Shades of Grey

Black. Is the answer to which pokemon game I recently purchased. It seems to be the less popular version of the game but i guess that’s because everyone wants the black coloured legendary at the ‘end’ of the game.

Now I say ‘end’ because its a game where the credits are not the last of the game at all. Pokemon has always had the major theme of good hearted individuals winning against the evil that threatens to ruin the balance of the world, and in b/w its no different… or is it?

It raises are question of morales this time, with the ‘evil’ cult/team Plasma wanting everyone to release their pokemon back into the wild and no longer keep them. Well this actually seems like the good side and if you pay attention you may end up questioning your own actions. May end up, i didn’t to be honest, as a 21 year old playing a childrens game i like to play in a style somewhat differently than intended. Now calling pokemon rather rude names is nothing original but I still do it for my own amusement and also to test my profanity vocabulary. On top of this i shout at my screen when they faint in battle and basically treat them as if i was a Roman owning a gladiator slave team. So to bring up this moral dilemma of setting them free was sort of lost on me, but as a design student still managed to pick up on the angle they were going for.

So this actually impressed me, of course ‘good’ does triumph over ‘evil’ and it kind of solves the dilemma for you so no choice is actually involved only questioning your own actions. Having just ‘completed’ the game (by that i mean seen the credits) it brings me onto the other aspect of the series that no other primarily single player campaigns have: endgame. Endgame is all too common occurrence in MMO’s but its rare to see such detail be put into a single player game. Many games (as i have complained about before) take the lazy approach and use the GAME+ mechanic which is just re-using the game again. Pokemon Black and White still has a story once the main narrative is over, there are still things to do and of course to collect.

I would love to see more games with End-game content bought in not just as DLC such as Fable 3 or the Fallout franchise but as a core part of the game, where it feels like the journey isn’t quite over yet…