No Angus, Brendan doesn't have white hair
Bullseye Hit Callout. Still wish it was so but that doesn't crack my top 30 nitpicks on ORAS.
This is the only part of your list I disagree with, largely cuz that aspect leads to heavy misinterpretation or toxic nostalgia. Headcanoning based on limited info (graphical or writing) ...
...Otherwise I agree with your list mostly, but I don't like "vagueness to headcanon" being romanticized. "Imagination left to the player" has unfortunately become a crutch for some writers just not worldbuilding, though the inverse of overly explaining also is true. That said, Pokemon games kind of are just too basic to have the latter largely cuz the player is cardboard + railroaded game design until SV
There's a degree of caution to be used with being too invested in headcanons when looking at shared experiences where they won't apply, but I don't agree with the idea that leaving space for imagination is poor writing. Crafting things with a mind for where players will fill in the blanks on their own is a talent. It only really runs into issues with iteration, where reexaminations can draw harsh lines where fuzzy indecision was deliberately chosen before, which is a problem I don't believe designers should think too hard about.
With all that said, imagine if N in BW1 actually helped the player and strike back at Ghetsis after realizing how evil he is? Instead of the player generically finishing the big bad. Would make him less passive after the climax
Yep. Multi Battle Climax against Ghetsis standing alone, with both Dragons in tow? I'd even accept the player being able to lose to Ghetsis alone and then have N clap back in a cutscene battle or something. Maybe even have Alder do something!
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here are the main things that plague BW1's design:
1. Stat Creep
...Excadrill...
Yep this one is hard to ignore. Feels like there were some wires crossed on this mon for ingame, it is absurdly strong and also breaks a cardinal gameplay design rule - making it blatantly better to just wait to catch the Evolution later in the game rather than grab the unevolved form and train it up. Getting Drilbur in Twist Mountain at levels 28-31 to evolve it at Level 33 with earlier Earthquake is the optimal way to use the mon by such a wide margin compared to leveling up a Drilbur from Wellspring Cave that it's sort of hard to fathom. (I'd argue the only other case so blatant is Tentacruel in RSE via Surf vs via Old Rod in Dewford Town)
Movepools in BW1 range wildly between dogshit and excellent. Many, again, have movesets that feel reminiscient of Generation 1 design, which really just means weaker and more specific.
This is also true, even if I do think it applies broadly. I'd say that there aren't anywhere near as many of misses in BW1 vs the older games, but they absolutely do exist. Some mons that already would struggle do even worse with shallow level up movepools. (Watchog, Unfezant, Liepard, Accelgor, Maractus)
As for the Grass types, yeah they have a pretty low ceiling in BW1 with just how hostile endgame gets toward them. Elesa being so hostile to Grass types in BW1 is a big deal for their utility in the midgame, and after Clay they do stop having fights to contribute to. It's basically just the spammed Krokorok throughout the Plasma Grunts in Relic Castle and Dragonspire Tower for advantageous matchups. Then Shauntal has a few things worth targeting with Grass moves and there's Carracosta and Seismitoad in the final head to head but those really are the few bright moments among a lot of tough foes.
I do think most of the game's Grass types get just enough to work with to make them worthwhile despite these issues, especially when not playing with high efficiency. The Grass Type association with Scaling is especially strong, as most Grass types in Unova get a strong tool to setup with, be it Growth / Coil Serperior, Curse Ferrothorn, Quiver Dance Lilligant, or Growth + Draining Move combos which several Grass types get very early on. Tools like Leech Seed also help a lot in letting Grass types play into opponents that resist them but don't hit especially hard back - opposing Steel and Dragon types get pretty scary towards endgame and Grass types don't exactly beat them but can often contribute more than other types that get stonewalled by them. Leavanny is the Grass type in the game that takes the longest to gain access to one of these mechanics, not getting Leech Seed at all and waiting until Level 46 for Swords Dance, but funny enough I'd probably agree with you that it does relatively well as an ingame option because it evolves relatively early and has a much better lategame than most Grass types due to its surprisingly solid offensive potential into the E4.
I think teambuilding is really not fun when half the Pokemon need to work 5x harder to be useful in any context than the rest.
This is the place where we diverge because I don't feel like the split is quite this stark. Outside of the pokemon which don't arrive until extremely late into the game, I don't think anything in BW1 struggles so much to feel unusably bad. Patrat and Pidove are pretty bad, but both are kept afloat somewhat by the Return TM. Purrloin is dreadfully bad if used from the start of the game but using Liepard from the midgame on it's just regular bad and at least has some half decent E4 matchups. Maractus mentioned earlier has some extremely unfortunate boss matchups outside of Clay but gets very early access to Giga Drain and has the tools to scale past some of its poor matchups. Yamask, Trubbish, and Cottonee are all very inefficient ingame but between Eviolite and their damage over time tools they have plenty of ways to contribute to difficult fights even when underleveled. A few of the really bad late evolution level cases like Vanillish, Klang, and Mienfoo have been discussed plenty before and in context aren't terrible if they can monopolize Eviolite.
With the best choices, with the exception of Excadrill grabbed during midgame, I think there's an adequate amount of barriers to using the best ingame options. Darmanitan and Archeops might be somewhat ridiculous as glass cannons, but they're still definitely glass cannons and will shatter when played poorly. Haxorus and Scrafty are absurd sweepers but have late evolution levels, are fairly underwhelming until they hit those levels even with Eviolite, and require more favoritism or grinding than many Pokemon that are just OK.
This is a design element most of the boss fights in this game have, they deliberately put the counter right next to the boss. Ever been playing RBY and been like, shit, I don't really have a Pokemon that can resist Electric, lemme go to "Ground Type Cave" and catch Ground Type? Diglett's Cave, I mean.
Almost every single bossfight in BW is like this, made worse that the game's fucking tutorial tries to teach you type advantage with "Explore to the right side of the gym to get a free counter!"
This is a thing BW1 does. Striaton has the Dreamyard Monkey, Nacrene has Throh / Sawk, Castelia has Darumaka, Nimbasa has Sandile, and Mistralton has Zebstrika.
I want to highlight Sandile. While the others do fit the Dugtrio for Surge model closely, Sandile definitely doesn't - and I do specify Sandile because the grinding it needs to get to Krokorok at Level 29 - Elesa's Zebstrika is Level 27 - is a high enough bar of investment to make it not ridiculous for the evolution to solo the fight. For Sandile, a Volt Switch immunity is fantastic and the 50% with Intimidate slowing down Emolga damage is nice, but even with Eviolite Sandile is just too fragile to sustain itself in the face of the neutral hits it needs to deal with, and can't solo the fight without items in battle or some luck. But there's a wrinkle I don't often see mentioned in the form of an effective but unlikely "solution" Pokemon - Dwebble! Stealth Rock at Level 24 is well within the game's expectations for the player, and with the Emolga spamming Volt Switch so often, surviving just one attack to get them up is a very strong set up for the rest of the fight. In fact, for this very kind of strategy, Grass types that can withstand repeated Volt Switches are super important. They can work as a part of an AI bait loop where you pivot the Grass type in on Volt Switch which baits out Aerial Ace / Flame Charge which can easily be handled by most things with decent physical bulk, then in turn baiting another Volt Switch.
Outside those cases, the examples sort of break down. Clay having Grass types available outside his gym isn't especially relevant in this setting because, well, Excadrill is kind of overpowered. Ferroseed and Foongus don't even resist Ground and Rock Slide slams Ducklett and Swadloon. (I don't think it's real to count a 5% swirling grass encounter as a boss exploit though Leavanny would count if you do) Even Deerling which you mention just doesn't do notably well into the fight, as it relies on the Grass Knot TM to do any Grass type in the first place and that barely 2HKOs Paliptoad if you have good IVs. I don't think the other cases quite fit as low investment - Pawniard is just a bit too weak to really take on the Dragon Gym and all of the Druddigon have Revenge anyway, while Brycen is sort of a wet paper towel for most teams that reach him regardless. You mention Durant for the E4 but with how frail it is specially it only really does numbers against Grimsley.
More importantly, I think the design sense around these sort of easy bake solutions does hold some water with the kinds of decision making the designers wanted to influence. A big problem prior games had was that players would very often fall into play patterns of brute forcing their Starter through every challenge. BW introduced some negative reinforcement to this play pattern in the form of the changes to EXP that give penalties when overleveled, but I think supplementing that with positive reinforcement to push players to add Pokemon to their team to take on specific challenges they're struggling with was a smart decision, especially for the early game.
Zebstrika into Skyla is actually the case that I think is the most unwarranted and is pretty weak design in practice. The training wheels are well off at this point, but the solution here is even more simple than it was for fights prior. Even the least impressive Zebstrika caught in Route 7 will be able to use Spark or the mandatory Volt Switch TM to fry Skyla. And it's a shame as well with how many good but less complete solutions there are alongside Zebstrika - Joltik is comparable to Darumaka against Burgh but is even more fragile prior to evolving, while Emolga takes a fair bit more effort to acquire and doesn't always have the raw Speed to escape danger turn by turn. We all kind accept that Brycen is incredibly easy but him aside, Skyla is the boss fight in BW1 that most often feels like a speed bump rather than a meaningful challenge, and I do think that's somewhat of a shame.
It isn't the most elegant solution, and for experienced players the cases for Gyms 1-3 + 5 will stick out like sore thumbs. (I don't even think Darumaka is that bad with how inconsistent and fragile it is but I digress.) But I don't think that it ends up as an invasive design choice for those who don't need it while it comes with some very real benefits for beginners.
Onto the actual world itself, it's mostly bland and carried by Generation 5's excellent art direction and artstyle. People shit on Sun and Moon's linearity and to be fair, I think it is worse than Unova, but Unova is a circle with sometimes "oooh there's twooo paaathhssss", which is my least favorite type of RPG level design, anyways.
BW1's sheer linearity is overwhelming and is a really big hit or miss point with the game. Unlike other games in the series that are linear, BW1's biggest fault isn't so much the lack of other things to do off the main path like in SuMo, it's way more that the way the world map is designed causes the main path's sheer gravity become so intense that it's hard to break off from it without shattering the game's pacing. Contrasting Unova's map where every node has at most 2 connections with no overlapping areas with the interweaving level designs of Kanto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh paints a stark contrast that does not come out favorable for Unova. Consider just how much faster it is to get from Fortree to any part of the left half of Hoenn compared to the absolute slog that is going all the way from Mistralton to Numeva on foot prior to getting Fly. The main reason it doesn't entirely sink the ship to me is that BW1 takes great advantage of being within such a constricted system to provide exceptionally well tuned challenges for the bulk of the game.
Still, with the world design choices and the actual level design choices (removing most forms of mechanical level design from the overworld, greatly simplifying puzzles, removing almost all navigational challenges from the game) it's very clear how deprioritized Overworld Gameplay design was in Gen 5, and so on this...
...but ultimately I think I like the aesthetic of Unova more than it is interesting to explore.
... I agree with wholeheartedly. And it is worse in BW1 than in BW2.
B2W2 has significantly better level design and despite giving up the insular Pokedex, actually way better balancing in my opinion. Yeah, the dogshit Pokemon are still dogshit, but at least the best Unovan Pokemon are now in competition with old good Pokemon, and finding some of them feels more like a dedicated task.
Assuming I'm correctly reading "level design" in reference to the design of areas in the overworld, my gut reaction was to think that BW2's Overworld Design isn't really any better than BW1's. As far as the larger world design is concerned, I still don't think BW2 really improves much with its changes, but as far as Level Design within the overworld is concerned, I didn't realize how much better a lot of BW2 areas got until thinking on it. Virbank Complex, Castelia Sewers, the Strange House, and Route 22 are genuinely a lot better than comparable areas like Wellspring Cave, Cold Storage, The Moor of Icirrrus, and Route 10.
