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".
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.