Alright, brace yourselves everyone. I have
opinions.
I remember Pokemon Black & White being very polarizing games when they first came out. People would crap on the games by saying the world map was too linear, or that they were way too easy. Only the new Pokemon could be found and caught in the main campaign
and Jesus fucking Christ did people not like the Gen 5 Pokemon when they first came out. You couldn't go to any Pokemon message board without
someone complaining about "that stupid ice cream Pokemon" or how they made a Pokemon out of literal garbage.
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Absolutely disgusting. 0/10.
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Aaaaahhhhh, perfection.
No, I'm not cherry-picking. I've got
four more in the chamber and I'm not afraid to use them.
Gen 5 has seen a lot more love in retrospect, mainly from people who feel that the series dropped in quality once it went fully 3D. Definitely a case of "oh fuck I didn't realize how good we used to have it" syndrome. Personally, I feel that Gen 5 as a whole was the last time that Game Freak tried to do something special with the Pokemon games. Those negative traits that people ragged on about in the past were not nearly as bad as they made them out to be. Heck, I would argue they weren't negative traits at all. Just different.
Playing with only the new Pokemon during the campaign made the experience feel fresh. It was Game Freak's way of trying to capture the feeling of the first generation where there was something new around every corner. It was a great way to get people out of their comfort zone and try out different Pokemon. Yeah, some of those Pokemon designs were odd... but that was the point. They were meant to feel very foreign. After all, we weren't in a region based on Japan anymore. We were in
AMERICA. THE LAND OF THE FREE, AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVIARY.
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Oh, and Team Plasma? What a cool concept for a villain team! I loved how they initially framed them as a group of people who looked at the way these animals were being caught and forced to fight and thought "Hey, that's kinda fucked up when you think about it". The only downside is how quickly that facade fades away. Once you see those grunts kick around that Munna in the Dreamyard, you know they're full of shit.
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But then you have Ghetsis' plan of literally hacking the Pokemon Storage System and releasing everyone's Pokemon to make them defenceless against his own Pokemon. That's great! They took a concept that people didn't think too hard about, and they flipped it into an actual story beat that makes sense. Pokemon are stored on PC in this universe.
Of course someone would try to hack those PCs at some point.
Plus you get to ride a ferris wheel with N, and that's just lovely.
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N is easily one of the most interesting antagonists (er... anti-hero?) in the series. He was raised in isolation from the rest of the world, literally living a lie that was thrust upon him with no room for discussion or reflection. I like how he grows as a character, which is a rare occurrence in a series where Team Aqua and Team Magma exist. By exploring the region, N broadens his perspective and questions his purpose. Of course it all ends the same way as every other Pokemon game - you beat the shit out of him - but there's more of an emotional core here.
When you walk through his room in his castle, it's full of toys and gifts. N had everything given to him except his freedom. And without freedom, he truly had nothing.
I like how this contrasts with his room in the sequel, where everything is destroyed. It's a very poetic way of representing how N's worldview was torn down.
What can I say? I sympathize with a man who got so frustrated with a Rubik's cube that he took the stickers off of it to make every side the same colour.
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And the music. I know Gen 2 is the fan favourite when it comes to the music, but Gen 5 is my personal pick for the best soundtracks in any Pokemon game. Like, where do I even start?
Fuck it, I'm just gonna leave this here and move on. There's only so many ways I can say "MUSIC GOOD. ME LIKE THE MUSIC."
I guess I should talk about Pokemon Black 2 and White 2 now, but I'm feeling kinda tired. Maybe I'll just copy and paste everything I just said about the previous games, then add some more paragraphs at the end to pad things out. Hey, does anybody want some ice?
So yeah, Pokemon Black 2 and White 2. It tried to address people's complaints from the previous entry, by which I mean they let you catch Pokemon from previous gens during the main campaign.
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ENJOY YOUR WEEDLES YOU FUCKS.
Anyways, the sequel games are actually pretty good. They
are mostly retreads of their predecessor, albeit with a much dumber story about flying ice ships of doom, but they make up for it by being jam-packed with so much extra content. It's crazy how much there is to do in these games. You got the Pokestar Studio, the Battle Subway, the Pokemon Musicals, Join Avenue, and whatever it is you're supposed to do in the dream world (I dunno, I never did that one). And that's just the tip of the iceberg!
The Pokemon World Tournament alone is worth the price of admission here. You can literally fight every gym leader, every Elite 4 member, and every champion from every generation up to that point...
complete with kick-ass remixes of the battle themes. Game Freak knew this was the end of an era, and it felt like a celebration of everything that came before it.
Oh, I almost forgot: You can finally change the difficulty setting!
After you beat the game!
Via an item that you need to trade between versions to have both options of making the game easier or harder!
.................................................................................
Great.
I'm probably romanticizing these games a bit too much, but I do genuinely think that these were cool games that were trying to break out of the existing mould that the series was stuck in. Game Freak wanted to move things forward, and they did so in a way that was incredibly ambitious. Remember how bustling Castelia City was?
How much movement there was in that one street, where people would shout little bits of dialogue as you pass by them? Now you have ghost towns like Lumiose City in Pokemon Legends ZA
where people have nothing better to do but stand in one spot all day as if they're all waiting for The Rapture to start.
What the hell happened? Where did the ambition go? It's all been replaced by pandering to nostalgia, which is something Gen 5 tried to avoid. Every generation after this places so much more emphasis on the Pokemon from the first generation that we've reached a point where some of the new Pokemon we see are now just rehashes of the old Pokemon, but with a design variant. Did we seriously need
three more Charizards?
WHAT ABOUT LUVDISC, HUH? NO LOVE FOR LUVDISC?
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No? Just me?
Okay.
RageBurner
