These might just be my favorite pokemon games.
Unlike most anons on this board, I'm an extremely casual fan, I just like to play through the main story and explore all the areas, I've never bothered with competitive or even battle facilities, and in that sense I like how polished and well put together BW are.
They may be linear sure, but unlike gen 7 the game knows when to let the player be left alone for a bit, and you're always able to move on and check out the next area before you hit a roadblock of any kind so you don't feel strangled. They really boiled the general pokemon experience down to it's core traits and built from there, what makes BW good isn't side content it's just small touches that directly stream line and improve the core gameplay like
>Shaking grass gives mostly audino or rare evolved pokemon to give a boost to players who might be grinding for EXP
>Dark grass serves to make wild encounters less boring, with wild mons often being much higher level and often triggering double battles
>Other phenomenon such as shadows on bridges and dust clouds give the player an endless stream of helpful items
>All the phenomenon have at least 1 pokemon that can only be obtained that way giving further use to them, with shaking grass having 5
>Gameplay is optimized out the wazoo from gen 4, battles are way snappier and have more kinetic energy to them making them drag infinitely less (I love gen 4 but this is just true)
>The game actually has great type variety, despite having the same dex size as DP, and new pokemon are introduced steadily so you never have long periods of only encountering the same 4 pokemon.
>Plot has follows a clear plan with multiple acts, and dramatic tension rising and falling where it should
>Obvious stuff like infinite TMs, and HMs being almost entirely for extra optional exploration.
>This is gonna piss off some of you but the graphical upgrade from gen 4 is huge imo and along with added seasons goes a long way to improve my immersion