Pokemon

I have said before that I do not really feel qualified to talk about the new Pokemon games, as I have not really played deep enough into my copy of diamond to warrant it, and even if I had, my experience of the series as a whole is next to nonexistent. Oh happy chance it is then, that I have friends better qualified than I. I will shut up, and let Max do the talking.


Pokemon - the thinking man's chess

Pokemon is one of the best game franchises in the world. It is. No, it IS.
I am very, very good at the Pokemon games, partially because they directly reward obssessive behaviour. The more you battle your Pokemon, the higher their levels, the more opposing Pokemon Trainers you can gleefully trash. But there's more to Pokemon than cutesy animations and hour upon hour of ceaseless battle.

Pokemon's great strength lies in the fact that it is more multi-faceted a game than any other out there - there are just so many ways to play it. Of course there's the narrative to play through, which combines compelling characters with increasingly apocalyptic plots. In Pokemon Red, Blue and Yellow you were battling bring down a criminal organisation called Team Rocket. In Gold, Silver and Crystal, Team Rocket regrouped and set about kidnapping and dissecting and selling parts of Pokemon. In Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald you had to stop Team Magma and Team Aqua from destroying the world. In Diamond and Pearl you are battling to stop Team Galaxy from destroying the space-time continuum. For a supposed "children's game", it's all pretty heavy stuff.

There are also Pokemon Contests, in which your Pokemon has to perform to a crowd and appeal to a panel of in-game judges in one of five categories: cool, beauty, cute, tough or smart. These are a science in themselves, and there are players who take enough pleasure out of them to spend most of their time in the game competing against each other and the in-game opponents. Then there are gamers that spend most of their time breeding, in which you can exercise unprecedented control over a Pokemon's stats, natures and move-set and provide such an edge that no serious battler would dream of competitively using a Pokemon they hadn't hatched themselves.

Increasingly, games are filled to splitting with different modes and unlockable treats, but invariably these are just add-ons - they're not woven into the fabric of the game-world. All the aspects of Pokemon I've mentioned are not different modes with the same game mechanics and ideas behind them, they are literally different ways to experience the world of Pokemon, and each has an effect on the others. As the graphical capabilities of the consoles increase, sports sims and racing games are touted as being more "immersive" than anything seen before, and yet Nintendo have managed to create a game that is more genuinely immersive than any of those in Pokemon. And they've done that by creating a believable world. The concept of Pocket Monsters that fight each other may be ludicrous, but if you take their existence as assumed then the world that they would inhabit would almost certainly be the one depicted in the games. For example, the beginning of Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald saw your character moving house, and the moving company consisted mainly of Machokes to move the large, heavy furniture around. Thinking about it, it's obvious that it would - if they existed then that's one of the things they'd be doing. People need help moving their furniture. The creators of Pokemon seem to have considered the impact that the existence of Pokemon would have on every aspect of life and the world, from transport (where you can fly on bird Pokemon or surf on water Pokemon) to electricity grids (powered by Voltorbs), from lighthouses (each with it's own Ampharos) to cooking (over heat generated by Slugmas). They've not been afraid to depict the mundane or practical applications of Pokemon, and that completeness is what makes the world of Pokemon so immersive and so compelling.

Pokemon is seen as a children's game, even by some of my closest friends, but that's because they are RISIBLE FOOLS who don't take the time to properly look at a game, or dismiss them just because they have cartoon monsters. If you think that different elemental types being super effective against others is the extent of battling, and that chatting to sparingly animated Pokemon Professors is the extent of character interaction, and that Pokemon Contests can be written of as pandering to Japanese fangirls because they have a competition catagory labelled "Cute", then that doesn't mean that Pokemon is a child's game, it means that you are a child.
Superficially, the demographic that Pokemon is aimed at are children, but to say that it's a "child's game" is derisive and patronising and implies that adolescents or adults can't enjoy or learn from it. There are parts of Pokemon that are quite clearly not aimed at children. For instance, there are moments of clear innuendo in the dialogue at the Veilstone Massage Parlour in Pokemon D/P, the beach in Pokemon R/S/E, and the Viridian Forest in G/S/C. How many children will laugh any of those? Of course, it's the fact that these borderline explicit pieces of dialogue are found in a game most would consider immature that makes it daring and unexpected and ultimately funny. Similarly, the battling mechanics. Most casual gamers get as far as the instruction manual's "fire beats grass, grass beats water, water beats fire" Pokemon battling "strategy". But beneath that is a very complex and even profound system. It's profound enough that the Pokemon community can battle over the Internet and in worldwide tournaments every day of every year for over a decade and still keep inventing new ways of structuring teams, and profound enough that 200 page booklets are being written just on potential movesets and tactics. My best friend and I have studied Pokemon Battling strategy for a long time now and we know a lot of stuff, a hell of a lot of stuff. A volume of stuff that would make many people out there seriously reconsider their friendship with us if they knew.

Over the many years and the four generations of Pokemon games I've clocked up over 500 hours of gameplay, and I'm proud to say that I still haven't seen it all and it's still fun enough to keep me up at night. How many of your "adult" driving games can do that?

Max the Felicitous