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_ __ ___ (_)_ __ ___ __| | ___
| '_ ` _ \| | '__/ _ \/ _` |/ _ \
| | | | | | | | | __/ (_| | (_) | wishes Game Freak
|_| |_| |_|_|_| \___|\__,_|\___/ was a competent studio
Like the other pages for shit I like, this page is a bit of a mess and rambles. Oh well.
Despite the last 12 years, I am a major fan of Pokemon. However, in a similar way to how I like Warhammer 40k but I don't want to give money to a company as pointlessly lame as Games Workshop, I don't want to spend money on Pokemon. Black 2 and White 2 were the last time I really felt good as a fan of the series with how the games were going. That was back in 2012.
I'm still thinking about how deeply unfinished each title has been since then has been. This isn't in the usual sense of how the majority of games in general are unfinished because they had to scale back on the scope they set out to accomplish, I'm talking about how major plot threads in X/Y are just not developed (probably because Pokemon Z never happened), how the Sword and Shield story outright doesn't make sense and it feels like they were in the middle of an editing pass, the barebones nature of Scarlet and Violet.
There was probably something blatantly unfinished for Sun/Moon, but I can't remember it and those games were lame enough that I dropped them. At no point in the hours that I played Pokemon Sun did it ever feel like I had left the starting tutorial. I felt like my hand was being held every single step of the way, except for maybe how I was deeply walled out for a fair bit by Totem Lurantis using Solar Blade every turn - that was actually pretty impressive, probably one spot of cleverness in what was otherwise a game for children too dumb to get through Pokemon Red and Blue.
I won't pretend Pokemon isn't a franchise that primarily targets children, even if there was definitely a point where you were probably more likely to find Pokemon players on a college campus instead of at recess (and it has only gotten worse in the Switch era because while I've seen people bring their Switch to university with them, a kid doing that in grade school is just asking for it to be confiscated or stolen, and it's much bigger to carry around than a 3DS). The problem is that Game Freak has decided that to compete with the appeal of the mobile market, the games have to be made for particularly dim children.
Still, I love these little creatures. The world is cool. Sometimes, there's a weird conflict between wanting to make the setting both friendlier and more dangerous sounding (some of the Pokedex entries in Sun/Moon are absurd lol), but fuck man. I love it.
My favorite non-Legendary Pokemon are probably (in no particular order):
My favorite version is a hard thing to answer; I've played Gold the most times by far, but I think Platinum would be my favorite if all the Gen 4 games weren't abysmally slow about everything (SAVING A LOT OF DATA lmao). Emerald is another close runner up, but the start of R/S/E is kind of terribly paced; it takes until you get to Slateport for things to feel right.
I hated stuff like Mt. Moon and the Silph building in R/B/Y as a kid, so I get why stuff like that hasn't been in Pokemon in a while, but replaying those games as an adult? The Silph building maze is great. I love those bits now. Hell, given the fact that modern young players are able to easily able to look up maps and stuff (contrast back in 2001, where I couldn't check GameFAQs while in the car), I suspect it would be easier to justify having mazes now even despite the youth target audience.
I'll add more to this page as I feel like it. If you saw this page before I actually linked to it on the site... well, it's actually live now.
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