Today, boys and girls, we're going to talk a little about Pokemon.
For those of you who've been living with your head packed in ice for the last decade and are mentally underlining the word with a little red squiggle, Pokemon (That's POH-KAY-MON, by the way, a contraction of 'Pocket Monsters". There is not, and likely has never been, any such thing as 'Pokeyman".) is a Japanese franchise produced by Nintendo. There have been more spinoff products for Pokemon then there have been celebrities in rehab, including animes, card games, movies, action figures, stuffed animals, hats, clothes, alarm clocks, atom bombs, lawnmowers, mail-order brides, and toasters, but today we're going to discuss the video game that started the whole debacle.
In a nutshell, Pokemon is a role-playing game in which the player assumes the role of a ten-year-old child who, instead of going to school or anything silly like that, travels across the land, capturing a variety of mysterious magical monsters in specially designed monster-shrinking balls and training them to do battle against other mysterious magical monsters that other people have captured and trained to do the exact same thing. The whole thing is basically glorified cockfighting, but with a rock-paper-scissors twist. Each Pokemon, you see, can be categorized by one, or possibly two, of seventeen elemental 'types' that determine how much damage it will take from attacks of the same types. A Fire-type will take double damage from a Water-type attack, for example, while an Ice-type Pokemon will take double damage from fire-attacks. Their types also give resistances, as in the case of a Flying-type being immune to ground-attacks.
The premise is simple enough, as one might expect from a childrens' game (I surmise that this was originally intended to be marketed towards people of the same age group as the avatar), but there exists such a wide variety of monsters, moves, and items, that the sheer number of possible combinations and strategies for playing is absolutely mind-boggling. It is, literally, the most complex game that I have ever played...which is why I keep playing it, despite all its flaws.
And now we come to good part: expanding on those flaws.
First of all, the game suffers from Power Rangers Syndrome. The franchise has existed for well over a decade, but instead of adapting the material to suit the sensibilities of its aging demographic, the producers of the game expect new buyers to keep flowing in, keeping the game's style and content as juvenile as it ever was.
People, this is just plain stupid. If you have an established customer base of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF OBSESSED CHILDREN (and in its heyday, the game did), there is absolutely no reason to let them slip through your fingers, banking on a fresh generation to get hooked just like the last one. TRENDS CHANGE. I will never understand why anyone allows this sort of thing to happen.
And the dialogue, yes, IS juvenile. It's trite and simplistic and cutesy and, while this sort of thing is to be expected from the children you encounter in the game, even the adults talk like the cast of Sesame Street.
Second, and this, in my mind, is the game's biggest flaw: Despite the seemingly infinite options available to the player as to how to train (which monsters to use, which moves to teach them, what items to equip to them, etc.) the player has absolutely NO IMPACT on the single-player campaign's plot. It's an oversight I keep hoping will be ammended with subsequent versions, but no. Five generations of game console upgrades into the series' run, and the pattern is completely unchanged. The player is given absolutely no options. You can have literally no impact at all on events.
Perhaps this wouldn't bother me so much, but for all the game's moralizing. I realize that with a premise like this, there has to be SOME rationale as to why forcing wild animals to duel for their owners' fun and profit isn't considered inhumane, but you're not even allowed to take a stance on the issue. One is forced on you, with your avatar, a silent protagonist, simply walking from encounter to encounter, tacitly agreeing with whatever the arbitrarily 'good' guys are saying and making what is considered a 'heroic' stand against the 'bad' guys.
There's even one point in the very first game where your character is offered a chance to join the antagonist's team, AND YOU AUTOMATICALLY REFUSE. I can't help but get the impression that the game is preaching to me. I don't listen to preaching from people I actually care about; I'm certainly not going to take it from a game that I PAID FOR.
A really good game, in my opninion, tries to give the player as many options as possible. Team Whatever is trying to take over the world, releasing a titanic Supermonster with which to terrorize the populace? Great. Awesome plot device. My friends are pressuring me to stop them? Yeah, I'd expect that from them. Am I going to?
Ah, now THAT should be up to me. I should have the option of stopping them, joining them, beating them to it and capturing the Supermonster to take over the world myself, or just ignoring the whole stupid hornet's nest, finding myself an island somewhere, building a castle and raising a bunch of sea serpents to eat any unwary intruders who threaten to bring the plot anywhere near me.
The funny thing? So far, in each and every game that's had this premise, you CAN catch the Supermonster. You just can't use it for anything but more deuling. Taking over the world is never an option. Agreeing with the 'bad' guys is never an option. Disagreeing with the 'good' guys is never an option. THERE ARE NO OPTIONS. You get a million different ways to do it, but no say in what you do.
People, for all its amazing complexity and innovation, for all the clever puns and bizarre creativity that's gone into the different monsters, despite the inescapable fact that no matter how many shameless knockoffs people try to make to capitalize on the monster-trainer theme, there will never, ever be anything quite like it...Pokemon, despite being a great game, will never, EVER be a good RPG. Not until it gets over this.
And maybe it's not trying to be. I guess it really doesn't have any reason to. It's wildly successful, after all, just the way it is.
But that just goes to show. Successful? Not the same as good.
Valentine out.
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