Pokemon White 2

Playtime: 35.8 Hours

Just like Pokemon Black version, I emulated this on my Steam Deck - so all the online stuff & DS functionality was pretty much disabled. Playing the White version for the sequels, but I don't think it ended up mattering very much outside of a few version exclusives because the big differences tend to be locked into the postgame, including the legendaries which you don't even catch before postgame. I beat the main game all the way up to the credits after the Pokemon League, but have no interest whatsoever in touching the postgame, even if there is some actual meaningful content for people who want to push for the legendaries.

Decided to take Tepig as the starter this time for some variety (after picking Snivy for Black version). Starter movesets are pretty awful this generation overall, but somehow made it all work OK by the time he evolves to Emboar and learns Flamethrower. My other party members in this run were Krookodile, Swanna, Sawsbuck, Galvantula, and Haxorus, each of which turned out really well; this is probably one of the most cohesive and effective teams I've ever had in a Pokemon game, with some pretty fun ability synergies as well. Everyone in my party had very meaningful contributions during the Elite 4 + champion, and I never had the same feeling in this game about Excadrill being an easy cheat code to win the game (maybe just because I didn't use one, but the idea stands).

I continued my annual Pokemon tradition this year (2023) by finishing up the Gen 5 games with White 2; I believe this is the only generation with a true sequel. Since it's been a year since the last one, and since I usually don't find Pokemon characters or worlds very memorable, I can't say much about the feeling of revisiting the same locations again, but I at least think the experience is different enough that I wouldn't consider this a soulless rehash. I'm still assuming the decision to stay in the same region was motivated by business constraints, but the decision to continue the story of BW1 turned out well. Gen 5 was pretty clearly an attempt to shift the tone of the game towards the slightly aging teenage to young-adult demographic, indicated by the more serious story (and sequel) as well as the teenaged characters - it clearly didn't work out that well, since they abandoned that from Gen 6 onwards. The moral complication around the idea of capturing Pokemon for battle has always been an odd note in the background of the entire series, and the ongoing conversation in this game between the people who truly wanted to do well by "freeing" Pokemon from enslavement and the people who stole Pokemon purely for their own benefit finds firmer ground in this game in my opinion. Team Plasma is still the same group of idiots, but this time you can meet a number of ex-members that have more to say about their beliefs. With that being said, the rest of this game's story is pretty standard JRPG or storybook villain trite, so there's not much else to think about there.

From a gameplay standpoint, BW2 differs from BW1 in a few ways from my experience. First is the available Pokemon; BW1 had pretty much only Gen 5 Pokes available until postgame, which felt fresh but also limited. A lot of the "new" Pokemon types were just lazy and uninspired clones of the popular archetypes from generations past. You have the generic bird pokemon, generic rat pokemon, generic dog & cat, etc. Unfortunately, while those are here to stay, BW2 adds a good number of older Pokemon back which adds some good variety in the gameplay. I didn't end up using any on my own team, but trainer fights felt a lot more diverse than in BW1. The level scaling in this game was also improved significantly from BW1 - in general, I found that my 6-Poke team didn't usually stray more than a couple of levels above or below the average trainer throughout this game. Enemy Pokemon were far more threatening this time since they aren't all guaranteed instakills anymore. Grinding ended up being fairly limited because of that - in my case, besides bringing up new party members, I only had to powerlevel in a couple of instances since I wanted to hit some levels for new moves. Also, since the Lucky Egg is convenient in this game, the total time grinding was quite low, maybe only a couple hours across the entire game for all party members. However, a huge tradeoff is that a lot of normal trainers in this game end up only having a single decent level pokemon instead of the frequent 3-4 Poke fights of previous games. Trainer fights simply don't last long enough to require any dynamic switching or tactics during gameplay. The triple & rotation battle trainers (which are completely unmarked, so you have no idea that they'll suddenly throw out these mechanics at you) are an interesting touch, but even those usually have only one tough pokemon and two little runts that act as free kills. I think a more dynamic implementation of level scaling on these regular trainers would work better in some other games to encourage longer and tougher trainer fights where tactics besides "hit hard and fast" are viable.

Besides the comments above, this game at its core is about the same as BW1. However, I'm pretty sure there was something wrong in the ROM I used, or maybe a bug in the emulation - in that the PRNG engine was very consistently very broken during my playthrough, usually against my favor. I definitely had a couple of lucky breaks surviving at low health, but there are too many BS issues to ignore, or for it to be any kind of fluke. Firstly, the critical rate from enemy attacks was about 2-3 times the normal rate consistently across the entire game - which includes an instance where 4 out of 5 consecutive attacks were unboosted crits against my team, an 0.001% chance. Speaking of extremely low-odds occurrences, an enemy Lopunny hit the Dizzy Punch confuse 3 times in a row, followed by 3 self-hits; this is about another 0.1% chance. I've had an unlucky speed tie turn into a crit + flinch, several instances in a fow of hitting the Static/Effect Spore/Poison Point roll, and far more. I've kind of mentally considered the playthrough as a Challenge playthrough (which it really is, with these odds) since it requires some cosmically horrible luck for any of these things to happen, let alone all of them. Trying to catch Pokemon was no better, too - for some reason these were buggy too. I tried to catch Cobalion and ended up throwing around 200 balls at it without ever actually catching it when I had a calculated ~1/17.5 chance to land the necessary roll (given low HP, no status, ultra balls). That's above 10x rate, and less than 0.001% chance to happen to anyone. I also had a sub-0.1% chance streak of missed quick balls - 2x Piloswine, then Lunatone, Sneasel, and Delibird; all moderate-to-high catch rate, yet all somehow missed in a row. Finally, I had two literally impossible misses on Pawniard and Golurk, both of which have above 100% chance to catch with a quick ball (5x odds in Gen 5) - very clearly indicating an RNG glitch. Ultimately, I can't tell if it's a fundamental issue with the game, my emulator, or the specific ROM I used for my playthrough, but it made so much of the experience unnecessarily horrible when I honestly think this game would have been quite competent without these issues. If it has anything to do with the setup, I thankfully won't need to use an emulator for USUM next year as this bug sort of ruined my experience with this game.

To put a short cap on my thoughts - I think everything I've seen of this game from a more objective point of view clearly indicates a passion for improvement and evolution of the series that hasn't been seen since, and I really respect the effort they put into making this game enjoyable to play without steamrolling the second half, and without having to grind for hours like BW1. On the other hand, my time with this unfortunately wasn't as great as I think it could've been; if I didn't love the team I put together as much as I did, I doubt I would have ever finished it. I very nearly quit the game entirely because of the PRNG bugs.