Once the story has been completed the goal switches from completion, to developing the perfect team of pokemon for online battling. The real strength of Pokemon White and Black 2 doesn’t show itself until the endgame, though. It would be nice if there was a bit more flash to the battles after all this time though – the basic swipes and splotches of colour don’t make for a particularly spectacular battle, and we know the technology is there to put some flash into DS RPG battles.
While I don’t think the series will ever see a collection quite like the universally brilliant design of the original Pokemon Red/ Blue’s relatively paltry 151 monsters, there’s a consistency across the massive number of collectible pokemon in this game that means just about everyone should find a team of six that appeal to them, even as they throw away the reject designs. The story, while as simple as ever before, does try to give players something a little more genuine this time around.Įven the monster design improves over the course of the game.
The online capabilities of the game are now robust and deep, removing the need to find someone nearby to really take advantage of the game’s social features. There’s some tweaks in terms of new gameplay features that help to add just enough to the basic formula to be worth exploring.
The pokemon themselves have lost a lot of their creatively interesting design quirks that make the first generations of the game so endearing.īut then the game hits its stride and Pokemon suddenly becomes interesting all over again. For my part my last Pokemon game was Emerald back on the Game Boy Advance, and immediately everything felt comfortably familiar and safe from the outset: my little hero started in a manageably small village, with the choice between three different basic pokemon and an immediate goal to go and find his first “gym” to conquer and medal to earn.įor the first couple of hours then, Pokemon Black and White 2 feels precisely like the kind of game that the series has threatened to throw in for years now – become so staid and predictable that it just isn’t interesting any longer. Surely just about everyone has played a Pokemon game in the past, and like an American daytime soapie, it’s easy to slip into Black or White 2 after an absence of some years without feeling like you’d missed anything inbetween. Pokemon Black and White 2 add the barest minimum of new features over the top of the game engine that has only improved incrementally since the original Game Boy, and once again it’s an essential, addictive game. I’m not sure how Nintendo and Game Freak manage to do this: over and over again they repackage the same game and convince us all it’s worth playing again.