reach these levels to handle these feats without too much difficulty, and it similarly does not expect them to become hilariously overleveled. This design decision is reinforced by the changes to the EXP system in Black and White, which now scales EXP based on a Pokémon’s level. A level 20 Pokémon fighting a level 2 Pokémon will get reduced EXP, while a level 20 Pokémon fighting a level 25 will probably gain a full level’s worth of EXP.

None of this is unique to Pokémon, this is largely how RPGs and games with level-scaled enemies tend to operate. However, the act of leveling up in Pokémon is decently complicated. EXP is purely a tool to achieve levels and EXP is dictated by the level of your Pokémon, their EXP growth rate, the opponent Pokémon, their level, if they are a wild Pokémon or trainer Pokémon, and their EXP yield rate. Changing any one of these can have intensive effects on any number of things, and complicates the process of mapping out any leveling system. Though, the general rule is that if you defeat a lot of strong Pokémon owned by trainers, you will get a lot of EXP. If you battle wild early game fodder, you will get jack squat.

I’m belaboring this point for the sake of clarity, and to remind you, the reader, of how the EXP system in Pokémon used to work before X and Y introduced the EXP Share. A move that made grinding utterly unnecessary and turned overleveling into a real risk. This puts Black and White into a more murky area. It is not easy to be drastically underleveled due to low EXP yield opportunities. It’s not easy to become crazy overleveled. Yet the balance still is not perfectly achieved.

As an overly detailed example, the area between the first and second gym is pretty well-designed conceptually. The player is funneled into one route with a scattering of trainers, a small cave with two story battles, and an optional secondary route with another half dozen trainers and new Pokémon. A player is seemingly given all the EXP they need to keep their team of level 12-14s to levels 18-20 between wild encounters and the likely chance they will run into an Audino. A wild Pokémon with the highest EXP yield of any in the game, making them an ideal Pokémon to grind on. …Wait.

However, that requires a level of diligence, awareness, and planning on behalf of the player. They need to be aware of what type a gym has, what wild Pokémon are available, and balance the EXP distribution among their party of six Pokémon. Because back in this era, EXP was not distributed among the party unless they participated in battle. And in Black and White, you don’t get the EXP Share held item until a bit before the third gym.

So, take this scenario and assume that the player decides they want to use a Timburr to take on the Normal type gym. They found one in the tall grass, where it appears at levels 12 to 15, and say this one happened to be level 14. Early on in the game, the gulf between levels is most severely felt, so that is a bit too low to take on a level 20 Pokémon with a 420 base stat total versus Timburr’s 305.

Even with super effective moves, STAB Normal type moves from a base 80 attack stat still hurt. So it would be necessary to raise Timburr up to a higher level, get some extra stat points, and a few Effort Value points to even its stats out. By the time the player can get a Timburr, there are 18 potential trainer Pokémon, levels 13 to 17. If a level 14 Timburr is used to battle most of them, they should handily reach at least level 18 at that point.

…But what about the other five Pokémon in the player’s party, who might be around level 15/16 by the time they reach this point? Well, without a party-wide EXP Share, they don’t get anything unless they participate in battle, so they would wind up sucking EXP from Timburr, and likely would not be able to all reach level 18 at that point. At this point, most trainers have early game Pokémon with a pretty paltry EXP yield. It is definitely possible to remain around the level of the gym leader’s team. This would require selectively distributing EXP, only occasionally swapping out members of a team, and being content with bringing in one or three Pokémon who are underleveled, but might not be good for this encounter.

It is very possible to win under these circumstances, but just eking out a victory does not necessarily feel good either. Even if something can be done mathematically, a success can still feel like a failure. Failure to complete the challenge efficiently, a victory coming with sloppy results. Failure to prepare adequately and going in without the tools you needed to succeed, despite the game giving them to you. Failure by relying too much on consumable resources— only beating a boss by spamming healing items or buffs. And failure to keep one’s Pokémon from fainting. Which is bad as fainting denies them EXP, lowers their friendship by an insignificant metric, and… feels pretty crappy.

This is a children’s game, so why are you failing at any point, you stupid box of clams? A child knows not to try to fight a level 30 with a level 25. The bigger number is going to win, so play the game properly and grind. This is not even a Pokémon thing. This is a thing from the broader world of RPGs, any game with level scaled enemies, or just games in general. And I’m not going to give it any special treatment because “you don’t need to be a high enough level.”

Now, I initially wrote all of this early on in my playthrough, but going through this game reminded me of an easy to forget factoid that I forgot after playing so many modern Pokémon games. In the first five generations of Pokémon, you’re not supposed to be raising a full party at once. You are supposed to have a full team of six during the end of the game, of course. Unfortunately, the EXP economy of these games is not designed around the player constantly swapping in and out new party members, like it is in the 3DS era and beyond. It is designed around the idea that you will have a few core members that you build up and add to, maybe with a flex spot to help deal with a gym or tricky challenge.

This is a VERY easy thing for players to forget when going back to these titles. The universal EXP Share is a quality of life feature that removes the onboarding costs of new Pokémon, encourages experimentation, and makes it relatively easy to incorporate weaker team members. Hell, what am I saying relatively? It’s almost effortless to nurse a Pokémon into something better. The modern system is a lot less annoying, with the main issue being the matter of overleveling and making the game less interesting as a result. I think the safe solution for that system would be to just add a damn level cap— and even a freshman CS student could figure out how to do that.

Anyway, the EXP meta is not the best in the early game. They always give the player access to some routes and trainers they can face to get a few levels in, and there are some optional areas strewn about for players lagging behind. Unfortunately, running a full team will leave the player hungry for EXP until around Skyla’s gym. This is when wild Pokémon levels scale up, EXP yields get higher, and the game opens up with several optional areas that are a great help for players finalizing their team.

The EXP game is seemingly fixed… until the Elite Four, which all sport a level 50 ace, implying that the player should bring level 50s in. Though, wich every member having at least 460 BST, and most having diverse movesets enhanced by TMs inaccessible by the player, a bit of overleveling is warranted depending on how janked up one’s team is. The problem is that there is no great grinding spot beyond random Victory Road encounters, which cap at level 42 and only Heatmor and Durant are really worth fighting, having twice the base yield as any other encounter. …Look, I get that there is a longstanding tradition of grinding for five hours to take on the final boss in an RPG, but some traditions are stupid, bad, lame, and poopy. This is all of those.

You can burn time, struggle with your faves, raise up some legendaries, or cheese it up with stat boosting items to do some setup strats like a damn speedrunner. There is a reason why people even doing CHALLENGE RUNS of these games just use Rare Candies so they can hit level cap and have a good time that way.

Oh, and now is a good time to add that the final boss battle is surprisingly difficult due to the lack of EXP. It’s two back-to-back battles, both against opponents with SIX Pokémon, in a campaign where fighting a trainer with FOUR Pokémon is an occasion, against kitted out Pokémon levels 50 to 54. NOTHING prepares you for this, and there is no good way to get past this other than lose and raise up your new box art legendary, completely breaking the flow of the story. That is what real ludonarrative dissonance looks like!

Like, have a Plasma Grunt with three level 40 Audinos or something who you can repeatedly battle before these final encounters. That would help a lot of players take on Ghetsis’s Hydreigon without getting too overpowered.

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Part 08: The Unova Journey

Next, let’s talk about Unova as a region, as it represented a curious point in the series’ history and Game Freak’s ability to make the most out of the hardware given to them. Pokémon’s fourth generation was, compared to many other series that made the transition to the DS, rather underwhelming. The environments still had iconic elements, flourishes, and the series’ signature vibes, but the games often looked like souped up GBA games. Especially on original hardware. They were iterative despite being on a system that could almost run Super Mario 64.

Black and White saw this and decided that they needed to push the envelope. After some experiments with a 3D world, they decided to maintain the 2.5D approach of prior games, but to make it overt. With more visual effects, pronounced 3D architecture and polygonal objects, and a camera system that added to the grandiosity of the world and make it seem further realized.

Bridges feature trucks and cars zooming on by while paved asphalt on routes give the impression that cars can and do drive across the entire region. The shifting cameras of various gyms and dungeons add an appreciated level of dynamism to the adventure. The 3D Castelia City, the Ferris wheel, the structure of the mountainous Victory Road. Even the sandstorm effects of Route 4 and the Desert Resort feel like things that could not have been done in prior games. All of which is before getting into the real time day night cycle and how the carefully chosen lighting changes the tone and texture of the world. Or how the underlying aesthetic of Unova is affected by a feature exclusive to the region. Seasons.

I both love and hate seasons in these games, as I feel that people going through this game are only ever going to experience one or two rather than all four, and it’s generally harder to compare them. Yes, the differences are largely minor, but the devil’s in the details and just tweaking the color of the grass and trees, adding a fog effect, can do a lot to change the character of a location and what it feels like to travel through it. It almost makes me wish for a region where seasons changed rapidly à la The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons.

The visuals and vibes of Unova are great, and it’s easy to see why this region is so fondly remembered, but this is more of a game design analysis than a world design analysis, so let me get back to it.

As a region, the map design in Unova is strange. On one hand, there was a concerted effort to make the games more linear and harder to get lost in. Which is fair, as I can easily imagine kids with bad memories getting lost in Sinnoh because of its backtracking, slowness, and questionable roadblocks. However, Game Freak also wanted to create a region that functions as a hub world of sorts for a large online push and make it the literal center of the world. The end result is a region where exploration feels more limited, by virtue of map design, even though it actually isn’t. And a world where a significant chunk is locked off to the postgame. And not some disconnected island like in Platinum. Like, a third of the game’s world is postgame exclusive.

You cannot visit Routes 11, 12, 13, 14, or 15 at all during the main campaign. Village Bridge, Lacunosa Town, Giant Chasm, Undella Town, Marvelous Bridge, Challenger’s Cave, and the version exclusive Black City or White Forest. All of these are postgame adventures, and it’s just a strange way to pace the game, as otherwise the game follows a very steady formula. Go straight, run into some Team Plasma ne’er-do-wells, stomp their butts, then go on with the next route, dungeon, and gym leader. It’s a game that very much wants the player to go through it fast, laying the foundation for a breezy experience that should lend itself well to multiple playthroughs (emphasis on should). But at the cost of backporting a lot of the game’s content to after the credits.

There are optional areas. The exterior of Pinwheel Forest, the bulk of Desert Resort, Route 16 and the Lostlorn Forest. Hell, after the sixth badge players get the freedom to explore several sizable bonus areas with Routes 17, 18, P2 Laboratory, Wellspring Cave, Mistralton Cave, the Moor of Icirrus, and a small Pinwheel Forest expansion. And while one might consider this to be too linear, it really isn’t. This is pretty typical for games in the series, opening up during the mid-game while having some minor side stuff early on.

If it ever feels like freedom is inhibited, that might be because of all the areas you cannot go to, and the fact that the region expects you to fly to travel around. There’s no central artery à la Saffron, Ecruteak, Mauville, Lumiose, Mr. Coronet that make the game feel like a more realized place. Which is funny for a region loosely based on New York City, a city with a pretty developed transit system by American standards. (Which is like saying someone’s the smartest kid in a remedial class.)

It all makes for a curiously designed region that I don’t think fully commits to the broader theme of seeing and experiencing the world as well as it could have. With a limited dex and a stronger story focus, I can’t say this was a mistake. The railroading, retreads, and deluge of postgame areas in Black 2 and White 2 though? …That probably was a mistake.

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Part 09: TM Distribution

Black and White represented a huge change for the series by making TMs infinite use items. A trend that was disrupted with SWSH and Scarlet and Violet, but has returned as a core element of progression in PLZA and will hopefully return in future titles. The reason I think this was so remarkable is that it wildly changed players’ relationships to Pokémon movesets. No longer were TMs these coveted resources with an immense amount of cost behind them, a thing where you would only get ONE copy per game. You could now teach them to as many Pokémon as you wanted, no charge.

I love this change. It eliminated a flavor of decision paralysis that discouraged players from experimenting with movesets. It took a “but I might need that later” and made it as permanent as can be. However, the way the developers distributed TMs, the way they introduced them to players, was pretty questionable.

There is no exact science of how TMs should be distributed in Pokémon. The series is full of contradictory experimentation with no cohesive vision. You could go into Whitney’s gym in HeartGold with a Pokémon that knew Focus Blast. Bulk Up went from being a TM from defeating Brawly in Ruby to a post-game unlock that took hours of work in Diamond. Surf has zero consistency in the series, despite being such a staple move.

Some may say that this is deliberate, to give the games quirks, to give them imbalance for the sake of friction, to discourage them from certain approaches and to emphasize others. To which I say… don’t assume that the creator is a genius. The people making these games probably don’t have the cushy development timelines needed to rigorously playtest their games for the optimal experience. There may be a different dude in charge of TM distribution across every project. And in design, not every choice is deliberate.

Assuming the goal is to create a balanced experience, it would be ideal to distribute TMs regularly. You would want to gradually increase their power, give the player a wide variety of tools to play with, and make every TM useful in some capacity, while relegating the strongest or more niche picks to the endgame/postgame. …And that is not at all what Pokémon Black and White do. Instead, they are on some hot nonsense.

In the early game, leading up to the first three badges, TMs are given very carefully. Cut is the first TM the player is given, which is just a less accurate Tackle in this generation. They get the attack buffing move Work Up as their first TM, showing that the developers want the player to use buffing moves and value them. Then the moves Thief and Rock Smash are given away early on. This makes sense, as pre-buff Thief is a utility move and the game already gave the player ample access to Dark type moves with the initial roster. It’s not imbalanced in any way. While Rock Smash is given out to help with the second gym of Normal types with a 40 base power (BP) super effective move that has a 50% chance to drop a target’s Defense.

The second gym’s reward is Retaliate, a surprisingly strong 70 BP Normal move whose power can be doubled, only restricted by its low PP count. It’s better than Tackle, but you can only use it five times, and it is best used when a foe faints another party member, which you generally don’t want to happen. While a good move, it’s hard to incorporate a move like this in a campaign playthrough.

Then the player is given Grass Knot in Pinwheel Forest, with Grass Knot being basically Low Kick but a Special Grass type move. It offers coverage but, much like in Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum, the player is not really given good instructions on how to use it, how it scales, or when to use it. It’s a 40 BP Grass move on most early game foes, and it’s easy for the to conclude that this move just sucks.

Castelia City is a bit odd, as the TMs given out there are Rest, Attract, and Flash. A series of staple utility moves, but nothing too exciting, nothing that adds power, leading up to gym three’s Struggle Bug. This marked the debut of Struggle Bug as a move, and it is a 30 BP move that decreases the target’s Special Attack. It’s weak, does not cater to the fact that most Bug types in this generation are physical attackers, and would later be buffed to 50 BP. The best option for this gym would have probably been the 70 BP physical U-Turn, but that would have arguably made the gym leader too powerful, like Bugsy’s Scyther in HeartGold and SoulSilver.

After completing the third gym, the early game if you will, Black and White open up considerably and give the player some actually useful TMs. Dig, Return, Rock Tomb (50 BP 80% accuracy), Thunder Wave, the screens, even Payback. Volt Switch is given as the first Electric type damaging move, though it can only be used by five Pokémon lines. Which is baffling after moves like Shock Wave and U-Turn had such liberal distribution. And a curious choice considering the player gets Charge Beam, arguably a weaker or worse move, right before the sixth gym.

Then the balance just completely falls apart around the fifth gym. This is when the player can find Scald, an 80 BP Water type move with a 30% chance to burn the target, arguably the best Water type move in the game. And Bulldoze, a 60 BP multi-hit Ground type move that lowers the target’s Speed by 1. A good move, but one that is simply weaker than Dig, and serves as the last Ground type TM the player gets until the postgame. Yeah, no Earthquake here, except for on Excadrill, Golurk, or an overleveled Krookodile. Then the player gets Fly as their first Flying type TM, only for them to quickly get three more over the next hour or two. Sky Drop, Acrobatics, and Aerial Ace. …I thought that Game Freak would look back at how players got Fly before getting Aerial Ace from Winona’s gym in RSE and find the distribution there questionable. Apparently not.

I’m belaboring the point, but there are questionable decisions on all fronts here. The only Fire type attacking TMs you can get in the campaign are Flame Charge and Fire Blast. With Flamethrower, Overheat, and the 30 BP Incinerate being postgame TMs. You can get Frost Breath, which can only be learned by the three Ice families, and Blizzard in the main campaign, but Ice Beam is postgame only and Icy Wind was still a move tutor exclusive. No damaging Psychic type TMs are available in the main game, with no Psyshock, no Psychic. The only damaging Dark type TMs are Thief and Payback after they replaced Dark Pulse with Frost Breath. (Snarl was never made available through official means, so it does not count.)

You get the Bug type X-Scissor and the Electric switching move Volt Switch, but the Bug type switching move U-Turn is only available in the postgame. While Work Up was the first TM players obtain, the game weirdly restricts ALL its other buffing moves to the postgame. They are THE reward for finding the six sages, putting a pretty high exploration cost behind them and relegating set up moves as a “postgame thing.”

I’m tempted to do some larger analysis of the entire series’ TM distribution to see if I can sense out what was going on here. To try to formulate a series of ideal rules and standards for TM distribution. Though I already know my ultimate conclusion would be frustrated squealing. Because it is just nonsense.

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Part 10: I Was Originally Going to Play Pokémon JetBlack

Going into this project, I knew I was going to have a couple criticisms with the game’s mechanical underbelly, and I did not really want to acknowledge them. I felt like what I had intended on saying about these games would have already been said, and that it would be boring for me to complain about certain balancing changes, learnset distributions, evolution requirements, or the games being pretty breezy beyond a few spikes of difficulty. (Only half of the game is breezy, the rest can be sorta tricky if you don’t plan properly)

I had already whined about these things enough in my X and Y Ramble, and initially wanted to focus more on the story, aesthetics, and journey of these games. So, I looked into the available ROM hacks of Pokémon Black and found one that seemed to fit the bill. Pokémon JetBlack. A ROM hack that promised to do four main things:

• Give various Pokémon additions to their base stat totals, making them more useful out the gate and allowing them to contribute throughout a playthrough.
• Revise and reimagine the move pool for pretty much every Pokémon, moving around moves, giving them new moves, and adjusting their TM learnsets.
• Expand Pokémon distribution while focusing only on Unova Pokémon, as otherwise that would risk betraying these games’ identity.
• Make the main challenges— gym leaders and rival battles— more difficult and complicated to add more challenge to a playthrough.

I don’t really care for the additional challenge, but after X and Y were such a cakewalk last year, it would offer some variety at the very least. …And unfortunately, the added challenge of this ROM hack is arguably its worst element, as the creator, EstrethAthema, had a rather peculiar philosophy on balance.

The designer was simply overzealous with certain early distribution, and while I think certain changes, others are more…perplexing. I love the idea of giving the Tepig line Fire Punch as a middle ground between Flame Charge and Heat Crash. I don’t particularly love how Purrloin learn Aerial Ace by level 11. A Pidove that learns Echoed Voice early on is far more interesting than a Pidove that only learns it as a TM after the third gym. Giving anything Power Up Punch by level 12 is just absurd. Herrdier naturally learning Return is crazy useful and feels spiritually accurate— in Platinum you get the Return TM along with your starter. And the very idea of giving the elemental monkey boss a STAB boosting held item and a base 60 power STAB move is… just kinda messed up.

Ultimately, JetBlack became a PITA before I got to the third gym and I decided to drop it and redo everything on an unmodified copy of Pokémon Black in a few hours. Its changes were too radical, and if I wanted a difficulty ROM hack, I would just play Blaze Black, thanksies.

It all left me wanting for more, wanting to see a rebalance of the game not with a competitive mindset, but a mindset that makes for a more engaging, fluid, and fun system. Where Pokémon are distributed a bit more liberally, where they have more extensive movesets across the board, where evolution levels don’t suck, and where every Pokémon can contribute something and be a reliable member to a team. I mean, a damn Audino is a good addition to a team in the base game, so everyone should be at least decent.

This pursuit of rebalancing Pokémon has been a fascination of mine for years at this point, and relates back to a side project of mine that may or may not see the light of day. After going through three Pokémon games over the past six months, after treating PokéTuber videos as my primary second screen non-political content for years, it’s something I find hard to not fixate on. And it leads me to a broader question:

What makes for a well-balanced Pokémon game?

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Part 11: The Pursuit of Balance

As I’ve said earlier in this Ramble, Pokémon is a highly complicated game series. Every aspect is worthy of introspection, but one of the trickier parts of its algebra, a factor that I don’t think even the designers fully grasped, has been how to balance a Pokémon game. The structure of the first eight generations is pretty much the same general mold. Get a starter, go through some routes, and fight eight gym leaders before venturing off to the Elite Four and fighting the champion, with some villainous teams, legendaries, and lore thrown in.

People seem to like this pattern— people LOVE patterns as a rule— but it often frustrates me how inconsistent these games are when it comes to balancing this experience. Not that I really blame Game Freak too much considering all the factors that go balancing these games. They need to determine how challenges are distributed. What’s the difficulty curve, where are the spikes in difficulty, what types are demanded when, where are the major encounters distributed, and how are the dungeons laid out? Well, assuming dungeons are a major part of the game— they sort of died out in the Switch games.

Then there are the Pokémon themselves. What tools are the players given? How are Pokémon distributed? What moves can those Pokémon learn? When can they learn them? When can the Pokémon evolve? What trades can the player take advantage of, if any? And, importantly, how are TMs distributed?

I feel like this all SHOULD be easy, but these are all things that Game Freak just keeps on struggling with. They have been getting better after SWSH faced criticisms for being too easy, and have even found new ways to incorporate challenges with via DLC releases. Yet even in the latest game, Pokémon Legends: Z-A, the balance remains suspect. And that just bugs me because so many of the features that go into balancing a Pokémon game are modular. It’s part of the reason so many people make their own darn Pokémon games.

Every game has some annoying oddities about its structure, its learnsets, its pacing of available Pokémon, and its pacing in general. Not every game should follow a routine structure. The town, gym, route, and dungeon structure should be altered with each entry. Doing so gives the games character. And even if the formula is followed, there are so many LITTLE THINGS that can change or worsen a playthrough.

You need to— or at least I do— consider how money, buying items, and losing money by whiting out all add a layer of economic anxiety around a game where money grinding was only a recent innovation. How the Amulet Coin held item was and is a staple held item for people wanting to get rich. How the act of managing held items has a time cost due to the sheer deluge of fussy held items that get put into a generalized box and need to be swapped around. Or how the games turn healing into a time and economic choice.

While Pokémon Centers are free, it takes time to get to them, but healing via menus is fast, and you can buy healing items in bulk. Except, you can only buy some healing items in bulk, as not everything is sold at the same store. If you want the cheapest healing items, you need to buy them from vending machines, or the one person who will sell a twelve pack of milk. Now, does this really matter? No. Same with trying to catch every new Pokémon I encounter. It’s dumb, wastes time, and does not get me anything (in these older games), yet it feels like the right way to play Pokémon. ‘Cos you gotta TRY to catch ’em all! The effort, the labor, is part of the experience.

Navigation is also a hurdle in these earlier games, as you need the right spread of Pokémon to do things in the world. Sure, Strength and Surf are non-issues for any reasonable team, but Fly is always a crapshoot that turns the act of travel into a bother. Hell, do you want to know what your options are when the game basically requires the player to return to Relic Castle? Pidove, Woobat, Sigilyph, and Ducklette lines, or Archeops if you picked the right fossil. That’s it!

I also cannot talk about navigation frustrations without talking about cave and water routes, which… just kind of suck to explore. I know that veteran players just repel their way through them, but is choosing to IGNORE a mechanic a good way to ENGAGE in it? I don’t think so. Though, I also have to question any dungeon design where you are constantly pulled away from the dungeon every few steps. I know, I know, it’s a genre convention, yet it just destroys the atmosphere. Which is pretty much the argument against random encounters in general. If they are everywhere, they are vibe killers!

These boundless little imperfections, things that could be improved, but never have, and never will, is one of the things that will forever drive me crazy about Pokémon. It makes me wish I had the knowhow to make a better experience, balance out some annoyances out of these games, but even if I do, they are still what they are. Still products of their time, and still full of the inefficiencies and limitations that the designers put in them… for reasons I cannot fathom.

I love these games, and want to love them even more, but due to my closeness with them, due to how much I have thought about them, seen their map, and seen other people talk about them, the harder it gets for me to view them as anything other than… games made of problems.

…Now would be a great time to announce that I am making my own ROM hack to address various balancing issues and end this Ramble by publishing my game design document for Pokémon: Better Black Version.

Unfortunately, I don’t know where to even START with ROM hacking, and I’ve already spent FAR too much time identifying issues with the Unova Pokédex. So I think I’ll just wrap this puppy up.

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Conclusion: I Love Pokémon Black and White, but Wish They Were Better

In many ways, Pokémon Black and White are triumphs. Its story is wrapped around big ideas that it carries at its very core, inspiring the player to question the world around them, and acknowledge the sheer diversity it holds. The machinations of its villainous organization seem particularly relevant in the modern era, neatly mirroring how many powerful people amass their influence.

The choice to expand the series with a deluge of new Pokémon was a truly bold choice the likes of which I doubt we will ever see again. It truly makes use of the DS’s hardware to a wonderful degree. Delivering an experience that, while true to the nuts and bolts of the series’ Game Boy origins, has enough flair in its battles and environment to feel like a modern adventure. …Circa 2010. And ushering in a number of quality of life features that make this game easier to go back to than many others. Though, it still leaves something to be desired.

I love the core of Pokémon Black, but as I veer into the nitty and gritty, I cannot help but fixate on things that have been fixed, that could be better, and how that could make this already good game shine as an excellent RPG in and of itself, rather than one of the best Pokémon games ever made.

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I have already given MANY details of things that could be better in Pokémon Black and White, but I’ve prepared a full second part to this Ramble that will go live two days after this post is published. A second part that is, somehow, longer than this overly long ramble.