Like this:

Things have been pretty quiet up on the blog front lately, so I figure what better way to return to form (or at least get one good post in before I get really busy and have a hard time updating again) than to return to my old standby and make fun of Pokemon a little more?

I just finished Pokemon: Soul Silver, and the above video is a (terrible) recording of the final battle, with my narration. The angle of the narration is a little different than the angle of this post, or, more accurately, in response to where I’m going with this post. Instead, I am talking about why Pokemon is CRAZY.

See, I hadn’t played a Pokemon game since Red. I was really tempted during the fourth generation to pick up one of the new titles and play it again, but stopped myself because the games are kind of a catalyst for insanity. When playing Pokemon: Red, it was really easy to get overwhelmed by all of your choices. There was one hundred and fifty Pokemon, for chrissakes. How do you know which ones you want to use? And what movesets to put on them? It’s generally hard enough to decide what four moves to put on a Pokemon sticking to what it learns from leveling up, but then you have the TMs, which can only be used once. Oh my goodness. How do you know when to use it?! Thankfully, this was finally done away with in the fifth generation, and TMs can be reused, but that’s four generations of obsessive decisions, and there are still quite a few other problems. Namely that there aren’t 150 Pokemon anymore. Now there are 649.

While the number of Pokemon has gotten bigger over the years, the number of Pokemon that you can use has stayed exactly the same. You can only ever have six Pokemon on your team. That’s it. Take a look at that clusterfuck of imaginary creatures up there. Pick six of them? How? Are we supposed to just find the six best ones? That’s like saying there are 649 moves in rock-paper-scissors, but you’re only allowed to know six of them. That would be a really complicated game!

Making matters worse, you don’t have access to all of those options. Many Pokemon are version exclusive, and many moves can only be found in certain areas after a lot of exploring or after a lot of money or battle points or however the game feels like consuming your life that day. The absolute worst part of all of this? Most of these options are only available long after they’re useful. A great deal of Pokemon are only available either after you’re already finished the bulk of the game or the entire game and have virtually no use for them. Why would anyone bother collecting a couple hundred imaginary creatures long after you have any use for them?

Oh, right. Because it’s a selling point. If you’re not developing OCD, you’re just not having fun. Has anybody ever actually caught them all? In the early days when there were only 150 and the hardest part was finding someone with the other version of the game to trade with, sure, I imagine a lot of people did. But now that there are, and I cannot stress this enough, six fucking hundred and forty nine of the things, that sounds laughably unachievable. Yet there’s still that drive to do it. I still go out of my way to catch every Pokemon I run across, even when I know perfectly well that I’ll never use it. Somehow, I will have benefited from catching a Buizel, and I’ll be damned if I even know what a Buizel is. I have had a friend text me at two in the goddamned morning to say nothing other than how jealous she was that I had a Pokewalker and wanted to know if I was aware how many Pokemon could only be obtained with the Pokewalker. The answer, of course, was yes, because I have walked one thousand miles with it so that I could get a Spiritomb. Guess how many times I’ve used my Spiritomb since then? Zero.

The final straw for me came when I got a Mew. In the fall of 2010, Nintendo gave away the super rare Pokemon Mew, a fan favorite since the original games. Owning a legitimate Mew is a huge deal, so I leaped at the opportunity. Unfortunately, the “Pokemon is making me crazy and obsessive” issues only got worse after this point because Mew’s main shtick is that it is the only Pokemon that can learn every move ever.

Oh dear God.

After reading articles on three different websites to try to figure out what I wanted to do with my Mew, I finally managed to make at least one decision. I wanted to teach it the move “Calm Mind”, which would raise its special attack and special defense stats in a match. So I looked up how to get Calm Mind. It could only be taught through a TM that could only be bought with Battle Points, which could only be obtained in what is very much an optional part of the game called the Battle Frontier. There were a few different Battle Frontiers with different shticks, but were all similar in that, if you won seven matches in a row that required way more obsessive and strategic knowledge than any other part of the game, you got somewhere between three and five Battle Points. The TM I wanted cost forty. So I did it. I had some fun doing so, but mainly felt very frustrated that it was taking such a long time and that some of it was very challenging. I actually had to have my laptop open the entire time I was doing this because I didn’t know the types of the hundreds of different Pokemon, and had to Google everything as it happened just so I knew basic information the game didn’t explain. And ultimately I got the TM, and taught it to my Mew. Guess how many times I’ve used the move “Calm Mind” since then. The one time it’s used in the video at the beginning of this post.

As soon as I learned what EV training was, I quit. I came to the conclusion that there was entirely too much to obsess about in Pokemon, so I put my foot down and said “No. No more of that.” However, the conclusion I ultimately came to, ironically enough, when replaying Pokemon: FireRed, the rerelease of the original game, was that this could actually be turned around into something way more fun. Instead of obsessing over one playthrough and trying to do everything perfectly and trying to be a completionist, it was a lot more fun to just play through it once and then play it again, doing things differently. The game does have hundreds of Pokemon and way more options for what you can teach them. The replay value is built right in. You can easily play the game again and do it completely differently. I’ve found that a lot of the fun of Pokemon is the Pokemon itself. The small handful of Pokemon you really focus on in one playthrough is what sticks out, as opposed to the completionism. So why does the game have to be played like that?

Unless you play competitively, in which case, you are fucked.