happy Pokémon day.
What is your favorite Pokémon based memory?
ah fuck, you want me to
choose? dick move man, dick move
god, what do I even pick. sticking only to mainline games. Pokémon being the only game I could play with the two friends I had? Becoming convinced that female Hippowdon was a shiny and going on a week-long hunt for one (in Heart Gold lol), trading one of my actual event mythicals for an obviously-hacked shiny Mew over the GTS just because I loved Mew that much and wanted one real badly, choosing my first starter, picking up physical copies of the gen 3 games and falling in love with Emerald, finding that stupid shiny Magikarp while I was hunting for a Feebas, getting two shinies AND POKERUS on a one-off Heart Gold save I was only running to test a challenge ruleset...
I'm gonna stop there but you could probably sum up a good third of my life in the context of this fucking series. It scares me a little bit to think about lol.
What is the reason you hold Pokémon so dearly to your heart through adulthood?
One word:
potential.
I've always been a sucker for interesting premises with CAVERNOUS depths to explore through other means, and HOLY FUCK DUDE I'm not sure there's another series out there as deep as Pokémon.
It sounds stupid to say given that it is quite literally shallow mainstream slop in terms of theming, writing, etc.
past gen 5 anyways, but I have yet to see a single franchise, gaming or not, with so many intricacies.
The fact that it's a nigh-omnipresent media icon means that almost every single product in existence has some kind of Pokémon version, no matter how obscure, often multiple.
The game's mechanics are relatively simple rock-paper-scissors, but there are
thousands of tiny intricacies within it: movesets, abilities, items, base stats, gimmicks, etc etc. You could spend your whole life just testing out different combinations of Pokémon and I guarantee you it would take an entire planet's worth of people to get through 1/10 of the configurations that exist out there.
I won't even get into the games' quality, which stayed consistently good for upwards of 15 years before they started fumbling the ball... I can't think of many other series off the top of my head that have achieved that kind of thing, but to be fair they also didn't have such incredibly efficient gameplay loops
The depth of the concept, removed from any context, may as well be infinite. There are over a thousand species at this point of almost entirely well-designed monsters, a
monumental feat that I am impressed by on a daily basis, with the parallels to our real world implying millions upon millions more if only you have the imagination to create some fakemon of your own.
Those real-world parallels also provide ENDLESS opportunities for stupid what-if stories: you can do stupid shit like asking how the Holocaust would have gone if Hitler had Weezing at his disposal or you could do SUPER MEGA GIGA AUTIST shit like trying to recreate all of human history with the qualifier that there are super-powered animals around every corner that could kill you with a fart. Or you could even be boring and just see how the average office worker's life would change if he has a four-legged supercomputer made of steel do all his work for him. Given that I quite enjoy learning about history, culture, and the like, I've got a bit of a weakness for that kind of stuff and love it lots. Funnily enough, I think part of the reason that I got so attached to Pokémon vs Digimon even though I watched + loved + played both is because Digimon treats the real world more like something to escape from, while Pokémon
augments the real world with magical creatures that live in harmony with humanity. The integration of real-world cultures might have helped hook me in even more than the Pikachus, come to think of it.
You could spend your entire life just on Pokémon. You could dedicate your life to collecting every single product, every single pixel, every single permutation of the brand. You could spend your whole life playing fan games, main games, spin-offs, bootlegs. You could devote your entire creative soul purely to shitty Pokémon-related alternate history. You could do
almost anything involving this goddamned franchise and it would keep you busy for hundreds, if not thousands, of hours.
It's a kind of titanic and intimidating depth I've yet to find elsewhere. The closest I've gotten has been singular games without any series like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress, and a lot of non-gaming media is restricted to a time limit or an author's lifespan so it tends not to achieve that kind of enormous size just by virtue of the format. It's also nowhere near as interactive, and although I can get lost in plenty of other fictional worlds I can never truly
interact with them like I can Pokémon's.
Pokémon is the Himalayas to almost every other franchise or game's Appalachians, the Mariana to almost any other trench. It's kind of hard to look away from it, and if you're the right type of person it'll inflict you with a fever so intense that it becomes hard to think about much else. It's almost impossible to conquer, with even its smallest achievements being near-Herculean tasks (reminder: the smallest National Dex is gen 1's, and that still has 151 creatures in it), and it is so omnipresent around the world that you can never really escape it.
That was an incredibly long-winded way of saying
nothing has ever managed to replicate what it does to my brain and I doubt anything ever will. It's basically the perfect game for me (with some exceptions, of course
: I'd rather that the battles were more TRPG-based (AND HEY LOOK THERE'S A SPIN-OFF FOR THAT), I'd prefer some more emphasis on bonding with your critters and general life-sim stuff, etc.)-- an optimistic view of humanity in an alternate universe where there are BIG FUCKOFF DRAGONS (but no dinky spellcasters or strictly medieval tech) that provides
endless opportunities for fan works-- and I'm incredibly lucky and grateful to be living in a world where I have something like that.
I deserve the puzzle pieces lol. Sorry for the spergery.
