Why is pokemon black and white so expensive

This game cannot get out of its own way.

The first hour of the game is barely playable because the game constantly stops you to either give you pointless tutorials and/or pointless storyline plot. You're constantly blocked from going past any area because the game forces you into doing this or that first, and it's not just about beating a certain gym first, now it's for everything. Here is basically the first hour of my game...

- Game has intro, then STOPPED so your mom can get a call.
- Go downstairs, STOPPED by mom to tell me the same thing I just heard from the call...why do they need to tell me this twice?
- Go outside, STOPPED by rival for no real reason.
- After you get your starter, you are STOPPED by rival to get his Pokedex (Why does it stop me for this?)
- Move a few steps, STOPPED by rival so he can battle you.
- When done, you are DRAGGED to the Pokemon Center by Bianca, who forces you into a tour of the place with no way to cancel out of it.
- When that's done, you are STOPPED AGAIN by Bianca and Co, who gives you your Running Shoes. Everywhere else is locked, so you have no choice but to follow Bianca.
- Get to the gate before the first path, STOPPED by the attendant there.
- Finally get outside the path, STOPPED again by Bianca so she can show you how to catch a Pokemon.
- Before you can get to the next town, STOPPED by Alder so he can yap about something, once again forced to follow him.
- Get into town, STOPPED by Alder again so he can tell you to heal your Pokemon.
- Go to Alder's house, STOPPED by Alder so he can tell you to give a Town Map to your rival first.(Why it doesn't just drag you to his house instead I'll never know, since your rival and any number of NPCs heal your Pokemon anyways, why not give Alder this function as well?)

Already stopped 14 times with no way to skip through any of it before I can even do anything, and even after this you have to follow the straight path because the game conveniently blocks you from going anywhere or doing anything else. Absolutely unnecessary and terrible, where is the skip option?

Moving on, this game is also unnecessarily annoying and difficult. Almost all the paths have the same exact Pokemon as the path before it with very little differences. The Pokemon they chose for this are awful with maybe just 1-2 different options unless you really want to run through the game with terrible Pokemon like Watchog and Pidove. I'm not asking for a Dragon-type off the bat but seriously, some more variety here would have done wonders. With over 600+ Pokemon, you can't tell me 1 or 2 stronger ones couldn't have made it into the first few paths, at least to add some variety to the palette.

All the Pokemon you fight seeming either have Protect or some equivalent (like Detect) so they can waste your PP, just to end up dying to the same move the next turn in order to really wear you down through attrition. Everything hurts a lot with the massive level jumps, which causes you to either buy a ton of meds and/or run back to the Pokemon Center REALLY often. In just about any other NON-Black & White game, you don't need a single med to really get through the game...they were always more of a luxury than a need, but it's helpful to have...in this game, it's pretty much necessary.

With few useful Pokemon to choose from, you'll struggle through the game especially early on when it jumps in levels and forces you to grind in order to stand a chance at the gym. All this was the same exact issue that the original Black & White had, so it's "nice" to see how Unova still sticks to its rotten roots here.

The game also has an unending array of useless features. The C-Gear thing that dominates your touch screen is totally useless, and I would rather have my regular menu there all the time. The Xtransciever phone system is so terrible...yet ANOTHER way for them to stop you incessantly and without shame, and many of the phone calls serve zero purpose...they neither advance the plot nor do they tell you something remotely useful. They call just to say "hi" but you can't hang up on them and you can't not pick up.

I can appreciate a harder game, but this game does it for all the wrong reasons. It tries to give you an updated story at the cost of not really letting you play the game, or taking away all your freedom within it. It tries to up the difficulty (I'm guessing that was a design intent) with the level jumps but it doesn't give you many options to deal with it except to struggle through it, with its lack of options at Pokemon to use and annoying moves that wear you out so fast through attrition.

EDITED

Having finished the game now, it does get a bit easier down the road, but not by much. The story is not much more improved than the original Black & White and it doesn't add much to it overall. Basically Team Plasma's old boss is still around and even though he was beaten in Black/White already, his minions still refuse to give up and keep trying to push their evil ways in Unova. It's not even really original and I got bored of it really fast. The only twist it provided is now they can fuse the Legendaries together and force you to fight this "super" version of it. Mine went down in 1 hit, which really took away from how "super" it was supposed to be. How's it supposed to take over Unova and bring a new ice age when I, a seemingly random trainer, can beat it in one single hit?

The Elite Four in this game was for me, easier than a lot of the Gym Leaders were at the time...but what is more disappointing is that Iris, the new Champion, was a bigger pushover than any of them. I felt no sense of accomplishment beating her because I didn't lose a single Pokemon and only took damage once the entire time. I've lost over half my team to the Gym Leaders before this fight....yet the Champion couldn't touch me?

This game does have an extensive end-game, but also makes you wish they had some of this stuff in the normal playthrough. The only Pokemon game I can remember that doesn't give you a Super Rod (or ANY rod for that matter, since the Good/Old Rods are removed in this game) until past the end of the game...and not just immediately past, but way past. This combined with what I mentioned before really limit the kinds of Pokemon you can catch and what you have access to for the majority of the game.

During the normal playthrough you'll notice areas you didn't have access to...now you do. This includes the original starting area in Black/White and some other zones..a lot of these towns and paths are abbreviated...really short paths with a few trainers and a couple items, and not much else. Mostly you're going to have to revisit a lot of older places to find the Legendaries there now that you've beaten the Elite Four. Besides this there are a few more story points here and there and you can battle some boss NPCs again and that's about it. I would have liked to have (and this would have been infinitely more useful) these extra trainers during the normal playthrough in anticipation of beating the Elite Four...not AFTER I beat them which really kind of renders the whole thing useless.

The last thing that really gets me is that the Forces of Nature are just outright missing from this game. In the original Black/White you can capture either Thundurus or Tornadus depending on your version, and when you did it and got both in a single game you could get Landorus too. Here, NONE of them are available...and considering they are Generation V Legendaries, where are they? Oh that's right...you have to buy a silly little minigame on the 3DS called Dream Radar to get access to them....wow. It's one thing to try and sell these little games on the 3DS store but it's another to literally rip out 3 of the Legendaries in the game just to sell it...it doesn't even really make sense because Black/White 2 is a DS game...NOT a 3DS game but you need a 3DS to get Dream Radar. So you not only needed to buy Dream Radar and play it just to get these guys but you needed a 3DS on top of this? Pretty pathetic way to sell not just the game but a whole system as well...I've never seen Pokemon sink as low as this before...

...though I guess I shouldn't have been too shocked since this is one of the only generations where the remake came in two versions, and in each version you could only get one of Reshiram or Zekrom, and not both. In Platinum, you could get both Dialga and Palkia. Even in HG/SS you could get both Ho-Oh and Lugia. In Emerald, you could get both Kyogre and Groudon. Here? Only one or the other.

My initial review still stands...this is still the worst Pokemon game of its generation. D/P/P and HG/SS puts the whole B/W series to shame, and it's not really close. This game (White 2 for me) feels like it was pushed out way too soon and was just done to cash in on all the Poke-fanboys out there. It looks and feels hastily put together, and most, if not all of the flaws I mentioned above are not present in just about any other Pokemon game. I'm glad X/Y is out now to really finally bury this chapter of Pokemon...X/Y is yet another example of games that do not have most, or any of these flaws and is just a good, well-put together and fun to play game.

Feel free to vote me down if you think this is a great game for whatever reason. For all these reasons (and probably more), I mostly hated it and was truthful about it.

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