What Black and White Does Better than Any Other Pokemon Game

it's 2009 in Tokyo Japan after the release of Pokémon Heart Gold and soul silver game freak moves on to a new project the first four generations of Pokemon all released on brand new Nintendo consoles each more powerful than the last allowing the new games to upgrade the look of their graphics and the sound of their music but Nintendo hasn't released a new console in a while so this brand new game will have to be on the DS just like diamond and pearl were so the developers go fine we can't make the games look or sound any better so instead we're going to do something new something fresh we're going to create the greatest Pokémon game ever [Music] made Pokemon as a franchise has always sold itself off of Adventure you get to the right old age of 10 or 12 get a pet then head out into the world on a journey where you compete with others and pick up some more creatures along the way it's a game series all about customization where you can play with any team you want each Pokémon having four moves of your choosing there's only one problem Pokémon's never been great at handling the whole Adventure aspect people generally agree that the first two generations are the best at exploration since you can do the gyms the eight difficult trials that you have to complete to finish the game mostly out of order but from there the games only got more and more linear forcing you onto a set path for the sake of story and even if those stories could sometimes be interesting or charming the downside was that it made you stick to a specific route through the game which Hur the adventure there's only one issue this General opinion is wrong it's actually the fifth games that handle exploration and player Freedom the best and in this video essay I'm going to be explaining why I'll be covering Black and White 2 a bit but this is mostly going to be about the originals okay so after that I'm sure a lot of you are going to be a bit annoyed how could these games where you can't even do the gyms and routes out of order be the best at player Freedom well it's simple well it's true that black and white is a very linear Story one that just so you know I won't be covering in this video you actually have a ton of freedom in how you want to interact with the routes themselves in every other Pokémon game game for the most part the routes are straight lines that'll occasionally have a small path of water you can surf across for an item for example look at the first four routes of CNO wow look this one is a pond that's so cool and there's a little cave in this one I wonder what happens when I come back later with surf oh nice I got a single TM great now even though I think these rats are aesthetically interesting there's nothing really to find here you don't have any choice in where you want to explore and which areas you want to skip so you're forced to encounter pretty much everything in the whole section I mean you can go back to orberg gate with Surf and head down to get the focus punch TM but the cave itself is really short and uninteresting and there aren't any cool trainers or rare Pokémon or anything to get excited about I'm just not particularly interested in exploring most of the routes in CNO because there's usually nothing to be interested in there are exceptions of course I think the area under the bike path is awesome but a lot of the game is just like this compare CNO to the first four routes of Pokémon Black and White the most boring by far is Route two you can come back with the strength and cut HMS to get some cool items but it's really short and other than that there's really not much here then there's route three which is this whole cave that the story brings you into very briefly just to show you it's there and how caves work if you come back later with surf you can go into the depths and get a bunch of rewards like two more TMS which are reusable now more than that later and the Mystic water it's still kind of a boring cave but it's a bit more interesting and expansive an orber gate then there's this pond off the edge of the bridge if you surf up there you can fight this trainer who's pretty tough and as a little extra award you get a rare candy and an HP up for straying up the beaten path this is the third route in the game and there are two different nice but completely optional things you can check out then there's route four this is a desert route which is super unusual for an early point in the game normally you only get access to these after you've beaten four or five gems at least if the game even has one so it being so early is pretty cool it breaks picks up the grass areas that you've already gotten used to at this point with something new and unique now you can only fully access it after getting a third gym badge but even before then you can get a little taste of it and even catch a few Pokémon like a damaka which might be really useful against the third gym leader now you can just go straight North but if you want to you can also head left an area with tons of Personality hidden items and it also gives you access to the desert Resort but the route that really takes the cake is number one it's very short and basic but halfway between the only two grass patches there's this little pool of water surf into it and you get access to an entire massive new area rout 17 and 18 rout 17 is a maze of different currents interspersed with swimmer trainers who you haven't really seen a lot of in this game and then around 18 is this cool little island with a bunch of powerful trainers and rare items plus the Rainer up in this house gives you a Larvesta egg which hatches and then evolves into one of the coolest Pokémon in the game so what am I getting at basically well it's true that black and white is more linear in story than a lot of Pokémon games virtually every route has some sort of interesting side path that offers something unique compared to every other area of the game there's Route 17 and 18 off of Route 1 the greater dreamyard Wellspring cave on Route three the massive side area just before pin wheel Forest the second path through pinwell forest and the legendary Pokémon hidden there basically all of castelia city which is massive by Pokémon standards and has several different giant skyscrapers you can search through the desert Resort and Relic Castle on Route 4 lost La Forest stalton cave on Route Six the entire bottom floor of charge Stone cave and the mo of Icarus on Route 8 and those are just the big optional ones you can access before beating the game and since they're optional while you can meticulously search through each of them you can also just Breeze right past them without any negative consequences this is actual player choice something that's really important for a game series based around customizing your adventure after all there's so much to do so much to see so what's wrong with taking the back streets you'll never know if you don't go you'll never sh shine if you don't glow Hey Now You're an Allstar get your game on go play and while there's some of this in other Pokémon games univa easily Takes the Cake Just bursting at the seams with endless optional side areas also just something I should mention I think that black and white has way too many rival battles you're spaced out much better if you go adventuring lot and that's not even talking about the postgame stuff here is a short list of the things you unlock in the post game two new cities a super boss figh against Cynthia champion in the center region white forest or black City depending on which version you have the Abyssal Ruins where you can loot an ancient Temple and sell the relics to a billionaire huge numbers of classic Pokémon from the first four games ability to fish allowing you to catch a ton of new Pokémon dep of Relic Castle second Super boss fight against one of the game's developers Royal univ CH cave after you beat it the a gador will teach you a powerful Dragon tyt RS 11 12 13 14 and 15 the Abundant Giant Chasm which contains the legendary Pokémon village bridge a village built on top of a plot where you search for the seven sentes of Team Plasma which disbanded after the events of the story with the help of a familiar member of the International police and the battle against the third Super boss Champion Alder allowing you to finally finally officially become the best trainer in the entire univ region black and white holds on to its nature as the most exploring heavy Pokémon game by having a frankly huge number of new totally optional things available to you after you beat the main story the stuff I just mentioned alone is like a third of a regular Pokémon game all on its own and adding on to the flavor of the game is the season system basically depending on which month you open the game univa will be in a different season of the year each of these four seasons changes something about the world for example it'll get dark earlier or later depending on the time of year it'll rain in certain areas during spring and the water in some places will freeze during winter making it icy and harder to navigate some music changes too like the summer theme for undela town which is completely different to how it sounds the rest of the year and routes 2 4 6 and 12 which all change tracks each season plus one pokon sbug will look different every single month the season doesn't change the gameplay a whole lot but it adds so much to The Vibes of the world if you play through the story over a long enough course of time you can see how long you've been on your journey everywhere around you as the leaves turn orange and snow begins to fall the mechanic never returned outside of black and white Sequel and the fan Community almost universally agrees that was a mistake and the music the music in black and white is incredible since there weren't going to be any graphical or system upgrades and Pokemon was dying down game freak went all out in giving this game an unforgettable soundtrack all the routes have their own unique Tunes each battle is a fitting piece going behind it hell there's even a song for when you get down to the gym Leader's last Pokémon just to add to the stakes also while a lot of generations kind of have their own musical Vibes black and white doesn't Holland uses a lot of grand trumpets C's dramatic piano and black and white has everything it's maybe the most varied and creative soundtrack of any Pokémon game it the music's fantastic but it would take way too long to talk about so I'm not going to besides there are other things worth talking about more in the other Pokémon games a lot of the NPCs the people that populate the world are just really weird and stupid and super naive basically all of them will just spout nonsense whenever you talk to them talking about how they like shorts because they're easy to wear asking you for a quote but only letting you answer in two words or how this guy will give you a if you talk to enough clowns just it's dumb and not in a fun way where it's self-aware about how ridiculous it is it's just sort of sad and pathetic because they think they're being funny but they're just being confusing it's not good some of the most famous examples of this problem are the human roadblocks where people would just sort of stand in front of doorways and stop you from walking through them for ridiculous reasons there are these folks in colos who stop you because of a power outage despite it OB obviously not being true this guy in Kanto who won't let you pass because he's too drunk and these Psyduck and CNO who won't get out of the fraking road just because they have too bad of a headache these roblocks have always been bad and stupid and just make the world feel a lot less real like at a certain point these pcker Pokémon why can't I just battle or catch them to get by I have a level 40 grass type and you're telling me a half dozen headache ducks are going to pose a problem this sort of thing just isn't present in original black and white the characters in this game are WR with a certain level of maturity that isn't really present in the rest of the series for example all the gym leaders feel like they have actual personalities they chat with each other and they have their own passions and jobs outside of Pokémon stuff they interact with a plot too which makes sense considering they're canonically some of the most powerful trainers in the region all of the human Ro blogs make sense like this guy who says they're finishing up some important construction and that you should go get the third badge to kill some time I think it really helps that the main character of this game is canonically older than all the other Pokémon protagonists every other game has 11 or 12-year-olds traing around the Wilderness stopping crime bosses and catching gods and I'm not the first to note how ridiculous that sounds on the other hand the main character of black and white is 14 which isn't old but it's a lot more reasonable like 12 is a seventh grader 14 is a high schooler I could totally see some Prodigy level 14-year-old becoming the best chess player in I don't know New York or something and there's lots of little things like how you can chat with this hiker in lost laor forest and I'll talk about the difference in LIF style he has with someone he knows or how after Team Plasma steals the dragon skull from lenora's Museum all the people in the museum who saw it will have thoughts on what they're going to do with it when you walk into Cynthia's house in andela town she's just going to relax on the beach the trainer that most of the fans agree to be the most powerful and intimidating champion of all time is on vacation in a Beach town it's super humanizing and the game can be genuinely intentionally funny sometimes like how after Team Plasma steals one of Bianca's Pokémon Iris forceably volunteers to be Bianca's bodyguard much to the distress of Bianca herself Iris drags her across castelia City for 20 straight minutes it's hilarious but I know what you're thinking after all I can read your mind wouldn't exploring completely destroy the difficulty curve of the game like you go off on your own for a bit all your Pokémon gets six level stronger and suddenly you're demolishing everything in your path nothing able to meaningfully challenge you and that's a valid question but no and that's because of a genius mechanical decision that made exploring actually worth it in all the previous Pokémon generations and Generation 6 and 9 you gain a fixed amount of experience for each Pokémon you defeat you beat a level 40 obamasnow you're getting 1,834 XP you beat a level 5 poen that's 58 XP now this can work as a leveling method since as you get more powerful you'll need more and more experience to keep increasing in level however there's a problem all the gym leaders had to be balanced around players who decided not to explore because they would be too difficult otherwise this meant that if you wanted to do one of the few optional side areas the game had there was a good chance you would end up being way too powerful because of all the extra fights you want and as a result exploring too much would end up making all the parts of the game that are supposed to be difficult into a cakewalk removing any sort of Challenge and making it less fun and if the gym leaders were instead balanced around the assumption that you did do the big optional side area then they would be way too powerful for anyone who didn't effectively forcing the player to either go somewhere they didn't want to go or just run around and grind levels for hours black and white fix this issue completely in this game the amount of exp or Pokémon gains actually depends on its level for example let's say you're fighting level 20 Herer in a trainer battle using your duat which is also level 20 if you beat it you gain 781 experience points that's a bit under 10% of the amount you need to gain a level which isn't much but it isn't nothing either now let's say you're 10 levels higher level 30 but your opponent is the same if that's true you only gain 537 XP and combined with the fact that it takes more experience to gain a level you'll get basically nothing out of it and this works in Reverse too if you're fighting a Herdier with a weak level 15 ashaw and somehow manage to win you'll get over 1,400 experience points easily enough to gain an entire level and then some so why is this a good thing well there are two reasons number one is that it keeps your Pokémon at a mostly balanced level for story regardless of how many opponents you fight you can absolutely still overlevel but it's way harder to do so unintentionally if you go exploring you won't come back being way too strong since once you get above the level of the Pokemon you're fighting you'll start to gain way less XP and if you decide to skip exploring then you'll end up at a lower level which means you'll get a ton of experience from the trainers in the gym before you reach the Leader by the time you do get to the leader your Pokémon will be at the right level what this means is you can choose to either explore or not explore with no negative consequences either way it also makes it really easy to raise weak Pokémon to a high level every time I play through black and white I pick up the Larvesta egg and hatch it into a level one Pokémon then I slap the Exp share on it fight one battle against three Pokémon and suddenly the Larvesta is up like 30 levels it's really nice number two is that it forces you to use more than one Pokémon see in every Pokémon game you can have up to six pocket monsters that you use in your party at a time filling out a full team of six is pretty much universally agreed to be the most fun way to play these games since it lets you use a bunch of different cool creatures and they can cover each other's weaknesses in ways that a team of two or three just couldn't there's just one problem Pokémon's always been really terrible at explaining to the player that this is a good idea you have the catching tutorials at the start of the game but those just explain how to catch a Pokémon not why you should want to so a lot of first-time players will pick up their starter and go through the whole game using just that only picking up other Pokémon for the required HMS the first Pokémon game I ever played was Emerald now I love that game too in fact it's my second favorite Pokémon game after black and white and it sequel but the first time I went through it I only really used a single Pokémon my starter septile I picked up some others for required HMS but that was the only one I ever really used in battle for most of the game this strategy worked great but I hit a wall when I got to the Pokemon League I had to go up against four of the most formidable characters in the game in a row and then the champion all in one sitting but I couldn't my septile was level 70 but even then it just wasn't strong enough enough for me to beat the game I grinded for hours on the level 40 Pokémon in Victory Road flying my way to getting a level 82 septile but eventually I just gave up I could get past Sydney and Phoebe pretty reliably but Claus 5 ice types could all do a quarter or third of my health with just one move I could only use Leaf blade so many times and absorb because yes I still had that just wasn't going to cut it and after that I had to fight Drake and all of his Pokemon resisted grasp moves and pound because I still had that two would maybe maybe KO a salamance in seven hits and his flamethrower could burn up septile in just three and even if I got through all that I still had to fight Wallace and even though I had the type advantage half of his team still had ice moves that would decimate my poor grass type lizard eventually even little 7-year-old me realized that I just needed more team members but it was too late my second strongest Pokémon was a level 19 Taillow and I was never going to be able to get it up to the level 60 or so it need to help me out so I gave up and I never beat the game Emerald didn't make me catch Pokémon for anything other than the required HMS so I never did but then I picked up Pokemon Black and White and something magical happened I hit a wall again but this time it was on gym one I couldn't just level up my du it was gaining levels so slow and I just could not get past silent second Pokémon his pan AG had powerful super effective moves and it was getting harder and harder to level up so out of desperation I picked up the panser that one NPC gives you and leveled it up a bit and I got liilu for good measure silin was a piece of cake and I never looked back it took me dozens of hours playing Emerald to discover something about strategy that black and white taught me in 30 minutes black and white forced me to learn about strength and numbers and that using more than one Pokémon is just a lot more fun I believe we professional game critics call this play conditioning now that I'm older and at strategizing I can appreciate the difficulty of trying to go through a game with just one Pokémon but because of the way older Pokémon games worked me and thousands maybe millions of other firsttime kids like me went through the game the hard way I'm happy that black and white conditions people out of that because being able to use other creatures opens you up to A Whole New World of choice and customization in the game so you can really make it your adventure you catch and use Pokémon because you think they're cool or cute or something you've never seen before not just because you need something to use HMS and it makes you want to explore too since you want to find cool and adorable Pokémon that you can use on your team black and white doesn't just give you options it actively teaches you how to use them and speaking of HMS there are a few other mechanical changes I want to talk about what happened to agms the notoriously hated mechanic that forced you to permanently stick an otherwise useless move onto one of your Pokémon just so you could progress through the story yeah black and white basically completely remove those seriously first of all you only need to use a hidden machine exactly once in the entire game one cut on this tree blocking access to the dreamyard right after you beat the first gym you can catch a Geral teach a cut use it once and then toss it away forever you will never need to use that hidden machine again or any other all of the other HMS surf strength fly waterfall and dive are never required for any part of the game you can use them to to find cool items locations and Pokémon but if you don't want to you never have to and what's extra nice is that other than dive all of these are actually useful moves and dive is literally only used in one location with no Pokémon and it's one of the coolest Parts the whole game and since it can learn cut Superior is the only nonwater type starter that can solo run a Pokémon game which makes me really happy since it's my favorite Pokémon if this video gets to 2,000 likes I'll make a video where I go through the whole game with just my beloved smug grass snake and on top of that you're no longer required to have certain badges to use your HMS you never get strength and really you don't have the fourth gym badge yet so you can't actually use it in black and white it doesn't matter how many badges you have if you have a hied machine it'll work this is a genius move HMS are one of the worst things about the first four generations they take up a huge portion of the few valuable moves your team has and half of them are useless now you only have to use a single one one time and you're good and now that I've talked about hidden machines it's time to talk about TMS or the technical machines when the first games red and blue came out they kind of had a resource management aspect to them for example your bag could only hold so many items and if you had more than 20 different types of item your bag would fill up you couldn't carry any more things and you would have to store them in your PC now back then there also weren't as many things worth carrying since it was before the days of held items and berries but your bag would still fill up pretty fast you had to decide what was valuable enough to haul around what you could use and what you just had to toss or sell and TMS were a part of this every now and then you'd find a little CD that could teach one of your Pokémon a rare special move something powerful like brick break or earthquake but not so fast you're only going to get one of these each game you'll only ever be able to teach one Pokémon earthquake so use it wisely this worked back in the day when Pokémon was simpler you get your Pokémon beat the first eight gems defeat the champion catch Mewtwo complete the poke and you're done that was it for Red and Blue but starting in Generations 2 3 and 4 the game started to get a lot longer it still took about the same amount of time to actually beat the game but there's so much more to do after that you could complete the battlef frontier explore new areas you'd never been able to see before counter tons of legendary Pokémon catch super bear shinies and so much more if you wanted to finish the national decks you no longer had to catch 120 or 130 new Pokémon you had to get more like 300 50 and with classic Pokémon fans getting older and it getting easier to battle against other real people even adding online matches in the generation 4 games Pokemon started to form a competitive scene where you could train up a team powerful enough to beat down your friends and maybe even go to Regionals and this led to a problem see if you wanted to use a powerful move like Shadow Ball or overheat there is usually still only one of those per game throughout your entire time playing you could give exactly one of your Pokémon one of those moves and that was was it this wasn't a huge issue back in the Generation One games since even if you made a mistake you'd only have to deal with it until you be the champion and maybe completed the national decks now if you made the same mistake in Pokémon Platinum it would reverberate through your game forever if you taught your camera up to earthquake that meant you could never give it to the Metagross you found later or that awesome shiny you found or to that new cool Pokémon that you didn't even realize existed at the time and if you wanted to make a competitive team well that was going to be a problem since earthquake was a fantastic moving competitive and you put it on a mediocre camera up wasn't even that good and are you starting to see the issue the games were getting longer with more and more stuff to do but very useful TMS like earthquake and rain dance were still single use you could only find them once in each save file you'd be too scared to use the very useful tactical machine for fear of regret so you just never did and it sat at the bottom of your bag collecting dust black and white white once again completely fixed this issue it was the first game to allow you to reuse TMS basically you could use them as many times as you wanted this changed the role of TMS instead of being an outdated onetime Resource Management item they became a permanent upgrade to Your Arsenal another tool that you could use on your path to becoming the very best like no one ever was they became rarer but also way more valuable and something you could actually feel comfortable using this gave the player back the choice that they gradually lost over the first four generations they can fre mix and match the moves on their Pokémon again without fear of regret I mean you still might delete a useful level up move but don't worry this game also has a move reminder so even though it might be a bit of a pain you can always get it back and that's what really makes a lot of black and white special it's the choices you get while playing the game they cut out a restriction that was limiting your choice and replaced it with a new system that was far more interesting so it might be thinking well hay you Nimrod you buffoon all that is well and good but you still can't do the gyms out of order you're still forced to play through black and white along a set path so there actually isn't any good player choice you utter well my friend now it's time to talk about why being able to do all the gyms out of order is virtually pointless so when the first generation of Pokémon came out they gave you a choice once you beat the first two Gym Leaders you could then go on to challenge the next five in any order you wanted so long as you fought Kaa before playing this was a pretty cool feature for a game that released in the late '90s you could fight over half the normal B in the game whenever you felt like it there was only one problem why would you ever want to do that aside from novelty there's no point it has no story implications Team Rocket's plan is going to play out the same way regardless of how you go through the game and what's the point in skipping them if you want to get to koga's gym you're required to go to the SSN in Vermillion City and the rocket hideout in Celadon and serge and Eric's gyms are right there in town if this was a branching paths thing where you can choose which story events to go to First like you could rescue Mr Fuji from the Pokémon Tower or take down Team Rocket and silco before you did The Hideout it would be really cool but since there's only one story path and you're forced to go to the towns of the third and fourth gym leader before you can reach the fifth one there's absolutely no reason to ever actually skip gyms plus since the gym leaders don't scale in difficulty depending on how many badges you have if you end up skipping Serge and Erica by the time you get back to them they'll be pathetically easy and it won't be fun anymore and none of the remix to these games fixed this now I'm disappointed the Gen 5 games are linear too but the truth is the first two generations weren't any better the stories will play out in the same order no matter where you go or who you talk to and there's no functional benefit for doing the gemms out of order it's a linear game pretending to give you choices and not only are the stories of those games linear the routes are two all of the paths to the game are so cramped you only get one one choice walking down a route walk down the specific path with these trainers and these Pokémon and if you ever try to leave it all you'll find is a tree line you can't pass through hiding nothing behind it once you get through them the first time you'll never want to go back to Rock Tunnel or diglet cave because you know that ultimately they're just big brown holes on the ground with nothing noteworthy inside and the same thing is true for every other route in Kanto which makes it feel really weirdly empty black and white meanwhile has a special energy to it a feeling that I've never seen any other Pokémon game replicate that the rest of the world exists for a reason other than the sake of the player you can witness a breakup find people training in seclusion and walk in on a bunch of folks just doing their office job all things that despite you completely missing them would be happening in the world anyway you can find all sorts of Pokémon off the beaten path hidden in plain sight s they don't need you to interact with them for their lives their hopes and dreams to be important to the game and the univa region would exist regardless of your interaction with it but it's fascinating so you want to talk to the folks in Anvil town and on rout 18 to meet Cynthia while she's on vacation and to just explore the Wilderness while music plays in the background black and white has a weird layer of maturity to it that I don't think is really present in the other games the knowledge that there's a world out there besides your own little bubble and it's an interesting world and one you should take the time to explore on your own time at your own pace exactly how you want to and the sequel Black and White 2 only improves on this feeling you can see how the world has changed 2 years after the events of the first game people are moving on with our lives but things are different in ways that are sometimes obvious sometimes subtle your two friends from the start are now a gym leader and the professor's assistant and haven't talked in 2 years there are parts of the region you've never seen before but they're still interconnected with the old stuff a lot of them still existed they just weren't places you could go the first time the antagonists from the old game have split in two a difference in ideology breaking them apart tons of new Pokémon have been showing up there's a whole new startup town in the desert from the first game and there's a tournament in drift veale City where powerful trainers from all over the world show up to claim the title of best in the world it's a reminder that the rest of the world of Pokémon exists and that the people in that world sometimes change without any input from you this is what I've really been trying to get at for this whole video this energy it's the spirit of Adventure and choice that Pokemon has always tried to sell itself on that it never quite achieved but black and white and black and white 2 are the games where they got the closest wow that was pretentious even for me but I still think it's true there's just more to univa than any of the other regions a lot of Pokémon games can come across as kind of shallow but black and white never does and I think that's something really unique in the series that was my video about the thing black and white does better than any other Pokémon game I hope you liked it thank you goodbye and I'll see you sometime in the [Music] future

Channel: The Hayze

Views: 84,395

Keywords: pokemon, pokemon black and white, black and white, black and white 2, unova gym leaders, unova, unova region, pokemon scarlet and violet, pokemon violet, pokemon scarlet, video essay, open world pokemon, open world, play conditioning, best story pokemon, pokémon

Id: Tsd0afESg3Y

Length: 30min 33sec (1833 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 28 2024