Jim and I head back to Aspertia Town, eager to check out the first gym of our new quest. We are delayed on the way by Alder, who leaps off a cliff again to prove that he hasn’t become any less manly since we last saw him. Alder has a precious gift for us, something that will make us even more unbelievably powerful than we are already: a handful of Oran Berries. We stare at him in disbelief for a moment, then throw the berries in his face and run for it.
In Aspertia City, we quickly learn that the new Pokémon Gym is actually an extension of the Trainer’s School we saw earlier. The interior of the building contains the School itself, which boasts all the usual books and blackboard diagrams explaining things like status ailments and type matchups, complete with a couple of intense-looking students trying to memorise everything. Out in the backyard is the Gym – a fairly plain dirt field with a couple of battle areas marked out in white. The Gym Leader is none other than Cheren, the other rival character of Black and White. Cheren is an uptight, bossy fellow who is nonetheless very clever, hardworking and loyal. He’s also a great deal more powerful than either of us have any right to be at this point. We shrug and decide to go for it anyway. Cheren orders his minions to assume their positions, before taking his own place on a platform at the back of the arena. This place turns out to be a tremendously unimaginative Normal Pokémon Gym. Both of Cheren’s trainers boast one Lillipup and one Patrat each, and fare poorly against our now quite well-trained Pokémon. Cheren himself is just as uninteresting (and appears surprisingly sweaty) – he turns out to have only a Patrat and a Lillipup himself, although much higher in level and spiced up a little with his signature move, Work Up. He complains later that he’s having trouble getting used to battling without his regular partners; I guess he’s supposed to tone it down for us noobs. Sansa manages to defeat both of them quite soundly by paralysing them with Thunder Wave, while Jim has been level grinding with Dovahkiin so obsessively that the little guy now knows Force Palm, a move Cheren’s Pokémon are utterly unequipped to deal with. Cheren muses that he’s glad his first ever challengers were so impressive, and hands over a pair of Basic Badges (the same badge formerly given out by Lenora in Nacrene City), along with the TM for Work Up.
This Gym is meh.
The first Gym of a game usually is, I grant you. Unlike most other Pokémon Gyms, which normally sport gimmicks or puzzles to work around as you fight your way to the Gym Leader, the first one typically features only a winding path that may or may not allow you to bypass the other trainers and head straight for the leader (Brock, Roxanne and Roark’s Gyms allow this; Falkner’s does not). The first Gym of Black and White, the Striaton Gym, went the extra mile to change that with its triplet Leaders, who took on challengers with a Pokémon that had an advantage against the player’s starter. Now, I certainly think this could have been done better, but I really loved the concept as a basic introduction to the type system by new players; if nothing else it really hammered home the importance of the Grass/Water/Fire relationship and encouraged players to use it to their advantage rather than simply blundering in with the strongest Pokémon available. Cheren’s Aspertia Gym doesn’t do any of that, which is especially ironic given that it’s based in the backyard of a school for Pokémon trainers. I don’t mean to suggest that the Aspertia Gym should have tried to replicate the lessons of the Striaton Gym, because it should be clear that it would just feel forced and artificial for anyone who’d played Black and White. It would make more sense, since the Trainer’s School has just been teaching us about status conditions and battle items, to have players fight Pokémon that emphasise one or both of those themes. It might be effective, for instance, to give players some firsthand experience with the different status conditions by including one trainer who uses paralysis, one who uses poison, and one who relies on sleep, before giving Cheren a selection of Pokémon that employ all three. Anyway, that’s enough soapbox time for me; back to the story.
As we leave the building, Jim and I are once again accosted by Bianca, who, delighted by our progress, presses upon us the TM for Return and a pair of C-Gears, the godawful devices that permanently occupy the lower screen of the DS and facilitate the multiplayer functions of Black and White 2. Cheren emerges from the school and greets Bianca, whom he apparently hasn’t seen since the events of Black and White, almost two years ago. He doesn’t even have her XTransceiver number, which provides the opportunity for everyone to swap contact details. Jim and I are thus introduced to the people we can contact for help on the XTransceiver (a wrist-mounted video-phone capable of managing up to four-way calls) and the types of assistance they can offer. Bianca can check the strength of your friendship with each of your Pokémon, any time and any place. Cheren can list the weaknesses of any Pokémon in your party, or explain the effects of your Pokémon’s abilities (including a few details that aren’t included in the ability description, like Magma Armour’s secondary effect of making eggs hatch more quickly). Professor Juniper, of course, can check your Pokédex and will give you hints about catching more Pokémon, but she can also tell you how to evolve any Pokémon in your party. She even knows the really obscure ones; I later tested her on Eevee and she listed all seven methods. While these are clearly useful features, I have mixed feelings about them. They greatly diminish the amount of important information the game hides from you, stuff you need to know but probably won’t find without looking up a walkthrough on the internet. Goodness knows I would have loved Professor Juniper’s help when I was mucking around on Sapphire version trying to evolve my Feebas. On the other hand, they put all of that information right there, just for the asking, so that there’s no longer any interest in playing around with the game to try and find it for yourself. I suppose what I’m asking for is a middle ground, where the game will tell you how all the weird evolutions go, but only if you work for it. Of course, perhaps this way of doing things simply recognises that most players in this day and age will just look it up on Bulbapedia or what have you.
Once all this is done, Hugh arrives to challenge Cheren to a Gym battle, right there on the street. Cheren indicates that he’d be happy to have another battle, but he needs a moment to prepare, and asks Hugh to follow him into the school. When Cheren leaves, Hugh explodes with indignation at being put off, and proclaims Cheren ‘weak’ before storming into the school after him. I… am beginning to think that every entry of this playthrough journal is going to include at least one hint that Hugh is a dangerous psychopath. Jim firmly declares that he is not our problem, and we turn to leave Aspertia City for our next destination: the second Unova League Gym in nearby Virbank City.
Pokémaniacal 