Pokémon Moving Forward
Also available in Portuguese (Brazil)
With the recent announcement of the new Pokémon Sun and Moon versions, it gets hard to not think about expectations for the games moving forward, so this led me to wonder over what Pokémon has done, what it hasn’t done, and what it could do. What fantasies were the old games feeding us, and what are the games nowadays doing to satisfy those desires better? We’ll start by analyzing the base of Pokémon games.
What did Pokémon do incredibly right?
I’m sure you all know the deal, Pocket Monsters/Pokémon is an RPG that first started out on the Game Boy, your party consisting from 1 to 6 of the over a hundred different monsters — Pokemon, that you could find and tame in your game (and then a few dozen more that you could get by trading with a friend that had another version of the game). Different types of both Pokémon and their attacks, or “moves”, have their own quirks, resistances and weaknesses. The key to the game is to capture as many different kinds of monsters you can find in the wild, grow those who you work better with or just are your favorites, forming a strong party of varied types of creatures that show off your unique preferences, personality and playstyle, and defeat other trainers’ Pokémon with your own, by applying knowledge of what types of Pokémon are strong against which, and employing some strategy accordingly on the fly. This is the basis of all “mainline”/non spin-off Pokémon games.
The Pokémon games are heavily focused on combat, being RPGs. The important and impressive thing that it did back then in 1996 is that with only using regular RPG mechanics as interface, it managed to convey feelings of raising pets, animal studying and exploring in one tight and concise thing that made complete sense and logic within itself.
Your Pokémon, for instance, can only have four different moves at a time, which isn’t common in RPGs — RPG characters never “unlearn” abilities, they only gain more and more of them as they level up. This makes sense in the Pokémon games though, as not only that creates an interesting strategy layer in itself, since the game also has a competitive side of battling your friends that other RPGs did not, but it also allows the players to express themselves and make their own Pokémon feel unique and alive. Also contributing to that, is the option to input them a nickname yourself, like pets.
The mechanics of different Types (a semi-elemental association that every Pokémon has) not only is another helpful point for the game’s strategic side, as to force players to not rely on just one Pokémon or mere raw strength, but it also has the function of giving the player a sensation of studying animals like an explorer would. Guessing a Pokémon’s typing was an essential part of the game, as it would allow you to guess what kind of moves, weaknesses and attributes a certain creature has. Not counting the Rock-Paper-Scissors system of each Pokémon type, they also have some distinguishing quirks — Bug types evolve fast, so they would be great for the early game, Fire types are immune to the ‘Burn’ status effect, Rock types had very strong defense and resistance to a lot of common types of moves, Normal types despite having no upper hand at any other typing, they’re able to learn an incredible variety of moves, etc. A Pokémon’s appearance was also key at strongly hinting at what typing it had, especially if you were playing on a Super Game Boy or a Game Boy Color, as the coloring of a Pokémon would be an even easier tell — a blue palette would often mean Water typing, a green palette could mean Grass or Bug, browns and grays were often reserved for Normal, Ground and Rock types, etc.
Knowing your types not only gives you an upper hand in battling trainers, but even on capturing wild Pokémon, as to be able to capture a Pokémon more easily, you need to lower its health as much as you can without depleting it. Sometimes you want to hit the target Pokémon with an attack that it is resistant to, as to not defeat it and miss your chance at capturing. The capture mechanic rewarded players who knew the most about Pokémon — what specific rooms of Mt.Moon, for instance, will I be able to find rarer creatures like Paras and Clefairy? What level will they be at when I find them? What are those creatures’ types and how are their defenses? Are they able to use a dangerous move that will put me at risk? Are they able to use moves that will allow them to escape from battle, and if so, how can I capture them in the least amount of turns possible? How easy are they to capture with a regular Poké Ball, do I use something stronger, like a Great Ball, or an Ultra Ball? Getting all this knowledge from playing the games more often, testing them and employing them, really made you feel as if you really are researching these creatures.
And all of that is truly impressive when you consider that this is all within the same interface that any other turn-based RPG of that time, like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, used, just designed around and re-contextualized to fit the fantasy of raising and taming animals. Nothing is excessive, every element means something in all three different spheres that this game delivers on, which I like to call them: ‘Tamagotchi’, which is the fantasy of raising your own pet, ‘Competition’, which means competing against other players, and ‘Narrative’, which I just mean going through the narrative of the game and trying to accomplish its main goal. ‘Narrative’ can be interpreted as the game’s “single player mode”, it’s also a form of competition, but an asymmetrical one, against the game itself.
These would usually be three different games, as RPGs are mostly solely focused on ‘Narrative’, ‘Competition’ is reserved for something like fighting games, and ‘Tamagotchi’ is self-explanatory. But instead, all the base elements of Pokémon battling fulfill something in these three pretty distinct spheres, which makes it a game with great appeal to a wide audience and very easy to understand. This is why I feel the success of the franchise is strongly linked to the games’ own DNA.
With all that praise, I’ll just completely 180 and tell you why I’d try to move away from this base that the franchise has clanged onto for so long.
Why doesn’t it work as well anymore?
These mechanics made more sense back then, partially, because they had more room to not be interpreted as literal. The original Pokémon games were made on the Game Boy, an 8-bit monochromatic system. It didn’t have room for nuance or to give you several different aspects of the Pokémon world. Your mind filled the gaps, alongside all the other media surrounding it. Nowadays though, your Pokémon isn’t just a 50 pixels squared monochromatic picture, it’s a polished 3D model that moves all by itself, breathing, blinking, looking around, swishing their tail. The graphics of the Pokémon feeling a bit distant from each other and not directly touching or animating much when attacking was okay at the time, but now, with the graphics depicting everything more literally, it feels awkward and constricted to still be holding onto that same layout, resulting in two fluid-moving Pokémon just standing around on a very ‘literal’ ’looking field, with an accurate sense of space and scale between them, just staring awkwardly and idly waiting to throw special effects at each other from a distance.
What those old games did to us as children, or at least myself, was to wonder how would those situations, depicted in a more abstract form, could play outside of the restrictions of the hardware. There was no sense of accurate scale or space between the Pokémon, so some battles could feel as if the two creatures are closely brawling with each other, while creatures that we felt were huge, like a Zapdos or a Dragonite would feel distant, towering, looming above. The in-battle animation for a Surf would make our minds wonder about the enormous size of the tidal wave crashing onto our Pokémon, and how would it react to it — my Gyarados is a Water Pokémon, so of course, it could just swim through it and that’s why it suffers so little damage. Or when I order my Charizard to use Fly to bring me to the other side of the Kanto region, it makes me wonder about arriving everywhere like that, like your own school, riding on a giant flying dragon. And then you’d wonder how would you hang out with your own Pokémon, and do other things that aren’t battling.
As the games kept getting made, they never quite answered those questions satisfactorily. Locations and Pokémon were getting depicted more literally, but the framework would not be expanded accordingly to accommodate and to fulfill these fantasies we had. The battle system was polished and balanced better, but, for instance, the overworld would still be tile-based and you can barely see actual Pokémon roaming around.
And it’s not just presentation, parts of its own system don’t work as well as it did. Like how beating a Pokémon up to capture it just feels like animal abuse. Nobody befriends or adopts pets that way. This was a criticism that was leveraged and joked about then, and it’s even more out of place now. Again, stripping it out of some context, suspending our disbelief and trying to take it as a system itself, it’s easy to understand and it interacts nicely with the other mechanics, and a Shin Megami Tensei or Undertale-style befriending mechanic relies on text in a way that it could make the games inaccessible to a 8 year old me, who didn’t know much English at all back then (and the games have yet to be translated in Portuguese). But as the franchise has strongly asserted a relationship of friendship and equals between human and Pokémon (which is complete bullshit anyway since Pokémon don’t wander around trapping people in Poké-Balls) and as everything framed around this system became depicted in a less abstract manner, it just feels weird to beat up wild Pokémon and then have the games pretend that we’re suddenly “buddies” and that it’s totally not a completely imbalanced abusive relationship. Also, with the internet and with the balancing of the newer games, the previously mentioned researcher-like guesswork in capturing wild Pokémon became undervalued very quickly.
In summary, as the systems of pure Pokémon battling were polished, the games never expanded upon the other fantasies that it lightly indulged. Not much else did the games do to make you really feel like a Pokémon explorer, rancher, or do anything meaningful with them other than pure battling.
And the reason why the games’ system is as rigid and immutable as it is, is ironically, because of it’s previous strengths. It’s a system that is simple to understand, and it tries to satisfy three different desires, or types of game (in which I dubbed previously ‘Tamagotchi’, ‘Competitive’ and ‘Narrative’). The result is that designers are now tied to it, as steering the mechanics towards any of these three axes can jeopardize the other two in a true tug-of-war manner.
For instance, if the game’s more worried about player expression and raising your favorite creatures (‘Tamagotchi’ axis), then why is the narrative of the game almost strictly focused on battling? Why should you raise your Pokémon to be stronger all the time and why is there little to no reason to do anything else other than making them stronger? Why aren’t there any other options to take? Couldn’t I raise them for something else? Why is the system put in place nearly obligating me to evolve my favorite Pokémon, Braixen, to the not-nearly-as-perfect Delphox so it’s not completely useless in game, because battling is all that matters? Steering into that axis means taking away focus from the battle system entirely.
And on the other hand, if the game is worried about its ‘Competitive’ axis, then why are players obligated to sink countless hours into grinding Pokémon levels, breeding the right Pokémon together several times, having a whole flowchart of what moves can this Pokémon learn from which game and how to transfer from each onward, across multiple cartridges and handheld consoles, and worrying about all the nightmare that is managing special values (EV, IV) that were initially designed anyway exactly so that two Pokémon would never be the same, and therefore, one could have an inherent advantage over the other? Focusing on that axis means instantly giving players access to whatever Pokémon they want with whatever stats and moves they want, which, of course, clashes against balancing the single-player experience and kills off the ‘Tamagotchi’ axis entirely.
Indulging players invested in these axes isn’t necessarily impossible. Pokémon X and Y were the best Pokémon games in a long while exactly because it brought important needed changes and additions to make for a better time for all those three different focuses. The Pokémon Amie mode, a simple side mode that you can pet and feed your Pokémon in a Nintendogs/skinship sort of way, is a great first step towards giving players more on the ‘Tamagotchi’ side. Meanwhile, Super Training is a godsend to players looking for ‘Competition’. Also, the sheer amount of different Pokémon you could capture even on the first routes of those games allowed players to easily pick their favorites, alongside the decision of giving players access to internet trading extremely quickly, and finally, the new EXP Share drastically reduced grinding, as not only it speeds up getting your Pokémon ‘Competition’-ready, but also allowing players focusing on ‘Narrative’ to more easily try out other Pokémon along the way instead of being funneled into one party if they did not want to spend a lot of time grinding and training lower level Pokémon up to shape to progress story-wise.
Despite those long-needed additions, I’m skeptical if the Pokémon games can truly deliver a lot more by still using this old framework. After all, turn-based RPGs existed partially because it was a handy way of depicting complex action in a minimalist way. As RPG series evolved with hardware, they moved onto delivering the same kind of action in a more active and involved manner, like the upcoming Final Fantasy XV, or games like Monster Hunter. That is not to say that turn-based RPGs are obsolete (Undertale was my favorite game of 2015, for instance), it’s just that I feel it shackles Pokémon from moving into more interesting directions and truly indulging in those fantasies we had over 15–18 years ago.
Still, I realize the inherent difficulty of my request. It’d take too much money and effort in making Pokémon a different game, and the turn-based RPG format is handy at giving more or less equal spotlight to all the several hundred Pokémon creatures created without putting too much time and effort in individual creatures — in other words, as they added more and more Pokémon and changed little of the framework around those games, they have designed the franchise into a corner themselves. I don’t have a clear answer either, but Pokémon-Amie seems like an important first step in bringing something meaningful to the franchise that doesn’t revolve around battling, and I’d really love to see that expanded upon and be given more care and attention by the developers. Something that could also help is exploring the Pokémon world more in attempts at better and bigger spin-off titles — we’ve had a lot of Pokémon spin-offs, but most of them don’t feel like they’re expanding and indulging on fantasies about things to do in a Pokémon world, just games initially designed as something else, and then with the franchise tacked onto it to sell better (and that’s because some of them literally are that, right, Panel de Pon?), and even the most successful ones are often have a lot to do with battling and fighting, like Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, or most Pokémon puzzle games, which are usually framed around Pokémon battling too. We need more games like Pokémon Snap.
There’s a reason why everyone’s excited about Pokémon Go despite little to no knowledge about how that’s even going to be like. Pokémon is still strong and dear to many people’s hearts, and they want to do more with these characters. I don’t know what shape that takes, but it could be delivered.
