Date: Date
Mood: Mood
The site broke again! I'm putting this up so I can copy paste easier! The articles might sound like complaints, but they're not. I really do love pokemon, it's just that there's a lot of things I think about pokemon when I'm in a pokemon mood and I'm like airing out my thoughts.
Date: Date
Mood: Mood
I feel like I'm hitting that wave of when a new season begins and my interest for a thing completely wanes. In this case, my summer feeling for pokemon is shriveling into dust and I want to get back into playing like final fantasy or something. I’m getting burnout, I think.
Putting the console down, turn it off, go outside, read a book or something.
It's quite easy to get burnout these days when you only stick to one thing or franchise, right?
I kept getting miserable YouTube recommends about how bad pokemon is now or how every game has always been bad and there’s going to be a new hack to fix it. I get it, you don’t like the direction the games and franchise have been going. People can have their own opinions unless everything they have to say is negative to which I will say "why are you still here then lmao."
Reigional and Generational wars are pretty silly. People don't play games with the context of awareness of the game development so knowing something like Kanto was literally compressed to hell and back to fit in OG Gen 2 Johto is a factoid that's been ignored for the narrative of "the kanto postgame is boring" well that's because in the spaceworld demos it was literally 1 town , like the development history for gen 1 and 2 games is fascinating but I digress. the XY chronicles have been the first time I've actually kept a gameplay log for pokemon that wasn't a hack and even that was an exercise for me in “am I being too harsh on this game or am I not being harsh enough or did I play it wrong because I failed the full context of the game itself in terms of what I was expecting? The notes I took paint one side of the story but did I truly feel as angry about the game because my play style was different from the intention? Then what was the intention?”
I have gotta start getting into other stuff, man. Like having more things added to your plate lets you appreciate all sorts of things from different avenues. New shows, new books, new hobbies… like if I’m dissatisfied then I should try other things. And I know that’s a cop out but eventually the well is going to run dry where I’ve completely exhausted myself of a thing and gotten sick of it and it will have an effect on the way I play the game and talk to people about the games. Sort of how I’m feeling on the site revamp tbh…
I fully understand that I’m never going to get a pokemon game that made me feel the same way I felt as a child from when I was playing older pokemon games and quite frankly I do not like open world games so I don’t have any particular extreme “want” for any of the switch games (Please note I was writing this out before I impulsively bought a used copy of Sword but still have zero interest in SV). I would’ve maybe for LGPE if it didn’t have the go mechanics and joycon reliance (I have a switch mini) and I would’ve maybe for BDSP if the models were like ORAS but they didn’t and I don’t have an extreme desire to transfer everyone over to be stuck behind another 5$ subscription service or however much money pokemon home is when bank’s inevitable shutdown means that the pokemon I caught and got from various saves will no longer be allowed to all be together in a single game. Least there’s the hacked transporter/bank save manager but still…
I know this is hypocritical when I’ve designed a good chunk of my website dedicated to just pokemon stuff but I’ve already mentioned that I have hobbies outside of pokemon, it doesn’t occupy my brain space as badly as it used to when I was a child, it’s just the thing I’m currently focused on since I can’t actually play my previous focus thing which was FF14. (Which is where I got this philosophy from because with content lull periods director Yoshi-P went “great time for you to play other games!”) Before that, I would’ve said it was MapleStory, but I have a very incredibly long list of gripes for that game even if I spent a decade on it because I have zero nice things to say about it outside of presentation. (Never ever going back to that game as long as I can help it.)
Date: 8/27/24
Mood: Meh.
Tl;dr: there are themes, I might just be too stupid to recognize them any deeper unless I go further in, which I don’t really want to, because I feel it seems a bit fruitless. This is quite the funny entry because I have been attempting to pay more attention with Pokémon masters, but now the focus has shifted from “understanding the lore” to “trying to understand like a handful of characters that I care about.” One step forward and two steps back.
Post base Sword and base Postgame Playthrough.
Is being a pokemon story/ lore fan/explainer a Sisyphean task? You kinda end up sandwiched between people who think pokemon has no story or people who outright ignore the story to make up their own thing or people who mash the A button and end up in the first two categories or people who take everything at face value and don’t get subtext whatsoever. Then there’s me, who genuinely draws blanks whenever they try to recall stories outside of select bits that stuck out to them in earlier generations and select characters within the games themselves (rival green, rival silver, mewtwo in pokemon mansion, that scene in gen 4 when you free the legendaries from Cyrus, N (Gen. 5 in general tbh), Lillie and Gladion and Nebby in Gen 7, rayquaza's cutscene in gen 3 where it went "STOP THAT"-- but does that really count???) (the reason I specify games is because like, I could tell you plot points from anime movies and manga and other things, but those aren't the games, so they have the advantage of being a different medium where they can show their story instead of telling it through dialogue boxes and a handful of actual cutscenes that are not just dialogue.)
To me, most pokemon game stories tended to be episodic in nature where it was more or less player goes to town and does a thing. It’s not until gen 5 in my opinion does there be a far larger attempt to have a narrative where they go “wait… is this whole pokemon thing… bad?” And even then the answer is “no you idiot. It’s only bad when people do bad things to pokemon is it a inherent problem, why would we make a game where the real answer is that the premise of the entire franchise is bad.” which is also something that was in gen 1 because team rocket was like, you know, running a literal traffic ring with the game corner and poaching pokemon from graveyards and shit. They try this again in gen 7 with Lusamine being like "don't you just box pokemon you don't use anymore" little does she know that her husband who was sucked into a dimensional portal and got amnesia is running an island resort where the pokemon are chilling and eating beans (unless they're trying to say that Poke Pegalo isn't canon and is just a gameplay only thing). There's a difference between cryogenically freezing pokemon versus not rotating them in the party (I do not recall if she ever unfroze the pokemon....). Trying to guilt trip the player like that doesn’t work especially if they’re doing something like a nuzlocke or solo run. I still don’t know what gen 6 was trying to say whatsoever.
Doesn't help that the franchise is wildly contradictory. Like there were books in gen 4 where it's like "wild pokemon show up to help people" but then the anime goes "wild pokemon attack people because they're jealous of trained pokemon" make up your mind. Thematically XY is going for a story about resource issues and the evidence Lysandere uses is the mega ring from the tower of mastery being only for the protag but later games (until 8 cut them out) just have a bunch of people with various mega items and even the rival from XY gets one in the postgame, so it’s clearly not all that bad mega distribution wise. (Really, the sheer fact that the creator in an interview said “well, the pokemon world’s a utopia and real life problems don’t apply” at face value seems dumb but then again, it’s a children’s franchise, not sure they can go too in depth into things like the sustainability of the pokemon world and stuff like taxes and things like “where does the meat come from?” without brushing into the fact that most Pokémon have some level of sentience and animals don’t exist but in SWSH hamburgers and hot dogs exist. They have to get it from somewhere. ) Most mechanics from other games try not to be as exclusive for pokemon either, like how every pokemon can use a Z-move and dynamax and terrastalize and how they pretty much attempted to bury Megas in the ground with the Alola dex entries.
Gen 8’s plot problem is that there’s something way more interesting going on with Leon and Sonia investigating factory explosions and fighting giant Pokémon outside of the wild area and instead the game goes “nah, you just keep doing the gym thing” and instead of me being like “wow, a game where adults are responsible” I go “their things sounds WAY more cool then what I’m doing”. I feel like maybe if we went investigating with them then the whole energy crisis thing wouldn’t have felt so last minute because seeing proof of the depleting energy would be a lot better than just hearing about Rose feeling desperate, right? It’s still a bit stupid the entire Lategame plot hinges on a problem that’s a thousand years from now rather than something that Rose would actually see within his lifetime. And there’s another narrative bubble problem of Galar saying it’s gym challenge is like globally important but there’s no one actually important checking it out— Galar has the least regional mentions based on NPC dialogue outside of people saying that people from Kanto also like curry and that Kabu is from Hoenn unless I missed some. Not a single cameo in sight but like in earlier gens you could at least get a mention of a character or one showing up. And it’s not like the Galar region itself is interesting either, a lot of regions I could say had their own culture and style but galar’s is literally built on the gym challenge and they had nothing else going on for the main game.
There’s a lot of ludonarrative dissonance in the way pokemon is. Like for roadblocks. It makes sense to have roadblocks right before you’re about to fight a final boss for something like an evil team rather than just having them be there so you can’t explore later routes. It makes zero sense to have this huge moment be like “oh no, we’re in danger!” And then the player can fly away to a different town and literally nothing has changed, it breaks the illusion of stakes. Of course, this is a difficult thing because what if you want to heal or buy supplies… okay, so what pokemon needs is more random RPG stalls instead of just centers. Theres kind of 0 narrative consequences for losing a battle outside of blacking out and losing money. There’s never really been a moment in a game where you feel like an underdog narratively unless you interpret like gen 2’s vague comments about Red as him overshadowing everyone else or like gen 5 when your dragon isn’t summoned like N’s until the finale because even in gen 3 when the weather crisis happens you can just like, leave the area and turns out that the thing is only localized to one specific part of Hoenn. (Note: I’ve only ever played Emerald and AS (A DECADE AGO?!) so idk if it did affect the whole reigon in the OG GBA games.)
Or my most recent example of Sword where Raihan said "we evacuated the place" then I go into a building right next to him and there are still
people inside talking about the same thing like robots on repeat. A lack of spot checking or just that "no one's going to check, don't program it in." But you know maybe Gen 8 just had like a problem in general because like I don't think I've ever seen
a pokemon plot that was actively sabotaging itself in the late game as much as Sword did between Rose and then the postgame with those stupid brothers where it got to a point where I just put my switch down and stopped playing not because the plot was like terrible but because they expected me to take any of it seriously as if one of the major characters I was dealing with didn't have their hair shaped like a sword
and flopping in the wind.
And like trying to like evaluate and rate the plots of games is difficult because of like. The complete inconsistency between games.
The whole like broad strokes kind of thing where it’s like Gen. 1 and 2 were like episodic personal adventures where the whole point was like your journey and then subsequent games add on the legendary formula thing and then gen 5 was good and tried and then gen 6 was like also formulaic and then gen 7 was good and was really good and then gen 8 immediately like kicked me personally with their attempt at a plot and gen 9 is like a lot of people say it’s good so like there’s no consistency whatsoever within the mainline games. The spin-offs had good plots when they remembered to have plots but that is also a case of “I played some spin-offs as a child and don’t remember the exact details at all.”
Literally every Pokémon story that attempts to tell a good story gets rated as the best one because like PMD2 is basically just a whole JRPG story based on what little I remember of watching a playthrough but like if it wasn’t a Pokémon story would it still be rated as high or is it rated as one of the highest Pokémon stories because the standard for Pokémon stories are clipping through the ground?
Insert gojo reaction image.
Tbh I could not answer this because I still am playing PMD 2 and therefore cannot give my full evaluation. I did see a video where they made dusknoir British though which made me go "huh I think I get it".
A pokemon game that actually has a rival that changes on whether you win or lose battles with them is something that would probably be pretty good rather than just by default railroading to “you, the player have to win! We did not program in an alternate path!” (The only time this has happened to my knowledge is Pokemon Yellow where your rival’s eevee evolution changes depending on how many battles have been won or lost with him.) It feels incredibly one sided if I have to win all the time.
In JRPGs outside of pokemon, sometimes whether you win or lose a battle thats plot important the villain either responds to that or its like a “win in battle, lose in cutscene” type of thing. Pokemon has to my knowledge, never actually done that sort of thing. There has yet to be a scene where everything is entirely hopeless but the player goes “I can’t lose here, my friends need me!” And then their party is fully healed through sheer willpower. The only case I can think which is kind of what I want is the one scene at the end of scarlet and violet where the Paradise protection protocol locks all the pokeballs outside of the giant motorcycle pokemon, but not exactly. I don’t count SWSH’s rendition of this because the setup is so convoluted and you do not have the same level of emotional attachment to the dogs vs the ScaVio motorcycles. I’m talking about a heroic second wind type of beat. That one where you start flashing back to all of the friends you made along the way.
The new trend of Pokémon lore with the 3DS era has been going with “we’ve got a
multiverse and alternate timelines and time paradoxes and hidden legendaries that
are godlike with craaazy complexities and people being plucked into different dimensions
with amnesia and then sometimes we decide to retcon things only to bring them back later
so you never know what’s truly canon or not! All the supplemental material is wildly different
too, so good luck applying any anime logic or spinoff logic or manga logic because they’re all their own canon! This doesn't even apply to the timeline problems!”
And I go “that seems really complex and headache inducing” and i go play a kirby game, which is funny, because those also have lore, but the lore there is mostly through pause menus and hard modes and miiverse posts and it's actually irrelevant as a whole because kirby lives in a world of cosmic horrors but doesn't give a shit, to him it's just "these guys ruined my day and now I will kill them".
Date: 07/22/2024
Mood: RAHHHHH
A piece I was writing for the XY Journal that I decided to put here instead.
I’m thinking about plot in Pokémon games and protagonist centric views and villains. opinion piece.
The trend of “you’re a new kid who moved here and basically became all powerful within the span of a few months beating everyone and your rival gets more emotional
until they give up” started in gen 3* and then got extremely overemphasized onwards to the point it’s actually almost plot important in scarlet and violets
dlc rival Kieran that points out that the player character is like borderline omnipotent in terms of having cosmic destiny just happen to them and the fanbase
outright either loves or hates the guy because of it. Bro is basically edelgard levels of discourse, I kinda noticed this while on other communities but if a character doesnt instantly suck up to your self insert character they are deemed irredeemable and a piece of trash and self centered and egotistical for not praising the ground you walk upon. To be fair with choice railroading (a lot of people complained that there wasn’t an option to NOT lie to Kieran, the game said you had to lie) this is also an issue I noted in the looker saga where the player is forced to say yes to progress the plot and do things that the actual person might not want to do like, I dunno, lying (I know that being with Ogerpon wouldn’t have magically solved any of Kieran’s other problems) but the game’s decisions don’t give the player any agency, you have to do what the plot tells you to because if you say no, the game just goes “but you gotta! We didn’t program in an alternate path!”. Then don’t give me the dialogue decision because when you put in anything aside from yes or no the game treats the dialogue the exact same and the NPC will still say the same line as if theyre in on the joke of ignoring the player.
Gen 4 Sinnoh doesn't have the whole "new kid" aspect but it pretty much does give you a bunch of legendary pokemon plus PLA makes your character an actual chosen one by the big G of the pokemon world so it absolutely counts in the plot aspect. Gen 5 does do this with the box cover legendary for BW but it’s otherwise an outlier in most other departments. True power scaling would give a lot of later protagonists a lot of power based of their game’s legends. Red was just some guy in comparison when compared to most of these kids but his reputation is higher because he was the first player trainer and therefore the greatest of all time.
I kind of agree. Powerscaling wise he shouldn’t stand a chance if everyone really had their best teams with legendaries and Z- moves and mega blasts and what not but I commend
him for sticking with what he wants and not budging an inch after all these years. (Unfortunately the same favor of being the best does not extend to Leaf who is in some sort
of limbo of being treated as less than Red despite being his female counterpart. Gamefreak are cowards for not saying that she’s on the same level of strength as him. Booo. ) Simultaneously
though I probably have the most surface level takes on pokemon plots and characters possible because my only real sources of reference headcanon wise was just me taking personality traits
from HGSS era fics from people who were on LJ and FF.net and occasionally my own observations when watching speed runs and reading through scripts through stuff like Pokecorpus or the
dissassembly texts.
I’m kind of sick of Pokémon games saying that the protagonist has some sort of special destiny where they have to have the legendary because… they just do, okay? The evil team has to be
involved with a legendary somehow to exploit its powers of "(insert game powers here)" to "(insert plot here)" or else! *shaking fist.* Everything has to revolve around the protagonist because…
they’re the protagonist! Character development has to be because the protag beat someone, the plot has to happen because the protag got involved, it’s like the world itself is
frozen until the protag moves to a different town and then maybe something will happen in the past one to make you revisit. (This isn’t even a pokemon centric problem but when you
play other RPGs it becomes more noticeable.) I think this really got to me when I played Alola in spite of the fact it tries to break this convention by using Lillie as a protag proxy.
The game’s plot also really wants you to like Lillie and if you don’t like Lillie like I did initially you end up in Alola in the postgame trying to explore the towns and cities
and realizing you recall absolutely none of them outside of just following around plot NPCs. I admit that I put Nebby into a box when I was 15 playing SUMO.
(SUMO will soon be turning a decade old and people who played it when they were kids are almost teens or adults now….scary… I still think they’re recent but now we’re 2 gens past it….)
I just didn’t like initially playing the game and going “man, the climax of the game is Lillie yelling at her mom while my character stands vacantly in a corner” but like.
It’s fine now. It’s a good plot, Lillie’s a good character, the execution is what kills me.
The funny part about this plot malarkey griping is that basically my personal peak for a pokemon plot that is in a pokemon game isn’t something like mystery dungeon explorers because I never played
it, but Rangers 2 Shadows of Almia which is basically impossible to replay because of the lack of a stylus and my hand dexterity and emulation would be with a mouse only plus
I left the games behind in a hair salon because of an embarrassing moment I had in public where I lacked any kind of social awareness that making circles on my DS looked incredibly stupid.
You need to have a way to balance goofiness, absurdity, and seriousness, and that game does effectively do that within the constraints of still being a Pokemon game where the pokemon
are important (only thing I could knock it for is that the pokemon don’t have much in terms of personality minus the partner pokemon because they’re mostly wild pokemon and there’s
no chance to do good team bonding). Rangers 3 executes this better with ukulele Pichu being the only partner pokemon instead of being able to swap out pokemon on the farm but it’s
kinda dumber in plot with the evil immortal old people deciding to lift a giant sky laser fortress out of the sky to destroy an entire island. (I would wish for a rangers 4 but the mankey paw would curl and it would be an F2P Gacha game that dies like rumble rush did.)
For some reason Pokémon villains from like gen 6-8* were all like rich philantrophists who wanted what was best for their own reasons and were entirely illogical
within the basis of reality. Pokémon has a really bad case of doing telling and not much showing. Probably a demographic issue. (The target audience is children after all…)
What about gen 9? Haven’t played it, only know some plot bits based on piecing things together and the story seems to be about “not judging books by their cover” based on team
star being bullying victims that look like bullies to the outside world, arven’s parents, ogerpon in the DLC, and the paradox pokemon in general being weird plot wise. And time
travel, maybe. I kinda did not care to watch a playthrough, nothing pokemon wise has given me desire to buy anything past gen 7. (I only bought sword this year out of impulsive morbid curiosity.)
Kalos attempts to go “We have a resource crisis” and meanwhile the solution Lysandere had in mind was “kill everyone except my select group (and even then it’s hard to tell if this was legit or if he was gonna kill the group too based on what Pokespe said)” and Rose’s was “well, I can’t wait for Leon’s championship thing to be over, so I’m gonna kickstart the apocalypse because I want to be the one to solve the problem!” Based on what little I know of gen 8’s plot.
*Lusamine is debatable since her reasoning is radically different between og sun moon and ultra likely because of some higher up being like “wait I don’t think we can have a villain metaphorically be about a grieving mother about her husband being presumed dead turning to obsessing over a magic space jellyfish with neurotoxins being like a drug allegory and her children being like sort of abused and runaways because of that but we can keep in some of the cutscenes where she’s obsessing over the jellyfish but last minute change it to be about fighting necrozma” but the reasoning still stands.
Archie and Maxie were extreme environmentalists. Whatever, game never says if they’re rich or not. Was Cyrus a nihilist? Was he truly apathetic or merely pretending to be? Was making a new universe truly his end goal? Is he the rotom guy? Idk. I can’t get a good reading on that guy. Ghestis was like an American cultist preacher who I could see being on a radio or a large tv show making his own anti pokeball religion but he started local and never got to reach his full heights with his propped up chosen one before losing to the guy he set up to lose before turning into a terrorist. Sad. (Said with full sarcasm.)
This is probably why Giovanni is one of the easiest Pokémon villains to write for and conceptualize because his motivation is “I want power and I am going to exploit everything and anything to do so including the magical animal creatures we live with.” He’s a real kind of guy.
He can be as vile or manipulative or maybe even mentor like as the writers want because he’s the kind of guy that could reasonably exist and be translated between localizations because I’m pretty sure Giovanni was meant to be a typical yakuza gang type villain and basically got retranslated as an Italian mafia type a la Godfather. He was a man playing both sides as absent gym leader and maybe he was even liked in viridian and then vanished someday and nobody knew why. Rainbow Rocket does kind of take this to comedic levels where it’s like “wow, in a world without the protagonists all the villains get their legendaries and are super powerful” but they still get their asses handed to them by a bunch of children and like 3 adults so I guess it evens out.
Now here I am, writing Giovanni manifesto.
Guzma is also like a real ass guy underneath the surface because he’s a man who didn’t match up to the traditional values of alola and was rejected because of it like I can see that man as well . He’s not that difficult to understand.
“Give me 200 dollars. I’m evil. I want power.” Is a pretty easy way to go for gen 1 because the plot isn’t the big thing, it’s incorporated into the journey rather than being a roadblock. Meanwhile with Lysandere I go… “idk…he’s French( deragatory). He wants to kill everyone because of an unseen resource problem. Outside of Lumiose having a single street urchin for the most part Kalos is as utopic as the rest of the Pokémon world as said in an interview where most people are chilling with their Pokémon.”
I’m sure someone out there has a far better piece of analyzing the plot of Kalos but for me I went like “that felt like a puddle of water.”
Like they try splashing a plot on you going “it’s deep?” The game plots don’t really truly have many deep moments outside of select parts
until later gens because for the most part until gen 3 the plots are non intrusive where it’s like “go do this thing now” you find the thing
and do it because it’s not like you’re directed. Then with gen 3 the legendary has to be incorporated into the plot rather than being “hey,
check this out!” And then some roaming legend shows up. Gen 4 onwards you will run into the box legend, people will comment if you run away
instead of catching it, it’s basically expected that you as a player will use it.
Date: 05/26/2024
Mood: jkklajfejsjf
Quite frankly, speed up is one of those things where it’s either loved or hated: Using it definitely warps perception of how long a Pokémon game is supposed to take and the experience as a whole where it’s an RPG, you’re supposed to take it slow… but other RPGs have speed up in their battles and even auto battle. Real hardware doesn’t have this debate because there’s only one speed, and it’s the default. The only solution there is to turn off animations. With speed up in Pokémon, though, what’s the end goal? Just the battles? I doubt the story’s the main appeal at that point, I know many people who mash A. Rare candies are a similar problem but I feel like they’ve been completely changed public perception wise over time. Professional nuzlockers (what a term) pretty much have the level cap by default and use the rare candies to not do grinding. Some hacks have this by default, other hacks will literally reset your game and freeze it if you input the code. Grinding isn’t really a problem if the hacks been properly level balanced but if it’s not…Again, sometimes it’s fun to overlevel and completely trivialize the challenge of battles! But there’s a difference between action replay, speeding up, and playing with animations off.
I’m not dictating the way anyone should play, because that’s not my end goal. I’m just posting my thoughts on it.On speed up, grinding, and rare candies. Opinion.
I’ve used it personally a few times myself, but only for games I’m not taking as seriously or when I’m stuck in a battle where things are tedious, but that’s legitimately only the case when I’m playing something like a Kaizo hack. If it’s story driven, I try not to use it, tempting as it is. I can also blame my attention span on being constantly pulled between IRL, other stresses, and other things and sometimes I have Pokémon games as a mindless task in the BG instead of my full attention and that’s where I can see a good excuse for speed up. Like if I keep losing a battle over and over I might be tempted to just push the button to lose faster.
EDIT: Additional add on I forgot to mention: The Doduo and Dodrio Tower options in pokemon stadium 2 that double and triple the speed of all the gameboy pokemon games
(minus crystal). Of course, it’s an unlockable requirement but it’s interesting to consider.
Date: 05/24/2024
Mood: jkklajfejsjf
Leafgreen might’ve been my first purchased Pokémon game as a child (emerald was a hand me down from my cousin), but I’ve always held a soft spot for the original gen 1 games. There’s a bit of a theming thing in gen 1 material that I feel like gets lost in later remakes that sort of clean it up—that is, the Kanto region’s rampant industrialization issue that was based on the direct childhood of the creator leading to gen 1 feeling more “urban city fantasy”. Of course, later gens have cities within them and are city like, but there’s something about Kanto’s that feel… distinct? (You know, this entire thing could just be me with the nostalgia blinders on again.) As an aside, it’s a plot point in early Pokespe where pallet town is the only place that doesn’t have the issue of modern pollution causing it to be a safe place for pokemon and people and the reason lance is so pissed off in the Yellow arc is because people are causing problems for Pokémon because of all the abandoned expanding projects leading to more pollution. The contrast of how city like kanto is can be felt more in gen 2 where some of the cities in Johto are more traditional and natural wood types in comparison to kanto’s buildings. I won’t go too in depth into gen 2’s Kanto because of the nature of how kanto managed to fit onto the cartridge in the first place (originally it was a single town and compressed in order to fit, but there’s also the factor that I’m not playing gen 2 right now and just going off my memory. Maybe I’ll get Crystal Legacy next on my backlog list?). There is also the factor that Kanto is literally just Kanto, Japan, which is something that I’ve probably neglected to think about but like. I get it, kinda. A few years ago there was this grassy field in my town that’s been completely flattened for new apartments and I never noticed it because I was going on through different stages of my life. I used to play in that field.I’ve been continuing my playthrough of Yellow Legacy and Gen. 1 is kinda weird. Not in terms of like, bugs and glitches, but how different it feels franchise wise. Opinion piece.
Commonplace animals being the most encountered Pokémon early because those are the ones that can survive the best with humans, the amount of cut down tree sprites, whatever those barrel things even are… seriously, I have no clue what those are. The factor of so many poison types plus how many Pokémon can learn toxic was potential environmental storytelling because of how many building areas and cities there are— fishing up Grimer in Celadon City as a rare encounter despite how pretty the city looks. Then something like team rocket existing at all— illegal Pokémon trafficking, the amount of crime they cause, Giovanni in general playing both sides by being the legal but absent gym leader and leader of a crime ring. Whatever war Lt. surge participated in that the series quietly drops— alongside every other real world reference too for that matter. (Raichu electrocuting Indian elephants became Copperjah in a later gen and most dex entries in FRLG were only retained with real world info like Ponyta jumping the Eiffel Tower because they were direct copies of the RBGY entries.)
Even a place like the safari zone could be a potential point of “kinda weird you can go into an area that’s called a preserve for rare Pokémon just by paying and they limit your steps— possibly so people can’t snoop around and find where those rare Pokémon came from?” Of course, that last one is just me misremembering stuff and being cynical. But if we’re talking about real weird cynicism, look no further than the early anime novel as depicted by Takeshi Shudo, former director of the anime until Advanced Generation. 10 year olds were considered as legal adults, most pokemon trainers suffered from burnout and unemployment, and the gym system would kick you out if you lost 3 battles in a row. His planned finale was for the pokemon to rebel against humans with Pikachu as the leader. It’s certainly fascinating in a kind of “what?” Way.
I’ve linked a translation of the novel. It doesn’t cover the rebellion thing at all though, you could look into Dr. Lava’s content since he goes more in depth into Shudo’s role.
Pokemon the Novel
Then this thought of mine continues further on in gen 3 Hoenn where there’s a lot more natural things you have to go through— the towns like fortree and pacildflog being more natural— and the only city I can think of that’s actually city like and has a skyscraper is the one that literally has the hoenn equivalent of sliph co in it. (I never recall the name but is it like…Devon? Stone?) There’s also new mauville in emerald being the exception to that though as the power plant equivalent. And uhhh… whatever ORAS did to mauville, I think the entire thing is a building now? I don’t recall ORAS well, it was years ago. If I recall this, I’ll consider a follow up with later gens and see if my opinion changed.
As a side update: We can’t forget about Team Rocket creating bioweapons and playing God with Mewtwo. The best way to describe it is that the legendaries of johto are revered creatures who have resurrection powers and the other hid away because of their power and the one in the kanto postgame was depicted as a feral beast. (Anime one notwithstanding.)
Date: 05/20/2024
Mood: jkklajfejsjf
My first foray into the manga universe might’ve been a best of yellow manga and an immediate reading of the RGB arc, but there’s many that I’ve pivoted to and read in the years as a Pokémon fan. I’ve always enjoyed the versatility of the franchise allowing for all sorts of different kinds of readings and interpretations as seen by the many authors takes and glimpses of their interpretation of the pokemon world, even if some are hit or miss. In fact, outside of early spe my favorite pokemon manga is diamond and pearl adventure. I like seeing the different directions of the world as provided by things like the animated shorts, OVAs, or the anime episodes whenever I saw them as a kid. I think Pokemon should continue to be a franchise that covers all sorts of stories and genres and aspects should be treated as pillars which is the reason why I will continue to refer to manga as supplementary material that expands upon the world and games.
Subtracting the popularity part, Pokespe also eclipses the rest of the manga in terms of length— a good majority of the ones I’ve read over years have only had 2 volumes maximum on average. Of course there’s exceptions (try adventure comes to mind) but a lot of the mangas can’t be as long running because they’re normally made in mind to only promote one game and trying to stay current with the game dev cycle would be a huge game of catch up — the BW2 arc in Pokespe took 7 years to complete because of how many games came out during that time frame that needed to be prioritized. I graduated high school years ago and the BW2 arc was still not finished in that time frame, which is crazy, because the arc is only 24 chapters in total. Sure, we can get more manga that cover and promote the game of choice, but something as long running as Spe or Pocket Monsters (both almost 30 years) probably won’t ever happen again due to the cyclical nature of the game development. The last but most important problem is that the manga that aren’t well known also are hard to find unless you really look and then normally aren’t translated (to English, at least). The further you look into the manga list on spots like bulbapedia the less there are that have info on them. Something that ran for 20+ years like pocket monsters (the corocoro Clefairy manga) isn’t going to get anything new or a full translation because well, it’s incredibly weird to begin with (literal toilet humor jokes) but it went all the way up to Galar and even got an anime reference (that one movie that Ash and Gary watched as children in the gen 3 anime). Some are completely gone like the sequel to phantom Pokémon 7 because it was in a magazine and never got manga format. It took years for something like Zensho (the true story) to get a full translation and that was only one volume. Even something that did have an English localization, magical Pokémon journey/ Pipipi Adventure, is barely anywhere to be found online with full scanalations of what was there. I found an internet archive copy of some volumes, but they’re all login only. And I suppose there’s some discord out there that talks about these but I’m burnt out on discord in general. Plus the only other person I knew who read pokemon manga on discord was a power level guy so me wanting to talk about like, characters and story and themes went nowhere.Today’s feature is me writing about Pokemon manga. Opinion piece.
But uh… there’s kind of a limit on discussing manga, a bit? Best you get in English on big sites is mentioning Pokespe/adventures which is referred to as “the manga” despite the fact that Viz has published other manga like Diamond and Pearl Adventure, Ginji’s rescue team, and even a bunch of ash tie ins and his movie adaption mangas (which is a different story to tell). It’s big enough to the point that trying to look up more unknown stuff just brings up Pokespe. Smaller sites talk about older manga but problem is those forum spots are mostly dead—no necroposting please.
But there’s still a few problems I have outside of that, like namely that the manga that is mostly well known is gatekept by out
of context panels to the point that it’s almost the only discussion. Even I myself have fallen into the hole of “what’s the darkest moment no one talks about in Pokespe ”
which was then proceeded to be used as bait for a joke on Twitter. Yes, I know that it’s a bit jarring to see some panels in Pokespe when most of the pokemon franchise
is family friendly barring maybe like, some scenes of implications. But I watched DBZ as a child which aired on TV and remembered thinking about Pokespe,
“I need to read more of this, it’s cool!” when I first finished the book when I saw it in middle school all those years ago. Pokespe isn’t even labeled as shonen
in its home country but instead has been labeled as kodomo (children’s) manga for the entirety of its run. In an even more bizarre contradiction the most popular
of the manga is also niche and the furthest I’ve ever seen people normally go is through just the RGB arc which again adds to the cyclical problem.
Some people on the YouTube sphere have tried to change this public opinion with their videos but it can’t really be changed if more popular channels
continue to run with the same old gag of no context panels (minus Dengeki/Electric Tale which I can understand why because the goon energy in that one by the artist is insane.).
To keep this light though, I’d like to link to the internet archive version of jb2448 alongside this neocities page I found which has been useful for seeing which manga are still around.
Pokemon Manga on Neocities
Archive of JB2448
Date: 05/18/2024
Mood: jkklajfejsjf
In a TCG book titled “Pokémon Card Strategies for Adults” Bill’s JP name is labeled as the author, where it then described that he was born in pallet town and then studied with Oak on Cinnabar island. The last name is different (Sonezaki compared to Kido), but then there’s also Dengeki Pikachu/ Electric Tale where he is in fact working with oak. (That one is all over the place though with it’s incredibly questionable …everything.) He’s a graduate of a JP magazine exclusive tie in fictional university. Celadon University was referenced in both the anime and Pokespe while also having a gift magikarp with dragon rage given out.
The infamous poliwhirl Fearow Pokespe panel is because it tried to eat Bill while he was turned into a ratatta. He also gets his house broken into during the yellow arc by Blue (girl) plus he has one of my favorite moments in GSC when he gets the teleporter working and all the friendly characters send in all their Pokémon to stop Lugia and ho-oh. In How I became a Pokémon card he’s one of the featured characters in a chapter, befriending a dratini in a time period where people were afraid of Pokémon.(As an aside, I wish more people could pick up and translate Pokewake. Please.)Today’s feature is on Bill, featuring reposted bits from my twitter thread on Yellow Legacy plus extra info I recalled.
Yellow legacy made me think about bill again and how he’s one of my favorite bits about gen 1 eccentricities and this extends to supplementary material and merchandise as well.
This is a man who works in the IT department for computer maintenance with digitized monsters and has a huge massive amount of PCs for them. It’s so funny that all the people in the Cerulean center were seething about him. Somehow the rival missed the entire teleportation incident plus Bill has been multiple different Pokémon depending on the game picked and it’s brought up in Alola as a thing. He has had both a British and southern accent because of his Kansai dialect. He has a little :3 smile. He has a fan club in johto where they reveal that he’s lactose intolerant.
I think he should be in masters. Leaf already mentioned him once.
Date: IDK
Mood: jkklajfejsjf
(I wrote this one when I was sleep deprived, cohost repost.)
Somethinh I like about Pokémon as a franchise is that there’s something for everyone in all sorts of different aspects that’s not just the games
You want to see cute slice of life stuff, there’s concierge
You want cool shonen stuff, there’s
pokespe and Diamond pearl adventure and all sorts of other mangas
You want to do math, there’s competitive
You want to be a Pokémon, there’s mystery dungeon
You want to break your hand, there’s ranger
Lots of anime episodes and movies and spin-offs that might feature one of your favorites (sorry porygon)
I just like that. It’s not like something where it’s completely homogenized
Okay, I really meed to go to bed, the keys are getting blurry agajn.
See, it’s the inherent uniqueness of the franchise that makes me enjoy it because really, you can pick any Pokémon and it’ll be someone’s favorite or they’ll have some kind of story attached to it. There’s so much you can do with Pokémon and it’s various pieces of material in all aspects so it really can potentially be a franchise for everyone in like. The creative aspect way. Not like. The existential capitalist dread way. That’s still there though.
Gamefreak’s got a few earlier works that it likes to reference in pokemon sometimes like Pulseman's Neo Tokyo Theme being referenced in Barry's theme and the SS Anne being named after the computer Pulseman was born on (there's a lot more Pulseman references like Rotom but I want to look into the game and see if I can find them before checking wikis). The Mario and Wario game that's in copycat's house is a game that GF developed. In the Gen 3 prototypes there's a sprite of a character from Mendel Palace/Quinty in the data. There's also a potential mother/earthbound connection in the fact that Ape Inc eventually became creatures Inc that developed pokemon. It's neat spotting some of these or learning about them afterwards. Harmoknight is talked about in a pokemon center in XY. Maybe the next game will reference Drill Dozer or Pocket Card Jockey?
Date: July 2023
Mood: jkklajfejsjf
Let's go, weird hacks!
There's something to be said for the way pokemon hacks have developed and how people tend to gravitate towards the best ones, meaning that a lot tend to end up being left in the dust. The thing is, you don't really appreciate the best ones until you come across those that are absurd in their values and make you, the player, question what the dev was doing or intended to do. The game in question? Pokemon Cintrine.
So buried in this seemingly unfinished demo is a complete pokemon game… in the most surreal way possible. Screenshots don’t match the total bewilderment I found in that a good amount of the game was functional, but the player just had to go out of their way with other tools to make it work in a manageable way. It’s kind of like, completely unfinished ROMs are their own mysterious thing because it’s easy to see where the author’s intents were going but due to either a lack of interest or cancellation it’s never finished and then it’s up to people like me to explore what remains of it and see how it could’ve gone. I basically watched a youtuber do the exact same steps I did with a different hack and my thoughts are if it’s like, entirely abandoned and unpolished then I think it’s fine to just go ham with breaking the entire thing down. I had fun doing that just because of the genuine curiosity. Pokemon kinda is a rabbit hole of its own in varying bursts of quality, original ideas, and it's ripe for potential. Even if it is uh. From an incredibly unfinished hack. (What I was thinking of was the term kusoge, translated as uh. crap game. I don't think the game is crap, but obviously it's not on the same level as more polished ones. I had to basically activate the game shark for it.)
Tl;dr, to appreciate good pokemon hacks you have to play through weird pokemon hacks.
