Pokemon Black

Playtime: 38.5 Hours

Playtime is measured by IGT, since Steam can't track playtimes for non-Steam games. I had to play this emulated on the Steam Deck, since the Gen 5 Pokemon games don't work well on a flash cart and will freeze up randomly, even with patches applied that supposedly fix the ROMs. Real playtime might be a bit different since I did use turbo a bit in the later game, but I also did lose hours of progress to unfortunate savestate loading a couple of times. My final party was Serperior, Excadrill, Sigilyph, Chandelure, Carracosta, and Zebstrika. I used Reshiram only for the last 2 fights, where it replaced Carracosta. Most of my party ended with levels in the low to mid-50s. I only played up until the end of N's castle and the credits; not bothering with any more of this, because there is a huge level jump for the postgame - the next route has mons that are mid-60s for some reason.

This was an average but fun experience - I'd say this is pretty much middle-of-the-road as far as Pokemon goes. There are a number of things I really liked about it though - I appreciate how this region only has the region-specific Pokemon up until the end (minus a few trades), leaving Pokes from other regions for the postgame grind. There's a certain amount of added interest in seeing and using a team that I haven't really used before. I also think that the level scaling was more spot on in this game than in most games before, at least through the end of the main game. I didn't have to grind much, and I ended the game pretty much on par with the levels in the final fight - most of the fights during the game were the same way. Postgame is a different story but it's not really worth mentioning, since I'm not doing it.

However, there were also a number of downsides to this gen. I feel like, more than any gen previously, there are some serious balance/usefulness problems. In particular, slower mons are absolutely unusable in the party - Carracosta was basically dead weight the entire game. Not being able to run away from fights, consistently going second and taking free hits (in a game where lots of enemies have annoying status moves, etc.) is really aggravating - more than I remember in previous gens (Aggron was fine in Gen3). A bunch of enemies also have abilities that take up so much extra animation time, near the end I realized it just made sense to play all of the trainer battles in permanent fast forward.

Continuing with balance, I'm disappointed with how many times I could look back at any fight and realize that I could just sweep it with Excadrill. I think Excadrill with Swords Dance, Brick Break, Rock Slide, and Earthquake might be the most broken loadout in the game - didn't even take too much to sweep the last fights with that. Because of that, I felt unsatisfied in a lot of fights, knowing that in any situation it would be more optimal to just spam EQ or whatever. I guess that's more my issue than anything, and I'm not going to use it again in BW2.

The final fights were quite shit - not only are there a ton of things weak to Fighting, but you literally do not get any chance to touch up Reshiram before the actual fights, AND it's forced into your first slot. That's horrible design! The fact that the mirror match with Zekrom (supposedly to show of Fusion Bolt/Fusion Flare) is optimized by spamming Dragonbreath goes to show how badly the last couple of fights were designed. Also note that Zekrom does not have any Dragon moves, despite learning Dragon Claw AND Dragonbreath. N is a retard apparently. No gaps to properly set up the legendary Pokemon that you just got, and both fights start off with a mediocre matchup. This doesn't feel like it was properly playtested, which is embarrassing. This is probably the worst endgame fight sequence in any game so far.

The menus were generally shit, too. Extremely laggy, super slow for absolutely no reason. Although I will give some props to the select menu, which was actually pretty great. The Gen6 4-way is a bit nicer IMO, but the list in this game is great.

Lastly (and not related directly to Pokemon), the RetroArch emulator controls/functionality could be better. It took me forever to even figure out where to configure things, because for some reason there are about 3-4 places to configure controller layouts, and only one of them can be saved properly. What idiot designed that? The controls are super unintuitive, and savestate loading wiping your save is absurdly stupid. Overall, time lost/deleted by this game probably amounts to a couple hours, enough to push playtime from 38.5 IGT to over 40 RTA easily. That's not to mention how triggering FF would sometimes turn the game into a stuttering mess (requiring force quit). It'll be quite annoying to play BW2 I imagine, whenever I get around to it.