I was in the seventh grade when Pokémon Blue and Red came out in North America. I remember reading an issue of Nintendo Power where they had an article on the rampant success and popularity of a game called Pocket Monsters over in Japan. An old friend of mine had a copy of Pokémon Green that he had got when he was over in Japan visiting family, and after playing it briefly one day I hopped that this game would eventually come over here. It was not until 1998 when Nintendo released Red and Blue over here. My good friend and I got them day one, at that started a love of those little creatures that has survived to this day.
It’s now been 13 years since the release of Red and Blue (15 since the original Red and Green), and Nintendo has recently released Pokémon Black and White upon the masses. It seems that Nintendo and Game Freak are starting to realize that the series has to start evolving, and they have taken a few steps with this new release, but is it enough?
The storyline in Black and White seems have received more attention than previous outings. While you still go around and collect all the badges, thwart the evil plans of some team or another, and eventually become the Pokémon master, Nintendo has made you more involved in it all. This time, you meet most of the gym leaders before ever fighting them and help them stop the plans of Team Plasma and learn a bit about them as people. Instead of playing out like a “my first RPG story,” the game seems a bit more focused on telling a half-decent narrative. I am really enjoying how this journey is the story of you and your friends growing up. The story focuses on the fact that everyone has to grow up, and that there are going to be trials and tribulations along the way. While this is set against a back drop of battling monsters and saving the world the message is still there, and Nintendo and Game Freak have found (or at least finally realized) one of the series biggest strengths; this is game that kids grow up with, so why not tell a story to go along with that?
Along with this improved narrative, everything from the graphics to the music has been done with a level of polish not seen in the series since Silver and Gold on the Game Boy. One of the biggest additions for me is that the monsters actually move around on the battlefields and are no longer static sprites. This adds so much more personality to this huge collection of creatures, and provides something to watch while the battles are going on. It is hard to imagine that Nintendo and Game Freak took this long to throw this into the game, but I am glad that they finally did; this change was something I never knew was lacking in the series until now.
While Black and White does offer some significant steps forward for the series, they still feel like the same old game with that new layer of polish with what we have come to expect from each new entry: new map, new cities, new gyms, it’s all here, but it’s also the same things we have seen for the last 13 years. It seems strange that a game with such robust online features (features I have yet to use thanks to the DS Lite’s archaic Wi-Fi capabilities) still feels so much like the games that have come before it. What do Nintendo and Game Freak have to change about the series at this point? I really don’t know, and at the same time I wonder if they feel that they have to change anything at all. With Black and White selling over a million copies day one in North America, and also topping sales charts in the U.K., I don’t think we will be seeing Nintendo or Game Freak making too many changes to the Pokémon formula for some time.
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