A digression from Breath of Fire Content:
I’m mad about Pokemon.
Like, I used to be mad about pokemon in the way where since 1998 I’ve caught them all, collected 54 Badges, 24 Master Medals, completed 14 island trials, photographed 277 pokemon, Capture-Styled 213 pokemon, and purified 130 shadow pokemon. Like, if it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, let me show you my doctorate degree in pokemon. I loved/love? Pokemon. Now I’m conflicted.
Now I’m mad about pokemon in the way where I’m angry at the direction the games have been heading. After years of being immersed in pokemon, it feels like a toxic relationship. Like if you love your dog, but now that Arcanine is 25 years old it doesn’t play, it only bites.
What is my problem with pokemon?
My problem is not surface level. For example, the big talking point for both SwSh, and Legends was the poor quality of the graphics. Graphics don’t solely make a game. And while non-cohesive graphics do affect my immersion, I think they are an indication that something deeper is wrong. For example, if your Pidgey returns home missing feathers and covered with cat-scratches, maybe everything is fine, but probably this is an indication that something serious has happened. Or perhaps, multiple serious things have happened.
So, what is my problem? Multiple things. Like it really bothers me that there are empty landscapes, object pop-in, arbitrary ankle high barriers, and the hand-holding empty ‘chosen trainer’ narrative. Since the transition to 3D, the pokemon world has felt empty and fake. It feels too sterile and too safe. It has lost the sense of danger that I feel is necessary for an adventure.
The core of my problem is that pokemon no longer caters to what I’m looking for in a ‘pokemon’ game. And there isn’t a good alternative franchise.
Why do you play pokemon?
First everyone needs to acknowledge that everyone plays games for different reasons, and that’s fine; please play the games that fit your needs.
Why do you play pokemon? Do you play to explore a whole new place with a brand-new attitude? Do you want to be a master (of pokemon)? Do you have the skills to be number one? Are you a contest champ? Are you a fan of cute lovely smart amazing Rapidash? Do you want to craft your own stories based on your personal experiences? Do you want to build secret bases, and play capture the flag with friends? Or do you gotta to catch ‘em all?
Why did I play pokemon? What I’m looking for in a pokemon game is to explore and get lost off of the beaten path. To discover secret places and ruins and rare monsters. Secondarily I want to catch ‘em all. And pokemon just doesn’t offer that anymore. Between Dexit and how paint by the numbers the games have become, players don’t really have the freedom to discover and explore optional areas and places on their own.
Like in gen 1 you can basically do gyms 3 through 7 in any order, provided you get the Soul badge before the Volcano badge. In Gen 3 there are a lot of optional areas, and paths that loop back to places you’ve previously visited from different directions. The direction of your adventure was dictated by your decisions. Since X and Y, the player does not have the agency to make meaningful decisions about the direction of their adventure. Black and White has this problem as well, but in X and Y the framing of your travel was changed from ‘ok, go explore’ to ‘Welcome to the guided tour of Poke-France, please proceed to the next landmark to initiate the next exposition dump’. This is loss of agency is way worse in Sun and Moon because instead of being told where to go, you are told and then taken there.
This loss of player agency makes for games that I’m just not interested in.
What has really changed?
There has been a shift in Game Freak’s design goals. If you compare developer interviews from the beginning to more recent ones there is a clear change in their design goal. From Satoshi Tajiri in the 90’s wanting “to make the kinds of games that he would want to play” to Junichi Masuda’s recent “without player feedback we are making a game we think children will enjoy”.
There could be any number of reasons for this change. From too much emphasis on focus testing, to the Pokemon company wanting to chase market trends, to focusing too much on a prefabricated story. The end result is a shift away from a game that offers a unique multifaced experience for each player, to a game that is largely exactly the same for each player except for which 6 companions they choose to take with them.
So why write this essay?
If we properly name what I’m doing by writing this essay, I’m grieving a betrayal of trust after decades of being in a relationship built on an expectation of new places to adventure and monsters to capture based on a strange natural world.
I’m mad that ‘Pokemon’ games pretend like they haven’t changed the experience in 25 years. Modern games are drastically different from what they once were, and it really gets my Gogoat that modern pokemon games have replaced meaningful choices with a large quantity of quantum ogres. E.g., “Is your pokemon cool or cute? Doesn’t matter!! It’s both! You have no choice!!!”
So, what now?
Well publish this essay online as a means of coping.
Point out that Pokemon Home is a scam. If you can’t have all of your pokemon in a format that you yourself own, and are not required to pay an external company money at a regular interval, under threat that they will delete your pokemon if you don’t pay, then that is by definition blackmail/ransom/extortion. It’s disgusting.
Note that the ‘new pokemon snap’ has bad game design. Link?
Wait for someone else to make a game that fulfills my need for exploration and capturing monsters. Or find the time to make it myself.
And try to find less stressful things to focus on.
Ciao
No comments:
Post a Comment