>>45251380The train system would have been the perfect spark to introduce immediate inter-town travel (like Saffron/Goldenrod in GSC/HGSS) but on a full region scale, serving as an example that the player wouldn't need HMs too much to get about and Fly would no longer be mandatory for fast travel, offering an alternative to having HM users be always on the team. It's a bit of a waste that it was only used as a reskinned Battle Tower (twice!) with some slight flavor alteration.
The Entree Forest had some really nice music and ambience that was sorely underutilized, with most of its functions locked to Wi-Fi features. I understand that Gen 5 had a lot of supporting gimmick games during its time but the result is that the main game suffers for it because this relationship between mains and support games ends up locking a fair number of legendaries and rare Pokemon to transfer-only. To summarize, the Entree Forest should have been swapped with the Nature Reserve and filled with more in-game material.
As small as it was, Pokemon like Manaphy, Shaymin, and Arceus still had in-game events attached to their respective distribution items. This was not applied to Victini, Genesect, Keldeo, and Meloetta, despite the regular reminders of their existence in NPC conversations, turning their respective unique areas in the game into little more than glorified Move Tutor spots once you attended the required distribution events.
The lack of involvement by the E4 and new Champion compared to the previous title is a bit of a sore point. I think it's only fair to say that BW had been the closest the games have ever approached to having a unified narrative involving most of the cast, and BW2 taking a few steps back in that regard was a bit of a letdown.
