Escape from the Parfume Palace

The problem with the sidequests in Pokemon games is that they inevitably boil down to "find item X and rub it on slot Y" until the supporting characters tell you how smart you are.  Thus it is with my character and Shauna (the most insufferable of the Pokemon Thieves, whose only character trait is "being a girl"): sent to "find Pokeflute and rub it on Snorlax" until it wakes up.

Apparently, though, I had to find the king of the palace's poodle in the gardens first, so this quest went from annoying to infuriating real quick.

I found the dog and played the "Farfetch'd game" (to catch a trainer's pokemon by chasing it around) from Pokemon Silver version and found myself watching fireworks with Shauna.  I have no clue where these events fit in logically with one another, but rest assured that they were all mandatory and definitely related to my quest to catch all the pokemon.

At this point, Nintendo once again tried to shove its stupid characters in my face with its terrible, terrible writing by having Shauna say that she was really happy to watch the fireworks because "[she] has never watched fireworks alone with a boy before."

NO, I reject this.  I will not accept a crappy love story on top of your crappy regular story.  I have to go lie down.
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I sarcastically alluded to the fact that Pokemon White and Y are both terrible in terms of character development in a few previous posts and I want to clarify my feelings on this matter.  I recognize that the best Pokemon game of all time, Pokemon Red version, was similarly plagued by "disposable character syndrome". 

Want to know if your game has DispCharSynd? Try to describe your supporting cast in any way without describing their job or their physical features.  If your only description ends up being something like "has a dog", "likes to dance" or "closet homosexual", then your character is shallow and useless and if it were a marine in "Aliens", it would most certainly be one of the ones that are killed off early and easily.

The thing is that Red version ALSO didn't have a real plot.  This was a game written back in the days where the entire story was told in the booklet that comes with the game--and the rest is made up by the player.  White Version and Y version, however, are given considerably less slack in the story and character-development areas of the game simply because they TRY too hard in these areas.  If White version took some time off pushing its hamfisted message of Pokemon suffrage into your face every 5 seconds and instead focused on letting you, the player, run the story, it could have gotten away with having odious and inconsequential characters, but since it spent so much time banging-on about its plot, the cast members were too easily exposed for the cardboard cutouts that they were.  The result is that you have presented a roller coaster and populated the entire thing with cardboard cutouts of "Winnie the Pooh".  Not necessarily a bad ride, but perhaps a little distracting and you have the constant feeling of shame and indigestion.