Potes'n'Roll

Why Pokemon Black/White Dominates Japan[/size]
The director discusses how innovation drives the latest in the series.
By Kevin Gifford, 09/29/2010
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In only two days on Japanese shelves, Pokemon Black/White sold over two and a half million copies, according to Japanese industry firm Media Create. That not only makes it the quickest-selling Pokemon game yet -- it makes it one of the hugest launches ever for any video game in Japan, period. (One wonders what the figures would've been like if Nintendo launched the game simultaneously in the US and Europe. The Halo: Reach launch frenzy may've seemed like someone's Chuck E. Cheese birthday party by comparison.)
Sales successes like that don't come about by accident, and the way director Junichi Masuda saw it, the secret lies in Game Freak's dedication to making a truly new Pokemon this time around. "We started thinking about the next fully original game in the series after wrapping up Pokemon Diamond and Pearl," he told Famitsu magazine this week. "We had Platinum and HeartGold/SoulSilver to think about too, of course, but we all figured that a completely new title had to come after those. It was a while after that before we had something really solid to work with, but even at that time, I had the basic ideas hazily floating around in my mind."

Masuda's top mission: reeling back old gamers who dropped the monster-collecting habit as they grew up. "One of the thoughts I've had in my mind ever since I was working on Diamond/Pearl was 'Why do people drift away from Pokemon over time?'" he said. "Most people who played Pokemon as kids gradually drop the series as they get older. Some of that's unavoidable -- people get busier and they have different tastes as they mature -- but one of the core themes of Pokemon Black/White was seeing if we could do something about this. If we wanted to have a wider age range enjoy Pokemon, all of us on the team had to basically throw out the playbook. That's what we prepared ourselves for in this project, and from the story and characters to even the little details, we concentrated on making sure that adults, and not just kids, could also enjoy it."

One big part of this was redoing all the Pokemon themselves. As most Poke-fans know by now, folks playing Black/White will run into nothing but brand-new Pokemon for the entirety of the game's story mode. "During this project, we thought a lot about people playing Pokemon for the first time, or maybe the first time in a while," Masuda explained. "For any new Pokemon game, there's going to be a huge knowledge gap between those people, and people who've played the previous games a bunch. We wanted to level the playing field and get new or returning players on the same starting line so they wouldn't have to worry much about how previous games worked."

Redoing all the creatures was a herculean task -- especially considering that, after creating 493 Pokemon over the years, you'd think Game Freak would be tapped out of ideas by now. "The graphic designers definitely had a hard time of it," Masuda admitted. "It's the same story for other games in the series, but all of us on the staff have our own solidified ideas of what Pokemon should look like, and as a result we let those ideas restrict us during the Pokemon design phase. For example, when it comes to ghost-type Pokemon, the first thing we always think up is something that looks a lot like Gengar. We've always tried to avoid overly similar Pokemon designs, but we made that a special priority with this game."

An even bigger change with Black/White is the story itself, which is a great deal stronger and less open-ended than traditional Pokemon games. "To some extent, we've always made the storyline a weaker aspect of the game up to now," Masuda said. "If players are being pulled ahead too much by a story, then they'll stop being interested in catching Pokemon. If there's some dramatic bit where the hero's friend tells him 'Forget about me! You have to keep going ahead!', then it's not like the player's going to start walking around tall grass searching for Pokemon right after that. They'll do what the story tells them to do. With this game, though, we figured that a little story tension wouldn't be a bad thing, and that players would still be interested in catching Pokemon after the story is complete. That's why we deliberately upped the drama and the role sound plays in the game. If we want to appeal to adults, then it's better to have a little drama and make them think."

These changes didn't come easily, of course. "I did have a lot of discussions with the team," Masuda told Famitsu. "I'm the sort of person who likes breaking down traditions and the like, so if I was let completely free, I probably would have broken down everything. That's why we exchanged opinions frequently, establishing boundaries on what can be broken down and what needs to be protected. My guideline was always 'Is this something both children and adults can enjoy?', but if that means lowering the value of the game in someone else's eyes, that would make me reconsider. Still, I had a lot of people say 'You're kidding me!' and so forth whenever I brought up new ideas."

English-speaking folk can see how much Pokemon Black/White has changed for themselves when it comes out over here this spring.