With Pokémon Black & White 2 just released, some people may need some tips to steer them onto the right path for complete, Pokémon Master-level dominance. Unsure if having 6 Kakuna in your team is a good idea? Want to know what you should do with all your items? How necessary is filling out your Pokédex? Well, read on and find out!
Train your team equally
Once upon a time, when you played Pokémon, you would pick the coolest Pokémon: Charizard. And because he was so cool, all you did was level him up and no-one else because he was the best! Then, you got to the Elite 4, and got steam-rolled because they would kill your Charizard on equal footing. Or, you got really lucky and won and were Champion and nothing else mattered.
Then everything changed. You are not supposed to level just one individual Pokémon, you see, that’s not what the developers intended. So in Pokémon Black/White 2, as well as the other recent games, you need to equally train your team. The reason for this is because you’ll encounter double- and triple-battles, and if you only have one decent Pokémon in your arsenal, you’re going to find yourself in trouble.
The easiest way to go about this is to just level each Pokémon one by one, level by level. So make sure that they’re all level 20 before levelling them to 21. Of course, there are always exceptions – like, say, a Gym battle where one Pokémon has a type- and move-advantage over and just clean-sweeps the Gym – but for the most part, Game Freak have balanced the game so that levelling your party equally is no problem.
Have a variety of types in your team
Pokémon has a base element of strategy to it: typing. Water beats Fire, Fire beats Grass, Grass beats Water. This is the most basic of strategies: you want to use moves that have a strong typing against your enemy’s Pokémon. In fact, this is the main bit of strategy that people are only really exposed to.
So logically, the best thing you can do is have a lot of types of moves on your team. The types of Pokémon aren’t really that important at such a low level, so you want a wide variety of move types to compensate. Typically this involves Flying, Water, Fire, Psychic, and Ground type moves. That will cover most of what you will encounter in game, and they’re some of the most common moves in the game, too!
Except Psychic, but I find it’s just so powerful if you manage to get your hands on a Kadabra or something equally awesome. I find that Psychic is just so powerful, especially if you’re using a Psychic Pokémon, because very little can resist against it and Psychic Pokémon generally have high Special Attack stat.
Honestly, if you can find Pokémon that can use Surf and Fly, you’re pretty much set, as they’re some of the better moves in their respective types.
Ignore your Pokédex
Ultimately, the end goal of your game is to fully complete your Pokédex; you need to “catch” (obtain, really) all the Pokémon in the land. There’s over 600 of them and it takes a really, really long time to do.
So don’t do it. Not right away. Don’t concentrate at all on catching Pokémon along your journey, because you can’t really do it. You need to be able to freely move about the region, need someone who has the counterpart to your game (so if you have Black 2, you need to know someone with White 2), and you need a lot of time.
Really, just catch whatever looks cool to you. There’s no added benefit to catching every single unique Pokémon that you see, because that just wastes your money on Pokémon that fill up space, money you could use on other things, because you’re buying so many Pokéballs.
Save your Pokédollars
Don’t spend your money. Honestly, Pokémon isn’t meant to be a hard game, if you follow the first tip: train your team equally. It’s designed so that kids around 10 years of age can beat it with no troubles. The hardest part is the end of the game: the Elite 4. This is the case for most Pokémon games: it’s relatively easy and straight-forward until you get to the final fights.
These fights are actually pretty tough, but if you’ve followed the other tips, you should have a really effective team and some good amounts of cash. The easiest way to beat the Elite 4 is if you spend a lot of money on items that heal and restore you; Full Restore, Max Potions, Max Revives, etc. Anything that can keep you in fighting condition is beneficial to you. So buy lots of them and win!
Really, that’s all you need your Pokédollars for; during the game, you can find enough Potions and other support items to keep you in fine condition between Pokécentres. After you beat the Elite 4, you can really just squander your money on whatever you see fit. There’s plenty of it and it’s pretty hard to run out of money unless you try and buy items in 99x stacks.
By Thomas Robinson