Hey.
Malstrom, you never talk about Pokemon. You never mention it. In my world, Pokemon is very much comparable and perhaps superior to Mario and the older Zelda. Pokemon was too much of a phenomenon to me as a kid for me to ignore it now. In fact I still play it because it is so fun and replayable.
(alright, I finished this email and it became quite gigantic. I’m sorry. Every single paragraph had information that I can’t ignore. Please read all of it. This email is basically breaking Pokemon to parts to prove that Pokemon is very much in line with your pro-gaming descriptions, even today)
Pokemon was disruptive, too, and it was very much a Blue Ocean game (you talked about how a certain type of disruption goes along very well with Blue Ocean Strategy). It disrupted RPGs by making them simpler. It is funny how the first week sales of Pokemon were 140k, yet a year later and two years later, it sold more than a million every month. You’re familiar with this sales graph.
Even today, Pokemon is still all about numbers and stats. If you would be kind enough to hop over to Serebii.net and click on their “Pokedex” section, you would see hundreds upon hundreds of pages all filled with NUMBERS. But even then, Pokemon is simpler than most other RPGs.
All you need to do is manage 4 attacks by looking at which attack is stronger. Their strength also depends on a very simple “rock paper scissors” system, similar to Megaman’s robot weapons. Did you know every single area in Pokemon, except for the big squared towns, is at most as wide as the screen? It’s fairly linear and you never need to know who to talk to or what to do. As an 8 year old kid who played Pokemon in a language he doesn’t even know, the only place I got stuck in was a maze near the end of the game that involved switches. The fun was not in the overworld, it was in the battles, and the developers realized this.
But maybe the most important thing about Pokemon is the content. Ever since the first game, with every sequel, GameFreak only expanded the content without breaking it up. Where the first game involved a Utopia of “monsters that get along with humans”, in the second game each Pokemon had his own Happiness meter that grew the more he battled with the trainer. In the upcoming remake of the second game, you can even take your Pokemon to walk beside you wherever you go. They only added the content in areas where it feels natural and true to the universe, something that you talked about before. They added different weather conditions that made the battle scene EXPLODE in terms of depth, and also more fun on a casual level. They added double battles which were a great additions.
Both of those additions were overshadowed because the game that included them was the 3rd one, which had horrible new Pokemon that only repelled players (as well as REMOVAL of content like the day and night or real-time day of the week). After that experiment, the 4th game went right back on track and the sales and popularity picked back up.
And Pokemon, besides the dip of the 3rd iteration, is still pulling the right moves every new game. Adding new content in the form of a whole new continent, a slew of new Pokemon, a slew of new attacks, a slew of new battle conditions that make it more refined and enjoyable. The amount of sidequests in Pokemon is so big yet so deeply hidden within the grand plan of “catching them all” that sometimes you will see someone not even realize he is doing something optional within the game. He does it because he can do it. So what if the next boss is waiting for you in another town? There is still the bicycle to get in this town, there is still the Underground Tunnels to explore under that other town.
The items of Pokemon are so varied (after all they’re only a name and a description, so it is fairly easy to create them) that you can always get a good reward out of a sidequest. It might be a Pokemon, it might be an item your Pokemon can hold to make it stronger, it might be something that makes your Pokemon go first sometimes in battle or something that makes it level up faster. The items explore the content of the game and and make it deeper. But the items are never required like they are in Zelda, it’s a different feeling.
Something that might be similar to the items in Pokemon are those in Monster Hunter, you know. MH’s varied armory, weapons and collectibles, have a lot in common with Pokemon’s.
Being a fan of the series, I tried to keep the email with as little fanboyism as possible. It’s important that you see just how good an example Pokemon is of gaming you always talk about, because Pokemon is the only series that even today (besides Mario which just came back), it still delivers with an explosion of new content with every game. Every once in a while you would come across someone in the game that says something about how beautiful the Utopia of the universe is, keeping it in line with the original vision. Sure, there is also that thing about “kids catching bugs and watching them evolve” but it’s at most a secondary effect.
And you never mention it, that is why I sent this. It seems like you’re unaware of it, even.
The Pokemon explosion began when I stopped console gaming during the SNES era.
Pokemon is just not my type of game. I am also too old for it. I know, I know, there are adults that play Pokemon. But not this adult.
What Nintendo did with Pokemon was interesting in how they spun it off into another company altogether. I don’t discuss Pokemon because while Pokemon is a huge system seller for Nintendo portables, it is not a system seller for the home consoles. There isn’t much to talk about concerning Pokemon.