Pokémon doesn’t need to grow up with its players

On the surface, 2022 was a monumental year for Pokémon. Here are the latest entries. Pokémon Legends: Arceus Pokémon Scarlet Violet, embraced an open-world design for the first time in franchise’s history. These games allow trainers to more or less roam the globe as they wish. Gone are the days of being funneled through linear routes one after the other — the trainers and their Pokémon were truly let loose into Game Freak’s worlds.

Despite this leap in game design, upon reflecting on this year in Pokémon, what struck me was how much the series felt largely the same. As a loyal fan of the series, 2022 marked the beginning of Game Freak’s 25-year old way to play the games. My enjoyment of the series was tested by this stubborn commitment to its form, but it also revealed the real reasons why I still play it. These games taught me that even large updates to the game’s design don’t change the fundamental formula — and so I needed to appreciate it for what it is. There are still many things to love.

The first memories I have of playing were of trying to get stuck. The first Pokémon game I ever played was Pokémon Silver. At the time, I didn’t know how to read, so I would spend ages running around aimlessly. Two trainers fighting for control of a northerly path was a vivid memory that I have. To get them to move, I just needed to talk to my mom, but I didn’t know that. Instead I just bumbled on in my small space, talking to everybody until the path finally opened.

An image of Pokémon Silver. It shows a top down view of a town with a pixelated art style.

Image: Game Freak/The Pokémon Company, Nintendo

My journeys were filled with obstacles like the odd tree that grows in a forest, or the Gym Leader who believes his Miltank can heal itself. Each challenge and obstacle presented a unique problem that I had to overcome. I continued until the next one was overthrown. I love Pokémon, but as I played it growing up, Pokémon was never a fully enjoyable game. Even in those early days, I found the games less fun and more of a continuous sharpening of my attention.

Trainers start with games such as Pokémon Scarlet VioletAt least not in the same way that I dealt with them. I find it laughable that a Sudowoodo can completely block the story’s progression. This is In Scarlet VioletThe linear route has been replaced by sprawling, open plains, deserts, or rolling hills. Koraidon is a giant red dragon with flared feathers that allows me to control him while he rides along. At the beginning of the game, we’re told to head to school, but there’s no reason you can’t take a little tour around the region.

In 2022, Pokémon has improved a great deal. The games have introduced key quality-of-life changes, like shared experienced points for your entire team (a controversial feature at first) abandoning Hidden Moves — so you don’t need to dedicate an entire Pokémon on your team and its move slots just to traversal. And now with the open world you can even easily avoid unwanted wild Pokémon, which could add a ton of time to activities like walking through a cave. Scarlet and Violet have one of the best stories in any Pokémon game I’ve played, and they even allow you to choose between three different challenges. If one boss causes you problems, there are three options. I would say, with confidence, that there has never been a better time to get into Pokémon — that is, if you can ignore glitches.

An image of a Pokémon trainer gliding on a Koraidon in Pokémon Scarlet.

Image: Game Freak/The Pokémon Company, Nintendo

And yet, despite these key changes, I can’t help but bump into the same old guardrails that guided me when I was 5. Sure, a single tree won’t block a path and all game progression, but you still need to upgrade your mount to be able to do things like swim, glide, jump extra high, or scale the sides of mountains. If you venture north, you might be confronted by the smiling Chansey while walking through a field of flowers. It’s possible to start the game only to realize that you can’t actually go and fight the Ice-type gym leader that you became obsessed with, because the levels of each gym don’t scale and it’s way too difficult to challenge early on.

The simple truth is that making Pokémon open-world didn’t really change Pokémon all that much. Game Freak remains committed to a 25-year-old gameplay system that’s the same as what ran on a Game Boy at its core. Sure, we can picnic with Pokémon now and hang out with our friends, but a lot of playing Pokémon still boils down to grinding and catching Pokémon and checking boxes on lists for caught Pokémon and calculating how effective a move is.

Because of the formulaic nature of the mainline games, this was the first year where I fully questioned if I still actually enjoyed Pokémon, or if I played them because of professional and social obligations. I owe a lot of my career as a journalist and so much of my family life to Pokémon; it’s been the main game my family has played since I was 5. This year, I explored other options. I was captivated by the vast landscapes of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and really grappled with the idea that I just didn’t love Pokémon anymore.

I can’t help but think of Pokémon having a Final Fantasy 7 Remake moment. It reimagined 1997’s turn-based RPG. The game also shed new light onto a long-running story, focusing only on one part of it. It addressed its ethical and moral questions and gave up the traditional turn-based combat system. Final Fantasy, however, is a film that’s marketed to more mature audiences. For them radical reinvention might be easier. I am fully uninterested in saying that we need “adult Pokémon” because I’d rather just grapple with what the series actually is, rather than speculate on what I wish it could be. I was thinking, perhaps like Ash, that it might be time to move on and retire.

A screenshot of a landscape in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. There are steep hills, trees, a river, and a path that seems to lead towards a castle town in the distance.

Image: Game Freak/The Pokémon Company, Nintendo via Polygon

Game Freak’s hesitation to iterate on the mainline series in a more meaningful way could come down to any number of reasons. Perhaps it’s because of constrained development timelines — the company released two different console Pokémon games in one year. Perhaps it’s because no matter how buggy a game is, how much criticism there is, the series continues to sell well. Scarlet and VioletIn just 72 hours, the series sold over 10 million copies worldwide. Maybe the old fan argument might be true, but we need to admit that this series is not for adults and is intended for children.

And while making the mainline series into open-world games didn’t revolutionize the gameplay, Game Freak delivered a lifeline to players like me this year in the form of the spinoff Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Arceus It also offered a more flexible format, allowing you to unlock an entire area of the globe at once. It also changed the way that monster-catching was done in franchise history in the most significant manner. Rather than rehash the details, I’ll quote the end-of-year blurb I wrote about Legends: ArceusWhy it is one of our favorite games

At the beginning of any Pokémon game, or even in the movies, we always get to learn about the world of Pokémon. We’re told that these powerful creatures live alongside humans as partners, and compete against each other in battles that further hone the relationships between Pokémon and trainers. Legends: Arceus completely departs from this concept by taking place in an in-universe historical period where Pokémon have not yet integrated with the general population, and where the average person is scared of Pokémon. We, the player, have time traveled from the future, and it’s up to us to be one of the first bridges between the apprehensive townspeople and the monsters that lurk beyond their fences.

Legends: Arceus didn’t stop at presenting a philosophically interesting world that unsettled our previous ideas of how we thought about Pokémon. Additionally, it was much more entertaining to play. It blended light stealth mechanics with the feel of a third-person shooter, where trainers tossed Poké Balls at unsuspecting Pokémon in order to catch them. The game felt like Game Freak’s first real attempt at modernizing its monster catching mechanics. The mechanics behind seeing, catching, and battling Pokémon blended together, and smoothed out the edges between battle gameplay and everything else.

The trainer became the heart of combat in a completely new way, as we fought Pokémon by chucking random items at them. I can only imagine my excitement when I saw that I would be fighting a bear in battle. I leapt around, dodged, and did a lot of what you might call “souls-like” combat. This way of playing felt like a step forward for an older audience who had grown up with Pokémon but was ready to try something new.

But it’s not really the systems of Pokémon that feel like the heart of the series, to me at least. The Pokémon themselves are the reason I started playing why I still find joy in it.

a pokemon trainer in pokemon legends: arceus crouching down between all of their pokemon as they have a conversation

Image: Game Freak/The Pokémon Company, Nintendo via Polygon

Criticisms aside, Scarlet and VioletYou must not forget that monsters drive these games. Whether it’s kneeling down to look at your partner eye to eye or admiring the bond we form with our starter Pokémon in Scarlet VioletThese games are full of joy through their characters.

The absurd details in the new generation make me want to laugh, and again. I love that Dunsparce finally got an evolution and it’s just called Dudunsparce! Tinkaton and Corviknight are two of my passions. It’s funny to set up a picnic and then see my friends in either utterly zooming or dead asleep. I think it’s funny that they also can’t seem to keep still and take a dang selfie with me.

I still have issues with the entire premise of “collecting” creatures when we’re supposed to develop bonds with them, but to me, details surrounding the Pokémon themselves prop this entire franchise up, even as I’ve chafed against years of slog and slow-moving turn-based battles. In 2022, everything and yet nothing changed in Pokémon. I still adore these creatures, and that is what keeps me coming back — even if the franchise can feel stuck in the past, despite its best efforts.

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