Pokemon Black

 
I hear people say Pokemon games are easy, but the people I hear say that are incredibly well versed in Pokemon games. That got me wondering, are those people overestimating just how easy Pokemon games are? Isn't learning the mechanics supposed to be like half the difficulty, that sorta thing seems glossed over. And that was a good enough excuse for me to finally check out generation 5 Pokemon.

Questionable Gameplay Decisions?

I'm not an ideal example of a Pokemon beginner, I've played a couple of the games, and I've learned a bit of the not super obvious mechanics through YouTube videos over the years. I didn't know much of the type match-up chart though, and I especially didn't much about actual strategy beyond healing items being considered strong. For a sort of experiment, I set out to beat Pokemon Black without grinding to see how hard it'd be.

I ended up beating the game relatively fine, there was some struggle I'll get into, but I'll concede that it was about as difficult as I heard. I also generally had more fun with the battling since I actually felt like I needed to strategize. One goal I set out for was to try and map out the type match-ups, but I accidentally deleted my file for that (along with all of my other notes for the game). I can recall however that I struggled to keep track of the match-ups, I guess I can attribute most of that to being a skill issue, but sometimes I just didn't know my opponent's typing so I'd be fed information that I couldn't do much with.

The difficulty of the game peaked really early on, the 2nd gym leader Lenora had a Watchdog that wrecked everything I had. I spent like an hour bashing my head against the fight because I could only come up with luck reliant strategies with my current Pokemon. I didn't realize until afterwards that it would've been better to clear out the following Pinwheel Forrest before taking on Lenora, but that didn't change my takeaway from her, I think playing without grinding is playing the game kinda wrong.

There was a very obvious solution I saw for beating that gym, I think I just needed to catch a Sawk. I think this where I lose hypothetical readers, as I conflated grinding with farming. I didn't initially even think about farming, but as I walked back and forth through grass waiting for another Sawk to show up (I didn't get lucky enough to catch them the first time I saw one), I got the feeling that what I was doing was close enough to grinding that I dropped the plan. While I caught a Sawk later anyways, it became pretty apparent to me that I was simply going to miss chances to get some Pokemon by playing like this, but isn't catching Pokemon supposed to be one of the main goals? Evolution also gets disincentivized, while there are ways to insinuate or know if a Pokemon has an evolution, it could be a waste to check in case that Pokemon ended up not being great anyways. Experimentation in general is pretty disincentivized if you limit a core progression mechanic like XP. About halfway through the story I pretty much just stopped cycling Pokemon in and out of my team and committed to some that I didn't entirely want.

Boldore was on the team before Reshiram showed up for the last few battles.

The postgame routes were pretty weird. I didn't like the variety introduced by the National Dex since it meant I had to fight a lot more Pokemon that I didn't know the typings of. Also, Trainer Pokemon were very consistently like 10+ levels higher than mine, but they were also usually unevolved Pokemon which in turn made a lot of fights feel like jokes.

What are you doing here, at Level 63 no less?

So yeah I think Pokemon is reasonably playable without grinding, but I think grinding is there as a central option beyond being a strategically simple way to overpower battles. That last statement might sound appreciative of grinding, but it's actually not. I prefer more tightly knit progression systems than traditional RPG level ups, and I especially don't like when the repetition of grinding is in the way of more generally interesting aspects of progression. I switched over to using a bunch of my favorite Pokemon during the postgame, and while I was able to beat Cynthia with the use of Rocky Helmet + a bajillion healing items, I felt too underpowered to wanna bother with any more difficult postgame fights.

I would've had Zoroark since that's my favorite Pokemon, but unbeknownst to me they used to be event exclusive so I didn't bother getting one.


But Enough Of The Gameplay

I actually had a great time with this game. I fell out of love with the Pokemon franchise back when Sword & Shield released, and this game has reminded me that I haven't just simply grown out of liking Pokemon. I remember back when gen 5 was know for having very controversial Pokemon designs, and I found it laughable that people hated Pokemon like Vanillite and Trubbish, I love those fellahs and plenty others from gen 5 (Garbodor was included on my champion team because she is my friend). Another reason I didn't like the National Dex was because I felt like the old Pokemon diluted the gen 5 ones that I like so much. The human character designs are also some of my favorites in the series. The camerawork in this game also fuels towards an overall great visual style. The one visual thing I particularly don't like though is the non-pixel perfect sprite scaling. Usually I'm not that picky about that sorta thing, but it's really prominent in the DS Pokemon games when sprites get weirdly scrunched up due to the low resolution of the DS hardware.

There's admittedly some charm I find in this, but I don't prefer it.
 
With age I'm now a lot less positively receptive towards the way Pokemon presents its own world and narrative. The games feel very self congratulatory with how much everyone seems to love Pokemon and Pokemon battles, and there's a lotta tongue-in-cheek lampshading to how arbitrarily in service of gameplay the world can be. I like that the story of Black & White specifically tries to challenge the series's ideals, although I would've liked to see its ideas fleshed out further. N is by far my favorite part of the plot, while without him I don't think the plot would fall completely flat, I would not care for it. Unfortunately N is only present here and there throughout the player's journey, at least the ending utilizes him solidly.

For once I actually got a little into the roleplaying aspect of an RPG. I don't like the notion people suggest that you get to just roleplay as yourself, the plot requires the protagonist to act in some specific ways, but I could at least roleplay as a character vaguely based on myself. It's definitely something I had to be in the right headspace for though, the general writing didn't take me out, but my arbitrary gameplay restrictions did.

Conclusion

This has game somewhat patched up the sourspot I've had for Pokemon, but I haven't just clocked back into loving the franchise. I've got a bit of interest in some of the other games, but this is am RPG series, I don't have an easy time getting into them.

 

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