Tag Archives: pokemon

No matter where you are on the internet, whatever the fandom is, someone is always going to ask about what you’d do if you were in charge of it. For example, a lot of Bible fans are very convinced that their fanfiction is actually factually true. Whether it’s fantasy Wrestlemanias or ideal outfit compositions in Pretty Little Liars, there’s always an urge to take a thing you already know and make your version of it.

Also, people who like Pokemon routinely talk about what stupid idiots the designers are and how they could do a better job of running the game. I don’t think I could, because I know there are competing factors and I think that everyone who opens their mouth to talk like that sounds like a tool.

Still, if I think those people are silly, it’s easy to say that if I don’t put myself out there, right?

Here! A bunch of opinions about what I think should be done in Pokemon as a game franchise. Nothing like ‘open world matters’, I think the game should always be a competitive 2v2 Bo3 format and the rest of the game can follow from that. I also don’t think that this would make the game better. It’s very important that I put it out there, on my sleeve, that none of these changes are based on deep insight into the game or the way that it should be. No. This is a centering of myself, as a designer, and as a player of games. This is how I want it done. Also note that none of these changes are simple or oblative, like, this isn’t all that I think should happen, there would need to be specific changes and fine tuning for all these pushes.

There, preamble done, here’s how and where I’m right.

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.

I’m something of an originalist in Pokemon. I think that the games are the core of what the narrative flows from and everything else is flexible story that builds on that. What’s more, in Pokemon, people can say things, but there’s nothing saying that they’re right. People are wrong all the time in Pokemon, and sometimes people even lie to the player characters, to themselves, or to one another.  What’s more, the player character is a kid, somewhat, but also a kid who is experimenting with and learning about Pokemon training and breeding, so chances are good, people would explain the useful things to them.

But they don’t.

In the context of Pokemon competitive play, speed is not everything but it is a lot.

A while back, a funny Tumblr post came across my dash. Fox doesn’t like Tumblr – like, for web design reasons. I tend to screenshot it and share it with her, or in some cases, read them aloud. This was a post I read as a dramatic reading, and it’s about the worldbuilding of Pokemon and the availability of Pokeballs.

That was fun, so we recorded more and I recruited another friend, Corey, to add another voice in the mix.

[Source]

I regret to inform you that the yearly article about the wonky handling of Genders in Pokemon has become a trilogy, and it’s all thanks to this thing, Enamorous.

There’s so little interesting stuff you can say about food in the Pokemon universe.

Not that you can’t say stuff about it, but rather that talking about food in the Pokemon universe is a well-worn and kinda boring topic. It was so boring, to me, that when I saw the the final Unravelled over on Polygon was about Brian David Gilbert tackling that idea, it wasn’t until uh… twenty minutes ago that I finally watched it. It’s boring. It’s someting a lot of people have looked into, and it’s been written about for twenty-five years. The second game had a plot point about people eating Slowpokes, after all.

The idea that ‘people eat Pokemon’ isn’t really controversial in the game, and it also tends to bring with it a deliberately muted understanding of what it means to eat meat, or what it means to exist in the world of Pokemon in the first place.

I mean, not like any given fairy type sucks. Every Pokemon, big or small, is someone’s Ya Boy, and it’s not like your favourite being a fairy makes it bad or not. It’s not that I think the Pokemon that are fairy type pokemon suck, it’s that the fairy type itself sucks, and I dislike it, and how it was implemented.

The problem derives from what fairy does, and what its presence changes.

Okay, context!

Nuzlocke runs refer to playing one of the Pokemon games with self-imposed rules to make the game harder and to change the context and tenor of the game. Typically speaking they are built around an attempt to make the game more edgy and meanspirited, to take a game that is made to be unbrickable for four year olds with numerous difficulty adjusters even more difficult.

And like, that’s good. That’s not a bad principle, in and of itself. Pokemon is a game designed to be very easy and to always have a route towards something like success no matter what the current state of the game, which can mean that if you’re outside the bottom end of player competence, which I want to again remind you is four year olds, you might find the default play experience a bit easy.

Now, ostensibly the game has a place to graduate to if you hit the limits of difficulty in the game and like pokemon battling, which is, you might want to try battling other people, but that is obviously very intimidating. People want the game to be harder, but not in a way that might involve that and all. If you want to stay within the difficulty of a game made for children by deliberately not taking the best strategic options presented to you, you start to get creative.