How did I not even think of using Reshiram and Zekrom? They would BOOST the popularity of Pokemon like crazy. Especially since it would be competing with the also popular Digimon... although that would get more ~comparisons~ and people will hate on BW :(
Genesect would actually be a fine replacement for Mewtwo. Sure it might not be the strongest Pokemon ever but instead it would be the coolest evil Pokemon. Storyline wise I'm thinking they'd save BW's story and compress it into B2W2. That would be a massive undertaking but it would create an incredible post-game. Plot for the new old BW could be Ghetsis trying to genetically engineer a perfect Pokemon to defeat Volcarona and take the desert for himself. However due Genesect being human made it will always be part steel and thus always lose to Volcarona. You catch your own Volcarona and take on Ghetsis for a final showdown.
Years later Ghetsis returns, claiming that he is reformed. He's not though! He's up to his old tricks. This is when Pokemon is introduced to its TRUE mascot - N.
Also you'll lose Team Rocket but as a new throwback you could have Team Rocket trying to infilterate Unova and steal Colress for themselves.
I suppose passwords COULD work or maybe if you link trade even? Omg link trading in Unova, a CRAZY thought.
Omg yes - expand Unova too. If they went along with my cool idea above.. then Unova would HAVE to be expanded into something a lot bigger otherwise the plot will run out of room...
I think those comparisons would be inevitable really. I mean, looking at it now people STILL compare Pokemon to Digimon, and I can remember comparisons running rampant between the two when I was a kid and they were both airing at the same time. Granted, Reshiram/Zekrom's "cooler" draconic appearance - and the fact that B2W2 would probably have been released around the time of Adventure 02, which also introduced fusion into the franchise - might have earned them a little more scorn, but then...apples and oranges. They got plenty of that criticism for introducing fusion into Pokemon years after Digimon did it. Are two franchises with the same idea at the same time better or worse than one franchise having it years later?
The "Pokemon did it first!" argument is one that was used a lot back then, because Digimon was seen as generally cooler due to the designs. Reshiram/Zekrom would have definitely removed that edge, so that argument would have been a lot stronger than it was. It's generally a lot weaker now because a lot of Pokemon's later ideas - Fusion, Mega Evolution, etc - are ones that Digimon have had for a lot longer. When Black/White Kyurem were revealed, people cried foul because Digimon had had fusion for ages. But Digimon was a new thing back then too. People still would have cried foul, but it wouldn't hold quite as much water.
Well, both Genesect and Mewtwo were man-made, so in one sense it wouldn't have made a huge amount of difference...especially with Mew being downgraded from the origin of species with the introduction of Arceus, which would have happened regardless. Mewtwo is still pretty terrifying stats-wise in the games, but in some ways Genesect is actually more interesting, since it has the Drives...which would have been even better if it had come before Arceus' elemental plates and been more comprehensive. Genesect's Drives were generally ignored because, as well as being Event-only, it was seen as a weaker version of Arceus; the idea of having a Pokemon hold an item to change types had been done before. But I share your desire for Volcarona to be expanded upon too - it was one of the few Gen V Pokemon I actually liked and I thought it woul have made a better Legendary than a lot of Gen V's Legendaries...
...that said, I wonder how the Kami trio would have been received? There is no getting around the similarities in their designs, at least in their base form, and that probably would have attracted more criticism back then. If they had combined B2W2 with BW though, and had them as obtainable in their Therian formes from the get-go, that would have worked...those are all strikingly different from one another, after all. Just do away with their base forms, maybe.
Would losing Team Rocket really be such a bad thing, though? And what if they adapted the
only good best part of the BW anime - the Meloetta arc - into postgame content? Not only would that have introduced Team Rocket and set up future games (and introduced the dynamic of a truly evil team to contrast Plasma's more well-intentioned extremist dynamic) but it would have given the Kami trio and Meloetta more of a purpose outside of just being there. Or it could have been like the Orange Islands and pissed everyone off that we never got to play that in the games I suppose.
That said, it DOES seem likely that, in that instance, it would have been Neo Team Plasma that would have played the role of antagonists, not Team Rocket. Which would have been better, as it would have seen Team Plasma developed into a more sinister organisation. Or maybe the two would have been one and the same - perhaps all of the other teams would have become offshoots of Team Plasma? With Sun/Moon reintroducing Colress as part of the Aether Foundation, that could have done wonders for that in those games, because it could have been remnants of the Team Plasma that was actually well-intentioned being formed into a new organisation. Maybe even by N. The problem with evil Teams is that they're all the same and they're never developed enough in the games they're in...I wonder if having an organisation turn corrupt in the first games, the way Team Plasma was portrayed in B2W2, would have served to make teams in subsequent games more compelling if they were offshoots of that?
Or both. Bit later on in the timeline, but I'm sure with Golden Sun on the GBA you could either input a password or transfer your data via Link Cable. I don't think doing that in the GB era is such a stretch; the technology is incredibly dated now, but for its time it was pretty revolutionary. In a way, connecting a cable and exchanging data that way is a lot easier than using the interface that the DS games had...
Well, if Unova had come first, theoretically we could have the majority (or just major areas of) America made into regions by now, instead of Japan. If they wanted to connect them in the same fashion and make a similar Pokearth, none of the other generations would exist in their current form...or they'd just be starting too. Sun/Moon might be the first games set in Japan, even!
