.... gonna get a lot of pitchforks for this but... black and white.

i'm going to preface this by saying the following: by no means am i saying bw are terrible games, or even bad games, or anywhere close. to be clear, i think i enjoy most pokemon games to some level, as i'd be lying if i said i didn't have some amount of fun with bw. but i think the delta of enjoyment between how much fun i really had with hgss and then bw following afterward left a really bad aftertaste, and that's probably the best/most accurate way to put it.

there are some parts of unova that i didn't really resonate with as strongly as others do. i never really cared or fawned over N or Ghetsis, and while the story is fine, and even as praise-worthy as its reputation suggests, it didn't have the massive impact for me that it had for others. i didn't really understand the point of the shadow triad and i wasn't... huge on team plasma in general? i think a good measure of an "evil team" in particular is how well they stack even against other games' evil teams and honestly i cannot name anything definitive about team plasma for the life of me. like, everyone and their mom knows something about team rocket, and there are memorable characters (archie and maxie, mostly) from hoenn, and cyrus, mars, saturn, and jupiter from team galactic. i will say, however, the biggest plus to unova to this day for me continues to be the pokemon it introduced far more than the characters.

i think the biggest disappointment was the battle subway and look - i hate to come across as one of those Battle Frontier Enjoyers (tm), but i do. after hgss, i had high expectations for bw's postgame and it just did not deliver. battle subway was the biggest disappointment to the point where after i've beaten the main game, i've pretty much just stopped playing and didn't really bother engaging much with it, because why would i, when game freak put so much effort into the facilities and optional content for hgss and skip out on that for bw? it made no sense to me. i vividly remember just. closing my DS the moment i discovered battle subway was a thing and knowing that this wasn't going to be my cup of tea.

there are things about bw that i did like aside from the pokemon i mentioned. i think bw was the first generation to introduce reusable tms, and i really like iris, and i think bw's e4 is pretty solid character-wise. i'd be remiss if i also didn't mention that the graphics weren't enjoyable, because they are. but if there's a tl;dr to all of this, it's just that bw didn't really hold up to the expectations i set for it after the highs i've experienced from hgss.

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