In a rather puzzling move, Nintendo just released a Demo Version of Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu/ Eevee on the Nintendo eShop about a day ago. It's puzzling because the full games have been out for, what, 3 months now? Don't publishers usually release demos for games before their release, not after?
Can't help but to think that the sales figures for the games aren't as hot as Nintendo had wanted them to be, in spite of how fast they were selling at launch. One thing that has always irked me about sales figures and bean counters is that they take sales figures at launch to determine the success of a sequel, when, really, who the hell is to say how good a sequel is until you buy the damn thing and try it?
Quick background information: I just turned 25. I was a "90s kid" who'd try to catch an episode of Pokémon every Saturday morning on Kid's Central. Hell, at one point I even wanted to cosplay Ash Ketchum, going so far as to even buying that boxy first gen PokéDex to complete the look.
My first Pokémon game was Fire Red on a GBA SP, and I've played at least two mainline games of every generation since. Like so many
That's... how I got into competitive Pokémon. I'm no amazing player by any stretch of the imagination, but I do know how to breed for and engineer out a perfect fighting machine, devoid of any of its personality in the name of competitive viability.
So why did I bore you half to death with that lengthy prologue?
See, LGPE is a very divisive title in the lineage of Pokémon games. Set to take advantage of brand new hardware that is the Nintendo Switch, many were anticipating a whole new generation of Pokémon on Nintendo's second best selling console in its history. That would mean hundreds of new Pokémon to catch, train and battle, a whole new region to explore, new mechanics stapled onto an old formula to keep things fresh, and, of course, a brand new coat of paint over it all. Yet when the time came, all we ended up getting was... Generation 1, again. All we ended up getting was LGPE.
"O-okay", the inner fanboy in me bargains. "A remake set in Kanto would be kickass! CD Quality music, full 3D overworlds, updated stats, egg moves, breeding mechanics, hidden abilities, physical special split, Mega Evolution, Z-moves in Kanto? Hey, I don't mind! Hell, even the remake, Fire Red and Leaf Green, are more than 10 years old by now, lots have changed!" And, you know, maybe I wouldn't have been so flabbergasted by LGPE if it were as cookie cutter as that - just the same old shit with a fresh coat of paint over it.
But no.
We would be denied even that.
A fresh coat of paint was just about all we got from all the things I listed out above. We got the 3D environments. We got the CD Quality music. Everything else, I kid you not, was stripped away from the game. No abilities. No held items. No Z-moves. NO BREEDING. ONLY the original 151 species of Pokémon were in the game, meaning I couldn't even kidnap an Eevee and force ice cubs down its throat until it became my favourite Pokémon, Glaceon. Quite frankly I'm surprised they even kept the physical/ special split introduced in Gen 4. Sure, they have Mega Evolutions, but with how intrinsically Megas are tied to their abilities in order to function, they almost seem pointless. Oh, what's that, Mega Charizard X? You can't learn Dragon Dance because every Pokémon in the entirety of Kanto has been neutered? Well, doesn't it suck to be you?! Enjoy charging up your Solar Beam like a normal mortal, MegaZard Y. Oh, what's that, your Body Slam only hits once now, Mega Kangaskhan? Oh you poor thing! I think I'll just stick to my Tauros, thank you.
See, much like the monsters themselves, Pokémon as a series has evolved with player feedback and grown with us as we grew up. Gen 1 was an absolutely broken mess of a game, if it can even be called that. I was only 2 when the original games, Red and Blue, released, so I couldn't tell you how the hell they started the multi-million global phenomenon that is the Pokémon franchise. Even if the game worked correctly, I can't believe anyone found it fun. Psychic types were the most overpowered type in a game focused around a rock-paper-scissors mechanic, and the elusive Dragon type had ONE move to its name, a move that dealt a laughable 40HP damage to anything it hit. Almost all Rock types were Ground types as well, and almost all Grass types were Poison. Why the hell bother with a Golem or an Onix when you could have a Rhydon? Why bother with a Vileplume or Victreebel when a Venusaur trumps them all when doing the same thing?
Pokémon has evolved a lot since those days. Now anyone and their mother could be a Dragon type just by filling out an application form. Not that being a Dragon type is really anything to be proud of, considering how mandatory the newly introduced Fairy and Steel types are in any team structure, custom made to counterbalance how overpowered Dragon types have become. Psychic types are now among the hardest to use correctly, because of the aforementioned Steel types, and how Pursuit trapping has become so omnipresent.
Even off the battlefield, Pokémon is a series that has never stood still. WE CAN RUN IN BUILDINGS NOW, SUCH LUXURY, MUCH WOW. No more dumb gantries that force us off our bikes in between routes and towns! Oh wait, bikes? What's that? We ride Pokémon now! We don't even need to waste a third of our party to dedicate to HM slaves to clear obstacles! We aren't limited to walking in four directions anymore! We can move freely like a normal human being! We don't have to look like identical clones of each other anymore now that we can have different hair, eye, and skin colours, and put on different clothes!
And, what, you throw it all away all the evolution of the series just for a cheap nostalgia pop?
Now, don't get me wrong, LGPE doesn't force upon you decade old problems like requiring HMs and forcing you to walk to a nurse in a hospital when your Pokémon is poisoned on its last legs. But what I'm saying is... the hell's the point? If you want to remake Pokémon Yellow, then keep everything the series has earned itself in the game, it shouldn't be that hard, right? Hell, internal data of new games always have leftovers of previous generation games, so it's hard to imagine they're not copy and paste jobs with a new coat of paint over them. I mean, data for Heat Wave hitting both opponents in a Double Battle is retained, for example, and displayed in the... what, 3 Double Battles you'll have in the whole game? Why go through all the effort to take away everything we've come to know and love, when evidently that data is still there, just hidden from us?
The only way I can rationalise it is that LGPE is a "back to basics" game for a new generation of fans to support the series over its next twenty years - the Red and Blue equivalent for today's 4 year old kids, to have the same effect on them that Red and Blue had on my generation of kids. But... I mean, even then I find issue with it. Why the heck are we fighting Team Rocket again? Didn't Red make Giovanni disband TR after the latter's defeat at the Viridian Gym? Why the hell are we staying at Red's house? Didn't Gold travel back in time and witness Giovanni commit suicide? Why is he back in Kanto again, trying the exact same plans that were foiled by Red? The chicken shit rival who's more kid friendly because brash Blue has gone out of style as a rival, who almost pees himself at the sight of yet another Marowak ghost, always trailing behind the protagonist, suddenly leapfrogs us and becomes the Champion ahead of us... how? Without first beating Red, the previous champion? Oh, so there's just another Mewtwo now, waiting at the exact same spot, huh. Wait, Green is suddenly a thing now? (I'm... not... c-complaining about Green or anything... I'll be her Growlithe... and lick her... if she wants me to...)
No Johto? Oh come on. Wasn't most of Johto's Pokémon planned to be in the original Red and Blue? No sign of the magnet railway in Saffron? Where in the timeline does this game take place? No, scratch that. In which fucking universe is this farce allowed to happen?
And like, what the hell? What do you do after beating the game and becoming Champion? No competitive battle facility, not even a post game episode? Jesus Christ.
Still, I have to admit that, for a few years now I've been thinking that the franchise has needed a reset button, because for as much as I rave about how much the series has evolved, I'm beginning to think that, perhaps it's evolved... too much. Back in the day, things were easy. Water beats Fire, Fire beats Grass, Grass beats water. A walking coconut tree is going to destroy a nondescript crab with giant pincers, and a turtle is going to douse a unicorn on fire. It's very rudimentary lessons any kid can pick up from the household around them; plants absorb water to grow, forest fires destroys trees, and, well, water extinguishes fires. Now it's like... Bug and Poison resists Fighting, but... why? Steel hits Fairy Super Effective? What the hell is even a Fairy? How the hell does something that's visibly flying like a Mega Charizard X and a Jirachi get hit by an Earthquake, yet a Rotom doesn't, even when the game tells you Earthquake hits it Super Effectively? Back then when you saw an Onix, you instantly knew what it was. Giant rock snake thing, pour water on it and watch it die. Now I use Gust on a Flabébé and I'm like "WHY ISN'T THIS HITTING SUPER EFFECTIVE IS THAT THING NOT A GODDAMNED PLANT WHAT THE HELL COLONEL ARE YOU HIDING SOMETHING FROM ME?!" You see a Beheeyem and it's like... the hell even are you?
See, I know all this crap, because I've been playing Pokémon since its beginnings. I've had time to learn the basics, and when I got familiar with the basics, the new stuff comes in and it makes sense to me, making it easy to learn. When I introduce my friends and family to Pokémon now and we battle, when I'm asked why a Mega Charizard gets hit with an Earthquake, I struggle to come up with an answer that's easy to digest. Sometimes they ask me things like, "why is Dark weak to Bug?", and I just... don't have an answer. A lot of things in the game don't make much logical sense, but as a kid I just went with it, so much so it became second nature. But it's exactly this complexity that no Pokémon player can escape from, no matter how casual you may want to be, which destroys the whole "easy entry point" appeal I mentioned earlier. And hence why a reset button on the franchise might not be such a bad thing.
This is where my argument falls into shambles and becomes personal opinion, but I feel that Nintendo ruined the "Reset Button Game" even before they even planned for a "Reset Button Game" to be developed. Starting from Generation 6, I've always had this nagging feeling I can't shake that the developers were in some hot water with the bean counters of their company. X and Y were undeniably incomplete games at launch, with big areas shown but inaccessible, and even save file problems that prevented the game from loading correctly and had to be band-aid fixed with a hasty patch. The plot, after the new heights and expectations Black and White had set up for it, fell flat on its face, hardly sufficing even as a cookie cutter experience. Not to mention that feeling of being pandered to was pervasive throughout the whole campaign, to me. I get two starters? One of which being a Gen 1 starter? Oh, beautiful, a Snorlax blocking an important path to be awoken with a Poké Flute again. Oh my, I get to catch the utterly garbage Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres again? And I get to catch Mewtwo with no backstory or explanation? Okay... I guess...
What really irked me about Generation 6 was how they handled the competitive scene; the Generation 1 Pokémon, the ones that were the most outdated and silly, got the most Mega Evolutions, most of which were game breakingly, obscenely strong, to the point where several of them were quickly banned in Smogon rules, the
It's like they can't even make a compelling single player adventure any more, instead having to gift you power by the boatload to make you feel like a hero and keep you interested. Sure, it may work in the short term, but I can't help but to worry about the sustainability of such practices. At what point do you say, "enough is enough"? At what point do you stop moving the slider of a Pokémon's stats up before thinking, "yeah, this is kinda crazy and stupid"? Gen 7 somewhat continued this trend of power creep with Z-moves, but I feel that the single player game was a huge step up, and Z-moves by themselves have never been so disruptively overpowered that they were banned. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that things have come too far. The game was a fucking mess, and the developers kept having to resort to band aid fixes like introducing Fairy types, or nerfing Dark Void's accuracy and useability. But with every band aid they slap on, they keep adding more stupid things to the game like obscenely powerful Pokémon that will just require further band aids in the future and I'm like... fucking... stop.
I've always been good at whining, but never at giving solutions. If I were given free reign over the series, I honestly wouldn't know what the hell I'd do with it. I was adamant about not buying LGPE because... well, it's a stupid game that panders to its players with even more power out of the otherwise useless Eevee and Pikachu that can't even evolve. But, what I will say is, LGPE is the prime starting point for anyone who's been thinking about getting into the series, but has been intimidated by its complexity, because trust me, it isn't that hard to hurl rocks at birds and watching them drop. And that's the way I've chosen to rationalise LGPE; that it's a game for casuals. And as someone who thinks he's a competitive player because of his own Overconfidence Bias, it just doesn't appeal to me one bit. I've been to Kanto before, you know. Twice. When I buy a new game I want new stuff. It's not that hard to comprehend, is it?
Still, it's a free demo, so why not? Some things just never get old, and, to me, carrying around a perfectly balanced team of 6 to grow stronger together through challenges, getting to know others, helping them, is that something that never gets old for me. I keep telling myself, "it's a stupid game that panders to its audience", and I have every right and reason to believe that, yet when I was confronted by my first Rattata in the demo I chucked a ball at it as though it was blinking; I hadn't even realised that I had done it until I had caught it, and I'm like, "Jesus I don't want this rat what the hell what will its family think when Jimmy doesn't come home for dinner? And what the hell am I going to do with 20 damn rats?!"
While it might seem like several steps backwards for the series, LGPE's main selling point is its capture system, a la Pokémon Go, which is another "game" I'm incredibly salty about. Still, having wild Pokémon visibly roam the overworld has been described by reviewers as making the world feel more "lived in", and I've also read that, after having a system like this, that they don't EVER want another Pokémon game wherein there are random, unseen encounters in the wild, both of which I'm heavily inclined to agree with. Not to mention, to me personally, having to manually aim and throw Poké Balls at wild Pokémon, while undeniably a chore when I just want to relax, is a very refreshing and engaging way to catch wild Pokémon; so much so that, two or three captures later, I began to realise just how disconnected I am in the previous games where I had my own Pokémon do the fighting for me, and... um... how much I was... actually... enjoying it.
God damnit why can't you just let me hate a game in peace Nintendo. I have mad respect for the creative minds at Game Freak, for presumably being told to cater to cheap and proven nostalgia, yet somehow managing to pull something this good out their ass even when their butt cheeks are squeezed so tightly shut- OKAY what the hell kind of analogy is that and where did I get it from.
My Eevee. I got it from my Eevee. His asshole, more specifically. After I took off all its clothing.
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