Pokémon Black/White Version 2 (Nintendo DS)

November 3rd, 2012 by

Developer: Game Freak
Publisher: Nintendo & The Pokémon Company
Genre: Handheld RPG
Players: 1 (2 online)
Console: Nintendo DS
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Hours Played: Approximately lots
Progress: Beat the Elite Four, putted around a bit afterwards.

Hello Carl. I, too, am Carl. And this is my son: Carl Jr. We are all Carls. Neat. Yes, neat. With that said, I am here to talk to you about my experience playing the copy of Pokémon White 2 which Nintendo was kind enough to send our way a week early.  Over the course of my playthrough, I found what we all should expect to find: this game is a Pokémon game.  No groundbreaking surprises or changes to be found. It is certainly an improvement over the original White, but… it’s Pokémon. I’ll go over whatever might deserve a mention, and I’ll try to keep in mind a hypothetical human who has never played Pokémon and has some hypothetical reason to finally consider doing so.

I should also warn that many of the points I make will apply to both Pokémon White (& Black) Version 2 and Pokémon White (& Black) and even sometimes to every Pokémon game since the very beginning. It is not only because is it a bit difficult to extract Pokémon White Version 2 and look at it by its absolute self, but many of the problems with Pokémon White Version 2 are based in the fact that it is a part of a never-ending, never-changing series of games.

This is for the newbies. Same old Pokémon deal, with a marginally different story, which no one really cares about.

  • You are a kid.
  • A Professor of Pokémology contacts you and says “Take one of these three Pokémon as a partner, run away from home and horde a bunch more Pokémon.”
  • You fight your Pokémon against not only other trainers’ Pokémon, but also Pokémon found in the wild. In this way you can make your Pokémon stronger.
  • Only the wild Pokémon you battle can be added to your collection (for the most part).
  • There are 8 facilities called Pokémon Gyms where certified Gym Leaders offer battles in order to be defeated and give you a Badge.
  • After you collect all 8 Badges, you can challenge the Elite Four and Pokémon Champion in order to become the new Pokémon Champion.
  • A criminal organization called (in this case) Team Plasma is up to no good and as you traverse the region, you will stop them many times.
  • You also have a friend whom you team up with or battle against frequently.
  • This is how it has been in every Pokémon game ever.

The majority of interesting information will be found here. Almost every other category is virtually unchanged from previous games.

  • New to the Pokémon series with Black 2 and White 2 is a pocket in your backpack called Free Space. This is obviously a minor gameplay element, but goodness me do I like it a lot. And here’s a tip: your first instinct is to put all the items you often use, like Potions, your Town Map and your Bicycle in this pocket. But I have found it far better to put everything you hate in this pocket. That leaves the rest of the pockets full of only the items you actually care about and they’re all correctly split up into categories like TMs and Medicine and Key Items. 
  • Perhaps the best addition to BW2 is the set of simple but numerous Achievements, which Game Freak has called Medals. Everybody loves Achievements and it’s cool to see Pokémon joining the club. The Medals occasionally come into play in the game, for example you might find a guy who will only give you a good item if you’ve earned enough Medals. I think there are also some direct rewards for earning specific Medals, like having caught ’em all.
  • Game Freak seems to have taken a step in the right direction with these two games in that ever since the second wave of Pokémon games, there have been more and more (and more…) Pokémon species for the player to capture and use. The more the merrier, as the more Pokémon there are that exist, the more unique everyone’s team of 6 will feel to them and to their friends and opponents. But Game Freak in every game for years has drastically restricted the number of Pokémon that are available to the player on their way through the story. First it was 149/151, but that makes sense. Then it was about 232/251: not bad. Then about 200/386… What..? Then 150/493, what are you doing? In Black and White “1”, they restricted access to every Pokémon which was not brand new until the player completed the story. This allowed for the capture of 152 Pokémon out of the entire cast of 646. Disgusting. But Black and White 2 was much better. You can capture approximately 300 of the 649 Pokémon on your way through the cities and Gyms to the Elite Four. Not only is that the biggest number yet, but also the best ratio for a while. I was pleased, though they really should bring that beginning rate up to something more like 90%, instead of less than 50%.
  • A new form of side-battling for rewards, but not for Experience is the Pokémon World Tournament, or PWT. There are a few tournaments available from the start, but Game Freak plans to provide downloads over WiFi of more and more tournaments as the months go on. In these tournaments, which are replayable indefinitely I believe, you get a chance to battle against old familiar trainers, like Gym leaders from previous regions, in varying types of battles, often Singles or Doubles. From what I understand they will also provide tournaments wherein the trainers you face are replicas of some real life tournament victors. So if you go and win an event tournament, Game Freak may actually immortalize you as a download for everyone in the world to be able to battle, albeit controlled by AI. That’s cool as hell.
  • One other new form of no-Experience battling takes place in Pokéwood Studios. As the name suggests, you can take part in the filming of movies for the Pokémon world to enjoy. There are a small variety of scenarios for you to play out, and I haven’t played them all, but generally you play a heroic Pokémon trainer and you engage in cinematic battle with some kind of Pokémon villain. You are supposed to follow a “script” that says how the battle is supposed to progress, such as “win the battle in 2 turns” or “hold out without winning nor losing for 5 turns”. Perhaps there are even scenarios where your goal is to lose. Once filming is completed, you can head over to the cinema and watch how the film turned out with all the post-production effects. There are actually a nice number of these to do, and I’m looking forward to doing the rest of them. They seem to be pretty mindless and easy, but the sheer goofiness of some of the things you fight against, it’s reminiscent of the way the protagonists battle Team Rocket in the anime. I am fond of this new feature. It is a grand step up from the Pokémon Contests and Pokémon Musicals Game Freak has tried to make interesting in the last few sets of games they’ve rolled out.
  • When you buy drinks from a vending machine, you can just mash A forever to keep buying them. You don’t need to arrow down to the drink for every single purchase. It’s still a slow process, but that’s kind of the point, since they are MUCH better prices for healing your Pokémon than real potions. I am very thankful for this improvement. 10/10
  • There is a new location called Join Avenue where you are inexplicably asked to manage all the shops that will open there. You can ask passers by if they’d like to open a shop, and what kind of shop they would open. If it’s not a crappy idea, you can give them the go ahead and you can purchase goods or services from them every day. You can also recommend shops to the passers by you don’t want to have open a shop which will build on the popularity of your avenue… Which will surely profit you in some way. It’s a nice feature for being able to maximize your intake of your favourite kind of item. I’m not sure if you can fire anybody, though… So it’s possible once you fill up your avenue you can no longer affect which shops are available, which would likely be annoying.
  • The Pokédex has a new function which shows the Pokémon you’ve seen or caught in any particular area, which is terrific for those attempting to catch ’em all. I haven’t played with that mentality since… ever, but on my way through White 2 I’ve been trying to catch everything on every route and it’s pretty awesome. Thank you fancy new Pokédex.

  • There are many ways to battle other people in Pokémon. Infrared doesn’t count because it’s stupid. Battles via local wireless, battles over the internet using Friend Codes, and random match-up. In random match-up, all Pokémon levels are capped at 50.
  • Depending on what type of battle is chosen, you might be bringing a team of 6 Pokémon and then choose only some of them to battle.
  • The types of battles are Singles (3v3 where each side uses one Pokémon at a time), Doubles (4v4 where each side has two Pokémon on the field at once), Triples (6v6 where each side has three Pokémon on the field at once) and Rotation (6v6 where each side sends out three Pokémon at once, but chooses each turn which one of the three is active). It is possible to have, for example, a 6v6 Singles battle, but not in every medium; when it is possible, you often have to forfeit other important options in order to select that one. It is not possible, though, to have a 6v6 Singles battle where the Pokémon are automatically adjusted to Lv100, so that certainly needs work. Not sure why Game Freak doesn’t just do it good.
  • Another multiplayer element is the ability to trade Pokémon. Again this can be done by local wireless (strictly superior to infrared) or Friend Code. You can also trade over the Global Trade System (tactfully not called the World Trade Centre), where you can put up one of your Pokémon for trade in exchange for someone else’s particular species, gender and level of Pokémon. There is another GTS function called “GTS Negotiation”, but I don’t really understand it.
  • Using local wireless, it is also possible to use a place called the Entralink to enter into another player’s world and complete some “Entralink Missions”. They seem like they’re more interesting than what the player could do with the Entralink in the original Black and White, but I sadly was not allowed to keep the game long enough to try them out.

  • Pokémon remains a top-down scroller with two dimensional sprites and a switch to a battle screen every once in a while where the Pokémon sprites are at long last constantly animated!
  • With the fifth generation of Pokémon games, the developers tried to use the DS’s hardware to render environments with 3D models, but I don’t even understand why they bothered. It does not impress a single person on the planet, and it’s almost a simple admission that they are very far indeed behind in graphics compared to even the other handheld gaming consoles, the PSP/Vita. It seems that if Game Freak is interested in making advances in the graphical department, they should make a brief switch over to the Wii U, reconstruct the very concept of a Pokémon game, make it pretty and 3D and more exploration-based, and then try to carry that fresh concept back across to the 3DS.

  • The sound effects in Pokémon games are what they need to be. At least for the current format in which the game is presented. Simple, clean sounds to go with what’s on the screen. No problem whatsoever.
  • The music in Pokémon games is always catchy. Even if you don’t like a song when you first hear it, after you’ve played alongside it for a while, you’ll be singing along in your head?or out loud like I do.
  • There are a number of tunes that have been recreated for every game since the original, such as the Pokémon Centre theme, the Evolution theme, the Gym theme, etc. In this game, though, each Gym has it’s own little version of the Gym theme, and the one I found myself most in love with was the one in Elesa’s Electric-type Gym. The game insists on building it up until you win a couple battles, but when it actually busts out the classic tune… I thought it was pretty wicked.

  • Well, how do I discuss the Usagi Factor of a Pokémon game…? The way the series hasn’t changed in twelve and a half years and continues to roll out new games all the time and is one of the most popular video game series ever suggests this game has an extreme Usagi Factor. However, since it’s just one of many Pokémon games that has gone by, it will easily become lost among the whole mess of them. Will the title Pokémon White 2 go down in history to be remembered beyond the ending of the human race? No. But it certainly is a solid brick in one of the biggest walls Nintendo has ever built, and that counts for something.

 

Rated 7.0

A review copy of this game was provided to us by its publisher.