Game Review: Pokémon White Version 2

Pokémon Black and White were the official mainline games in the 5th generation of the franchise. Releasing in 2010, these titles did a commendable job in re-visualizing the core design of the game with more 3-D environments and fully-dedicated animations for all 649 Pokémon.  The main talking point that Black and White often touts in discussion though is its narrative component.  Each Pokémon game has their own dedicated story, but they don’t often have a major presence in the games and wrap up without much shift in the stakes of the world. Black and White felt like the first time a Pokémon game had a narrative with a constant presence in the game from start to finish with a serious and thematic concepts.  After the release of Black and White, many fans wondered if Game Freak would do their typical 3rd variation release but, in a series first, the studio actually dedicated time and resources to developing a full-fledged sequel to the events of the original Black and White.   

Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 was developed by Game Freak and published by The Pokémon Company and Nintendo. It was released for the Nintendo DS on June 2012 in Japan and October 2012 worldwide. It was developed on the same game engine as its predecessor and primarily uses a lot of existing assets when it comes to world design and gameplay. The main selling-point behind this version is its original narrative that seeks to follow up on the Kalos region 2 years after the preceding events of the original games. Other new features include a PokéStar Studios side mode as well as the Pokémon World Tournament. Upon release, the sequels aggregated an overall 80 score on Metacritic and selling around 8.52 million copies worldwide, making it the 12th best-selling game on the Nintendo DS.

The story of Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 is set 2 years after the events of the original game in which your player character foiled Team Plasma’s attempts to conquer the Unova region. You play a new player character who is setting off on their own journey to challenge the Unova gym leaders and elite 4 and become the regions newest champion. Along this journey you will encounter your friendly rival Hugh, who is on his own journey to find and return his sisters Pokémon which was stolen by Team Plasma.  Despite being defeated, the remnants of the nefarious organization still persist and have titled themselves Neo Team Plasma. Your journey across Unova will have you come into confrontation with members of the team as they seek to use the power of the legendary Pokémon Kyurem to try and take over the region once again.

The narrative component for Black 2 and White 2 while less present than the narrative of its predecessor still does a nice job of capitalizing on the concept of seeing what Unova would look like in the wake of Team Plasma’s defeat.  There’s a nice effort to make your journey through Unova feel different than before too, as your player characters starts off in the western side of the region. You’ll be traversing new towns, meeting both new and old characters as you aim to make your way to the Pokémon League and defeat Neo Team Plasma in the process.  It does justify itself as a sequel for the most part when it comes to the story but I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge how the main threat and emotional plot beats are severely lacking in this entry.  There just doesn’t seem to be as much effort in this entry to tie the narrative together cohesively which is disappointing when you consider how well the first entry was able to do it.

Similar to the 3rd variation entries, Black 2 and White 2 make an effort to incorporate a more varied array of Pokémon from different regions across the course of this game. While I personally like to build a region-specific team on my playthroughs, I do appreciate Game Freak giving players even more options when it comes to Pokémon encounters and building a team based on your own preferences.  Battling with your Pokémon is made more interesting in these iterations too with its mixture of different battle styles.  You have your typical single battle formats, which will be your primary form of battling.  There’s also duo and triple battles which has you putting your team in 2 on 2 or 3 on 3 encounters.  There’s also rotation battles where you’ll in a 3 on 3 encounter but have to rotate the order of play.  While they’re nothing to write home about, it’s still nice to see Game Freak trying to constantly shift combat up to give players more variation to keep things interesting.

Exploring the Unova region is really fun too as Game Freak smartly avoids making things overly familiar by having you start out from the western side of the region with a range of new towns to work with. While they still haven’t done away with the HM move obstacles, Game Freak appear to have listened to fan complaints and make them more of an optional feature. To progress the game’s main story, you don’t need to use HM moves and the obstacles are more so there to provide additional exploration and rewards if you feel so inclined.  There’s a nice sense of variety in the biomes you’ll explore as you make your way North through the region as well.  Unova is a fairly balanced region when it comes to route and town design and there are area which offer loop backs to make navigation easier.

On the visual end, you can tell Game Freak were trying to push the DS hardware as much as they could with these iterations.  We were 1 year away from Pokémon X and Y releasing on the Nintendo 3DS so the studio was trying to do as much as they could to make this world feel 3-Dimensional and fluid despite the limitations in the original DS hardware. The end result is a game which plays it smart with scale and framing when it comes to rendering backdrops to help you feel like you’re in a living and breathing environment. I also love how much effort was put into animating the battle sequences in the game.  The fact each Pokémon has their own unique animations during battles goes a long way to expressing their unique designs even further.  It’s not just the Pokémon either, as each trainer you encounter has their own unique animation sprite too. It’s nothing major but these are nice elements that help make the world feel less stationary and more alive.  Go Ichinose and Hitomi Sato also knock it way out of the park with the music for these games. The generation 5 tracks are severely underrated in my opinion and deserve so much more love.  Some of my favourite tracks include Neo Team Plasma, Legendary Pokémon and Champion Battle.

Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 are solid experiences that will give you a decent run of milage.  I do find fault with how little the game really innovated in comparison to its predecessor but it can be forgiven when you consider they were likely hard at work on the next generation titles so they focused on justifying the sequel with a continued narrative and different pathways. What’s here is fun and varied and you’ll definitely get a fair portion of fun for your time and investment in the title.  I would just personally recommend not to play both Black and White and Black 2 and White 2 back-to-back as you’ll likely notice the lack of innovation more.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐