You do know someone with your name (hint: it’s you), so really- don’t bother lying.  On agreeing, she exclaims that you -are- you, which is good, because if you were someone else and hadn’t known it this conversation could have gotten really awkwards.  Bianca bows and greets you, and tells you she has a very important request to make; she wants your help to complete the Pokedex.  As ever, there’s really not much point in refusing, and your agreement garners a cheerful thanks from her.  You’re freed from story-lock again after that... with no Pokedex or anything.

Talking to Bianca again, though, prompts her to show you a case with three Pokeballs in it- each containing one of the starter Pokemon for the Unova region, so that you can choose which one you want.

Your options here are the Grass-type Snivy, the Fire-type Tepig, and the Water-type Oshawott.  Each has its strengths and weaknesses.

Snivy eventually becomes Serperior, a Grass type with passable attacks and fairly good Defense and Special Defense, whose speed is very good.  This sets it up to use a lot of status effects and more subtle methods of bringing down opponents, as while its Attack and Special Attack aren’t bad, they’re really nothing to write home about. To compliment this it comes with a number of status-effecting moves in its natural growth, many of which are also modest attacks, and a compliment of the better self-healing attacks from Grass.  Towards the upper levels, it gains several higher-powered attacks, but several of them have debilitating drawbacks- poor accuracy, required conditions, or negative side effects for Serperior itself.  In order to really access its power, you’ll want to either keep a number of the lower-level moves, or dip into the possibilities you can gain via the Move Tutors in Black2 and White2.

Tepig’s final form is that of Emboar, a Fire/Fighting Pokemon whose high HP and strong Attack are set to balance out its passable Defenses and Speed, with a good enough Special Attack to run a side of moves that rely on that instead. Tepig thus presents you the option with the most flexibility in terms of which moves it’s going to bring, and is more of a tank than the frailer, faster Snivy.  It relies less on status effects and more on a consistent offense than Snivy does, but has a more varied natural movepool than the other two starters and a stronger set of TM offerings.  Virtually all of its moves pack secondary effects, though some of these are negative.  The combination of TMs and Move Tutors with its natural movepool really opens Emboar to a variety of strategies that is only really limited by its subpar speed and reliance on raw HP numbers over combined defensive capability.