It is difficult to articulate just how hard it would be to travel back in time to 1999 and explain to my 10 year-old self just how busy Adult Life can be. Not because time travel is hard – you can do it with a hot tub these days – but because children in stable households cannot possibly comprehend just how much stuff there is to do.
“So you live alone?”
“Yes.”
“No pets?”
“Nope.”
“No partner?”
“God no.”
“Oh. Wait, we’re allowed to do that?”
“Yeah. You’ll learn all about it when you’re older. Oh, and ignore Mr. Smith’s banana in sex ed class; the guy has issues.”
“Uh…okay. So…if it’s just you…I mean, me…on my own…in a small, one bedroom flat…how could you possibly be busy all the time?”
“Well, for example, did you know that you’re meant to do washing up every single day?”
“Every day? How much cutlery could one person possibly generate??”
“<laughs in teaspoons.>”
Being an adult sucks. I mean, it’s great, because I can theoretically do what I want – within my financial limits – and if what I want to do is spend all Sunday in bed reading books and drinking coffee then that is definitely a valid option, but it means on Monday that none of Sunday’s chores got done and I now have six extra mugs to wash. And nothing to wear, because I forgot to do my laundry. And the bin smells. And I also have depression, so spending one day in bed means the next day I’m more anxious than usual about Going Outside and my emotions shaking empty tin cans at my serotonin emitters and crying.
(This is not to say that exercise cures depression; people who assert that are stupid and have no business giving out harmful medical advice. Being active can assist in helping you feel healthier and happier if you are in a state to do so, but when your actual brain chemistry is out of whack the best thing to do is speak to an actual doctor or therapist. Never be afraid to ask for help).
Adult Life is also relentless. I don’t have children and I have absolutely no idea how parents cope with looking after another small human because I can hardly look after myself. It seems that as soon as something is paid, or fixed, or signed for, or sorted out, it just as quickly comes around to needing me to pay for it, or fix it, or sign for it, or sort it out all over again. It took over seven months to negotiate the mortgage on my flat and I spent the entire time hearing a high-pitched noise in my ears which I thought was my usual tinnitus, but I’ve since discovered was me constantly screaming internally at all the legal paperwork.
But you know what can save you from adult life?
If you answered ‘hiring a life coach’, get out.
Indulging in something harmless and fun is the ultimate way to stick two fingers up to Adult Life, and Pokémon has come to be that thing for me in 2020.
I received Pokémon Blue for Christmas in 1997 with a purple crystal GameBoy Color after having loved the anime and collected the cards and I was lost in Kanto for most January and February 1998. My uncle followed this up in 1999 by returning from a business trip to America with copies of Pokémon Yellow for myself and my cousins, and one of my mum’s first ever internet purchases were Japanese cartridges of Pokémon Silver and Gold in 2000 so that I could see the new Pokémon of Johto before most kids in the UK (and therefore smugly knew that Marill had nothing to do with Pikachu). I was stupid and sold those cartridges on eBay for £10 a couple of years ago when I was short of fun money and I’m still bitter about it now.
A GameBoy Advance followed, but for whatever reason I totally missed Ruby/Sapphire and Emerald. I grew up in a small town with no gaming shop and no friends to keep me up to date on things, so the first I knew of the Advanced generation was LeafGreen. I loved visiting Kanto again, but I (…wrongly) was a bit annoyed that the franchise was remaking stuff already. I can’t remember how I justified the weird Hoenn Pokémon appearing in the post-game, but I was a really dumb teenager who once tried to remove mascara with nail polish remover so it was probably in a really stupid way. I had a DS but I skipped Diamond and Pearl because…um, again, I didn’t know they existed. I think I was firmly in my Gerry Anderson phase and wasn’t to be shifted by video games. Because somehow all video games based on Gerry Anderson franchises are bad?
…I just imagined an open-world game based in the Thunderbirds universe and got a bit misty-eyed there.
Anyway: Pokémon Platinum happened to me.
I adore Pokémon Platinum. It was a huge game with so many new Pokémon (…that I later discovered were from Hoenn HAHA WHOOPS) and a post-game that could keep you occupied for hundreds of hours. With the advent of internet-based Pokémon gaming I could trade with people all over the world, and at one time had a pretty popular account on the PokéCommunity Forums thanks to being able to clone Pokémon for shiny breeders. It was a really cool and happy period of my fandom-life, and the game buoyed my spirits when I needed it the most; it was 2009 and I was struggling with university paperwork, new depression medication, and the crashing reality that Adult Life was going to suck. (It got better).
I’m gonna be honest with you. I really did not like any of the Pokémon games that came after HeartGold and SoulSilver, because they all broke what made Pokémon fundamentally interesting for me: the ability to go on an incredible journey alone. From Black & White to Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon you were handheld so much it was almost like the games were frightened of you having fun making your own discoveries. X&Y and Black & White were the worst contenders in that they gave you two or five fucking rivals you constantly ran into and a Professor who called you every time he/she got bored and demanded you immediately dropped everything and ran over to [location] for [next plot point] and the game basically railroaded you into following whatever convoluted tale GameFreak had come up with this time. Exploration? In a Pokémon game? Shut up. Go over there. Now go over there. Now go over there. Are you having fun yet? Oh, you are? RING RING JUNIPER-SYCAMORE PHONE STOP HAVING FUN IMMEDIATELY THIS IS A NO FUN ALLOWED ZONE.
And the villains. Dear goose in the garden, these villains. Look, in Pokémon Platinum, the villainous Cyrus was going to destroy the world and recreate it because he was a sociopath who couldn’t understand the people and Pokémon around him, and his plan was subtly built up gradually over the course of the game so that by the time you faced him for the final showdown he was genuinely frightening and the stakes were WAY HIGH. And the cutscene at the end of the denouement in which Uxie, Mesprit, and Azelf call for Giratina to stop Palkia and Dialga from obliterating everything still gives me shivers now despite the comparatively limited graphics the DS has against modern consoles. (See also: Champion Cynthia’s battle theme. It’s still a banger all these years later).
I also felt sorry for Cyrus, in a way: he was written so well that whilst I absolutely did not want him to destroy the universe (because I live in it) I also pitied his inability to feel the love I had for my little pixel friends. He was a great villain. And Team Galactic were great henchmen with really cool designs.
And they came from a pretty strong history of good villains in the Pokémon games. Team Rocket of Kanto may be comical by today’s standards, but Giovanni was a frightening and intimidating opponent, both because of his untouchable criminal enterprise and his shadowy machinations on Cinnabar Island, as well as the ‘twist’ that he was actually the missing eighth and final Gym Leader all along. In the Johto games the returning Team Rocket played second fiddle to Silver, your rival who starts off not understanding concepts like friendship but grows into a better, more likeable person by the end of the game – where it turns out he was the son of Giovanni all along. Team Rocket trying to get Giovanni back whilst his own son railed bitterly against his unwanted heritage was great sequel material, especially when Gold/Silver/Crystal allowed you to return to Kanto after beating the Johto League. In that way the GameBoy games really do feel like a perfect pair and it’s almost a shame that the franchise continued beyond that, but I’m not complaining.
Teams Aqua and Magma were an interesting take on GameFreak releasing two separate titles per game and having more differences than just a few monsters in the Pokédex, and whilst Hoenn was where the franchise started thinking cataclysmic events were needed to hold the player’s attention every single time they’ve aged relatively well.
I still, to this day, cannot give any fucks for whatever it was Teams Plasma, Flare, or Skull were trying to accomplish. Black & White’s N was an interesting character but he was constantly surrounded by melodramatic assholes who turned up to steal all of his screen time and further frustrated my ability to take more than two steps before the plot intervened in my free roaming and dragged me along to the next expository dump kicking and screaming. I don’t think I ever finished any of these teams’ associated games: I just didn’t care because they were trying to make these big epic plot-driven melodramas in which I had no free will and was just there to witness cutscenes. In fact, actually, no, that’s a lie – I did finish Pokémon X, and do you know what I got for my efforts? Certainly not an explanation for the incredibly tall sad dude who kept wandering in and out of the game and who seemed to be its most interesting character. You gonna explain why he was so tall, GameFreak? No? Then why did I just finish your game? I don’t care about Lysandre and whatever the heck he was trying to accomplish – why is the tall man sad?? Why was there a random ghost girl in that city?! Why does this sodding game feel half baked?!
…I did not intend for that section to be so long, but I’m trying to convey just how fatigued I was with the franchise by the time March 2019 rolled around and I impulse-bought a Nintendo Switch that was bundled with Let’s Go Pikachu! because I was struggling once again with the real world and just wanted a bit of escapism.
Let’s Go! Pikachu was the bright, colourful adventure I needed. It has some adorable call backs to Red/Blue/Yellow whilst also being set in their identical timeline but Updated A Bit, and the ability to walk along with (or ride upon) any Pokémon in your party reminded me of just how much I loved the Kanto designs and everything that Pokémon Blue represented for me on that chilly Christmas morning in 1997. Heck, to my memory the Let’s Go! games are what Blue and Yellow looked like for my childish imagination. If you’d gone back and told me then that one day there would be a game where any Pokémon could follow you around – not just Pikachu in Yellow – I’d’ve been half delighted but also half confused because that’s what I imagined the top Pokémon in my party doing anyway.
And then came the announcement for Pokémon Sword & Shield, and the shitshow that followed.
I’m still not entirely sure what to think about the vitriol of the backlash, to be honest. Gaming can be an incredibly toxic hobby at times. I think it’s because games are the only medium we get to fully interact with, literally walking in the hero’s shoes as we solve puzzles, defeat bad guys, fall in love, or get frustrated that we can’t romance Nick Valentine when he’s so mysterious and has that voice. (And yet you could romance the lady robot, eh, Bethesda? I see what you’re doing there and it’s bollocks, mates). If VR ever does take off to the extent that we’re able to create things like Holodecks, I can only imagine it getting a lot worse.
The backlash itself…confused me. As rambled about above I am someone who had been playing Pokémon on-and-off since 1997 (although I had been officially Out Of Love with it since around 2011) and at first I thought I should be as mad as the other people I’d seen on Twitter because a lot of the narrative was centred around GameFreak betraying “the true fans”, or some such. (Protip: never trust anyone who uses the term ‘true fan’ for they are a gatekeepy idiot). Then I actually read up on why people were upset, and I just…I didn’t get it.
I’m going to tackle the graphics thing first, because another annoying thing in gaming is the elitism surrounding graphics and every time it comes up I roll my eyes far, far into the back of my skull and foam at the mouth. Graphics are important in gaming because they help to create the world of the game – as games are primarily a visual medium – and therefore require a unique style that blends into the narrative whilst not interfering with the game’s interface. The original Silent Hill is misty as fuck and you can’t see two steps in front of yourself because it is An Horror Game and if it was bright and sunshiney with a draw distance of six billion miles it wouldn’t be nearly as effective. Tetris, on the other hand, is a game about blocks. Making its interface confusing and cluttered with lots of shiny things makes no sense: it’s a puzzle game and you need to be able to concentrate on the puzzle. (Tetris 99 is a great update that really Gets This).
As a result, Pokémon was never a game that is primarily concerned with AW MY GAWD LOOK AT DEM GRAFFIX because the games are about the monsters and your journey to stuff them into tiny balls for the approval of a strange man you’ve met only one time, and the people who continue to insist that Sword & Shield look ugly and outdated utterly baffle me. “Look at the Witcher 3 on Switch!” They cry. “Why doesn’t Pokémon look like that?” Because…my dudes and dudettes…it was…never…supposed to…? Pokémon Sword and Shield use stylised art because they’re games about a child collecting a horde of mythical creatures to beat the shit out of fellow children with. Don’t get me wrong, the Ken Sugimori artwork from the original games is *kisses fingers* but Pokémon has been about Being Cute since Pokémon Yellow. You’re meant to want to collect Pokémon and in order to make you like them they have to appeal to that raw primal instinct deep inside you that utterly loses its shit whenever it sees a puppy. The Witcher 3 animals are all about being Scary As Hell because it’s your job to murderise them. The two are not comparable in any way, shape, or form.
Galar as a region straight-up looks frickin’ incredible, especially towns like Motostoke and Ballonlea that play to a certain theme – inspired by the good old U of K, although I can’t spot much Northern Ireland in there, GameFreak. The decision for the camera to be locked outside of the Wild Area is fine, because the game was clearly created to follow a fixed camera and does a great job showing you the area around you whilst also drawing your attention to the majestic stuff around you. I especially love how you run up a snowy hill and emerge the other side to see Wyndon, home of the Galar League, and which I really hope was not based on Swindon because that meant some poor GameFreak employee had to come to Swindon to do research and they did not deserve that.
So like, to each their own. We’ve all got opinions and goose knows the internet has made us think that what we have to say is the most ground-breaking thing ever, but…the games look great. If you want to play The Witcher 3, then play The Witcher 3. Stop trying to drag Geralt of Riveria into the Galar region, he’d only go and slaughter a couple of Obstagoons before Piers turned up and shoved a microphone stand where a microphone stand has no business being.
The other main complaint, though. This one I get. Sort-of. I get it, but at the same time…I think we need to move past it, maybe…?
Like I said above, Pokémon are designed for us to like them. There are, as of writing this post, 807 of them. Eight hundred and seven adorable little monsters who are each guaranteed to have at least one fan somewhere in the world. Yes, even Klefki. Yes, even Luvdisc. Yes, even Mr. Mime – they’re one of my personal favourites. The fact that one got such a big part in Detective Pikachu delights me so much, you have no idea.
Anyway when it was announced that over half of these 807 Pokémon would be cut, and that Galar would have ‘just’ 400 of the little buggers, I can totally, 100% get why people were upset. The Let’s Go! games were great little side games and a brilliant introduction to Pokémon on the Switch, but Sword & Shield were going to be the main event and if 407 of the previous generation Pokémon are unavailable on the titles then there’s a definite “uh oh” that they’re never going to make it onto the system and the future of the franchise. At time of writing the (paid) DLC seems to be fixing this, with Venusaur and Garchomp at least teased in the video announcement, but we didn’t have this information at launch and I can definitely, 100%, fully understand why “gotta catch ’em all” seemed like it had instantly become an empty platitude. It’d be like saying “I’m definitely going to ace this test of ten questions” when the paper only has five questions. Or “I’m definitely not going to finish this tub of ice cream” when your spoon is already striking the soggy cardboard bottom.
This post brought to you by a tub of cheapo Aldi ice cream, by the way. The diet’s going great.
But here’s the thing: by constantly including every Pokémon in every game, GameFreak’s workload is building up and building up and building up. The Pokémon games were never great because there were so many Pokémon to collect, they were great because what Pokémon they had felt naturally integrated into their world and there is enough of a variety for everyone to find a team that worked for them. Pokémon Platinum, my all-time favourite title, ‘only’ had 493 Pokémon – and even that felt too many for me at the time; despite playing the game to death I never caught all of them.
And yet GameFreak continued to create new Pokémon, not because they were needed, but because they had come to be expected. The screaming meltdown the online portion of the Pokémon fandom had when it was revealed the Galar Pokédex would (at the time) stop at 400 was a deafening, entitled whine that encompassed everything wrong with…well, everything, really: MORE. WE WANT MORE. GIVE US MORE. It wasn’t enough that we were getting a whole new world with a whole new story, improved graphics (shut up they are) and fun new mechanics like Pokémon Camp and Dynamaxing – if all 807 Pokémon aren’t in the game, yes, even Klefki, then the game is bad. The games were judged to be bad before they even hit shelves because Alolan Raichu wouldn’t be in them despite Alolan Raichu being native to *checks notes* not-Galar.
Here’s the thing: I didn’t mind 407 Pokémon being cut from Sword & Shield because, to me, it doesn’t make sense to have all 807 Pokémon in Galar. Our real world today is fascinatingly interconnected thanks to the advent of planes and cars and the internet and telephones but I still do not expect to walk out of my front door and see an elephant on my lawn because elephants live in hotter climates than Wiltshire, England. Similarly I did not expect to see Giratina in Galar because Giratina is the sacred Pokémon of Sinnoh.
To use a non-legendary example to explain myself: Eeveelutions. Eevee is a Normal-type Pokémon who can evolve into lots of differently typed secondary Pokémon, and these evolutions perfectly tied in with the advancement of the games. In Kanto (Red, Blue, and Yellow), Eevee could evolve into Flareon, Vaporeon, or Jolteon using evolutionary stones. These stones were a way of making evolution more exciting and mysterious: instead of grinding Eevee up to a certain level, you had to find mysterious items to trigger the evolution. And you had a choice of three of them to contrast with your Starter Pokémon, who was also one of those three types.
Gold, Silver, and Crystal introduced the day/night cycle and the friendship meter, and therefore GameFreak introduced two new Eeveelutions: Espeon, who would evolve up if Eevee became your best friend during the day, and Umbreon, who would evolve if Eevee became your best friend during the night.
The Hoenn games of Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald didn’t introduce many new mechanics (to their strength, looking back on them) and therefore there were no new Eeveelutions. You could still get the previous five because their evolutions only depended on items and the day/night cycle.
But then, in Sinnoh (Diamond/Pearl/Platinum) the concept of Pokémon needing to physically be in a certain place to trigger an evolution was developed for Pokémon such as Magnezone (the third evolution of Magnemite) and, ta-dah! Two new Eeveelutions: Glaceon, who needed to be near a certain rock in the snow, and Leafeon, who needed to be near a certain rock in a forest. And this is where the problem begins.
The above is fantastic world building, but also an example of how quickly the games have become convoluted: Sinnoh establishes that you can only get Leafeon and Glaceon by evolving Eevee in certain areas that only exist in Sinnoh. That made these Eeveelutions seem special: you had to figure out how to make them happen, and then their actual happening felt intrinsically linked to Sinnoh and therefore Diamond/Pearl/Platinum themselves. So in the follow up games the designers either have to replicate the Mossy Rock & Icy Rock and make Leafeon and Glaceon not all that special, or risk the ire that comes with starting to remove Pokémon from future titles. It’s a Catch 22 and they can’t please everyone.
In Sword & Shield, Leafeon and Glaceon are created by using a Leaf Stone or an Ice Stone on an Eevee at any point. It feels lazy and dumb, but it had to done: for them to be able to be in Galar, the very thing that made them special had to be sacrificed. Eevee is a popular Pokémon. It simultaneously wasn’t possible for Glaceon and Leafeon to be left out (because fan outcry) but their appearance also feels crowbarred in and unnatural. If Magnemite had to be included in the Galar Pokédex, then a similar situation would have had to have occured for Magnezone: either create an area of high electrical fields in Galar, or you’d have to have smashed Magneton over the head with a bloody Thunderstone.
…This is a very tl;dr way of typing out “look maybe we ought to stop with the idea that all Pokémon have to be carried forward into future titles for the sake of their own stories and habitats and trust that GameFreak know what they’re doing”, but I am also aware that “I’m really sorry that Tauros isn’t in your game and I hope they’re put either in the DLC or the next one”. It’s become a hard balancing act and I just can’t bring myself to be all that angry about it because, surely, we all knew it had to happen some time – right?
(Also, as a side note, I’m totally down with Pokémon continuing to be released in pairs with exclusive Pokémon in each title. One of the fundamental aspects of Pokémon is the trading and with online play the easiest we’ve ever had it, having the two titles still encourages people to go online and ask for help in completing their Pokédex).
Sword and Shield are not perfect, and I know this post up until now seems that I’m unnecessarily blowing my trumpet a little too loud for them. Goose knows their story needs tightening up (which is a shame because the whole ‘rewriting history to suit our agenda’ is a brilliant direction and is certainly a Call Out Post for English history) and they are far, far too easy – even for a casual player. I realised when I got to the League that my Togekiss had not fainted once, which is not a great sign for a crap player like myself.
But at the same time, Sword & Shield tried to be different and I applaud them for that. They almost feel subversive, in a way.
For a start, Team Yell are not a villainous organisation: they’re actually just overzealous fans cheering on their chosen champion who is herself a working class trainer from a town that has no Dynamaxing spot and is therefore not given the attention or funding that other towns in Galar have. The game itself is criticising its own gimmick, and I really, really like that. It makes it feel more genuine. I also think it’s why Piers is one of the most liked Gym leaders in the fandom – I certainly don’t remember any “actually maybe Mega Evolution has its downsides” types featuring in the previous titles except as bad guys who just don’t ‘get it’. That and Piers is just too cool for school. None of us will ever be as cool as Piers, and that’s OK.
Of course the game doesn’t actually remove Dynamaxing from itself once its revealed it can be used for evil, but baby steps. Baby steps.
Secondly, the Rival has finally rediscovered the perfect Platinum balance of cheering you on whilst also wanting to beat you, and you don’t run into Hop nearly as many times as you do the sixteen million little pests in X&Y who have just dropped by because you haven’t spoken to them in nearly twenty seconds and they’re worried you got lost. Or started having fun.
Hop is a brilliant character in that he is An Actual Character, living in the shadow of his elder brother – the Galar Champion Leon – wanting to both live up to his family name but also carve his own path. I was so, so pleased in the endgame that he got to befriend the legendary dog that isn’t on the front cover of your title, especially when the dog outright chooses him because it recognises he’s the good boy in the scenario. And it breaks my heart whenever I do some grinding in Wyndon Stadium and the game puts me up against him again because goddamnit that little disappointed sigh he does when he loses is too much GameFreak just LET HIM WIN –
True story: if I have a bad day I let Hop win because I like to imagine him finally achieving his dream.
I also liked that the game’s Professor wasn’t some snotty know-it-all who had decades to write their own Pokédex but couldn’t be bothered because surely a gullible kid would come along some day and do it for them – Magnolia barely has anything to do with the plot, and her understudy Sonia’s journey from not being sure of herself to becoming the new Professor was genuinely gratifying to see.
Dynamaxing is fun. I thought I could live without it, but hearing the crowd go wild in the stadiums when I draw Togekiss back into my Pokéball to make him the size of a building so that he can utterly thrash Raihan’s Duraludon with Max Starfall is a Total Experience, especially on the telly. Max Raids in the Wild Area are also a great way of doing online play without worrying that the players are going to start using racial slurs and insulting one another’s mothers, and I’m totally fine with not knowing who I’m playing with. Ditto being able to go into other player’s camps and play with their Pokémon. These are all things that make the post-game really fun whilst we wait for the DLC to come out, and I’m happy they’re there.
Finally, character customisation. This was started in X&Y (…I think?) and continued to the extent you could change your outfit in Let’s Go!, but Sword & Shield finally bring the goods in allowing you to make your avatar look as near to you as possible and that’s just bloody great. It’s finally me on my Pokémon adventure, not some girl who looks nothing like me and wears a hat for some reason (I hate wearing hats). It’s never made much sense to me that this feature has taken so long to come into the games: the protagonist in every single title is you, so why you’ve been stuck looking like Generic Anime Protagonist #69 for years is beyond me. I really like that you can make your own little trading card and trade them with other players around the world: that feature is just neat.
I’m not exactly sure what I set out to say when I started writing this post. Originally it was meant to be “Five Things I Loved About Sword & Shield”, which (in case you’re interested) were these:
5. Quality of Life Improvements
4. Hop
3. Stadiums
2. Piers
1. The Wild Area
But during writing it I started playing Let’s Go! again from scratch and it made me nostalgic for all the reasons I both loved and hated this franchise at times in my past, and also had me realise how much Pokémon actually does mean to me – and how much Shield restored my faith in where the franchise is going after the 3DS games all but turned me cold.
Have I mentioned that I really, really, really, really dislike X&Y?
If you made it this far then thank you very much for reading my ramblings and if your favourite Pokémon were not in the Galar games then I really hope they’re either added later or are in a future title. I really, really do. But please stop commenting with #dexit on every single Pokémon-related tweet, dust off your DS, and give Platinum another go. I promise you’ll have a fab time.
AROFAN 