"Pokemon Black/White appreciation from the perspective of someone who's never played a pokemon game before"

I've never owned a video game console, so much of my Pokemon experience as a kid was watching my friends play (what I now recognize to be) Gen III/IV games and wondering what the hell a "Groudon" was. By the time I realized you could use an emulator, none of my friends were playing, and I no longer had any inclination to do so.I played Pokemon Go for a few weeks, and while I eventually got tired of it, I did become interested in actually playing a Pokemon game all the way through. Arbitrarily, I decided I'd play Pokemon Black.It might be because I've been emotionally numbing myself gaming-wise with multiplayer-only titles for the past couple years, but it was genuinely one of the most moving experiences I've had playing a video game. The story is super, super simple. The characters are all very straightforward, with the deepest of them scraping by with 2-ish dimensions. Given these minimal narrative tools, the story somehow manages to be incredibly well-executed. The spirit of friendship that's written into the cast, and the overall optimism of the story-line, is so unashamed, unprocessed, and sincere that it almost has to work.I'm now in the awkward position of only being familiar with Gen I (because of Pokemon Go) and Gen V (because of Pokemon Black) Pokemon, but I enjoyed the new Pokemon designs in Gen V, about as much as I did with the Gen I Pokemon. Perhaps this is because I only really became familiar with Gen I Pokemon a few weeks before playing Pokemon Black. I have no nostalgia filter to look through.The visual and sound design of the game were actually incredible. I've never been so blown away as I was crossing Skyarrow Bridge, when I decided to slow the fuck down and actually walk, not run, across the bridge, and talk to all the pedestrians to ask them what was up. I also thought that the soundtrack characterized the different geographic locations pretty well too.Obviously the game has deep and intrinsic flaws--seeing as I haven't played any other Pokemon game, I can really only speak to the ones I see in Black and try generalizing them, instead of making any comparisons between games. The game is fundamentally fairly simple in the "campaign" mode; while I understand that PVP is actually complex as hell, the actual meat of what Pokemon will be for most people (a casual experience) is basically consulting a rock-paper-scissors chart to figure things out. And I think that there are fairly tedious grind-y elements to walking through dungeons and whatnot that I did not particularly enjoy.I think I've realized, in playing a Pokemon game for the first time, that what Pokemon does best is create an attachment between the player and the Pokemon party. I had been with all the Pokemon that I used to take on the Elite Four for a fairly long time. I invented personalities and mannerisms for all of them, and I felt like we were a real team.At the end of the game, right before I fought N, I caught Reshiram. To my surprise, the game was programmed to let me swap in Reshiram, even though I had a full party. After realizing this, I thought for a few seconds, and decided that no, I didn't want the legendary in my party. It hadn't gotten me through several gyms, Victory Road, and the Elite Four. I thought that if I was going to end this game, I was either going to do it with all six of my team or not at all. And this was honestly never a feeling I'd experienced playing a video game before.So yeah. Pokemon Black was a ton of fun, and while I understand (?) that Black/White may not be the most popular anymore, I really enjoyed it. via /r/pokemon http://ift.tt/2ayY7Xl