Did You Know?

Catherine: Full Body is actually a completely different game to the original Japanese Catherine as Atlus assumed the game was too difficult for English audiences.

This game is a retooled version of the Japanese Exclusive ドキドキトランスパニック which roughly translates to:

Doki Doki Trans Panic

Follow for more fun gaming facts.

In the subway station in Nimbasa City, there's one train line not reserved for the Battle Subway. If you take this line, you'll find yourself in a small town in northwestern Unova called Anville Town. This town is optional. Many players probably went several playthroughs without ever finding it. It consists of a couple buildings, a railroad turntable, and a bridge.

On weekends, the bridge is packed with people. You can trade various items with these people, and it's nice, but it's not really anything super important. The turntable in the center of town has a different train car on it every day, and an NPC will tell you details about whichever car is on the turntable.

One of the cars that can show up on the turntable is the one that takes you to Anville Town in the first place. If you talk to the NPC about this car, he'll say, "Isn't it just so cute? This one is a little slow and heavy. When it runs, the whole train sways. The train car is the same model as a Single Train. Because it is an old train car, I hear the maintenance is hard, but it's the one I always ride, because I loved it as a kid!"

The music that plays in this town is unique—as is every other town theme in Unova. There are no repeat tracks between towns. The Anville Town theme is serene, perfect for late-night background noise to calm the nerves. The song itself is called "A Lullaby for Trains."

A lady in town can be seen playing the flute. And if you walk close to her, a flute gets added to the arrangement.

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In my opinion, Pokémon Black & White are the peak of what the series is capable of. They certainly have flaws—and at first, those flaws were all I could see. Some of the Pokémon designs are outright ugly, and many of them borrow concepts from previous generation Pokémon (particularly from Kanto). The palette of the region is largely muddy and muted. The early routes are littered with bad Pokémon, and I often find myself getting a second team member very late, even after the second gym.

If someone told me Generation V was their least favorite, I'd understand. It's how I felt for a long time, and I remember it getting a lot of flak when it was new. But I'm glad that its reputation has turned around in recent years, and that more people are starting to see its merits.

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Mechanically, the starter trio of Unova is my favorite of any generation. Emboar plays very differently from the other Fire/Fighting starters, being more of a glass cannon than a sweeper. It always makes me sad when people see the type and don't give it a chance, because it's actually very fun to play!

Serperior, on the other hand, is my favorite Pokémon of all time. Its unorthodox combination of high speed and high defenses makes for a very unique single-player tank, with the ability to whip out first-turn status moves like they're nothing.

Samurott has a bit less mechanical identity than the other starters, but is still a nice alternative whose movepool has a fun range of secondary effects.

Unovan Pokémon tend to have quite unique playstyles. There are a lot of duds in the dex—Unfezant, Maractus (it's cute though), Mandibuzz, Heatmor, Liepard, to name a few. But there are many more that I could use on several playthroughs and never get bored.

For example, Krookodile is a very well-loved Pokémon with good stats and a wide movepool. It also has two abilities that are both equally good in very different ways; Intimidate helps it tank hits, and Moxie turns it into a fearsome sweeper if it can get going. You could play Krookodile across two different playthroughs and get two very different experiences.

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I've probably played this game 8 or 9 times, and I'm still finding new things to appreciate about Pokémon I previously thought were worthless.

I always hated Vanilluxe like everyone else—until I realized that it had great mixed attacking stats, just enough speed and bulk to make use of those stats, and that the two types of moves it learns happen to be super-effective on the entire latter half of the game's gyms. Now I love it, I appreciate its silly design, and I name it Jerry on every playthrough that I use it (updating to Ben+Jerry when it evolves).

Just this last playthrough, I realized that I had been completely neglecting a few Pokémon that may actually be really fun to use in a single-player context. So many times while building teams for this game, I thought, "this Pokémon would be so much better if it had a good buffing move." Then I realized that X items are basically buffing moves that always go first, always raise the relevant stat by two stages, and—unlike some other games in the series—are repeatably and cheaply purchasable early on, in Nacrene City.

Even though I'm still working through the postgame at the moment, I'm already imagining a new playthrough where I make use of new Pokémon with this trick. You could use Klinklang with X Specials to make use of its slightly bigger special movepool, or use X items on Audino to make its absolutely massive movepool more usable. I don't know for certain if this strategy will work out, but that's the fun of a new playthrough!

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The world of Unova is a place I can visit again and again. Each town has its own identity, a place that feels lived in & vibrant. Nacrene City is built from disused warehouses, and it has a local museum and a vibrant art scene. The residents of Lacunosa Town stay inside at night, fearing a monster. Nimbasa City is a hub for the entertainment industry, with a musical theater, sports stadiums, a theme park (which houses the gym), and a large train station to bring the tourists in.

The game's art style does a very good job at portraying the character & charm of these locations. The use of 3D models to represent scenery is much more pronounced here than it was in the Generation IV games, and the visual effect works well. In my opinion, the games strike the perfect balance between 2D and 3D, a balance that was somewhat lost in the transition to full 3D. There are certainly things I love about all of the 3D games—but there's no denying that the 3DS games run like ass, and the Switch games tend to have rather poor texture work.

Here, the game runs smooth as butter, the battle system is lightning fast, and the fully animated sprites help make each Pokémon feel alive. The animated sprites can be a little off-putting at first—all the aliasing around the edges kinda reminds me of early seasons of Ed Edd n Eddy, with their squiggly-line style of animation—but I've grown to really love it otherwise. I still kinda wish the series improved upon this concept, at least for a couple more generations. It would've been especially cool to see this style brought to a region with a less moody tone & muddy palette, like Alola.

Sun & Moon are my next favorite games in the series, and they really share quite a lot with Black & White—a bigger emphasis on story, a new approach for the gameplay, and a surprisingly good cast of characters for a Pokémon game. In fact, on that last point, I'd actually say Sun & Moon have Black & White beat. While N is probably my favorite human character in the series and Bianca is one of my favorite rivals, I'm not the biggest fan of Cheren, and there's not really any other characters in the story with a shred of depth.

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On the note of N: I think he is single-handedly what makes the story of Black & White work for me. Honestly, the plot of Black & White gets praised a lot, and while I think it's good, I don't think it's quite as good as people make it out to be.

The whole Team Plasma plotline is basically the same rigmaroll of "villain has reasonable goals, proceeds to kick babies and destroy crops to prove they're bad" that you see in so many games these days. Team Plasma spread the idea that Pokémon are abused by people, and no one in the good corner even attempts to make a counterargument to that. It's mostly just "prove that Pokémon like their trainers by beating Team Plasma in a battle, or something." No big deal, it's a Pokémon game; there's just not as much here as people would make you think.

However, N's character arc is my favorite part of the game.

This game explores abuse in a surprisingly tactful way. N has been manipulated by Ghetsis from childhood. Ghetsis exposed N only to abused Pokémon, in the hopes that someday he would become a charismatic leader who would convince people to release their Pokémon. He plays N for his own personal benefit, and does not give a rat's ass about N's thoughts and desires. When N begins to falter on Ghetsis, Ghetsis calls him "a warped, defective boy who knows nothing but Pokémon," apparently without a shred of self-awareness. Seeing N reject Ghetsis's worldview, broaden his own horizons, and start to see the good in the world is cathartic every playthrough.

It's certainly not complex. It's not a deep dive into the dynamics of abuse, and it's not all that thought-provoking. Really, it's mostly confined to the final scene, as that's when the game finally admits that Ghetsis is the bad guy. But for a big series to pull a character like N off without forcing forgiveness on them is cathartic. I think, more than anything, it's what makes the story of Black & White work.

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In the modern day, I'd suggest playing White Version over Black; the version-exclusive content is much better, and I think the story is slightly more symbolically interesting. Also, the White version of Opelucid City is much more cozy.

That's about all I have to say on this game. It's a great Pokémon game, highly replayable, and has a surprising amount of mechanical depth. The story, while simple, is mostly well-executed. It's about the most perfectly-crafted a Pokémon game can be.

Echoes of the Eye seems kind of like a square peg, round hole situation, to be honest. They wanted to tell this story about owl matrix and a prisoner, but had to fit it into the confines of the game they had already designed, and I dont think it worked.

I need to get more objective distance from it, but letting it sit with me so far, I think I Intensely Dislike the DLC, which I feel has nearly none of the elements that I liked about the base game. I just kinda wish I could forget I ever played it, and not so that I could play it again fresh like I wish I could do with the rest of the game. The initial puzzle of figuring out what and where The Stranger is is fantastic and straight out of vanilla OW, as well as the first couple times around the track as you greedily explore the surface world. It’s incredibly atmospheric; even the dream world is full of great atmosphere. But unlike the base game, there’s zero substance to any of it. In the DLC for the archaeological simulator, you learn nothing about the people on The Stranger nor what they were about. Other than they’re spooky horror aliens that communicate entirely via homemade found footage horror movies and jack into a big VR simulation of an early 2010s Slenderman fangame that you need to scour to assemble a strategy guide for. The goal of the whole thing is to find three sacred cheat codes, all to release a dude who’ll play the theremin.

The biggest problem is that it feels like an entirely different game stapled on top of Outer Wilds. OW’s biggest strength is that all these disparate areas that operate according to their own rules are cohesively tied together by a common set of systems and mechanics that work everywhere. Except in the DLC area, where none of the tools from the base game do anything, not even your knowledge of how to move your character around because you spend hours of it outside your suit slowly walking around in the dark. Even your rumour board stays blank because there are no rumours to learn. One of those mechanics in the base game and a fantastic piece of design work are the quantum laws, which are so consistently applied in so many places that you can just organically pick them up via osmosis. There are a few places in there where they give an explicit lesson if you need a little help, but most people I’ve talked to seem to figure out and apply at least one of them on their own, and it makes you feel like a brain genius. Here, they super transparently try to recreate that with a set of rigid laws within such a confined scale that solutions feel arbitrary and are often found by repeatedly beating the same brick wall.