I think it’s fair to say that at this point in my life I have fallen out of interest in actually playing Pokemon games. The last one I finished was Pokemon Sun & Moon, which I thought was excellent! I didn’t finish Sword & Shield, and I think that’s mostly because the game is full of guardrails and reminders that are designed to keep the game playable for a four year old who may be learning to read, and in the process plays very slowly compared to how I want to play games. I do know enough about the game to think that most of the criticism of Pokemon as a franchise is at the very least, weird, if not outright bad faith nonsense.
Despite all this though, I love looking at Pokemon. I love watching streamers play it, and I love watching strategy reports from the real competitive scene. I am, for lack of a better word, a spectator. A fan.
This last generation of Scarlet & Violet, has brought with it something that I’ve wanted for so long, and never really formally been able to express. Thanks to time travel shenanigans – oh, spoilers, I guess? – this is the generation where we get to see Pokemon’s dinosaurs.
Pokemon has had ‘dinosaur Pokemon’ before, of course. I don’t just mean the perhaps-famous seeming dinosaur Pokemon like Tyranitar and Tyrantrum (as if Tyrantrum is famous to anyone who isn’t extremely into this franchise). I mean that back in G1, we had four pokemon in the Pokedex that represented prehistoric Pokemon, Pokemon from a bygone era and the ways they existed differentiated them from the rest of the Pokedex. As with many things in G1 — like gender and forking development — this involved a cool idea executed on roughly, that didn’t get expanded on until later.
Much later in this case.
Fossil Pokemon aren’t the same as the Paradox Pokemon. The Fossil Pokemon are unified by how you get them; you find an object in the game (usually only one of a set) and then you later on share it with a scientist who brings it back to life and now you have that in your team. The Fossil Pokemon are definitely designed to invoke ancient animals – Kabutops and Omastar are both trying to look like animals from our own ancient history, like the trilobite and prehistoric giant nautiluses.
Paradox Pokemon have a unified mechanical framework. They all have the ability Protosynthesis, which is an interesting thing (because Protosynthesis is pretty strong), and a really annoying thing (because it’s a lot more like the Paradox Pokemon don’t have any abilities at all, and therefore look like they’re not Pokemon any more).
It does create a coherent worldbuilding note; not one I have dug into at length, but which implies that the world they’re from is unified in the way that Pokemon in it relate. It’s probably a time when the biology of Pokemon and – oh no I’m doing it, aren’t I? I’m doing that thing where I imagine that Pokemon, which aren’t animals – follow the rules of animals!
Anyway, so right, Pokemon Dinosaurs. They are Dinosaurs to Pokemon; they are prehistoric, they are rudimentary, rougher and somehow unnatural and strange compared to the ones you’re familiar with. They get to show you the way that some Pokemon lineages have changed over time; Jigglypuff and Scream Tail are both related by a thread of music and sound powers, but Scream Tail is really fast, compared to Jigglypuff’s middling stats.
What’s even stranger there is that Wigglytuff is only evolved with a stone from the moon.
I think these Pokemon are cool. I think that dinosaurs are cool. And while Pokemon aren’t animals and don’t follow those rules for evolution and genetic distribution, they are absolutely an interesting thread for these things to walk down. Originally, I was pretty distmissive of the entire genre, because they were just, y’know, high-end, high-power, hard-to-acquire Pokemon for the competitive scene with high stats that weren’t going to be useful to the gameplay experience I wound up at.
Gouging Fire here is the one that tipped me over though. It’s a tiger. It’s a styracosaurus. It’s a fire elemental. It’s got the jaw of a bug and its’s got the face of a kamen rider. It is an absolutely amazing mix of components, a beast the likes of which any Pokemon could already be, but which here, contrasts itself with Entei (a Pokemon for whom I have no strong feelings), and the other Paradox Pokemon!
A brachiosaur! A therapsid!
The names are out-of-type too. They have names that read like, well, to be nice about it, someone translated their names into modern words, rather than tried to prononuce the word. It’s the way you’d hear Native Americans being named ‘translation of the actual sounds of your name’ and that’s why these days people think that Native Americans have names that are English.
Slither Wing, too! Slither Wing is a Pokemon that is derived from – but implied to be the progenitor too, but, y’know, the games were made in real world time scale, don’t worry about it – a flying bug, Volcarona. The way that it represents what starts as a flying bug and turns into a grounded bug is a pretty cool way to represent the way that traits evolved over time in the –
Wait, no, now I’m doing it again! They’re not animals!
But they feel like they’re evolving.
I like Paradox Pokemon. I wish they were a little more varied with their abilities. I wish they could show up in the normal timeline of the game instead of being a late-game thing for post-game material. If you could run around with these things early on I bet I’d be more interested in playing through the game and playing around with these cool little dinosaur gremlin monsters. I was always going to be a mark for ‘Pokemon explores prehistoric Pokemon’ but I wasn’t expecting them to take a big swing, and give me so many at once.
Oh there are also Pokemon from the future but I think most of them are boring and suck.