"Pokemon Black" and "White" hits stores here in the US on March 6. Just three weeks later, on March 27, Nintendo is releasing its next generation handheld, the Nintendo 3DS. Since the 3DS will work with DS cartridges, picking up the new handheld won't prevent you from catching them all, but the timing does seem a bit odd. After all, why not just release "Black" and "White" as a 3DS-exclusive game and give the system a massive launch line-up boost? In an interview with MTV Multiplayer, Junichi Masuda, the game's director, explained why the DS was a better fit for the title.
"The main idea behind the Pokemon series, what's most important for it, is to have as many people be able to play it as possible," he explained (through translator David Numrich). "It has to be on hardware that has lots of units and people worldwide can play it together with each other."
Because "Pokemon Black" and "White" is a DS release, it's unable to take advantage of the boosted hardware in the 3DS. Despite that, it's the most graphically intensive handheld Pokemon game yet released, with much of the environment rendered in 3D. The actual Pokemon creatures, however, remain strictly 2D sprites. Masuda explained why they chose to stick with 2D:
"One of the reasons for sticking with the 2D Pokemon images is, with the 2D, it really depends on who draws it. There's a lot of personality that's drawn from the 2D images, whereas with 3D, it's the same model used for everything, so the personality doesn't really come out. One of the reasons we've stuck with 2D is to get a more individual feel with it."
He went on to say that they aren't ruling out the possibility of 3D Pokemon in future releases and that it's a conscious decision made at the start of every project.