:bw/reshiram: :bw/zekrom:
Here’s a discussion some of you aren’t ready for. The storyline of Pokémon Black & White is objectively one of the worst in the core series and while it is absolutely not the worst- it takes genuine effort to write a storyline as bad as what Sword & Shield was given- I do not believe this game ever truly figures out what it wants to be as someone with a bit of background and interest in creative writing myself.
Pokémon Black & White’s storyline ultimately suffers from a major identity crisis that begins the moment the player meets N in Accumula Town. Placing extra story emphasis on a character who is not the player isn’t the issue here- it’s the fact that the game is deliberately trying to balance telling the story of the player character and their indeterminate actions with the linear storyline of N’s character arc. For the first 1/3 or 1/2 or so of the main story, N doesn’t do too much besides provide cryptic dialogue just like we saw from Maxie/Archie and Cyrus earlier in the franchise, and he really only gets off the ground after the Ferris wheel scene where he reveals he’s a part of Team Plasma. This shift towards N’s role with Team Plasma changes the player’s perception of what Team Plasma was attempting to do in previous parts of the story (we never did find out what they wanted to do with that Dream Mist either, did they just forget about that whole part?) and I would like to say Team Plasma is more relevant in the story’s second act, but compared to other evil teams they’re really not, and their appearance at Dragonspiral Tower and the Relic Castle reeks of “Evil Team shows up right around the seventh Gym cliché”. During the third act of the story where you finally get to see more of what Ghetsis has been planning, you start to think, man, the game’s taken ages to get here but finally we’ll get to see what sets Team Plasma apart from the other evil teams. Aaaand then the entire thing falls apart the moment the player defeats N in the castle. Not only is this the one set of games where the main character of the story arguably not the player, but any sort of character depth Ghetsis had disappears as he regresses back to the archetypal “I want to rule the region” villain the Junichi Masuda Era of games is known for. You can make the argument that he’s simply trying to silence the protagonist from revealing the truth about his plans to Unova now that N’s been defeated… except this logistically makes little sense because we’re a Silent Protagonist
and even if we weren’t, in the situation that the player loses against Ghetsis, Game Freak hardly ever incorporates the consequences of an important loss in these Pokémon games because this is a gigantic multimedia franchise for kids! We don’t have to put in effort! We’re going to make billions regardless! In all seriousness, since the player doesn’t get exposed to the consequences of something like that, any impact of Ghetsis’s threat is completely undermined by Game Freak’s handling of whiting out to the nearest Pokémon Center and trying again like nothing ever happened.
…so as you can see, I don’t like Team Plasma, but this post doesn’t end there. A major part of the appeal of Pokémon in the late 1990s and again in the mid-2010s onward is that, in a sense, the adventure and discovery was the story. What I mean by this is that, especially for large ensembles of newer fans playing Pokémon for the first time, the writing direction of these games is directly influenced and attributed to the concept of exploring a new, vaguely familiar world to our own but with a touch of fantasy, and by the time Unova came out, Pokémon was already an established franchise, and while Unova’s writing is different in places, it’s fundamentally not THAT different. As much as we all bash on Kanto and Johto for how boring they can be to go back to, these older regions and their narratives worked because they leaned into the idea that you, the player, are experiencing this new world for the first time, and I also would not argue that elements of Johto’s storyline feel like an overcorrection of certain elements of its predecessor in the same way that Black 2 & White 2 intentionally try and erase the more in-depth but potentially controversial parts of their own predecessor, such as Team Plasma’s religious imagery for example.
