Pokémon Black and White Is a Reddit Game

The Best Story in Pokémon Is Terrible

The Reddit Game.

A Reddit Game is born when time passes and the memory of actually playing a video game fades. Players reconstruct the experience through secondhand sources like forums, wikis, and YouTube essays. The actual game becomes secondary to the game as it’s remembered, reinterpreted, or imagined—a Reddit Game.

When you Google which Pokémon game has the best story, the answer is almost always Pokémon Black and White. It’s the critical darling, the grown-up of the franchise, the game that dared to ask: “Is it okay to catch Pokémon and make them fight each other?”

Finally! A Pokémon game that took itself seriously. I had been playing since Red and Blue released in 1998, and by the time Black and White came out, I was sixteen and straining against the franchise’s softness like someone being told a bedtime story years too late. I wanted the games to grow-up with me. I wanted Pokémon to stop feeling like something I had to justify my interest in.

Even when compared to the games that were released after, everything in Pokemon Black and White is darker, edgier. Characters deal with internal issues stemming from purpose and self-worth. The villain speaks in ideology instead of mustache-twirling phrases. Even the color palette and creature designs feel more dramatic, like someone made everything sharper, more violent, and dimmed the lights. Pokemon Black and White promise gravity, depth and meaning.

But Pokémon Black and White is a Reddit Game.

I played through these games for the first time on my YouTube channel last year and discovered they have no story worth defending.

Let’s go point by point.

Our first claim, repeated often in Reddit threads and YouTube essays, is that Pokémon Black and White asks an interesting philosophical question: Is it ethical to catch Pokémon and make them battle?

This question is first posed by Ghetsis whom we meet within the first hour of the game in a plaza surrounded by a militia of Team Plasma grunts. Sinister music plays as he delivers a speech on liberation. “I'm sure most of you believe that we humans and Pokémon are partners that have come to live together because we want and need each other,” he says. “However... Is that really the truth?”

Compelling! But stories are not moments—they are movements. Pokémon Black and White begins with a question, but the game ends as if asking was enough. But asking–asking is not a story.

Ghetsis’s argument is only ever stated, it’s never dramatized. The player continues on, battling, catching, leveling up, receiving praise and badges. You still defeat wild Pokémon. You still defeat Pokémon that have been made stronger by leaders of the region. You still win. You win and you win and you win. Nothing in the world reacts differently. Nothing in the world interrogates you or your choices. Nothing changes.

The story itself makes no argument—no counterpoint, no dilemma, no arc. There is no set-up, no tension, no consequence. The ethical crisis exists only in text boxes delivered by characters that the story is clearly positioned against and never is it present in the game’s structure or storytelling.

What do people think happens in the “story,” exactly?

Well, if you visit the Bulbapedia page for Pokémon Black and White and read the game’s plot synopsis, you will find that the entirety of the game’s 30+ hour plot was not relevant enough to include in a section labeled, “Plot.” The summary skips from trainers receiving their first Pokémon to entering the Champion’s room for the final battle.

The “Best Story” in Pokémon is impossible to pin down. It might as well be invisible.

Now, how could the game have dramatized its central moral conceit? Easily. Black and White already stops the player every few steps to deliver flat dialogue and hollow exposition—empty calories of text that players assume are meaningful. The opportunity is there. All that’s missing is story.

Imagine this.

You run into Cheren—the rival obsessed with winning—and he challenges you to a battle. But something’s off. His Pokémon enters the field with its health already halved. He’s pushed it too far, chasing strength without purpose, and that pursuit has worn his partner down. You don’t out-strategize him. You pummel him. He loses because he’s cruel to his partner.

Later, out in the tall grass, you start to note that wild Pokémon behave differently from other games in the franchise. Some flee before the battle even starts. Others act erratically—flinching, ignoring commands, recoiling as if possessed by uncertainty. Maybe they don’t want to fight. Maybe they never did.

And then later still, you find one Pokémon in the wild whose data lists an Original Trainer. Not you. Not your rival. An NPC in the next town over. Was this someone convinced by Team Plasma to release their partner? Were they right to do so? You catch it, but it won't obey you. Not because you don’t have enough badges, but because it doesn’t want you.

None of this requires a dramatic amount of work on the part of the video game developers. Just a different intention. Give the morality shape in the story. Let it live in mechanics, in character arcs, and in the game’s friction. It is not enough that the central question is asked–it must be explored.

Our next claim: N is a deeply meaningful character.

That’s what you’ll hear online. N is beloved in retrospectives and Reddit threads. You can find faceless YouTubers pontificating about him in video essays with titles like “The Tragedy of N” or “Pokémon’s Most Complex Villain.” He is remembered as different. Philosophical. Hurt. A figure so unlike the childish cartoons that usually fill out a Pokémon story, right?

When you first meet N, he claims to understand what your Pokémon are saying. He speaks in lofty declarations, often about the state of the world. “As long as Pokémon are confined in Poké Balls... Pokémon will never become perfect beings,” he tells you. “I have to change the world for Pokémon, because they're my friends.” Even one of your companions notes that N talks differently. He sounds like someone thinking about capital-T Truth, not gym badges or other contrivances of this world.

But where does the idea that N is deep actually come from?

The answer is pain.

Late in the game, we’re told that N was raised in isolation. His bedroom is presented with Peter Pan whimsy as a sealed-off playroom, filled with toys he used to occupy himself. Ghetsis, his father, scolds him while revealing he was never actually interested in liberation, only power. N has not been leading a revolution, only pretending to perform one. He thinks he’s a savior, but he’s a pawn.

In contemporary American culture, especially in young, white, vaguely liberal spaces, pain is often regarded as immediately meaningful. If you’ve been hurt, you’re interesting. If you’ve been broken, you are worth listening to. I’ve sat in dorm rooms and Discord servers where intimacy is built not through personality or shared interests, but through shared confessions of suffering. Identity, in those spaces, is something you claim by pointing to a scar.

N is ripe for this kind of connection.

But stories must be more than diagnoses.

Hurt people are not, by default, interesting characters. And in Pokémon Black and White, N’s pain is never dramatized. It is treated like an easter egg, rather than an arc–only directly gestured to at the very end of the entire game. What’s implied about him doesn’t deepen the game’s plot or challenge its themes. N is not deployed with meaning. You could remove him entirely and lose very little. There is no arc, no interiority, no complication of his beliefs. Just the faint outline of something interesting when described separately from the actual video game.

What is N’s transformation? What does the story want to say about hurt people?

Very little, if anything at all. But the presence of a hurt person means this children’s game is mature, right?

Now, reader, if you desire an example of how the wider Pokémon fanbase projects meaning onto characters like N, sadly, I have the perfect one.

I recently posted a thread on Bluesky about the phenomenon of the Reddit Game. In response, someone offered what they clearly believed to be a knockout example: a fan-favorite moment from Pokémon Black and White, an interaction between N and the protagonist on a Ferris wheel.

The reply read:

“They literally force you to interact with the main leader of the enemy faction in a Ferris wheel while he gives his philosophy on the world.”

Sounds compelling, right?

You, the player, trapped in a glass box with your ideological rival as the world turns slowly beneath you. The set-piece suggests emotional intimacy, claustrophobia, perhaps even romance. It’s cinematic. Symbolic. The sort of moment one might imagine in a prestige television drama or a well-staged play. No wonder it’s mythologized so much among the fanbase.

But here’s what N actually says on the Ferris wheel in its entirety:

“[Team Plasma is] not here. Let's ride the Ferris wheel and see if we can spot them. I love Ferris wheels. The circular motion… The mechanics… They're like collections of elegant formulas.”

“First, I must tell you... I am the king of Team Plasma. Ghetsis asked me to work with him to save Pokémon. I wonder how many Pokémon exist in this world...”

That’s it.

No argument. No escalation. No point of friction. N doesn’t challenge the protagonist’s worldview or deepen his own. He delivers a flat revelation—he’s the “king” of Team Plasma—and then muses about how many Pokémon exist in the world. If I wanted to make this sound as artful as possible I would lie and say the game was really demonstrating that N is nothing more than a child staring out a car window.

Why does the reveal about N’s place in Team Plasma even happen here? Because the game needs it to. The author needs the player to know certain information, so it delivers it directly to you in the most inorganic way possible. I could feel the author’s thumb pressing down on me as I played this section.

And still, this moment lives large in the minds of the franchise’s biggest fans. Why? I think because it resembles just enough the shape of something meaningful as long as you don’t bother to actually read the words on the page. Players remember what it felt like it was supposed to be, not what it was. The Ferris wheel becomes symbolic over time through the fan’s desire to extract something from it and for that something to be serious.

This is the nature of the Reddit Game.

Moments are magnified and retrofitted with weight. The Ferris wheel isn’t some meaningful turning point. It’s just a turning circle. Elegant from a distance, but ultimately going nowhere.

Finally, I think anyone reading this essay who’s even vaguely familiar with Pokémon Black and White is probably surprised that the terms “Truth” and “Ideals” have yet to be mentioned. If you have played the games you know that those words are mentioned constantly. It’s truly an insufferable frequency that I will never be able to make clear in this text alone. Every character, every legendary, every bit of dialogue seems hellbent on hammering home that these are the Big Concepts. The games insist that the conflict you’re playing through is one of Truth vs. Ideals.

And it works. Not in the text, but in the aftermath. Fans come away convinced this must be the theme. They post comments. They write essays. They explain that N stands for Ideals and the player character stands for Truth, or maybe it’s the other way around, depending on what version of the game you picked. They confuse repetition with significance. But let’s be clear: Truth and Ideals are not themes.

A theme is not a word. It is not a binary. It is not an aesthetic. A theme is an argument, a point of view. It says something about the world and invites the audience to contemplate it. But these games don’t argue anything. They just say “truth” and “ideals” over and over again, as if the mention is enough.

And here’s where it gets especially dark: whichever version you buy, the game simply decides which word you will read more often–mad libs style. No change in the story, surrounding context, or even the sentences. Reshiram or Zekrom swaps out depending on the cartridge, and so do the words Truth and Ideals.

Now, obviously, if these opposing principles are so interchangeable, so non-specific, then what are we even talking about? The game has no real use for the ideas! They never appear in the game as material or purposeful–the ideas are only ever ideas spoken about in theory.

This failure becomes most apparent during what’s supposed to be the grand reveal—a lore dump from Drayden in Opelucid City. You’re told the two legendary dragons were once one Pokémon belonging to two brothers. But when those brothers began to argue: one seeking Truth, the other Ideals. The dragon split. The brothers fought. Nobody won.

Here was the chance to actually say something.

A narrative moment ready-made to explore competing philosophies.

What did the brother who pursued truth believe in? What was the world he imagined? What sacrifices did the brother of ideals make to chase his vision? What did either of them lose? What was actually going on?!?

The story has no content, it barely has symbols. It’s just slop that only makes sense if you’re mashing the A button and writing fanfiction years later.

There’s so much Pokémon Black and White gets wrong. The games fundamentally misunderstand how games communicate meaning. Many players, especially those eager to defend this generation, seem to believe that story is what happens when a video game stops. When control is taken away. When the cutscene plays, the music swells, the dialogue boxes appear.

But video games have so many more tools at their disposal and Pokémon has always been at its best when it speaks in the native tongue of gaming.

In Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, I love how the Safari Zone is a bespoke challenge. A limited number of steps and a maze you must learn to navigate. Take too many steps and you’re sent back to the entrance. Succeed and prove your skill in the art of exploration and you're rewarded with the HM for Surf. The world opens up to you. The map you've come to know is recontextualized. What were once barriers are now shortcuts. The game is dramatizing your skills as a trainer evolving, using the structure of the game as its language.

In Black and White, Surf is handed to you after a random battle. No context. No thematic link to exploration or mastery. It’s convenient. And that authorial thumb presses down in the name of convenience again and again in Pokémon Black and White.

I’ll never forget when N appeared—perfectly situated right outside a Gym I had just defeated—for no reason other than to deliver exposition the game assumed I probably needed at that particular point.

That is the design philosophy of these games in a nutshell: gameplay stripped of expression, story stripped of meaning, and the connective tissue between them entirely absent.

This is the central problem with Pokémon Black and White, and the reason I believe it to be a Reddit Game.

It wants to be taken seriously. It gestures at maturity and philosophical themes all while hoping you won’t actually read the words on the page. Characters repeat the words. Players repeat the characters. And in the echo chamber of retrospectives and YouTube essays, the words eventually start to feel profound.

Just don’t actually play the game.

Thanks for reading all that.