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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. This one rambles more than most because my feelings on the Pokemon franchise are very complicated and things are a mess now.
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. It is now 2026, and while I still find enjoyment in Pokemon, even some of the recent titles, I would actively steer someone away from buying a new Pokemon game.
I'm still thinking about how deeply unfinished each title has been since B2/W2 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 was able to happen), 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 (that the DLC doesn't do remotely enough to rectify).
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. That sounds mean (when I was younger, I got super hard stuck in a lot of places in Pokemon Yellow, although some of this was being too proud to use GameFAQs, and some more of it was just not having GameFAQs available while playing in the car since this was 1999).
Also, while maybe not literally true, I will say that Heart Gold/Soul Silver is probably the most premium Pokemon experience. I still have no good answer as to why following Pokemon weren't in most later games. I will never get over the complete lack of the Battle Frontier after this game. The game has some hard to ignore rough points, several of which it inherits from the games it remakes, and then some are just the weirdly stilted Gen 4 era dialogue, but it's just full of ambition. This is the Pokemon game that feels like it understands everything that came before it, and tried to put everything good into a beautiful, shining game. OR/AS not having any content from Emerald is horseshit.
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. It's super inspiring all around. 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.
The franchise really is just in some seriously rough straits, however.
I was recently able to play Pokemon Sword with a modified version (not that modified, you can just look up and down a lot more) of the Wild Area camera enabled everywhere, and I will probably never stop being mad that the game didn't ship this way. Towns that feel like theme park rides suddenly feel like actual places because you can look around. This simple change feels like the game literally had a million more dollars in the budget - yes, this isn't exactly a massive amount of money in modern big-name gamedev, but a million bucks is still a million bucks. My girlfriend was legitimately shocked when she saw it.
I have not really sat down to play Z-A. I will say that the opening tutorial is way, way, way too long. Move cooldowns are probably not something I want in mainline Pokemon, but I do like the idea of actively directing Pokemon in real time. I'm not against turn based combat, but being able to actively direct your Pokemon was the dream that the anime promised. I am actively annoyed at just how much this game doesn't take from Legends Arceus.
Pokemon Violet's DLC plot... isn't particularly great. The DLC content is also weirdly lacking, and I'm bothered at how the BBQ system in the DLC is a weirdly limited version of the sort of quests you'd expect to see out of the box in a big open world game like this. Ogerpon is cute, at least. I'm genuinely mad at how they handled Kieran.
Admittedly, Pokemon plots haven't been particularly great since... maybe not Gen 7, but definitely Gen 8. Like mentioned above, Sword/Shield's plot is terrible. Large parts of S/V's main writing aren't good either (I kinda forgot just how much of a dick Arven is at the start; he has reasons, but it's super jarring).
I will say, I am playing Violet again, and despite having oddly terrible graphics (Sword is a vastly prettier game in every level), it just feels satisfying. Walking around and letting your Pokemon beat up random wild mons is cool. It really could be cooler, since the game desperately needs to have the typical sort of open-world game missions; something to give you an incentive to traverse the environments and seek out Pokemon and battles and the lot beyond your own personal whim.
Still, if I want to play a proper Pokemon game (other than firing up Gold from the start for the 20th time), I'll fire up Platinum (in fact, I did start a new save recently), but Violet is the kind of game you can just chill to. It's the kind of game I was looking for when I was too tired to do anything productive, but also too tired to be any good at my usual fare (my typical most played games are arcade games, which are high intensity immediately and are not particularly tolerant of mistakes, and I was not in any position or mood for anything like that).
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. Hell, even if they made that sort of maze content optional, they really should add some.
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.
This page is a bit negative, yeah. Maybe I should do a Sonic franchise page if I'm willing to keep this one this way, lmao.
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