Seneschal said:
I must admit I'm struggling to understand the appeal in pokemon games. Recently, a friend of mine convinced me to try SoulSilver, and I thought it was nice. But I vaguely remember playing one of the earliest games, and aside from the graphics, it didn't change much. Actually, I think it was merely updated. They don't seem to have particularly intensive story or quests, the mechanics have remained largely the same since the first one, and adding more pokemon sounds like DLC material to me. Does the series innovate at all?
And now this Black/White thing is coming although SoulSilver/HearGold is relatively new. What warrants a sequel so soon? Could some pokemon fan explain this phenomenon to me? Because from an outsider's perspective they look like many iterations the same game. I don't mean to attack the fandom or anything, I'm just wondering what drives the whole thing.
The games seem the same because they essentially are. There have been minor tweaks to streamline the story play, and the different regions help that. New Pokémon are there so that people don't get bored catching the same 150 over and over again.
Seriously though, you say that you've tried the game, take a look at the meta-game sometime. Pokémon has one of the most hardcore competitive scenes that I have ever seen.
Soul Silver and Heart Gold were remakes of older games in the series, they just updated the graphics and fixed everything that they had improved on with the third and fourth generations of the game (certain stat fixes as well as moveset changes). Black and White are true sequels, while Heart Gold and Soul Silver were just fan pleasing remakes.
If you don't really understand the series now, you probably won't ever really understand it.
Personally, I think that these are the best games that have ever been made and I will continue to support the franchise until it's death.
EDIT: There was a great article that I read detailing just how much the games have changed since the first generation. I'm trying to pull that up again.
EDIT2: Here it is. [http://ds.ign.com/articles/114/1143427p1.html] A wonderful read.