My Problem with Pokemon

[Dr.Henry_Killinger]

The apostrophe over the e is too complicated...

Disclaimer: Let me get this out of the way first because I can guarantee that someone is going to read the title and immeadeatly respond.

• Pokemon is too childish: That is an opinion that I do not share and do not care about.
• I hate turn based battle systems: False. In order my favorite mario games are Melee, Paper Mario, and TTYD.
• You just don't like pokemon/complaining: Never did I say it was bad or make any other judgement claims on the franchise. Furthermore, I've played and enjoy many of the franchises, including all of the mainline games up to emerald. Snap, Collesium, and Stadium, Gale of Darkness, and Poke Park.
• I'll probably add more as they come in B|

Last time, I discussed a change in battle systems for pokemon I was accussed of wanting Skyrim dressed up as Pokemon by someone who obviously had never played Skyrim and had no idea what they were talking about.

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/37415/?

http://pixelmonmod.com/

It has come to my attention that the best way to create a "Pokemon" with a different battle system, is to design an entirely new IP. However, this is not what I mean to discuss in this thread.

It is this endeavor that has lead me to understand the more subtle nature of pokemon, and subsequently My problem with Pokemon. Before I get into this let me clarify something. This is only an observation, I am not making any judgements on this with the exception of my opinion on this aspect of Pokemon, but not the series itself. As this is an observation, it will inherently subject to the things I notice, and it will be impossible to be unbiased, but I will try as hard as possible to remain objective.

A little context before I begin. Pokemon was one of the major reasons for my desire to go into the industry, I loved and still love the game, but at the time my Naive 7 year old self thought that the main battle system could be changed as early as the GBA and n64. I mean there are already 3D games, why would it still be turned based? Now, I concede that at the very least, from the 64 and GBA backwards, technology was way to limited to allow for a development into a real time system. However, I do believe that the GameCube and the DS could have supported it, and since we are on the Wii U and 3DS, I've realized there should be a reason that they are not changing it.

Excuses will be made for GameFreak, but honestly these are easily dismissed, lets go over a few:

• It will change the nature of Pokemon: their have been Pokemon Spinoffs since Pokemon Snap, many of which have completely different systems and gameplay entirely, their is no reason for a real-time spinoff to some how change pokemon.
• What about the Metagame: Not only will a spinoff not even affect the mainline metagame, the metagame changes with every iteration. Just ask Gen 1 players.
• Real-Time pokemon is too hard: Lets cover a bit about Game Development. In most cases, the most expensive and or time consuming aspect of game development is Asset Creation, where assets include models, art, sound, and actual world creation. This is why Activision highers 100s of artists for COD. This is why indies typically don't make open world games, UNLESS, they are procedurally generated. It is rare for a AAA to be procedurally generated.       
•               Now lets use pokemon collesium as an example. As a 64 game, in its present state it should have no difficulty running on a N64. If you've played PC, then you know that every Pokemon in the game has models, and every attack has animations. While there is the issue of the disparity of pokemon's size, that's an issue I will cover later.
•               In order to make pokemon collesium realtime, in theory it should be a lot simpler than the creating the assets already in the game. In fact, you don't need to add any more assets. All you need to do is add a bounding box to every pokemon and a bounding box for each move. This allows for collision detection. Once you have collision detection, then the only thing that remains is camera control and you've got Pokemon Collesium: Real Time edition.

Without further ado, I will summarize in a single statement. My Problem with Pokemon is that it is designed to sell merchandise.

Like Skylanders and in some respects the Amiibo, nearly every aspect of the entire Pokemon Franchise, the mainline game, the spinoffs, the anime, and the Manga in some respects are tailor made to sell Pokemon Merchandise. No other Franchise, not even Mario, sells as much merchandise, and have sold more merchandise then Pokemon. Pokemon is essentially what Skylanders has been doing for 20+ years.

Now again, I say that their is nothing wrong with it, and the only reason I personally have an issue with this is because I desired a change in gameplay that would provide a very different and intense experince as well. Even if it flopped, merely trying it would add cresedence to the idea that realtime and pokemon are incompatible, which I personally beleive is very silly. Especially, when there have been many spinoffs with different systems entirely as well.

Here are some major pieces of evidence, that support this observation:

Anime

• The theme song, and the motto of the show "Got to Catch Em All": Rather then emphasizing the training of Pokemon or exploration of the world, children grow up with the idea that they need to collect all of the pokemon. While it is obvious that this advertise the game, it subtly advertise collecting or "catching" all of the pokemon merchandise. Cards, shirts, lunch boxes, food stuffs, literally almost everything. Unless you live in a cave, you will know at least 2-5 people who have bought any pokemon merchandise not including the games themselves or the anime. 
• Whose that pokemon: Being able to identify and discern pokemon from their silouhettes alone, increases its recognizability, especially in buying cards or action figures.
• Pokemon saying their names. Only in the anime, do pokemon ever say their own name.:  This reminds viewers of the identies of different pokemon. If for example, I mention "Aerodactyl" 99% of you will immedeatly have an image of the pokemon in your head.
• Ash, the main character, not only rarely trains his pokemon, and loses as many battles as he wins: It subtly suggest that building relationships with pokemon is more important then actually battling with them. Which suggests the capture of pokemon vs training a single one.

Mainline Games

• Pokedex: The concept of the Pokedex is to gain information on pokemon to complete the pokedex. The strange thing about this is that each trainers pokedex only has information on the pokedex they have. It can be argued that every trainer's pokemon are unique to them so that even if two trainers have pikachus, their pikachu's are subtly and uniquely difficult. But since the pokedex are connected to the lab of the scientist that study them, and this has been going on for decades even centuries, why shouldn't pokedex come with a little basic information on every pokemon in a region?
•      The reason is because it again encourages players to "Catch em all"
• New Pokemon: In accordance with the former piece of evidence, every generation new pokemon are introduced. Going from 151 to 719 pokemon in many different regions suggest that very few players are going to ever catch em all, and those that do, will immedeatly lose that status once a new generation occurs. Even at 150 pokemon, to catch every pokemon and level them up to max without rare candies or hacking, before the next generation would be extremly difficult if not impossible.
• Shiny's: Most Shiny's look cool and have different favorable ivs, but really they are merely recolors of existing pokemon. That have very low probabilities of appearing. This encourages longer playtime and collection of more pokemon.
• Pokemon Sizes: The disparity in pokemon sizes from pokemon as big as Wailord to pokemon as small as Roselia suggests that battle was merely an after thought. Pokemon were hardly designed with realism in mind, Pikachu for instance is Huge for the rodent it is supposed to be based off of, and charmander is tiny as a Dragon. So why not Roselia be bigger and Wailord be smaller. Even then this issue could be solved by savvy design.
• Pokemon types: Specifically, fishes on land. While this and the previous argument don't directly emphasize the sale of merchandise, they do make it hard to change the system, even though the spin offs show that they already have.

Spinoff Games

 

• Snap: Encourages the Collection of Pokemon Cards and Figures
• Gale of Darkness: The sale of merchandise related to Dark Lugia and Celibi, possibly an attempt to make the series more edgy, but didn't stray to far from the formula. It had dark pokemon, but they more or less had the same move set, until they were purified.
• Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Emphasized collection of Pokemon, and in away encouraged playing with the figurines.
• Pokemon Ranger: Collection of Pokemon
• Pokepark: similar to Mystery Dungeon, except the prioritation of Pikachu suggesting the advertising of pokemon's mascot, which is Pikachu if you haven't already realized.
• Pokemon Rumble: An actual realtime system, although its completely divorced from Pokemon as an RPG, furthermore it emphasize the collection of pokemon and the sale of them as figurines
• Spinoffs in general: Gamefreak only makes spinoffs to explore new avenues of marketting merchandise. 

 

Honarable Mentions

 

• Cards: Should go without saying. There are also Shiny and Holographic version of the cards that encourage buying packs because their is no pack solely consisting of them. If one wants a holographic card, their going to need to buy an entire pack.
• Movies: Rather than multiple pokemon, the movies emphasize the merchandise related to the legendary pokemon they feature, similar to what Gale of Darkness does for Dark Lugia.
• Manga: Which actually doesn't market any other parts of the franchise explicitly that isn't emphasized by other mediums, i.e clothes, pokeballs, figures, etc. It sales itself well enough.

To suggest that GameFreak would invest in a spinoff that prioritizes gameplay instead of merchandise is naive only because it is very unlikely. As the series as developed it has become more and more tailor made to sell merchandise at the expense of other aspects of the game play. This is why even in the games, most of the changes are either cosmetic or iterative rather than innovative.