I need to stop bothering you fucking people with such petty bullshit
Imagine if that’s what Professor Oak said during
the tutorial for the next Pokémon game
Reality is testing me something fierce today, I’ll tell you that much. Just that feeling of moving from one minute to another filled with nothing but the energy of rolled eyes and stubbed toes. My “cold open” today (see above) has a slightly more direct reference point of sorts, as there was a massive Pokémon leak that went down over the weekend, a moment in time I’m sure Nintendo’s lawyers were likely truly delighted to see in terms of job security and a steady paycheck.
Anytime Nintendo’s lawyers get wind of a new
Pokémon fan made website hosting unofficial mods
Among some of the juicier details involved with the data leak, was the code name for the Switch’s successor, which was confirmed by the leak to be “Ounce”, the next major Pokémon release is entitled Pokémon Legends: A-Z, which is due out by next year, and also apparently the source code for HeartGold and SoulSilver, which is likely to be a major boon for the modding community, in whatever hidden underground bunkers they’re all still cooking up romhacked versions of Pokémon games while successfully trying to hide from Nintendo’s lawyers at the same time.
The average dwelling for Pokémon Rom hack makers
There’s a lot of other details involved with the initial leak itself, and this is one of those happenings which will likely to continue to bear fruit, as gamers and modders the internet over will scour through the nitty gritty in search of even more yet to be discovered truths previously buried among the data debris. One of the more interesting tidbits I’m still waiting on hearing about is whether or not Gen 10 of the Pokémon series, internally nicknamed “Gaia”, will even be any fun to play or not.
(Pikachu liked that)
Not to be such a Pashy-Pissy Pants about the series, but it’s been riding on the fumes of nostalgia for awhile now, and the series is about due for some kind of serious overhaul. The reappropriation of the design approach in utilizing the Breath of the Wild style gameplay in Scarlet and Violet just didn’t cut it, and even after numerous updates, the games still felt like fucking betas, with very little in the way of compelling gameplay to deliver in any meaningful way.
Is this a pic of a poorly implemented Pokémon game?
A lot of people have been going on for-fucking-ever about the series finally getting the MMO treatment, and I can’t emphasize enough what a shitty effort that would end up being. Would it generate money and hype? Yeah, but something more akin to Pokémon Go was and is still a much safer bet to how something like that kind of adaptation can work, and I really don’t think we should go any further down the road of mass player exchange in trying to move the needle on that particular reinvention process. I know this flies in the face of recent thoughts I had in both regards to remakes and games in general, but I think it’s about time Game Freak go back to the old drawing board to inject some much needed life in the Pokémon franchise, lest they remain in a creatively bankrupt state of mind.
Let’s pretend “just add guns” isn’t an option
I think the series is just in dire need of a bit more complexity, as they keep building the whole thing outwards instead of building inwards. The series has subsisted too long on shallow simplicity, and the people that grew up with the series have indeed grown up themselves, and are ready for something meatier to bite down on. Especially when you consider why Gen 1 is always so heavily focused upon, in that it had cultural relevancy in being ripe for the nostalgia wave, with newer iterations being less favorable for not bringing anything interesting enough to the table. When you combine that with the notion that even “retro” gens of the Pokémon series, like gen III for example, were already dramatically less popular when they even initially launched, and you realize they’re going to run out of nostalgic track to run that train on sooner than later.
A sneak peak of what the remakes to Pokémon Black and White’s
launches would look like
Truth be told, I don’t claim to have my finger on the pulse of the Pokémon fandom, so all of this might be horrendously off base conjecture that may completely contradict an average fans outlook and public desire, which makes me the old man shouting at clouds right now in terms of where Pokémon as a series should be headed, but last time I checked, the geriatric millennial is pretty much the series bread and butter if we are speaking to the reality of relevant demographics, so I don’t feel like I’m chugging stupid juice right now in critiquing Pokémon as a whole. With all of that said, I think Pokémon is in need of a much needed self-identity overhaul, pronto. Make the games more real without being more realistic. We need some kind of depth involved, or the Pokémon series is destined to drown in the shallow end creatively speaking. A sad fate for such a beloved franchise.
~Pashford
Active Time Event 