Crawl out of my screen and into my pocket

It’s time to Pokemon.

If you haven’t played any Pokemon games (which is insane, what are you doing here?) you capture creatures with different abilities as you journey throughout a region. As you train them and battle them, they get stronger and sometimes evolve and look more badass. Or in some cases, evolve and look so. so much worse.

I’m lookin’ at you, Kadabra.

The base of all Pokemon games, excluding GO, are roughly the same, like turn-based combat, movesets, storylines (“We gotta stop those evil trainers from taking over the world by using the legendary Pokemon of this region that has only been a myth until now!”) Oh, and there are legendaries, which you can only catch once a game (unless you cheat ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ), and they’re usually a slam dunk.

So that basically brings you up to speed on all the Pokemon games that have ever existed and ever will exist.

Pokemon is such a strange thing because it happened to occur at the right place and time to become a cultural phenomenon. I almost want to argue that public sentiments to video games are thawing thanks to Pokemon GO.

That summer when GO was huge felt like a fever dream. I remember driving home one night and turning on the radio, and the announcer was giving away rare Pokemon to people who called in.

Um, but okay. Back to the Pokemon games.

I gotta be upfront about something: I’m a Pokemon purist.

I wholeheartedly believe Pokemon get worse with every generation released. Long gone are the “good old days” when the Pokedex ended at Mewtwo and you could turn the TV on Saturday mornings to watch Ash and Pikachu blindly stagger through the Indigo League.

This is just my opinion and I will fight you if you think differently (kidding! I’m kidding).

Everyone started somewhere with Pokemon, and my start was with Pokemon Ruby, which is still one of my favorite Pokemon games to this day. Probably from the nostalgia, idk.

It’s been a rough journey, but presently I’ve gotten all the way to Pokemon Moon, although I skipped White/Black and White 2/Black 2. After writing that sentence, I now realize how confusing this would be to someone who doesn’t follow the Pokemon games. You’re probably better off not knowing at this point. Run while you can.

Pokemon feels like something I definitely should not poke with a stick, considering it’s a series rooted in many a childhood. People have strong feelings about it. I don’t want to ruffle feathers, but at the same time, I’m three posts behind my class quota and I wanna talk about Pokemon. There, that’s my justification.

One opinion we probably won’t agree on is that, to me, Pokemon’s jump to 3D was rough. Platinum, one of the last traditionally 2D games of the series, was an absolute gem, and they followed it up with Pokemon White/Black, the problem child. The pixeled dimension felt like it couldn’t make up its mind, blending the worst of both the 2D and 3D realms, which up to that point I thought was impossible.

This led to me giving away my copy of White after a week of trying to play it. Or Black. I can’t remember which one it was. It was a long time ago.

But I’ve come all the way up to Pokemon Moon for one reason, and that reason is Pokemon Y. And Pokemon X, by extension, I guess. They’re basically the same game.

If you haven’t played Pokemon Y, all you need to know is everything I had an issue with, 3D headaches, really dumb Pokemon designs, and everything else, were totally eclipsed by an essential element every game of the series had been needing. That one thing that made Pokemon Y (and X) so amazing and revolutionary is the ability to pet and touch your Pokemon. It was decades in the making, really, but oh my god. Finally, I could pet my beautiful, hardworking Pokemon.

It seems so simple: give players the ability of faux-tactile bonding between them and their Pokemon, but it’s a closer step to reality. I mean, I totally know Pokemon won’t become real suddenly, no matter how many birthday wishes I spent on that dream.

But that’s not the point of the game.

The game’s purpose is to drag you into that world, lose yourself in a winning streak, name your Pokemon cute names like Tom Jones and Booger, and feel like you’re a part of team. When I’m playing Pokemon, I completely lose the distinction between my real life and the game world. It’s like if the temperature of a pool was the exact same temperature of the air, so you didn’t notice when you’re slipping in and out of it.

This is a problem I face with a lot of games: being too aware of the distinction between myself and my character. When a game can’t draw me in to the point where I say “me” and “I” rather than “my character,” it’s easier for me to walk away from it. (Example: I need to get my guy some health versus I need some health).

But in Pokemon, it’s me. It doesn’t feel like a character, it feels like myself.

I think this is because the focus isn’t on making a believable or authentic character for players to control, but on the relationship between the player and their Pokemon. So, in all ways, the playable character is just a vessel used by you to interact with your Pokemon team.

That’s partly why the development of touch felt so important to me. If it’s me in the game, why can’t I directly interact with my Pokemon? Instead, I have to go through menus, I have to feed their 2D sprites Poffins, and if they’re cute enough, I can walk around with a little 5 pixel large version of them through a specialty park. You can compete in contests with your Pokemon, but you can’t pet or touch them.

And that was the extent of it for a long time.

Allowing you to finally, after 20-some odd years, touch the damn Pokemon is so beyond touch. It’s breaking the barrier between our reality and that fantasy world.