Saturday, 28 September 2013

Why I prefer Pokemon Black/White even though Black 2 and White to is better.

I'll be honest with you. When Pokemon Black and White came out, it was really amazing. I thoroughly enjoy the game, the story, and the music. Then they decided to not a 'Yellow' or 'Crystal' version for this generation, and instead released Pokemon Black 2 and White 2, which are sequels set a few years after the events of Black and White.

Was B2/W2 good? Yeah, it had tons of additions, more Pokemon in the Unova Pokedex, and Pokemon from older games in it. But despite the advancements the game has made over B/W, I still prefer B/W. And here's my reasons.

Note: I do acknowledged that B2 and W2 are far better games with the sheer amount of content it has. It's more of a personal preference on why I prefer Black and White.

Also, spoilers.

1. The Story
When Pokemon Black and White came out, I felt that the story was quite amazing. Gym Leaders played a bigger role in the game compared to previous games as they also had other jobs to do. They even help you out on your journey when facing Team Plasma. You see them outside their gyms more often in the main story compared with other gym leaders (who you only see when you wanna fight them in a rematch post-game).
Also, you don't exactly fight the champion on your main story due to N interrupting the battle. Instead you face three battles without break where you catch the main Legendary of the game, face N, and then his backstabbing adopted father. This was very refreshing. You hardly see boss rushes like these where you can't reshuffle your team on who to go first (like a competitive battle).
Defeating this boss rush feels extremely satisfying, and the ending was someone bittersweet, but was quite awesome too.

Compared to B2 and W2, the story is still good. They did continue where it left off from B and W, but it just doesn't feel as nice as the former. Sure, you get a boss rush in the form of facing Kyurem followed by Ghetsis, but it doesn't feel the same compared with facing Reshiram/Zekrom, N, then Ghetsis.

2. The Ending Theme.
What I don't like about Pokemon is that whenever I beat the game, I am usually greeted by slow-paced music along with the main character cycling/running away. Sure that didn't happen in Heart Gold/ Soul Silver, and at least in R/S/E they showed you the Pokemon you've caught in your Pokedex in the ending, but I didn't really enjoyed it.
Pokemon Black and White on the other hand had their ending sequence extremely simple - A white or black background with scrolling text (with Reshiram or Zekrom being the White or Black in the background if this is the first time you watched the ending sequence). While there's nothing to watch, it's far from boring, as the theme playing is by far the best ending theme in the Pokemon main games ever. It's so fast paced, it's so amazing, it has a message saying 'it's not the end of your epic journey yet'. It is a great way to finish a great game.
Though I give props to Black 2 and White 2, for showing us, the players, that we didn't just simply teleported back home after entering the hall of fame, as the player gets congratulated by the Elite Four and Champion, and celebrated on his way back through all the towns he visited along with the Gym Leaders, ending with him running back to home to his mom (which is pretty sweet, in my opinion).

3. The Pokemon.
The great thing about Black and White is that the Pokedex is filled with only Gen V Pokemon, meaning your journey in the game will feel like a fresh one since you will not encounter any familiar faces until you've beaten the game. It gives attention to some of the newer Pokemon, that are usually hated upon by older fans for several reasons. While I seem to notice that the design of Pokemon is starting to shift a little, with Pokemon somewhat resembling Digimon in certain ways, I don't really mind it one bit since I'm a fan of both series.
Also, Because of being unable to use older generation Pokemons, I had to use only Gen V Pokemons, and that made me realize that these Pokemons are kinda cool. In fact, a lot of my new favourites in Pokemon comes from Gen V like Haxorus (who reminds me of a Digimon), Serperior, and Excadrill (whose drill is the drill that will pierce the heavens).
That was the slight problem I had with Black 2 and White 2. Because I was able to use Pokemons from previous games, I really end up using them. Four of my six Pokemon in my final team was from an older generation (Gen I-II). It's not like I don't wanna use new Pokemons, it's the fact that if you give a users a way to access stuff they're familiar with (older Pokemon), they will use those stuff. I could have easily used Joltik instead of Mareep. But since you catch Mareep so early in the game, and the fact that I used Mareep in my Soul Silver file made me had an attachment to it, so I ended up using it.

4. The theme of the game.
The Sinnoh games' Team Galactic was really weird. I mean, I find the theme of the game really strange. They tried to one-up what they did in Hoenn (which was creating two organizations, one wanting to fill the landmass, and the other doing the exact opposite) by trying to make things even more epic with Poke-Gods and Time/Space distorting Pokemons. Yeah, on sheer scale, Team Galactic do seem really evil on trying to create a new world with the legendaries. But if you look at the bigger picture, it's kinda dumb. The grunts don't appear to be serious most of the time (despite world destroying being something rather serious), and Cyrus has so little charisma that it's a wonder how he recruited so many blue haired spacemen.

In B & W, we have N and a bunch of medieval armoured grunts called Team Plasma. What they did was they stopped trying to make the bad guys evil in a sense of the sheer scale of destruction they will cause, but make people think that the bad guys are more towards being misunderstood, with them talking about 'Pokemons should't be kept in Pokeballs'. Also, you can tell that they're serious about their motives, but somehow you feel like there's an ulterior motif by someone, but you can't figure out whom, until the final battle, where you found out that Ghetsis was evil by doing what he did to his adopted son N. They went for a more ideological approach instead of a 'destroy stuff with legendaries' approach, which I like.

While the Team Plasma in Black 2 are somewhat similar to Team Rocket in the older games and Team Aqua and Magma of Hoenn - being evil by trying to take over the region by using a legendary to change the landscape of the region (by freezing it). While having motives similar to previous evil organization, I do like it when you see Plasma members having conflicts, with some siding with N, and others with Ghetsis. You then realize that some people who joined Team Plasma in B and W really supported N's ideas, and they were caring to Pokemon. And that made Team Plasma a really great organization. However, the motives of Plasma has changed to something similar to that of older games, so it was an average experience to me, when facing Plasma.

In conclusion, I don't think Black 2 and White 2 is bad, it's just that Black and White made a bigger impact on me compared to their sequels. B2 and W2 made a lot of advancements that I do like (like asking you whether you wanna continue using a repel, that is just genius), but I guess I'm one of the very few who likes the older game better.

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