Pokemon B&W is out!!!

Awww yea… Pokemon Sunday… aka the Day Nintendo Butt Rapes the Game Industry for Money. :twisted:

I had to drive to five GameStops before finding a copy, because they were sold out (didn’t preorder).

Random comments…

  • Experience is based on a diminishing return scale. You get less XP for fighting lower leveled opponents. Seriously makes grinding a pain in the ass, when you wanna over level. There’s also FEWER trainer battles on the field maps. On that note…

  • Gym battles are harder, because you’re not 10+ levels higher than them on average. However…

  • The AI still sucks, so saying it’s “harder” really just means a 6 year old might be more fustrated than usual.

  • Old moves like Tackle aren’t useless anymore. Old version of Tackle only did 35 base damage (and 25 in the GBA gen). New version does 50 base damage. It’s not a joke anymore.

  • Camera angles can be pain in the ass here and there, when exploring maps. Can’t move the camera too.

  • The animated monster sprites, while quite good, aren’t the best ever. Compare with Dragon Quest 6 for example.

  • Speaking of which… it took Pokemon FIFTEEN YEARS to get animated sprites!? DQ has been doing it for how long now?

  • Not all the trainers are actually animated. Just your rivals. Seems like Nintendo wanted to make all the trainers animted, but didn’t have the time. I think that will be a “new” feature in Pokemon Gray (you know it’s coming).

  • Speaking of rushed… Team Plasma has no Executives. WTF?! More over, in the “before press start” intro movie there’s clearly two cute girls shown, who are watching N get crowned. So why aren’t they in it?

  • At first I thought the new Pokemon were ass ugly… but they grow on ya. They’re not bad when you see the official artwork for them, or when their animated too. Plus let’s be honest… Squirtle and Venusaur weren’t exactly top of the line designs.

  • Team Plasma uses a LOT of hate speech. Seeing prejudice in a kid’s game, is quite jarring. I mean yea… it’s anti-Trainer hate… but as an aware adult, the underlying comparison with cultural/racial hatred is quite evident.

  • Pokemon America is ran by Democrats. There’s free universal health care. :wink:

I thought you already had the Japanese version of Black and White? Did you buy it again? :?

Yup. Got the American version too. I had no one to talk to about Pokemon - at least outside of 2chan - because it wasn’t out in the West yet. Now that this is no longer the case, I’ve picked up on the game again. I’ve got Pokemon Black in Japanese. Pokemon White in English.

To be honest, I frequently get the Japanese and American version to games, because I wanna support both sides of the market. It’s really not a waste because I can see how faithful (or unfaithful) a translation was done… I can also see if design changes were made (increased difficulty, changed random encounter rate, etc). Also there are some Pokemon released (special events; legendaries; etc) on one side of the pond, that isn’t on the other.

Trying to strike up conversation with fellow Pokemon fans here… but it seems I’m the only one playing it right now?

I already beat the US version in two days, because I could port my level 70+ team from the Japanese version. :stuck_out_tongue:

Maybe because every place was sold out?

Though suprisingly our gamestop had 3 copies of black and 2 copies of white.

Pokemon B&W sold over 1 million copies in one day. [b]Best selling title in the series so far[/b].

Yes… I think we’ll be seeing that Pokemon Grey very shortly. Might be for 3DS even. On a similar note: there’s some people betting that the Pokemon Sapphire/Ruby/Emerald generation will see a remake on 3DS (like how Gold/Silver saw one on the DS).

Hmm, from my experience so far it doesn’t seem to really be a harder game overall. Less XP for fighting lower leveled opponents is balanced by more XP for fighting higher leveled opponents and there’s plenty of opportunity to do that. You get the experience-dividing held item early on and even earlier on there’s those double battle fields that are just great for leveling up the weaker parts of your team. I found it easy to keep about three pokemon leveled far above the avg level of the trainer battles and I could have had more if it seemed necessary.

Plus, a lot of things like making TMs infinitely reusable (although they don’t refresh your PP for that move any more; understandable, because that would create a great loophole) serve to lessen the irreversible choices you generally have to make so many of in a typical Pokemon game.

Less trainers? :frowning: for me, the field trainer battles’ one of the best part in the Pokemon series. Coz I tend to quit near the end when there’s no more trainers to do battle with, it kinda feels lonely, idk, with just elite four to battle.

There’s stuff after the final battles (Elite 4 etc.) to do, and quite a bit of it. Not as much as in Gold-Silver though.

As for fewer trainers, to be honest I didn’t really notice that much. There’s plenty of trainer battles even if there’s not quite as many.

There’s roughly half as many trainer encounters as D/P/Plat. Assuming you don’t grind and just go straight through the story with moderate exploration, using the same six Pokemon for most of the game, you’re looking at having a level 45+ team (but likely no higher than 50) at the first run against the Elite Four if you encounter all the possible trainers. The final boss before the “after credits” stuff is sporting a hax’ed level 54 sweeper IIRC (can two hit kill a level 50 legendary; one if it crits - appears to have high crit in those hax).

True. Although I’ve noticed that all the “strategy changing” moves can only be learned through breeding or the Dream World. Most of the TM’s that are useful to a Pokemon as their primary type move, are already learned via leveling (Overheat and Psychic for example). TM’s predominatly serve as a means to directly add a non-type move (for example giving Shadow Ball to a Psychic type, or Crunch to a Physical type), or use it for the aforementioned breeding process. I think the situation is now Breeding > TM – so having unlimted TM’s is not as huge an advantage as it would have been in Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald… but it’s still nice.

Presently I’m shifting my playing style, because max Speed + max Attack/Special Attack are no longer the kings of the battlefield. Everything is sporting some sort of defensive “two/three hits to kill” gimmick and/or offense nullification thing nowa days. :expressionless:

That dragon thing? Man that thing pissed me off- thankfully unlike in battles against other players, you can use items all you like so I pretty much just wore it down over time >_>

Yea.

[spoiler]The immediate thing about it being an A.I. only cheat, is Hydreigon is a level 64 evolution… he gets it at level 54. Impossible. The other part is that his HP is above what’s possible for that Pokemon, and of course, it has an abnormal crit rate and damage output. That Sephiroth-theme song wannabe hacked hard core. :stuck_out_tongue:

I went through all six of my Max Revives before it went down… and it was his next to last Pokemon in my battle. My team was level 45 to 47 at the time, except for the level 50 legendary dragon. Definately the hardest battle in the game for me, that wasn’t in the Battle Subway. :|[/spoiler]

My team was small but higher level- I don’t bother keeping a full battle team for the single player game, so in essence I just keep 3 pokemon for battling (in this case it was 3 pokemon I got pretty much at the start of the game- my water starter, my fire that I was given for the first gym and a normal-type that appeared in a moving tuft of grass* and could learn things like Hyper Beam, the TM for which cost a third of my money) and kept levelling them throughout (I think my starter was ~lv60 and the other two were a bit behind but still >50) which is enough to cover my team’s elemental weaknesses (I don’t need to exploit every elemental weakness in the enemy if I’ve got the level and stat advantage, so I just need to make sure I have enough variety to ensure I always have a pokemon that isn’t weak against a particular enemy- something quite easy to do). My other 2 pokemon cover the HMs and I leave a spot free so that I can easily look at the details of a newly captured pokemon before depositing it.

That dragon thing was still way too much (not to mention fast) and even my starter could barely stand the onslaught. Many aqua tails, fire blasts and hyper beams later, it finally fell (couldn’t use the Legendary for that one despite how useful it was earlier in the battle and for the previous battle because Dragon Pulse was just far too strong against it - it could only manage one attack before being knocked out)

*yeah, I don’t remember the names =P

You take on the “improved” Elite Four after Team Plasma is defeated? They’re sporting some haxxx too. :x

Oh… but this cool trick, requires no haxxx whatsoever. :smiley:

On a strange note: When playing in the Battle Subway, I remember one NPC mentioning how it’s a “secret and exclusive” kind of train, that only a select few knew about and were invited to. The dark eroger in me, kept thinking how it has a lot in common with those “molest train” games. :stuck_out_tongue:

Almost TOO according to plan. I mean, normally ONE pokemon would be immune to sandstorm OR have a multi-hit attack OR some healing item, you’d think~

Pretty good game so far, I’ve always been a pretty big pokemon fan.

Maybe I overleveled, but I honestly didn’t have much trouble with the final battle. I used one max revive, my guys were 49-51, I had Thundurus in my party along with the brand new Zekrom, who nicely locked up in the first ultra ball I tossed out. Did they give these two legendaries unusually high catch rates so you wouldn’t be pissed off and chuck your ds away right before the big battle? I’ve traveled around most of the map, still have to beat the final elite 4 and the champion, forget his name.

Everyone going in said Snivy was hardmode because his move pool sucks, but I’ve had a pretty easy time with him, I can’t remember losing any battles I hadn’t planned on losing. And he’s got such a cute little face even after he evolves, I couldn’t help but choose him. White forest was extremely underwhelming, but I guess it’s fine since I have a full dex on platinum I can transfer over, and get the black only pokemon off GTS sometime. Just hatch a few Spiritombs, and some older starters. Should be easy!

Useless stupid fact that I never realized before until now…

Female Azurill can sex change into Male Marill after evolving. Seriously.

Breed like 5 or 6 Azurill, and make sure they’re all female. Now evolve them to Marill. At least one or two will change sex. Insane.