Welcome to Pokemon Week! To celebrate the upcoming North American launch of Pokemon Black and White, I have dubbed this week Pokemon Week at No High Scores. That means for entire week, it’s nothing but Pokemon posts, all Pokemon, all the time! Well, not including anything written by Bill, Todd, Danielle and Michael. That means it’s 20% Pokemon, all the time!
Oh, I know what you’re thinking. It’s GDC, you say, shouldn’t you be covering that? Man, GDC is hella boring. Blah, blah, blah, new release, blah, blah, blah, design document, blah, blah, blah, Will Wright gets an award. Screw that. Pokemon is where it’s at. Now, if you had to attack Warren Spector with a fire breathing lizard to get him to answer your questions, or if Ken Levine only came out at night, or better yet, only came out at night in the summertime and you had to spend four months waiting in San Francisco to get a chance to talk to him, then, maybe then I’d be interested in GDC.
So, instead of all of that GDC blather that I’m sure someone else will cover, stick with me to get your fill of Pokemon related posts to get you good and ready for Pokemon Black and White. I even have a Pokemon themed version of Don’t Shoot the Food coming on Friday. Stick around my Pokebrothers and Pokesisters because it’s going to be Pokeawesome!
Pokemon is the last bastion of slower than molasses, move a step, select the fight command five times, repeat ad infinitum JRPGs. All I can say is that if Dragon Quest can change, so can effing Pokemon. When it does, I’ll be all over this series again.
Oh man have you stepped in it now…
Banned, I say! Banned!
Heh.
Well, I don’t know if I’d say it’s exactly like Dragon Quest of old, given that I’m in the middle of DQ VI and just recently beat the Elite Four in SoulSilver. I think your description fits DQ VI perfectly while Pokemon requires a little more strategy than simply hitting the attack button over and over again. Sometimes you have to switch out team members too!
That being said, for some reason, a lack of change in Pokemon is something I’m ok with, whereas going back to DQ VI after playing IX is so a step in the wrong direction. Hypocrisy!
I’m not going to deny the turn based intensity the trainer/boss fights bring to the table. But wandering around in the field, with an encounter rate that I thought was higher than anything I came across in DQV, spamming attack on ratatas is an exercise in tedium the series would do well to move past.
Oh, absolutely, the early game stuff can be a pain.
I’m just gonna add that you can pick up Celebi at GameStops, and that this Celebi is the key to obtaining Zorua in Black and White. You can get them until March 6th.
I’ve got the japanese version of Pokemon White, but I can’t wait to get Black and play it on my XL. (As it is DSi enhanced, white is region-locked on DSi consoles, so I have to use my Lite.) It’s been fun to play though, even though I only understand like 5% of anything and have to play in kana-only baby mode.
Oh, I’m with Brandon on this one. Pokemon games are remarkably well designed: easy enough to allow casual players to breeze through the main story without too much trouble, but sophisticated enough to really reward people who want to explore the intricacies of breeding, training, and fighting.
Gabe from Penny Arcade once wrote up his experience attending a Pokemon tournament. It sort of summarizes the things I like about the franchise: how well it caters to different levels of play, and the emphasis it puts on cooperation and good sportsmanship.