Visiting Pokémon Black/White’s On-the-Go Pokémon Centers

Welcome to a mini-chapter of our Pokémon Diary series, part of our in-depth coverage of Pokémon Black/White. This isn’t a full-blown entry — more of a place to mention a few interesting details that we couldn’t fit anywhere else in our past chapters.

Pokémon Black/White have what I call on-the-go Pokémon Centers. No, they aren’t inflatable Pokémon Center tents. They’re nurses and doctors who, after you battle and win against them, will heal your Pokémon if you talk to them again at any time. One of them, a nurse, is posted before Yaguruma Forest, which is the first “dungeon” you enter.

Once I gave it some thought, I realized she was positioned very strategically, given that she’s standing right outside the grass with the tough wild Nageki and Dageki, who will certainly give your team a run for their money.

If you’ve been keeping up with our coverage, you’ll know that Black/White are very much designed around convenience and streamlining, and appealing to players that have gone through the motions of a Pokémon game many, many times. This carries over to breeding as well. The Breeding Center is located right after the second city, which makes it feel like the game is putting the breeding and raising tools into the player’s hands as soon as it possibly can.

I acquired the C-Gear, too, after a simple side quest. The C-Gear is Pokémon Black/White’s customizable communication interface. It looks for a local wireless or Wi-Fi or even infrared connections constantly, for you to communicate with; although you can turn this feature off.

The C-Gear takes up the entire Nintendo DS bottom screen. However, you can also use the Y button on the DS to assign shortcuts to multiple items that would normally be accessed via the tapping the bottom screen. The Y-button can be assigned to four different tools, such that when you press Y, a menu pops up for you to select which item you’d like to use.

One of these tools, the Dowsing Machine (yes, got that too) is one of the most handy items in the game. It’s a radar that looks like two dowsing rods that points in the direction of nearby items. I can officially say it’s my favorite item in Black/White thus far, and I find that it works better than similar items in previous Pokémon games.

If you missed previous entries in our Pokémon Black/White Diary, you can catch up on them below:

Diary Entry 1: Embarking On A New Journey

Diary Entry 2: Tweaks To Wild Pokémon And The Battle System