Record Keeper

Speaking of pokemon... Speaking of pokemon! Don't I have enough pokemon pages! Nope. You can never have too many pokemon, they have like, 100 of the things.

Page will also occasionally bring in other 'Mon related franchises just to spice things up (AKA: I didn't feel like making a page for them yet.)

Record Keeper: One City Thanks for not adding Mega Charizard Z, Gamefreak. I know that took a lot of restraint Realass comment I saw one city i don't know why i'm in legends ZA with nothing to try The game looks alright but I just don’t really have the full excitement to go out and buy it and even with the trailers I had no optimism, just like, apathy. I’ve held that since Gen 7 and it hasn’t really come to be anger, just… acceptance. I look and if I don’t like it, I wait for it to be on sale. By all means, I’m glad everyone else is having fun, I’m just gonna be over here lurking in the corner. Pokemon speculation season sucks because these are the only options to see things: Solve my fucking riddle Bigfoot is real and he’s in Pokemon We data mined everything the millisecond the game came out; have fun that's how it's been since like, oras at least the customization seems to be the only thing I'd probably want to do so therefore this one is bookstore checkout tier Pokemon suspicious moment where your first moment in lumiose is getting pickpocketed Don’t worry about it We have paper Mario sneak attacks in Pokemon but since it’s a city now it’s just a mugging Remembering that video of a guy in French crying over his bike wheel being stolen What about the one with the uhh, the guy who blew himself up with a firework Aw man, and hawkmoth is gonna use his evil butterfly to corrupt the people too and Xana is gonna kill people, can’t have shit in France You have to see a cutscene every time it’s night time You can deal with obstacles by using pokemon attacks Rangers did it a decade ago, glad to see GameFreak innovating If we’re talking quests, mystery dungeon did it too Things GameFreak that are seen as new and innovative are within the wpinoffs but the spinoffs are eclipsed by mainlines and suffer under the burial by phone games I'm considering that maybe Gamefreak gets the budget of a shoestring because what are those window corners bruh Now that ZA is out and YouTubers are speed running through it I wish I didn’t even write my earlier comments because my expectations were low and the game really is mostly the wild park zones and rooftops, the battle royale thing seems interesting and so do the live battle things but it might just not be a pokemon game I’m particularly interested in even with the footage I’ve glanced over. Ultimately it looks fine, it’s just not my particular taste. Also the fact they’re charging the same amount of money as the final fantasy 7 remakes is also probably earning a bit of ire for me at least, the rest of the internet is probably being insufferable as usual about their opinions on Pokemon I’m clearly not in the negativity cult of people going “ZA poisoned my crops and killed my grandma” because I don’t care for that. I just checked some footage and said “doesn’t look like I’ll like it much” and then moved on. The Sisyphean task of letting people enjoy things Nah The Sisyphean task of wanting to be a Pokemon enjoyer when you have an evil brain duende YouTuber whispering in your ear about how things suck I dislike things but I do not want to make it a core part of my soul. I feel like too many people make hating pokemon part of their personality, and that's not me. I just haven't liked the vision pokemon's taken since they started on the switch.
I like how apparently some of the people in Lumiose think the wild zones suck and they don't want the pokemon in their city which is kind of a wild route to take since it's supposed to be about the harmony of people and pokemon but apparently it's a massive infrastructure issue. The mega designs are all over the place, the character designs, some are fine, but others still have that thing where I feel like past gen 7 there’s a bunch that overly clash with the art style of earlier games. Ive seen it described as like, Pixar vs Anime and I feel like that's how it overly feels because there's been a lot of guest artists and the pokemon look fine but the people will not look like they come from the same franchise. I think it’s gonna look quite jarring when some guys are added to masters. Also apparently despite the game taking place in kalos after a timeskip there’s barely any appearances of actual old game kalos characters or mentions of them in the text which sure is a choice. Some are, but some aren’t. It’s not called Legends Kalos or something but like if there was a sequel being set up to a region there would probably be expectations to see a few returning characters like Clement and Bonnie apparently aren’t in the roster either despite living in Lumiose… Prioritizing the pokemon over the people but not caring about where said people go when a pack of pokemon descend into their home area is tasteless but also turning a graveyard into a wild zone is morbidly hilarious Some of the Mega Designs are fun though Starmie. I think it’s a funny fucking looking thing. Long ass starmie. I saw it in leaks and thought someone legit photoshopped that thing. Some of the comments I’ve seen on this beast
Ultraman… Whoever designed Mega Starmie deserves to be tied to a chair and forced to look at it #this thing pisses me off#dudunsparce was funny bc it was dunsparce#but a pokemon like starmie. it makes me sick#pokemon #it needs to skip and frolic through a field of flowers#reblog #watching a stream and seeing this thing run around is horrifying #thats... one of the designs ive looked at in my life... 😐 #ive been avoiding leaks. is this real#is this actually. genuinely real#im gonna be SICK #ITS REEAAAALLLLL HEEEELP LMFAO#LIKE I KNEW ITD BE REAL BUT GOOD FUCKING GRIEF IM HOLLLERING#i need this thing to come out in fortnite next so it can do the fucking dance. its skeleton looks perfect for it #DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY OTHER STARFISH OR ALIEN DESGINS THEY COULD'VE CAME UP WITH FOR A MEGA FORM.... EXCEPT THIS#i can;t witjg this shit i'm gonna start howling with laughter at 1am#this has to be a result of the same thing that caused them to not create a flying type eeveelution. it has to#what is THAT#did somebody draw over that patrick star scene from the movie with this yet#misty your freak has sprouted legs & walked away#walk a mile in these louboutins . they ain't wear these shits where i'm from#reblogs#pokemon#starmie#pokemon spoilers #man i thought this shit was one of those obviously fake leaks people do for shits and giggles but no. it’s real.#pain and suffering on planet earth #just got introduced to Mega Starmie and I just stared in abject disbelief for like a full minute#the video I saw this on had every single comment ragging on Mega Starmie and I was like 'oh come on how bad can it be'#IT IS THAT BAD!!!#this is a bigger troll than Dundunsparce and idk whether to throttle Gamefreak or applaud their balls#pokemon legends za#pokemon#legends za spoilers#mega starmie#starmie This thing is the personification of the hanna barbara xylophone running sound effect and I will not hear a single negative word against it
As a person ambivalent towards modern pokemon the palworld clamoring on hindsight was hilarious because people were going “this is the NEXT pokemon killer, the designs are ripoffs, gamefreak needs to SUE” and as soon as the next pokemon game was revealed most discussion on palworld was immediately dropped so people could hop onto Digimon instead. The people flock. French people hate the curry crossaints no one liked it Miracles happen every day, pokecharms is back I need a dedicated team of people to make a Pokemon character creator that just wholesale uses the models from every game where you can have a customizable character How has that not been made yet, we’ve had like 3 gens and the best we have is screenshots of the clothes The FF14 benchmark but for Pokemon Name games that take place in cities RN GTA Shenmue Cyberpunk Astral chain What was I expecting though Idk, stuff to do. To be fair the games truly don’t matter because Pokemon makes more money through the multimedia and the cycle of Pokemon is fueled by the media Pokemon deploying the battle network tactic of fading to black whenever the cutscene has something they don’t have the budget to properly animate If the games had a sonic 06 level of crashing and burning it still would be one of the best sellers of the decade Pokemon discourse at this point has somewhat become more interesting than the games at some points but it’s pretty much the equivalent of Sonic discourse for Nintendo fans except for the fact we’re never getting the year of shadow because it would be like if Pokemon decided to have like a year of Unova or something or Johto or whatever region gets people riled in a frenzy but at this rate it’s every single region and every game Gamefreak internal drama revealed by the second leak season where apparently the reason we keep getting evil executive villains is because they really don’t like one of their own staff members and banned him from directing games I want to take the gamefreak devs and get them onto pokemon essentials to see what kind of thing they’d make in RPGMaker XP for shits and giggles
Record Keeper Direct Season Worse than being a dead company dissolved into nothing is probably forced to make mobile games forever and that’s what happened to genius sorority like they’re never allowed to make another stadium esque game again It would be incredible and nothing short of a miracle of the thing that happened to the odyssey devs with the mass migration of Sonic team devs to their team to make that game and bananza happened but with a bunch of rpg devs who were good at making monster games but it’s kind of insane how pokemon basically has like, the number one hold on the gameplay system that appeals to everyone and most other popular games in the mon genre don’t have that going on and the closest equivalent I can think of with my sleep deprived behind is SMT and I think an SMT like Pokemon game is not what the people want even if it would be really funny to have a Pokemon game that is just the equivalent of getting socked in the face by the matador fight. Pokemon is a very easy casuals series, there’s some exceptions, but I think there needs to be a line between like, Kaizo difficulty and whatever hard mode rom hacks tend to do, which is spreadsheet simulations. if you have seen this red image you are own financial compensation worse than being forgotten being trapped in a gacha game where your characterization is mid when masters shuts down it'll still have been 20 years or so since she's been in a mainline if you don't consider Green from LGPE to be the same girl i'm starting to think personality wise she's just a nice girl and fashion wise leaf was just drawing on the trends at the time and accidentally the leaf i envisioned came from the fashion trend of what was considered rebellious at the time pokemon fandom wiki saying crazy stuff Her personality was challenging to discern due to it being almost completely non-existent. This was made worse by the fact that she never appeared if Red was chosen as a playable character instead of her, in addition to the fact that Red is actually the canon protagonist and that Leaf never appeared with him in Sun and Moon. In fact, due to her being Red's counterpart, Leaf's personality was, for all intents and purposes, identical to his (i.e. quiet and compassionate). The real answers: Distinct, likely universal counterparts, Radical redesign and name change ,Only weird pedantic super nerds would bother themselves this much about this seemingly inconsequential detail That person is ME because I just thought “man leaf is cool” and then I discovered in terror that her new characterization is just MID so I need to make a distinct leaf I’ve been trying to find fashion examples for her to add to the character headcanon page the big issue i'm finding that is so minor but only bothers me i would like to see the fashion and also not put images of real people as much as i can which is an annoying problem only I have maybe i have scocophobia Leaf wearing wrist braces I know they’re not lifts but it would be funny early 2000s fashion disaster who would hypothetically vape and skateboard leaf making her own perfume and brand and then eventually slides into "weed lmao" what if she crafts and brews mysterious potions to sell them to people for jacked profit I do like her hat being a premiere ball since Gen 3 is where it was introduced note: i may be thinking of her adventures counterpart more than actual fanon leaf I made up 420 mlg no scope leaf i'm 99% sure what i'm envisioning is just a splatoon character at this rate i feel like kris suffers more though because at leaf gets tcg cards, kris exists in this limbo bubble of not even getting her design upgraded to fit more in line with the later art styles florian's also in a sucky position because he's the only guy from the violet timeline and everyone else is strictly scarlet Malabar looking like that code lyoko villain The Scyphozoa? Actually it’s more of a Mind flayer Look at monster design It’s dnd All RPGs Lead to dnd I like the commercial having all the real life people cosplaying as trainers Lies and slander, my friend malamar would never use hypnosis on the general population! One day my vast approximate knowledge of various animals from National Geographic and marine biology and bug facts and environmental development will come in handy but right now I’m trying to get back into reading farming sim manga The ditto farming sim however terrifies me G rated version of the Thing I keep thinking that Blue Rival would be in spoken for or it would be the whole kanto trio Edit: it’s real?! YuuTenshine Thank You Blue and his New York sized rat You know sometimes I outright forget he tries to throw red off his bird in Zensho I’m the living equivalent of that one xkcd comic but about random pokemon trivia I’m talking about pocket lint in the Pokemon merchandise rabbit hole I’m talking about things that are so far from what is normal for poke fans and only super nerds would catch my vibe unless they start hypothetically beating me with a shoe Thinking about other characters that will likely be on the OC page once that's completed... uhhh... My lame ass OCs that game jumped from final fantasy to just being their own cast of clowns They will be Pokemon characters soon One of the major players of Rumors who keeps fluctuating from "original obnoxious character" to "literal clerk NPC." Clerk lady was going to be a girl named Milla or Mia from Kanto, a down on her luck clerk for a poke mart who liked playing games on the side and mostly wanted to quit her job who had ended up in the glitch world once and ended up with a few glitch mutations, some rabbit ears and blue hair, and her personality was a lot more abrasive and bickered often, but I figured that a more grounded character would have a more interesting contrast. I did keep her Pokemon (the minun) however, which was more of a match to her personality which I gave to the clerk as a thing she did not want to emphasize the story as an average person getting involved with absolutely Weird Things She Did Not Want. Directly to you! We’ve got preorder DLC before the game’s even out, gorochu was released from the seal of hell, Kalos starters finally get some love, and I still haven’t finished my Y Nuzlocke. “Yeah so to beat this game 100% we want you to pay base price plus dlc and in USD it’ll be 100 bucks and a subscription to keep all your mons” and the price will be jacked for anywhere not in the US look me in the eyes and tell me this is justifiable behavior because I think things can’t get worse with the state of monetization but they’ll keep digging I’m definitely not keeping up with Pokémon games past switch, I think I’m good with gen 9 as my finale. So like if all this stuff is locked to online what exactly will happen if the servers ever shut down like ds and wii Pray that they don’t Beating the deadest horse on earth by saying I think pokemon games should have more time being cooked and diehard Pokemon fans shouldn’t settle for what’s been given but they have settled and as much as anybody grumbles it’ll still be the best selling thing ever because they don’t need the games since there’s merchandise a plenty. Doesn’t matter if they’re overpriced if they can make the money back by being multimedia.
Record Keeper Anime Ramblings Trying to define what my good edition of a Pokemon anime would be outside of stuff like poketoons and the best thing that comes to mind would be beyblade for some reason. Is Pokémon inherently a tournament arc or a sports anime. It’s neither of those things at all. It’s wrestling. I wish it was, the single episode I saw with hawlucha was enough to convince me. Considering that smash bros and pokken tournament are both things alongside the general tournament/sports league vibes pokemon has been running with since day 1 a pokemon wrestling game is not so far fetched. Type:wild and the one game centered on just fighting games battling prove this point. Close combat. I think if a pokemon series had the same unhinged energy that beyblade seasons carry where there will be street jumping and Sephiroth expies and 11 year olds running away to start cults and ancient super evil beyblade and guys who have their hair on fire there could be a lot of entertainment value derived from it Every single episode of pokemon give or take Ash and friends are going somewhere They meet a person or pokemon with a problem or maybe someone in the party has a problem They solve the problem but not before an obligatory team rocket confrontation Ash and friends continue going somewhere Remember when ash got jumped by a guy with a GameShark Journeys didn’t even have him bring greninja or Charizard or infernape and like… it was a fresh team? The whole anime company wanted him GONE with the teraleak though they were like “get him OUT” Kanto gen 1 style was unwritten rules, the establishment of a franchise, Pokemon as a JRPG versus it just being Pokemon The original names for Ash and Gary for the dubs were Casey and Bailey based on some early sticker sheets and can also be backed by TCRF’s early localization rejections https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Stickers_series_1_(Artbox)#cite_note-3 https://tcrf.net/Development:Pok%C3%A9mon_Red_and_Blue/Localization_Glossaries/English They got Ash and Gary from rearranging Satoshi and Shigeru… Also there was a running theme of naming towns after gems and gym leaders after plants. Optional but similar formula: ash has a gym battle. This lasts the entire episode. I want a pokemon series that is a slice of life and select episodes from poketoons, some movies, and filler episodes are the closest things I have to my vision Or a pokemon series that is entirely tournament based. Like there is a vision there too but I don’t think the studio wants an entire series based on battles which is why they’re usually just whatever. I think about Big Unova all the time I think Unova was like regional pokemon before regionals were even a thing but regionals are beloved while Unova gets called a kanto ripoff I think going for a straight 151 did limit the creativity a bit though They’re called pocket monsters, I think there’s could certainly be weirder aspects to the mons themselves. Pokemon isn’t just taking from yokai within folklore, or the concept of familiars/shikigami, but rather taking from all places of the world in terms of mythologies and folklores for the various animals. That being said, and this is an issue with like, two franchises I’ve seen with their take on America, but like, there were barely any cryptids. Yokai Watch didn’t even have mothman. I know earthbound already covers some of that with the Loch Ness monster and generally if I think of an American inspired RPG, I think of earthbound first, but like, I think Bigfoot should be in more video games. Pokemon vs Christianity in the states was insane when Digimon and SMT were right there Ash Ketchum as a Christ figure when he has followers. What is Pikachu then, Also Christ. I mean Digimon does have angemon basically punch the devil with the power of faith in an episode so I think people would see Digimon as A-okay. Believe SMT would be blasphemous since they’re like “yeah all gods are real fueled by human faith” Fantasy airtships are so cool and I’m surprised it took Pokemon this long to have one I know the show is supposed to be about Lino but I would love a rising volt tackler show too Seeing things that would be otherwise rare unknown pokemon adventures artwork just sitting on the pokespedia guy’s twitter and snatching them up like a hawk descending onto a small creature. He is dedicated to the craft, he even identifies the haircuts and clothes for custom styles and every accessory used for contests and musicals He even made a chart locating every side character in a crowd that later became a plasma member In the original run of Ruby sapphire they just die Pokespe is 28 years old now as of (august 8th) and it is my boy red’s bday but out of universe he’d be 40 8.8 is leaf day on social media!? It sucks every single Pokemon manga outside of special is borderline lost media I kind of think the state of pokemon special is alright, but there's a lot of missed oppurtunities in the writing and remake stuff that we'll never get because the storylines got rushed post hiatus and in a few interviews I need to go find Kusaka Sensei said he didn't like doing remakes because then he'd need to find a reason for the characters to get new arcs and they pretty much write their arcs as if they'll be completed. Which I guess is why Yellow hasn't appeared in years since her character arc has been done for years. Yellow is one of my favorite characters but she is so much in the wrong genre that she’d be in Oras, hear about the giant meteor, and just go home and chill and be like “daammmmn okayyyy” Like she works for the yellow arc because of how much emphasis is put on her being in the wrong genre but having her as not a main character makes her feel utterly random especially as the story moves past Kanto and now there’s a random magical girl in the gang because no one else has the same skillset as her because Pokémon special went to hard sci-fi immediately Like post GSC and during FRLG she was only there because she was asked to and rocket attacked her city I feel like the creators have no clue what to do with her and an anthology comic might help where it’s like, she does LGPE and helps out those characters with their Pokedex problems since there’s a time gap where nothing happens in Kanto apparently but we're not getting that, we'll be lucky if they even get to the DLC for SV with a good pacing and maybe possibly cameo the BW characters unless they get rushed to do ZA, which I doubt, because they didn't even make any marketing manga for PLA. They should put Blake/ Lack Two in blueberry academy, not as Interpol, but as a regular student and he’d have to adjust to a life outside of being a super cop They NEED to get that boy out of the super cop cult please I might think he sucks as a character personality wise but conceptually it’s a terror onto itself BW2 you will never stop making me mad for years of hiatus and character potential snapped in half for 24 chapters with the lack of character development because it’s like “plot time!” Her high empathy vs his lack of empathy, both kids being raised in cults but one is considered good and the other evil but both were terrible, the fact everyone is ok with this 12 year old having zero sense of morality and his entire justice system being based on a cop who told him as long as the arrest happens it doesn’t matter what you have to do, like, they sent this guy to alola in disguise as Colress instead of sending him to a therapist LACKTWO!! I can’t stand this guy but he was literally raised to be emotionless and all of his personalities are literally masks someone needs to get this kid into a regular situation and make normal friends without always thinking about his cop life!! Eeyikes! “It doesn’t matter if I was relieved of my duty. I wasn’t taught a way of living outside of that.” He makes me ill if I think about him too long. Its wild how pokestar studios is one of like the creative things that came from bw2 but people hated it because of the tutorial bit so they never did that again. I kind of wish it stayed, but I could say that for a lot of features in pokemon. The best game to do customization in face wise is scarlet because they let you instantly tool around at the start as opposed to being default and going into salons to fix it up The downside is that now all my OCs are in school uniforms Recreating a gaggle of OCs I had made in piccrew to see how accurately I could make them in Scarlet so I can have less piccrew pages on here There’s multiple official arts out there of mysterious blue haired Lance And it matches up to Clair I was testing out all my game cartridges to make sure they’d still work and now the Pokemon Diamond that was freezing my 3ds before worked perfectly fine… so strange. Everyone was in level 38 and only at snow point though so the run might be cooked. I started it in 2015. It’s a decade old. Story discussions Pokemon stories aren’t that deep For some reason mine either range from chill slice of life ideas to meta narrative horror stories with no in between or happy medium so maybe I’m just the wrong audience for stories I feel like they either have to emulate ash’s story or retell ash’s story with a variation, or just cover the main story as told by the games in order to emulate the hero’s journey and nothing in between because idk, reading a story about an everyday bug catcher would be boring. I want to know and read that story, I’d love to read about bug catcher idk… Samantha going on a journey to win bug contests in Johto so she can apply to be a bug trainer for Bugsy. Outside of select filler episodes and some scenes from supplemental material there’s not much for me Reburst reading: This one is definitely the contender of the most alienating premise for Pokemon manga discussions online when people remember it exists. They don’t. Pokemon exists in this bizzare bubble where the only thing it ever gets compared to is Pokemon and the further generations the less there is stuff to compare to The audacity to have such a weird premise for Pokemon and then turn it into a generic shonen… The thing I think about pokemon TCG speculation and just a lot of comments for people’s dream projects and gamefreak expectations is that people aren’t so much fond of pokemon the game but Pokemon as a multi-illion something brand. Which is why it’s so hard to get these types of people to play other RPGs. They don’t want to play a triple AAA rpg, they want to play a triple AAA Pokemon game. Which is why my dream Pokemon game being like a triple AAA contest simulator would kill these people. I’m talking about insane berry gardening and fashion making and cooking and basically making contests as expansive as they were in the anime adaption where they were hyping that thing up only for it to be just side game stuff. I want contests to be a legitimate way to see the credits roll.
Record Keeper: Writing Edition Trying to write pokemon based stories is a tone balancing act. There's so much to pull from that sometimes it's easier to just go off rails. More or less games anime and manga fans do not overlap in subsections of enjoying their rendition of Pokemon stories and I have what I like to call borrowing from transformers terms a “continuity soup” where I pick and choose what parts I want to add in to make a full meal. How would you describe this interconnected universe for pokemon It’s also like if I put every single media I’ve ever wanted to write fic for and put them into a godawful blender So the pokemon they’d be paired with would be based on what gen came out the year of the property so anything pre 1996 is gen 1 but the Y2K era gets gen 2 and yugioh gx would get GBA stuff and so on… I also have OCs based on the OC page. I’m so afraid to introduce the OC in an actual setting because she started off as a genderbent red I made because I couldn’t think of a design for tower of fantasy when they let me make a character and then bloomed into her own character who checks off all the marks for a Mary Sue because it’s like “the secret daughter of Giovanni with psychic powers that are sometimes EVIL who is also a red clone like that episode of Danny phantom and she likes wearing pretty dresses and she hangs out with the popular kids in the high school AU she was made for and she might have a pairing tease with Blue” with zero irony attached and at that point it would be easier to just say she’s a self insert or whatever language people say to do that thing where they distance themselves but no she spawned into my mind and like her pokemon is a ditto that just sits on her head and a meowth like girl is onto nothing!! She runs a mono normal team she is going to be owned!! But then in the high school AU the real Red shows up because he gets dragged off Mt. Silver and then it turns out he is JUST as weird as Auburn so it evens out and he is super popular even though he just ditches classes and stands on tall things to aura farm
Record Keeper: Cityscape Edition Pokemon as a franchise will always be mixed for me as I move into different areas. It isn’t even like top JRPG writing for me and the world building sucks sometimes but I just want a story that makes me feel the way I did when I was a kid playing th egames again And the storytelling is all over the place too. Pokemon stories aren’t that deep. They could be though. For some reason mine ideas and concept wise either range from chill slice of life ideas to meta narrative horror stories with no in between or happy medium so maybe I’m just the wrong audience for the current stories that end up circling as the popular ones in some circles I read in Pokemon games and stories lean towards the fantastical for characters to become top number 1 and less about the little guys like route NPCs because who’d read a story about a bug catcher. I want to know and read that story, I’d love to read about bug catcher idk… Samantha going on a journey to win bug contests in Johto so she can apply to be a bug trainer for Bugsy. Pokemon could have a lot of different genre based stories considering that primarily it’s a story about supernatural magical animals that enjoy fighting which means off the top of my head they can do a horse girl story, a wrestling story, some sort of horror, and daily snippets of slice of life that occur in character of the day episode but the games are dedicated to having the same cookie cutter structure gameplay wise, they tried once differently with alola and then immediately backpedaled. Pokemon can casually dip into horror even in Gen 1 they had a while tower full of ghosts and possessed channelers and even in the anime Ash briefly died to get his haunter and Sabrina had her evil doll and the manga had that fucking arbok I hate and the zombie psyduck (controlled by ghosts) Medieval accounts of unknown beasts and it turns out to be a galarian Rapidash Pokemon doesn’t have a traditional slime monster outside of Grimer Industrial pollution guy? It’s like a thing in Shintoism where objects can come to life. Subbing in general tropes with Pokémon where the Loch Ness monster is just a really irate lapras and the candle burning through the night is a litwik So basically I’m envisioning dnd monsters but as pokemon Me dragging around imagination theory even that one is dead in the water reconfirmed by every single source that the turtle can just do magic with crystals but it’s just outright alternate timelines and multiverses, but conjuring from non existence is too much. Dreamworld in gen 5 had pokemon come from alternate universes if you could connect to the internet. We have Pokemon that can literally bend reality to their whims, I think a Pokemon making stuff up based on things that don’t exist isn’t that farfetch’d. Pay to store your pokemon for switch when you can’t even use all of them in a game Ok gamefreak 10$ subscription Fuck off Pay to transfer your pokemon from go Ok niantic Mew wept these rates are ass WHY ARE SCALPERS GETTING TO GAMESTOP CODE DISTRIBUTION EVENTS YOU ARE SCAMMING PEOPLE FOR A CHILDREN’S FRANCHISE. GET A JOB. It sucks to get into an interest that’s relatively popular but simultaneously niche and the entire place is dry like a desert for stuff you have interest in because you’re too picky to go with the actual popular stuff and you still haven’t checked alternatives. Yes this is about pokemon hacking. I still haven’t played any RPGXP games. For every complaint I have. They’re gonna drop an itemized list of all my complaints about games and their weird quirks into one specific mega game that’ll be super popular and cost $80 that I’ll be compelled to buy and then say it was bad Leafeon and Glaceon are some of my favorites and it makes no sense because like you don’t get them until late game and I was such a dip when I was a child I thought I could evolve eevee with a leaf stone when leafeon was revealed Like what does glaceon have A Hime cut And what does Leafeon have A bootleg plush I bought once Like every pokemon in theory is someone’s favorite and has some story attached to it, and there’s anectodes of a story for very single pokemon out there, but I don’t think the people are necessarily going to want a flurpiff plushie anytime soon. Not every Mon is getting a funko pop, and there’s some out there that are despised and called a waste of dex space like people used to grouse about smash bros Rosters. I think eevelutions are one of those really popular mons that if you have them as some of your favorites makes you sound basic despite there being like 8 of them to pick from and sometimes I like weird mons but sometimes I also like stuff that can easily be turned into a marketable plushie and like they’re not making merchandise plushies for aggron. (I wish they did.) Sometimes I want to take N when he had pre character development to stuff that modern pokemon incentivized and see him start genuinely seething. Like I want to bring him to a contest, and poke pégalo, and poke jobs in Galar, and show him stuff like the costumes in cafe and unite. “Pokemon shouldn’t have to do labor for people or wear clothes for their entertainment” “Idk they look pretty chill though” With pokemon sometimes there are mons that have universal appeal that also make me feel somewhat basic for liking them like I mean… Pikachu is one of my favorites. And zorua. And flurpiff. Note. That’s not a real Mon. I meant to type something and I forgot because of the typo. I hope anyone reading this realizes I’m not being a hater out of the sake of being a hater but like my passion for this franchise has eclipsed my emotional rationality and it needs to come out in a rant that comes out of “come on you guys can do way better than this” and it feels like they’re trying but every single gen it gets held back by circumstances out of their control but it’s a multibillion dollar company that can pull effort for every single nostalgia trailer they put out every presents now but their games have been lagging behind in 3D since XY. Nothing about ZA has looked appealing to me and every trailer has actively discouraged me but the standards for the games have been so low that some people will be excited for scraps and with every game that makes decisions in the right direction gamefreak decides to just do something else for the next iteration because there’s no internal communication. I don’t even know if we’re gonna be able to go into shops or if it’s just gonna be menus again. All the mobile games have lost the plot with their money draining practices and the TCG has turned into a speculative hell with grown adults being bottom feeders for card hoarding and inflating the market and every single thing about Pokemon in its current non-cohesive state makes it feel like it should’ve fallen apart but since it has no legitimate competition that isn’t niche or plays too differently it just persists as the only super popular monster franchise. You think the city in ZA would have more stuff to do shown off in trailers Like aquariums Or a park that isn’t the zones Or a tour area A tournament arena Arcade games I don’t even know if the museum is back yet Why don’t we have a Pokemon sports game Who do I have to convince to let me see Lucario balling Like Unova had a sports arena Why don't I have kalos soccer or contests like in the shows Seriously, there should be a little bit more stuff to do aside from battling...? Pokemon if it was yakuza could be possible but ZA is not it bro If some guy started punching and the pokemon jumped a guy too I’d lose my mind Dame da ne They could’ve made it GTA I feel like making it a city and so far it’s just buildings is really limiting the scope even though there’s examples of games being in only one location that can really work If the game had evolving NPCs and time based activities like majora’s mask… There might be the paris catacombs We haven’t even seen the resturaunts Is the evil flare lab still there Will we be able to make the poke videos Can you even go in the buildings or is it just menus Like these are not questions I should even be asking At least there will be side quests, like fangames haven’t done that for years and I have to be excited for the bare minimum otherwise feel like there’s nothing Hand in hand the pokemon fanbase is switching over to Digimon and going “maybe we treated you too harshly” at yokai watch, maybe nature will heal Nah It’s literally this panel of Rodrick from wimpy kid. I know there are other games and franchises to get into, but I like Pokemon, I want it to be better, and gamefreak has me on a ball and chain with Pikachu running a hamster wheel in my brain. No matter what I get into eventually I circle back to Pokemon, so it’s even worse because when I see something that’s super good and then go back i inevitably end up mildly annoyed. Pokemon dlc in practice is fine but the thing with third versions is that they improved the base game. DLC doesn’t account for the problems with the base game, it just creates a separate area for the player to go through that basically doubles as the postgame depending on when you bought it because otherwise you can just blow through a game with Pokemon over the level cap the base game didn’t account for. And the way to improve the base game of SV is to shell out $500 dollars for an entirely new console according to people online who are experiencing buyer’s remorse for the $70 dollar Mario kart game. I think the other mildly annoying thing is now the features people want in a game are all registered to mobile spinoff stuff now— like I can’t decorate my room in the games anymore but I can do it in friends, can’t make my Pokémon have any sort of accessories because contests are gone but I have the ability to dress them up in cafe and unite if I do the battle pass or cafe pass or roll the costume stuff or whatever and character clothes customization is nonexistent in ScaVio but Unite has me covered if I just pay enough money and big pikachu is going to gamble on what features are kept in between the next mainlines because 3D pokemon is consistently inconsistent. Like it’s probably not great if battle revolution which is almost 20 years old had more customization options and character body types which is something I’ve never seen anyone mention aside from going “wow the pokemon animations” dude I’m over that it’s just recycled stadium models. It’s quite the conondrum.
Record Keeper Trying to write child characters as their actual ages as opposed to me just writing characters where I just arbitrarily throw numbers like anime characters have is a trip especially when you see actual kids versus written kids like how Sasuke was like 12. He should not have been doing all that. Basically the way the kids on master chef Junior act is how pokemon trainers would actually act if those kids were running around at 10 and 11 (or like, the 8 to 13 year olds they let run around on the show.) The way child protagonists feel so dissonant from actual kids especially when I used to read those books as a kid and admire those kids and now thinking back as an adult I feel like it’s a very large contrast but it doesn’t help that I’m trying to write this thought while watching masterchef jr and Gordon Ramsey is dressed like an elf and eating a giant lollipop He is full of whimsy and it’s taking me OUT “I am covered in frosting and full of anger.” “I have to slay this next challenge.” The kids are all groaning none of them want to make the beef Wellington They all looked so sad trying to cook it… The same energy I get from watching junior finals and seeing a small little guy with his headphones pulling out an iron hands and saying to trust the process and having a plush next to him and another kid with an eevee hat wearing purple with his miraidon plushie using his trick room and overheat He has an oranguru Very small child voice: It doesn’t do any damage The audience cheered Fire Do you think he could defeat Wolfe and his incineroar Well, turns out by sleeping through the championships I missed out on a huge sweep of all the predicted favorites and a bunch of weird picks especially in the TCG area where apparently budew is terrorizing the meta. I’ve always liked budew, good for it. Champions (the game) has introduced the Omni ring which lets you do all the gimmicks Cool. Everything in the Pokemon world is super sleek technology stuff I kinda would’ve liked a Pokemon world where everything was somewhat still clunky The aesthetic of blending old tech and new tech like in the form of retro futurism I guess Or that one Twitter gadget punk trend Rotom phones are such a weird gimmick that it actively concerns me that the Pokemon world is so reliant on a bunch of ghosts to handle their technology which feels like some sort of ethical breach This is the same generation that introduced poke jobs though so I guess Pokemon innately understand the division of labor Remembers that gen 1’s anime proposed ending was a Pokemon rebellion Huh. I would’ve loved a Pokemon world that still had the weird tech stuff that was still happening up to Gen 5 with the wristwatches and like conference phones and regular vhs tapes but now we just have regular phone and zoom calls I feel like it’s also weak from a marketing standpoint to not have like, cool magic technology or integrate the pokemon more into the systems of the places like the TCG cards fill the niche a lot more of seeing pokemon in day to day life and in day to day work and scenarios while in the games it’s more abstractly like, implied. Like Gen 3’s town that has corsola possibly carrying it or the oreburgh mines. Gen 7 was probably the best version of this concept with the poke ride but then Gen 8 went “phone bike.” They brought it back for PLA with the summons and then sort of in Gen 9 with the motorcycle bike Pokemon but like… idk. I’d rather use a revavroom, that thing looks cool. I want a pokemon that is a car that turns into a robot. Like a transformer. Revavroom is close to that. How is let’s go the only switch game that has a larger roster of riding Pokemon oh right it was just the 151. Worse than being a dead company dissolved into nothing is probably forced to make mobile games forever and that’s what happened to genius sorority like they’re never allowed to make another stadium esque game again It would be incredible and nothing short of a miracle of the thing that happened to the odyssey devs with the mass migration of Sonic team devs to their team to make that game and bananza happened but with a bunch of rpg devs who were good at making monster games but it’s kind of insane how pokemon basically has like, the number one hold on the gameplay system that appeals to everyone and most other popular games in the mon genre don’t have that going on and the closest equivalent I can think of with my sleep deprived behind is SMT and I think an SMT like Pokemon game is not what the people want even if it would be really funny to have a Pokemon game that is just the equivalent of getting socked in the face by the matador fight. I can’t think of a single Pokemon fight aside from like, Lenora’s bulk up battle where it’s absolutely mandatory that the player knows about dealing with stats buffs and that is because Pokemon is a very easy casuals series.
Record Keeper Direct! Speaking of pokemon… Speaking of Pokemon! They got tatsuro yamashita to sing a song for pokemon concierge A new pokemon stop motion show, huh… Wallace and gromit but as pokemon They brought back pokepark? Oh, amusement park. Japan exclusive If you don’t live in Japan, get bent, the segment I don’t care. Flaccid. Pikachu LIGHTBULBS… I literally said this as a prediction but I really wasn’t expecting it to be 2/3 mobile games (champions is also on mobile) I miss regular spinoffs so much man Guess we’re doing cafe They let you dress up in ZA To be expected Kalos is about fashion Emma revealed real She was on the box art too Mega dragonite These narrators suck and drain the life out of an already sucky presentation What if the team MZ kids were those orphan kids from Emma’s sidequest I expect 20 billion fanarts of Corbeau by the end of the day Billion minus 1 Mega arbok Isn’t Mable one of those team flare members She had blue hair I don’t think they’re actually rogue I think some evil group is probably doing something to them I don’t recall the last time I’ve actually been fully excited during a direct ZA announcement But then the more they revealed the less hyped I got Least the fangames will pop off with the new revealed Megas but there's still Pokemon hacks buried in some YouTubers discord. Quit keeping them there, I'm not signing up for your things. Please be nice to the multibillionare company! Me recalling home:
Pay to store your pokemon for switch when you can’t even use all of them in a game Ok gamefreak 10$ subscription Fuck off Pay to transfer your pokemon from go Ok niantic Mew wept these rates are ass
No. :)

More Fun Anectode: I found about about 3DS DS dumping and forwarding

Pocket card jockey was just uma musume before uma musume Uma musume is just a psyop to get people into horse racing My 3DS JRPG machine My diamond can be saved if I just use the forwarder Lets gooooooo
Ah jeez, messed around with a pokemon save file manager a bit too much and cloned my entire party. Initially I was like h oh, in universe I just made an existential crisis, but now I have two exp shares, cool.
So turns out if you load in two pokemon events at once on Diamond you brick the game so I was just met with an awful screeching sound The entire save is gone The only thing left on my OG black save is a patrat
A bunch of games that aren't 3DS I need to reset in my backlogs because between transfers of games and files being misplaced I’ve got a ton of saves that are incompatible or just went missing in general which is a major shame. I'm trying to get more RPGs but also not like, 20 billion GB so I'm going for smaller. Maybe even some... comfy games. Eventually I'll get to bravely default. Just not today. Maybe if I move off one of the other ones I'll go for monster hunter as well... Moco Moco friends looks super cute, so I picked that up. No puyo chronicle though. Arle is in puyo world forever because the franchise of madou monogatari just made their own legally distinct cast, renamed to sorcery saga, and continues just chugging along
Record Keeper Everyone give it up for the next pokemon direct where everyone will sit there stone faced for 20 minutes as they introduce more mobile microtransaction FOMO shit and show us like 10 seconds of blurry footage for the next rushed generation game while spitting on anyone who wants virtual console or a non mobile spinoff to return from the grave and also if they do they’ll charge 60 or 70 bucks for it now

No franchise will ever get me feeling this way every single day as much as Pokémon I love this franchise I loathe this franchise

I have spent many years of time, passion, and dedication towards this franchise I will have scoured the internet for various pieces of trivia and fun facts no one cares about as the world grows more openly hostile to this franchise I wish I never got the games, I wish I could take it all back and be a different person

All these contradictions make me up as a person and my obsessive involvement with a massive multibillion dollar multimedia franchise that has lifted me up and subsequently let me down. It’s a children’s game. It’s a vehicle for my creative endavours. It’s a franchise that was never expected to last this long. It’s a conglomerate of ideas put by every person who’d ever touched it. It’s a capitalistic nightmare hellscape of rushed dev cycles and an unreachable peak based on fan expectations and the shareholders.

Why did I have to get the pokemon neurodivergence, I couldn’t have gotten Digimon or something.

What are your thoughts
Pokemon should have some Pokemon that are ugly freaks of nature again like the OG gen 1 sprites
We need more pokemon that people go EUGH at that have zero marketing capability because TPCi seems to push only some to be marketable anyways, let the artists flex and add in some more biological weirdos

I think the personal translation commissioned by DKYG on the 1996 Zukan/Encyclopedia of Pokemon is pretty neat to see as to how wildly different Pokemon as a franchise was for its original iteration in gen 1 and I wonder if the new pokecology book will shy away from it or just reference it wholesale? Pokemon Zukan vs Pokemon ecology encyclopedia released almost 30 years later as the pinnacle of how much the brand has developed and evolved I feel like there has to be some regular normal animals in pokemon because of the classification system. Like, what the heck is a horse in ponyta’s description if horses don’t exist? Pocket monsters vs regular animals

The gap between casual sweep vs competive spreadsheets in pokemon is wild

So people don’t go for e4 rematches when they play Johto and now I’m understanding the endgame problem https://web.archive.org/web/20090903054823/http://geocities.com/thelegendarydogs/faqs/all/breeder/breederguide.htm

Me looking at the fangame space knowing gamma emerald is probably going to be shot so M-riomon can live

Marlon is a wild ass design because you get cracker jumpscared by his tan

Man I wish I knew all of the influences for pokemon like how the Digimon adventure writer once wrote his influences
To Two Years' Vacation, Treasure Island, The Mysterious Island, Journey to the West, The Blue Bird, The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia, Dracula, A Princess of Mars, It, Stand By Me, Summer of Night, Stinger, Lord of the Flies, The Crystal World, The Last Adventure, Capital City Disappearance, Crystallized Star Cluster, Legend of the White Devil in the Land of the Gods, Genma Wars, Kunlun Commando Unit, Steal the Agni, Invader Summer, OKAGE, City of Flame, and many others that I couldn't write here, all the stories that have entertained me up until now, all the monster movies, and Ultraman, especially Ultraman Tiga, I give my thanks
I’m never gonna have the full contextual analysis of what influences everything in part because I’m not Japanese and as time continues marching on said influences will fall into more obscurity as the ouroboros of media consuming itself to make references to itself will eventually lead to a collapse of the industry itself Huh?

The concept of G1 and G3 happening simultaneously is kind of hilarious because Brendan and May are trying to stop the apocalypse while meanwhile Red is going around fighting the mafia

I think TPCi should allow GF to make smaller games and weirder spinoffs and I’m not joking

When I was younger because the sprite was blurry and I never watched the of Hoenn anime and he had grey hair I thought Steven was an old man It feels like every game after though is absolutely a course correction to making Steven a bishonen Miku is a permanent fixture to Pokemon now

Spinda is the pokemon ever, why did gamefreak program literally any of that in Sometimes I think gamefreak has like a single developer that just makes pokemon equivalent to shitposts

I miss spinoffs that weren’t phone games and if they shut down Nintendo and TPCi will run with the money and not make them offline

I miss rangers but I don’t miss playing rangers in public That goddamn rhyperior and that drapion can go to hell The embarsssing boss fight in particular was the giant forgot fight in rangers 3 because I was at a concert for school with my parents and generally not caring about like, the irl connotations of just…. Making circles on a DS really intensely.

Trying to document fun facts about towns for my region project sucks because pokemon barely talks about towns and no one documents regular Pokemon does have a normal rpg amount of dialogue by NPCs and trainers but unless you’re a plot important NPC then a lot of it isn’t really documented on major sites aside from like script repositories and those are flag dependent and not really like, super readable or accessible or like. Interesting to scroll through. It’s all just text dumps. Not chronological so it’s like… basically the worst case scenario for out of context ness. And it’s even harder to find for languages that aren’t English so like… what the heck.

Like looking at beta stuff still but it sucks that had to happen The development process is a trip Castelia city was so engrained into gamefreak they did it again with Lumiose How come Lenora had her design good in the beta and then they did THAT to her in the final If I had a nickel for every developer inspired by Jennifer Lopez to make a flying character a sexy Latina woman I’d have 2 nickels. There might be more.

Pokemon cafe is a funny premise because you don’t actually capture the pokemon and you just feed them No humans exist aside from a random team of evil cafe owners or something Random legendary pokemon can be hired for labor They don’t get paid They literally get fed in berries They keep slightly adjusting order level things and putting me off The cafe is now customizable in remix That’s cute… I still think this game is one of the worst monetary wise and they’re actively coming up with new ways to get money which is kind of crazy for such a cute looking game.

Pokemon isn’t a singular franchise as much as its 20 billion subfranchises stacked onto each other. Every single forum is full of some poisoning Effect for discussing pokemon especially post gen 8 Ash has some absurd feats for a 10 year old it’s a whole rabbit hole beyond just the YouTube thumbnails I never looked at that radiated a dangerous energy to me You have no clue how wild things get online when you’re not paying attention because on forums people were fighting over if ash should’ve been with Misty or Serena

You can’t talk about pokemon in a way that won’t have someone try to jump you on either side Quit pitting every Mon franchise against Pokemon Digimon vs Pokemon is stupid, an official crossover would have them be friends Well I don’t think they should fight, they should work together with the power of friendship to create pikachu ultimate gigawatt thunder blast and just blow up the crossover villain by augmenting it onto Omni/omegamon’s sword. It would be very cool.

I’ll be here all day if I do all of the TCG cards for every protagonist I’m not strong enough to do that The line between “official art made for rare merch, concept art never meant to be seen, and fanart made by an official artist but not for the brand” isn’t that thin so I’m only trying to post stuff from category 1

Pokemon finally adds in voice acting but it’s banjo kazooie grunts of eh ah eh hmm huh or JRPG hmmmms with only super important lines voiced with the same grunts

Johto be so good when you don’t have a twitter user or YouTube influencer saying it sucks Make your own opinion

I’m so glad I saw the writing on the wall when GO started attempting to funnel all money during COVID because the game seems to actively hate rural players and will attempt to get as much money as possible and no one seems interested in interfering on the business side at all I think TCG pocket should find a way to destroy the stock market of investors of IRL cards I think it would be funny

Do you still play on gpxplus or poliwagger or pokefarm q
No
Okay

Lucario post watch What the hell is aura anyways Like, the pokemon term or the meme term? Aura was called swag Looking in the tightest fit to be cool Aura farming and the Bible has been a thing It’s not the same thing in pokemon but simultaneously it could be, idk. I’m SCRATCHING my head ever since I read it in adventures because I was like “is it like infinity energy?” from a later arc. Which could also just be the life force of pokemon from XY It doesn’t help there’s like 4 or 5 terms that are translated differently that could all be the same thing Z-moves for example because of Z-Lillie could just be aura Lillie. Stupid. Idk. Riley is cool though. Yeah.

Reminded of, August 18th, the disaster of Kalos. I probably won't finish XY the anime but I could theortically finish my nuzlocke before then. Future Purchasing Edit: I hate that used games are basically the exact same price as the OG dude... Why do you have all the mainline games I am a fool who is easily departed with my money All the mainline switch games minus ZA Maybe it won’t be good Entirely doubtful I’ll get ZA if I’m being honest because I’m not that attached to kalos
Record Keeper Anyone ever think about how casually insane Pokemon world building is? If I told you there was a modern world full of magical animals that can get stronger by eating beans and curry that people can befriend using the power of friendship that have people with superpowers and sci-fi scenarios and clones and holograms and robots and destroyed civilizations that faced the wrath of god and aliens and people plucked between dimensions as the universe collapses onto itself you’d think “damn, that’s awesome” but it’s pokemon so literally only a handful of people actually know this and nobody else gives a shit Gen 7 and 8, Pokemon Ranger has the rangers literally transmit their feelings through their Ranger disc without pokeballs This has been here since Gen 1 baby!! Psychics and things! Amber from the Mewtwo movie, also Gen 1, but they also brought it back for Gen 5’s Mewtwo movie Mirage pokemon from the animated special Gen 3 has the movie with the robots, Gen 4 has the ai lady in Giratina, Gen 9 has two of em Multiple Pokedex entries in regards to artificial Pokemon Gen 7 with the tapus and also Gen 5’s ruins with the heroes Multiple dex entries since Gen 1 and also the whole deal with ultra beasts Also gen 7 with ultra worlds and fallers but we could extrapolate the alternate dimension thing started as early as Gen 4 with Giratina and that alternate world and maybe Gen 6 with hoopa’s dimensional holes Pokemon lore: huge book Pokemon lore properly explained in game: smaller book It doesn’t help that any time there is a source of mystery in a Pokemon game 9/10 times gamefreak will never elaborate on what it’s supposed to mean until years later it gets answered in a remake or an interview that never made it overseas or like, the time people broke into the servers to get answers that were just gamefreaks rough drafts of story beats that were just them writing mythological stories based on actual folklore stories but replacing the yokai and animal nature spirits with pokemon that people immediately ran into the ground by saying it was canon. Pokemon might as well be yokai though, they’re pocket monsters If it doesn’t appear in the game, and its content that was never supposed to be seen by public eyes, I think it was more of a document process than an actual canonical thing for Pokemon… Pokemon could literally have fighting game levels of plot insanity and it’s just background info Like they can make clones of people in theory
Let’s try and figure out what Pokemon has referenced in terms of people who are definitely stronger than the average Joe. The mysterious creatures known as Pokemon and some guys that stand next to them. Not accounting for mystery dungeon in this setup. You think a pokemon DND game would go hard?

The handful of trainer classes and NPCs that have powers are based within the supernatural or scientific.

Kind of fun imagining how you can have like the scientists and pirates and medieval knights all within something like Masters and no one bats an eye. There’s magicians (moves like magic guard, coat, room, powder- but those are normal and fairy and psychic) and illusionists and stuff like bounty hunters like Hunter J in the anime, supernatural science stuff with shadow pokemon, psychics, shrine maidens (what religion fits into this) s omehow there was a war but I guess there’s no need for heavy weapons since according to interviews the pokemon world is a utopia. It would be kind of mildly morbid to sub in weapons with pokemon and see a Voltorb be a landmine or something. In terms of the sliding scale of realism Pokemon lies pretty firmly in the cartoon harm section aside from when they actually want things to be taken seriously. Humans being able to tank attacks just fine like in every one of oak’s lectures and kukui who is an active move researcher makes me go like “okay how much of pokemon moves are actually real and how much of it is like applications of kayfabe wrestling and cartoon logic and abstract energy” because like explosion is a literal explosion but pokemon blow up and then you get smoke clouds like its a cartoon and like how the iconic pikachu shocks people on the daily.

Weapons are probably severely out of the question for pokemon though. Pokemon as a family friendly children first franchise would never, but I haven’t changed much from my teenage self so for me in my mind sometimes it’s still over the top dramatics and monumental edge and big powers and fantasy spells and the occasional swear and gore. I think the concept of a gun in pokemon would be completely ludicrous , even worse when I watched a podcast where they discussed in length how fast pokemon plots could be solved if someone whipped out an M15. Obviously I am an individual whose opinion should be discarded. Note: I wrote some of this before seeing Lucario and the mystery of mew.

Pokemon rodeo seemed like an interesting game about riding pokemon to defeat them and Ranger was a game where you didn’t really “fight” in a traditional way aside from calling wild pokemon for help but spinoffs tend to just be for playing with pokemon.

Some people can talk to their pokemon better as a but I don’t really think that counts as a power as more of just a basic thing about pokemon being based on the power of friendship. Masters especially emphasizes the bond between people and pokemon. I think the Pokedex holders from the manga and their titles count as powers? Red as the battler, Green as the trainer as he trains Pokemon and people… maybe they just have supernatural based things, I recall seeing a comment on that sometime around the DPP saga on my reread. Yellow’s the big example plus Lance since they have psychic powers and healing from the forest, but I don’t think that’ll ever be brought up again and I doubt there are any other magic forests (I did make a post on this once with candidates being Illex Forest and Winding Woods.)

It’s different from N though since N was raised by wild pokemon and might be the descendant of the abyssal king of Unova or the legendary hero according to the teraleak. I’m imagining Red’s title as the fighter now as him being like, literally punching things though. He did have an fistfight with Giovanni that one time. It’s vague in stories across material if the greater public conscious is aware of superpowers since something like pokestar studios does exist which features what Pokémon’s take on fictional materials would be but most of the things in that minigame segment still revolve around pokemon battles.

I’ve been taking some notes from Masters since they like giving out little tidbit explanations on things so I can define Aura since I’ve never actually seen Lucario’s debut movie. (Which I should. I guess.) Aura in that game is said to be like, a vibration from the soul or heart. I also went to a wiki page. Aura is one of the things mentioned in game with Pokemon like Lucario and Cutiefly. The form of everything in life and an energy field… sounds pretty generic to me. Something a mood ring would be based off of color wise. Plus I guess it’s more elaborated on in Alola as its life energy from the dances? Ultra Necrozma has that cutscene where the player uses the Z-power and then is exhausted after. (Today I learned that The Z in Z power stands for Zenith and is also referred to as full force/full power). All I know it from is memes though about things like aura farming and like smell. Like kingdom hearts that one time. Sort of like the generic anime power system that every single anime has at some point where a guy goes “woah, I can sense that guy’s power, he’s pretty strong!” Maybe being a monotype specialist is a power in itself. Like how fire type specialists tend to have fiery personalities. Do humans have types regularly? Yeah, they're normal. Their moves? Fight, item, bag, and run. I guess humans might be built different since a lot of people tank various attacks throughout various canons? I think there’s less danger overall though when you have a dog that can breathe flamethrowers.

I’m out of my league though, I still need to watch more shonen. Been distracted by watching through mid 2000s anime instead of more recent stuff.



I think trainers having powers might be pretty limited in how much of an effect they can have, because if they can throw hands with Pokemon or people all the time, then they don't really need Pokemon, do they? this was actually brought up all the way back in interviews during Gen 1 to 2 where they considered having the player fight with the pokemon like a standard RPG but decided against it. https://lavacutcontent.com/sugimori-masuda-developer-interview/

The manga did the whole "trainers fighting with their pokemon" thing before any of those which I think was why it was once considered the closest to Tajiri's vision. If it was implemented now maybe it would work like PLA with dodging or like an FF14 summoner’s style. PLZA allows for real time battles which is cool, I'm glad that's a thing instead of just being a thing within one fangame.

I’ve already kind of noted on my protag elaboration page that I assigned them roles/classes based on what actual trainers are like. Fun fact, according to a dev interview the trainers grow up in their various roles, like schoolboys becoming super nerds.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211203191611/https://www.glitterberri.com/pokemon-red-blue/game-freak-staff-interview/gold-silver-powered-up/ Ultimately though I think a bigger thing about people who can have powers is dampened by the fact that the world of Pokemon is so pokemon focused in terms of a lifestyle that it probably doesn’t matter that much? Some guy would be like “hey guys, I can shoot fire from my hands!” And I doubt anyone would care aside from asking if they’ll become a fire expert. A bit of fanfiction and fangames out there do utilize the ideas to some effect but I’d love to see a gamefreak game that actually utilizes a bunch of these ideas that doesn’t elicit the reaction people had to stuff that was leaked and not for public eyes (you do realize they’d have to severely tone down most stuff, right). Is Pokemon constrained by being a children’s franchise to show darker aspects? Not exactly, the alola dex entries were surprisingly unhinged, the manga everyone loved to say is dark and edgy still manages to throw in whatever it wants and the thing that probably prevents it from going hog like it used to is the fact it’s always rushed now (the last time I felt it had a bite was Gen 6), uh, the latest game didn’t let us see the murder but the plot does hinge on a person getting killed by a Pokemon, the cute mascot mon from the teal mask also has a kill count. Whatever was going on with sea mauville with the guy in the notes having a mental breakdown. Theres more implied then directly shown on screen like how ghestis and lusamine were terrible parents but every media after sun and moon is dedicated to whitewashing lusamine and saying that she wasn’t a bad parent, just extremely focused and neglectful to her children, which is still bad parenting. Trying to make sense of what’s going on within pokemon lore is a headache though so I understand why people barely do it Multiple timelines? Parallel universes? Consider characters with radical redesigns like Bridgette Nebby dependent timelines based on evolutions Branch pairings. And it doesn’t help there’s some translation terminology issues as well Like how Mew was initially called a phantom pokemon while in Japan it’s always been considered a Mythical Tbh every save game is an alternate dimension if we consider the entralink being able to connect to other worlds (saves) And there are also retcons It’s far easier to just think the Pokémon timeline works on like, simpsons timeline where the year is the same but the technology changes and only some characters age because of plot reasons otherwise the battle tree makes no sense because Wally looks the exact same unless he’s like. A ghost. Cynthia was right there She uses makeup And sometimes characters straight up change names in universes or don’t exist at all like whatever is happening with Leaf They could just be AU versions of each other Not many characters get that distinction in universe, so why her… There was rainbow rocket that one time, white Archie came back. So true, there was rainbow rocket that one time. Incorporating weird things from different sources like how TCG has a bunch of weird exclusive items and objects I’d love like a pokemon game with crafting and gathering and hearing weird trivia and isn’t legends arceus We need more games like it but Z-A feels like the opposite of it but maybe the direct will change my mind The reason there’s so many tourists in kalos Paris syndrome Apparently Japan loves to romanticize Paris so when people actually go there and see it sucks they get mentally overwhelmed It isn’t even like top JRPG writing for me and the world building sucks but I just want a story that makes me feel the way I did when I was a kid playing th egames again



You’ll hear me gripe about this every time I see a rotom phone past gen 8 but i am not a major fan of digital sentient beings surpassing their programming. Miku is fine though. It'll pop up in stories if I ever get to them instead of everything else on the site. You think about Megaman battle network and it’s like that game is 100% the definition of why I am as an adult the kind of person who is wary about smart fridges and smart ovens and being like “we should not have that stuff connected to the internet.” Then there’s the issues of netnavis where it’s like if you want to upgrade your netnavi to a new one after it gets deleted then you’re basically killing the old one off entirely and the data still lingers on the net as ghost data. It’s like the ultimate ship of Theseus for me. Don’t even get me started on the premise of the fact that the titular Megaman.exe is framework for a dead child’s soul. “But robots are fine for you?” Yeah, robots are fine because they’re solidified. I don’t like purely sentient data, that’s like ghosts. I’m scared of ghosts.

Yokai Watch Session 1

Y=Yokai Watch

I’m thinking of extending my uh. Impromptu break from playing Pokémon games but the pull was too great and I ended up immediately gravitating towards reading all of the early Pokespe arcs and live tweeting the experience because I’m the resident Pokespe/manga reader and if I talk to my one friend who has no Pokémon thoughts whatsoever the power gap grows too large. A two week break and all that came out of it was me doing more Pokémon related things than ever. All my yokai watch knowledge is limited to when I briefly watched parts of the anime, a fic that was deleted off the face of the earth staring Katie, and wibble wobble which is no longer in English.



There are four voiced cutscenes in yokai watch 2 within the first 40 minutes, The children deserve more capsule games. You can skip the cutscenes too. We’re so back. Following yokai... They automatically fight and I have no clue what I’m doing.

I was told to play 2 since it improves over 1. I know yokai watch died horribly but there’s something uh. Really interesting about playing 2 now tbh. Especially in contrast to my X playthrough. I’m only an hour in and it’s pretty chill. Notable things: The quests give out exp for the yokai There’s a lot of bugs. Like for bug catching. They let me explore under like trucks and stuff and I have to wait for traffic signs on the crosswalk. This might be the most slice of life monster catching RPG I’ve ever played just by these vibes alone. That’s a great thing, I’m gonna keep playing it in short periods. The crank a kai thing and the yokai food recruitment are tripping me up though. I’m not good with either of those… I have to have some semblance of self control to continue old things or else my backlog will never shrink.


Palworld was also on sale for $22. Plus untitled goose game. FP2 and Spark 3 are still on my wishlist and probably will be sitting there a bit longer because I’m still working through playing a few spark mods. I shouldn’t really buy new stuff when I have such a large backlog of stuff i have that I haven’t touched but I really need to get a “hook” into playing stuff or else I drop it and if I lock myself to one thing then I just don’t do it and it starts making me feel a grudge. So the only thing I’ve really played outside of pokemon is undertale and that was me getting through the hotlands.

Record Keeper Jeez, these are some old AF posts about pokemon lodged in my gameplay journal.

I was playing a nuzlocke mode of Emerald for one of my story concepts but it unceremoniously died at Flannnery and the only survivor was Azumarill, which died to a random battle, so I’m just going back to playing regular Pokémon. Pokemon Emerald: There’s a section where I’m like… hmm. IGN might’ve been memed on for this one but they were kind of right to say there’s too much water. Why’s there a whole section with only like, one town that’s insignificant outside of floating on logs. It was at this point in emerald I was like “crap where am I going” so I just uh. Went with a guide. Route 123 to jagged pass… the back to back magma aqua stuff was grating, but rayquaza is so cool it makes me forgive it. speaking of forgiveness in video games. in between intermims when I get sick of pokemon (which considering I saw my playthrough’s team and realized there was no way I’d get to the elite 4 without grinding (I’ve been using music playlists to allievate the boredom), I play Kirby’s adventure. Even though it sort of has the same problems I had with nightmare in dreamland (fast ability stars and like zero time to react to grab it, enemy placement that’s absurd, minibosses… I don’t like), I forgive it because I think by NES standards it’s good in the music and art style. Nightmare in Dreamland just has something on it I don’t like (or it could just be rose tinted glasses.)

April:
I beat Pokemon Emerald but… I broke the rules. I did something I shouldn’t have done. I beat the elite four being carried by a level 70 rayquaza that replaced my camerupt because I was too lazy to properly train up the rest of my pokemon. It was real easy too, like once I caught it the final chunk of the game might as well have just been a speedrun. Disappointing? A bit. Guess I should try grinding a bit more for the next time I play emerald. This was the final roster since I was originally playing a nuzlocke (the only survivor was the Azumarill of the original run after everyone wiped to Flannery) and then just continued after the run ended. I swapped out my starter for Celebi. I made a piccrew of the protagonist too a while back (the story was that he thought the Celebi was a weird budew.)

I’ve been playing through emerald again but with a weird randomizer. Nothing more jarring than watching Pokémon be in the ocean and then use explosion and legendaries be commonplace catch rates and all. Now that i know what I’m doing though for Emerald’s plot I’m not as pissed off by the aqua magma fetchquest stuff, it’s not as bad once I recall what to do. I could always just consult *how long to beat* and see how far I get with that for non Pokémon RPGs but everything requires me investing time and for some odd reason it’s quite easy for me to not do that.

As for the Pokémon thing I’m considering after this latest one I move onto the DS ones since I want to do more long running games for the fall to switch pace. The only consistent thing will likely stay with XIV (thus, ending the whole latale-flyff-RuneScape-MapleStory M rotation I had going on.) Pokemon Reboot certainly had some designs I didn’t see because I was too busy aiming for the nugget bridge exploit to get a dratini. Honestly that last chunk where I had to systematically hunt down every trainer was my fault which has inspired my new challenge run idea for randomizers I have, otherwise I’m just moving onto Gen 2. Which I’ve done so with Pokémon Crystal Advance (redux) I’ve never played the original crystal advance, so I have no merits to judge it. However, I’ve had some to say about it so far like… they sure did have a double battle with Falkner for the first gym. There’s a lot of generational distribution. I’m kinda more into an experience of vanilla johto instead of the perfected experience so after this I might go backwards to just plain crystal and gold and silver instead of something like… legacy.
Played more of Pokémon Crystal Advance Redux. This crap is hard as hell, even the magikarp have hands. I have to do teambuilding but also have to consider I can’t use more convenient Pokemon due to already using them for other halls of fame. And it’s only gonna get worse the more games I clear… I’ve yet to find a vanilla johto game remake but hey, shiny onix. I did not want an onix on my team. But since it’s shiny. I have to use it. My system in place is that I only play until I get a badge and then I stop. I hope onix can evolve without trading because I do not care about Onix in any way, shape, or form. I’m sorry onix enjoyers.

More Pokemon . Same old, same old. Nothing incredible to say so it’s whatever. So the way I vibe with Pokémon isn’t active, but passive, because I use it to multitask with my hands while doing other stuff, like watching shows. Going forward I’ll only post cleared Pokémon games instead of in progress ones (unless it’s an ended demo.)

I beat two rounds of emerald with pixie mons so now the third run of emerald is obviously just a regular run with it. I’m considering having a checkmark dex or something to ensure that I actually utilize all Pokémon that are available to me, even if that mindset is stupid. Actually, that gives me an idea based on my IRL Pokémon games I still have….

Everyone is out here with their new games and meanwhile I got back into playing like, a Pokémon Emerald Bad Pokemon only run where I immediately busted out the rare candies since I quite frankly do not have the time or patience to actually grind out them. I think it’s justifiable when other hard mode games do have them.

( I still stand by the rare candy thing. No one is playing something like run and bun with grinding, there are level caps for a reason.)

Pokemon(?) :There’s only so much time I can spend dedicated to long term RPGs so my new strat is doing ironman’s. One run and if I die im done.

Pokewilds retake: i updated but I lost all my old saves… I got swept by a sudowoodo. Pokémon crafting is pretty good fun. The Ironmon thing is pretty funny because it’s either like I manage to get through a game easily or I get wiped to the first few battles. I’ve gotten a bit in of Gaia and Turquiose.



Unsure of when, Janurary:
Worsties update: So I beat Zapdos. Only took me learning attract and a lot of stat reducers between tail whip and attract (like my previous Eevee run. Also did the fugitives arc. Will likely cover later. Now I’m going to be stuck on Groudon like my first prediction!

Pokémon Section: Pokemon gets a seperate update but I’ll have three posts for it depending on how the rest of the month goes. My current progress on the XY chronicles has grinded to a total halt as I’ve found myself easily distracted by wanting to reread all of special, playing crystal clear instead of X, and being too invested in finishing death note instead of continuing to watch the anime since I finished up the Pokémon TV project already. You need to collect that crap on different services like it’s the goddamn chaos emeralds to have a chance of watching all the seasons now. So it was probably better in the past before all the streaming services started taking pieces of the pokemon pie which makes it a bit annoying that there’s no official subs after all these years either, right. If all of the pokemon series is a distrubution nightmare it’s kinda crazy that 20 years in they refuse to acknowledge other language options. Eventually I caved and grabbed the docs for crystal clear since that seems? to be my focus right now. Pokemon Related Content

I played through Yellow Legacy which was fun. I did it on my tablet instead of my usual computer. I also played through cubic crystal since Delta came out. I forgot how much Zubat SUCK in early game when you’re on mt.moon and all the SuperSonics hit and you hit yourself everytime Goddamn bat. I have no idea how to start the looker quest in X and I think it’s hit low priority at the moment.

Magikarp Jump experience: Let’s go gambling! Voltorb Aw dang it

Pidgeotto Aw dang it

Gyarados Aw dang it

Only 2 leagues left Entire thing is a numbers game and time sink Best method is getting lucky with training because later facilities give larger nunbers for JP Unless you’re willing to spend cold hard cash majority of what I do in between ranks is dump money into lower level training facilities so I can get more support candies It’s a high risk high reward high danger sort of thing where if you heck up you have to reset the levels and spend more time retraining which is the entire game Motivation bonus carries the late game but is double edged because the higher rank means more time to raise up a new karp to raise the bonus so it’s a huge time waster the game is basically a case study of conditioning because i really did check in every hour 30 minutes to do training, go to league, rinse and repeat literal habit forming for a silly game on jumping obviously the fact that i realized this was for F2P games this was basically the stamina bar this is how addictions get started, the sunk cost fallacy because it's like, i already get up every hour 30 to check on the fish, might as well keep going..? I got to the last league and yeah this is just a case study for conditioning someone to check in and do the same thing over and over for the sake of number get big. So it’s the cookie clicker of Pokémon, minus the grandmaapocalypse.

Magikarp Jump (Complete, 7/26)

I already complained about this one in the journal, but kinda crazy how a simple game about Magikarp jumping made me realize the futility of stamina bars in mobile games It’s not like there’s a gacha to speed up the process you have to sit and wait every time for the same of BIG jump, they really did jump high up though, This game best exemplifies what an actual grind to level 100 would be like for IRL Pokémon, completely and utterly tedious. I really did luck out with my gen 148 Magikarp getting the pikachu cheer bonus on the final fight instead of actually getting to level 100.

Did you have fun though? was the journey worthwhile?

I mean, it was kinda funny seeing the elite four have increasingly weird hats, and the various jokes if you screwed up with RNG, and I saw in game proof of Red, so yeah. I wouldn’t do it again though.

Anyways, Pokemon Ironmon has been pretty weird, what I sincerely need to do is just play the game like a speedrunner and go fast, that’s the way I got the first run of Leafgreen done and I haven’t really had that momentum for any other game I’ve played because doing ironmon means if I make a single mistake I don’t actually get to fully explore the game… so ironically, ironmon might be dead again? Depends on how it goes with the Gen 1 games, that’s my new focus. The XY chronicles is a year long project so it’s okay if I don’t do it all now. The notes are scattering a bit more now. Right now pokemon wise I’m hitting a wall with my normal monotype because normal types and fire types mean no type coverage at the moment. I think I’ve got a run of recharged pink halfway through if I decide to evolve my pokemon which is… interesting to play with no evolutions. I’m doing the same with Baby Blue since that one is based on the little cup.
So in my final line up I’ve got Yellow Legacy, Baby Blue, Mono Sword, and I’m probably not finishing my X nuzlocke this year. My pokemon gameplay log is getting severely reduced after this year as I’ve essentially grown incredibly bored with pokemon post Sword playthroughs.