Pokemon Black and White

There comes a point, admittedly pretty far into any Pokemon game, where I can only feel exhaustion – not the exciting promise of new battles, new abilities, new places to see and people to meet, but just a sheer, overwhelming done-ness with everything. It's not really the fault of the games, necessarily, but moreso that this series has rarely resonated with me the way that so many others, and even so many others just like it, have.

Part of this is due to being outside of the target audience, surely. There's no nostalgic attachment to the Pokemon series for me; indeed, as a kid, I had such a fierce and unswerving loyalty to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that I was unnaturally pissed off at every new "phenomenon" that sought to take the Turtles down from their childhood hero throne. I hated Mighty Morphing Power Rangers with a passion, and Pokemon represented the worst destruction of the things I loved the most as a kid. It was just so inescapable too. Every one of my friends had the games, collected the cards, watched the TV show, watched the movies – the whole nine yards. I've always been on the outside looking in when it comes to Pokemon.

And that didn't really change when I picked up my first Pokemon game, SoulSilver for the DS back in 2010. I was kicking myself for the first ten or so hours that I poured into it. Such clean, bold aesthetics! Such a wondrously tactical battle system! Such cute little critters! Shit, I even carried around the PokeWalker to the gym.

Doubt started to creep in, though. All the game seemed to promise was ever-escalating challenge in the battles, which was fine, except that (and this is going to sound heretical) I started to get really bored with the battling. It's not that the battling was bad, per se, just that it was really all the game offered beyond the admittedly-awesome joy of "catchin' 'em all." I didn't have the time or the patience to actually form a strategy, to find rare Pokemon, or to explore every nook and cranny of this world, because all it offered was more battling, and more battling on top of that. Sacrilege, maybe, but to me, if Pokemon were a ten-hour game that could be enjoyed in bits and pieces, it might be terrific, but that's never been the case.

And perhaps the biggest problem with this series is just how glacially it changes. Black and White are clearly the "superior" Pokemon experience, and while it offers a completely new roster of Pokemon, a wildly different setting than usual and the best looks that the traditional style can afford, it is perhaps too recognizable as a "Pokemon game," and as such, is trapped within conventions that could really use some updating.

The main, essential problem of the Pokemon games, at least for an adult, is that the themes that they grapple with are really only applicable to kids. That's not, or shouldn't be an issue, but as gamers we have a tough time leaving things alone for kids (you know, the Pokemon tournaments that occur around the world are proof of that). Anyways, if you're over the age of eight, generally the storyline is best left unnoticed, as the same template has been used in all of the Pokemon games. For most people, and unfortunately that doesn't include myself, the battling is the main attraction anyways.

I was shocked, then, to discover that Black and White makes its first baby steps in telling an actual story, one that fundamentally changes the perceptions that people could have towards these games. Basically, Team Plasma, a group of environmental activists, have taken to stealing people's Pokemon to show the world that what has been treated before as symbiotic domestication is actually a form of animal abuse. You know, for me, it was hard not to identify with Team Plasma at first. The relationship between humans and Pokemon has always seemed weird at best. Is this not just a cuddly version of dog fighting, essentially? Indeed, that the game is able to raise questions that undermine the very foundation its built upon is pretty revelatory for a Pokemon game.

That last qualifier is necessary, though, because it is still a Pokemon game, which means that the idea is never taken very far – Team Plasma are revealed as the snarling, PETA-baiting evil doods that we're supposed to take them as pretty early in the game, and the writing quality on the whole is abysmal (charmingly abysmal, but abysmal still). Had the story been told with the writing and care that Nintendo pours into its first-party franchises (The Pokemon Company is more-or-less autonomous from Nintendo in terms of actual game direction, FYI), there could have been something there besides the battling.

But the battling is what people want, and the battling is what they get, either in single-player or online, and it's of course super refined and very tactically demanding and satisfying. If you've played any Pokemon game, though, you know that already. Tournament play doesn't usually occur for any game that doesn't have that level of polish in its central mechanic, and Black and White represents the best implementation of that so far. And by changing up all of the Pokemon in the game, it forces longtime players to develop completely new strategies, which was a very good choice by the development team.

And yet, there's still very little to draw people in who have been left cold by this series. The series has always seemed "good enough" to me, but never brilliant: the presentation is still curiously creaky for such a megablockbuster, the graphics, while stylistically interesting (and somewhat Earthbound-y?) don't really have very much in the way of technical prowess, and the changes that do occur seem very, very minor. Pokemon stands in for the perils of appeasing a (very large) fanbase. How do you change things to bring new people in while still keeping your loyal fans happy? Those loyal fans, as economically useful as they may be, are holding Pokemon back from true greatness, and if Nintendo can change the formula between, say, Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask so thoroughly, why couldn't they do it for Pokemon? The general "gym badge" progression system, which has been the template for every single main series game, has lost all of its potency by this point. Sure, this is a game for kids, but does the Pokemon Company not think that some people have grown up with these games, and might still play them?

With that being said, there's something about those little critters and the world they inhabit that has a certain level of charm, I suppose, and can gameplay this solid really be faulted? I guess it's just that it could be so much more.

(Side note: as an owner of a 3DS, it's been interesting to see all of the wasted space talking about the "death" of the handheld and how Nintendo is going to eat a lot of money on this product. Now, obviously the DS didn't have a stellar opening year either, and it did OK. But people must be incredibly shortsighted, because once a Pokemon game comes out for the 3DS, I imagine everyone will be shutting up about the death of the Nintendo handheld. And hey! Maybe fans will finally get what they've been asking for for awhile – a console-style, fully 3D Pokemon MMO. That wouldn't appeal to me, necessarily, but it's not hard to see how that would make a metric fuck-ton of money. End side note.)