Game: Pokemon White

Platform: DS

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Game Freak

ESRB: E

Genre: Monster collecting RPG

Players: 1

What's Hot: Over 150 new Pokemon, great efforts made to streamline the game, interesting enemies, new battle types add strategic wrinkles

What's Not: New battle types don't happen nearly enough, still follows the same Pokemon formula, some graphical funkiness

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Review by: Brandon "Tepig" Cackowski-Schnell

More than any other game I can think of, the Pokemon series has been inexorably linked to Nintendo's handhelds. From the original releases on the GameBoy all the way to Pokemon White for the DS, there has never been a Nintendo handheld that didn't have at least one entry in the pocket monster series running on it. How fitting then that as the DS begins its trip into the sunset that the best version of Pokemon made to date is there to see it off.

If Pokemon players are tired of catching the same beasts over and over again, fielding the same early game teams of Ratata's and Pidgey's, I can only imagine how the designers at Game Freak must feel using essentially the same tools to create game after game. Pokemon White and its sister Pokemon Black fix this in part by introducing an entirely new region along with over 150 new Pokemon to discover and capture. Sure they still cover the basic formula with early game Pokemon represented by cute puppies and small rodents, eventually giving way to fiery beasts and strange, ghostly creatures. The joy of creative expression is abundantly clear in these new creatures as both the character animations and names of the new creatures are delightfully original and, at times, just plain weird. The same strengths and weaknesses among the 17 different Pokemon types are at play, so veteran players need not learn an entirely new system, however new dual-type Pokemon are introduced requiring some return trips to the Pokedex to determine what creatures would work best for the battle at hand.

At their hearts, the Pokemon games are about a young kid taking a long, wild journey and meeting a whole bunch of monsters along the way. For all that this entry changes, the basic story remains the same, albeit with a deeper, more grown up component to the journey at hand. Gone are Team Rocket, a bunch of ne'er do wells that aways came off as slightly annoying rather than outright menacing, replaced with Team Plasma, an animal rights group committed to freeing Pokemon from the shackles of their trainers. It's an interesting move, as you can't help but wonder from the beginning if Team Plasma is correct. After all, throughout the Pokemon games, all you hear is how Pokemon are our friends, yet to celebrate this friendship we capture them and store them in boxes, taking them out only to have them batter other creatures into unconsciousness. Granted, Team Plasma's plan of freeing Pokemon by battling with the very creatures they're trying to liberate is odd, but still, it's rare to see a game question its core concept in such a way.

Even with the new creatures and new story, the early game is still very, very much the same. For some reason, the regions foremost Pokemon expert resides in your backwater town and is willing to give you, an unexperienced trainer, a Pokemon unavailable through any other means. You have a friend/rival, in this case two, that go on their journey at the same time you go on yours, stopping occasionally to meet you and gauge their battling ability against yours. You head off into the tall grass, catching early Pokemon and fielding a team until you get to the first big town where you can battle the gym leader for a badge and some previously insurmountable obstacle is removed, allowing you to venture off into the wider world. While I understand that every iteration of the series needs to serve two masters and appeal to both new players and veterans, I still wish there were a better way of dealing with the early game. Perhaps a mode that lets you skip the first few hours, gives you a stock team of level 5 Pokemon and lets you loose in the first major town.

Once you get to that first town the game really starts to breathe. The Pokemon games have always had a huge amount of extra content outside of the main story and it's clear that the designers want you to go off the beaten path and explore. For example, your first gym battle is against one of three trainers with your opponent chosen specifically to be strong against the Pokemon you chose as your starter. This can be a formidable battle as you're already in the hole from a strength/weakness perspective however if you explore a little you'll find someone willing to give you a Pokemon that helps turn the tide in your favor. The game is littered with nuggets to find, be they healing items, new moves or entirely new Pokemon should you decide to stray from the road and see all that the game has to offer.

As you travel from town to town you'll be treated to the best environmental graphics the series has ever had. Cities have their own distinct personalities and rise up as you approach them from long, winding bridges. Streets teem with travelers while buildings all house their own secrets and trainers. The environments have always changed in the Pokemon games depending on where in the region you were, but this is the first time that the cities feel like their own distinct places in a greater world than simply dots on a map that you fly to whenever you need healing. On that note, in a move that is long overdue, Game Freak has added healers at the midpoints of roads between cities, minimizing the amount of time spent heading back to town for revivals. Also gone are the separate buildings for Pokemarts and Pokemon Centers, combining the two into one place that allows you to access all of your Pokemon related needs at once.

The same notion of streamlining is also present in the how the game handles wireless communication. As more and more features were added to the Nintendo handhelds over the years, more and more buildings and counters were added to the Pokemon games to allow you to use them. Go here to battle people online, go there to trade Pokemon online, go to this other place to do this other thing. Pokemon White introduces the C-Gear, a persistent communications device that takes up the bottom screen of the DS. When activated, it allows you to access the various wireless modes with the touch of a screen, allowing you to instantly jump in and out of battles or trades as needed. It also adds a battery meter and a clock, two items I never knew I missed until I saw them there, silently cataloging both my time spent and energy consumed in the goal to catch them all.

For all that's new, the battle system has, thankfully, remained largely unchanged. Battles are slightly faster which is a welcome addition, but it's still the same turn based system where you and your four moves go up against an opposing creature and its four moves. Much was made of the game's new triple battles and rotational battles, both of which provide a nice strategic wrinkle as they require you to design your team differently based on how the rules of the battles play out, but these battles are so rare that all they do is make you wish there were more of them. On a similar note, the camera movements and combat animations are so well done and add such vibrancy to the quirky sprite design, it makes you wish the sprites themselves weren't so blocky and pixellated.

It's easy to sit back and view the game through the lens of what hasn't changed, but to do so would cause you to miss out on all of the wonderful tweaks and additions to a series built on an already strong foundation. I still worry and fret over my team, wishing there was some way to level up or balance them, but then I lose myself for two hours roaming the grasses in hopes of catching that one very rare beast. I still grumble when I lose a gym battle and have to head back out to get more experience, but spend hours outside of the game researching beasts and their moves to try and assemble the best team for the rematch. For all I think I want Pokemon to change, what I really want is what I've always had, just better. Thankfully, that's exactly what I got.

Brandon Cackowski-Schnell is a regular contributor to GameShark and is the cohost of Jumping the Shark , GameShark.com's official podcast and co-founder of No High Scores.

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