Becoming A Pokemon Master

So this week I am becoming a Pokémon Master. After a heavy lay of from the series I have just picked up Pokémon Black. The reason for this apart from the glowing reviews is to challenge and, obviously, defeat my girlfriend’s brother, James, at his own game.

I truly haven’t pick up a game since Pokémon Ruby back on the Game Boy Advance and have found the whole experience refreshing so far. I’ve only just tackled the first gym – who I easily swept aside – with my Pansage and his strong Vine Whip ability.

The graphics are nice and the sprites are far more interesting than anything I’ve experienced before. Even so they are still a long way from being interesting; even for a Nintendo DS experience. James explained that due to his love of the anime, and as a fan of the franchise in general, he would be interested to see the sprites become more of a hand-drawn style than they are now.

I decided to grill James in the fine arts of Pokémon mastery and the ways in which the experience could be made better with the next instalment as he has already ripped his way through White 2.

One of the first things he raised was his enjoyment of the Rotation and Triple Battles from the Generation V games and would ideally look for these to become more prominent in future instalments. I’ve only played one of each of these matches myself but found the ideas interesting. While the Triple Battles do add a certain level of difference the premise is just a larger Double Battle, which I remember from the old games, but still add some variety. The Rotation Battles however are far more tactically demanding and require a certain level of knowledge to know what attacks will damage all of the participating Pokémon at any given time.

Black and White 2 both have the ability to push the game into a ‘Hard mode’ following a restart after full completion and James explained that he would love this to be available from the start. As a regular Pokémon player he feels that this being included from the offset could give him a far more challenging experience. He told me that ‘playing a game through once gives you an idea of what to expect and how to plan ahead… so the hard mode would make the difficult playthrough even more demanding for seasoned players’.

One of the gripes of the games that he explained was the prompting of the HM type moves. For those of you that don’t know these moves are used outside of battle and help the player navigate different areas of the terrain. James explained that it really doesn’t take long to know what these work on within the overworld and is fed up with asking the game whether he actually wants to cut that tree that’s getting in his way. He also mentioned that he would love to be able to overwrite these moves which would stop him from requiring one ‘HM slave’ in his party.

Being a long term fan of the series the one area he feels has downgraded is the ability to allow a chosen Pokémon to follow you area. Understandably he explained that this gives you a bit more of a bond with the monsters being used as they are always visible to the players and that there could be some interesting ways in which these monsters could also interact with the environment like picking up items or wandering off to ‘smell the flower’ – perhaps even notifying you with a sense that a tough monster is close by.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time talking to him about his personal adventures with the games and found myself wanting to tread through the Unova region – which perhaps is exactly why I’m doing it now.

Let me know in the comments below whether there are any changes you would like to see in the next games and even more so whether you agree or disagree with any of the above.