Complaints of a Long Time Pokémon Fan

This coming Wednesday is Pokémon Day, the anniversary of the original release of Pocket Monsters Red and Pocket Monsters Green for the Game Boy. On 27th February 1996, Nintendo and Game Freak unleashed this duo of titles to the Japanese market. The addictive nature of catching, training and battling with a menagerie of 151 creatures - coupled with the revolutionary trading mechanic - sparked something special and with the worldwide release of Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue several years later, Pokémon truly became a global phenomenon.

Even now, 23 years on from its introduction, this is a franchise that remains consistently popular and shows no sign of going away. We’re now on the 7th generation of the core series of RPG’s, with a trading card game, a long, long running anime, countless videogame spin-offs, more merchandise than you can shake a Sudowoodo at and a hugely successful mobile app ensuring that Pokémon is on the minds of millions of people around the world, whether they’re fans of the critters or not.

The game that kickstarted a global phenomenon.

Staying on the subject of videogames, though, it’s been a while since we’ve seen new entries in the core Pokémon series. The last time we were introduced to a whole new adventure with a fresh batch of Pokémon to discover was back in 2016 when Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon released on the 3DS. Since then, we’ve had pseudo sequels Pokémon Ultra Sun and Pokémon Ultra Moon (also on 3DS), and last year Nintendo got the nostalgia juices of all us OG Pokémon trainers flowing on the Switch with Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu and Pokémon Let’s Go Eevee. These reimaginings of the original Game Boy games boasted a dramatic visual makeover alongside a slew of quality-of-life changes and integration with Pokémon Go.

The 8th generation of Pokémon games have already been confirmed as being well into development and slated to release for Switch sometime in 2019. It’s not unreasonable to assume that Pokémon Switch and Pokémon Switcheroo - or whatever they end up being named - will be Nintendo’s tentpole holiday season releases as far as Switch exclusives go. But what can we expect from the next generation of Pokémon RPG’s? With hopes being high that Pokémon Day will bring Switch related news, below you’ll find my own personal wishlist, some of it perfectly reasonable, some of it… somewhat impractical, if you want to get technical. These are the key areas in which I, as a long time fan of Pokémon, personally believe that the franchise needs to evolve in the future.

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I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was…

I don’t think that it’s unfair to state that the main storylines in the core Pokémon RPG’s have become somewhat predictable. A world-renowned Pokémon professor lets a 10-year old kid choose his or her first Pokémon companion - either a grass, water or fire type Pokémon, almost without exception - before the mother of said minor inexplicably allows their child to wander halfway across the world while sleeping rough and interacting with hundreds of strangers along the way, many of them being of questionable moral character. Now, I’m not completely against letting that specific staple of storytelling live on, but I’d also like to see that traditional setup get shaken up a little.

Pokémon Switch and Switcheroo should allow players to buck that trend and inject more of themselves into their playable avatar and the storyline they experience. We’re currently already able to personalise our roster of fighters to a certain degree by governing their moveset, their evolution and the like. Likewise, more recent entries in the series have allowed us a limited amount of customisation in terms of our physical appearance and clothing. But why not allow us to take it even further by entering our actual age into the game and have it alter the premise of the storyline? Why do I have to play as a 10-year old who gets his first Pokémon? Would it be so heinous if the series slightly deviated from the basic story template that it’s adhered to for so long so that I could actually play as a 34-year old man? A 34-year old man who quits his job at the local supermarket, decides to devote his life to fulfilling his dreams of become a Pokémon master and sets off on a journey to finally make it happen? This relatively small change would not only grant the player the feeling that they’re truly inhabiting the world of Pokémon, but by changing how the NPC’s react to the player depending on their age, it would make their journey so much more personal.

Why am I always forced to play as kids?

Speaking of story, I’ve always felt that Pokémon games have been sorely wanting in meaningful side quests. More often than not, there’s a subplot involving Team Rocket or some other nefarious gang of evildoers attempting to take over the world or catch a mythical Pokémon in order to reach some dastardly goal, but the option to have the player wander the map and be introduced to interesting NPC’s has forever been squandered. Think back on the RPG greats - Skyrim, Fallout 4, The Witcher 3, to name only a few - and how the sidequests that the player could discover were likely to end up being every bit as interesting and impactful as the main plotline, if not more so. That’s what Pokémon needs, in my opinion: a shaking up of the status quo and the addition of characters and storylines that make the region you’re exploring truly feel like a real world that’s inhabited by real people, with their own wants, motivations and stories to tell. There’s an opportunity here to inject some really heartfelt and emotional story beats, something that’s generally lacking in a Pokémon RPG.

I will travel across the land, searching far and wide...

As a rule, Pokémon games have never been the embodiment of technical prowess. The only true standout moments, when the games’ visuals and presentation truly leapt forward, came when Pokémon Gold and Silver arrived on the Game Boy Color and later when the series made the transition from DS to 3DS in the form of Pokémon X and Y. Even then, Pokémon has been pretty steadfast in its reluctance to abandon that classic zoomed out bird’s eye view of the world, only ever so slightly experimenting with sweeping camera angles in an attempt to inject some cinematic flair into proceedings.

One of the reasons for this must surely be the fact that the core series has, up until now, remained solely on handheld consoles. There’s only so much juice you can squeeze out of a technically limited device before it becomes more akin to squeezing blood from a stone. The Let’s Go games on Switch certainly dialled up the visual fidelity for the series, but ironically it’s two of the GameCube Pokémon spin-offs that most closely resemble what I’m looking for in Pokémon Switch and Switcheroo. Pokémon Colosseum and Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness both provide a great template for how the Switch instalments of the core series should be presented, regardless of how many missteps they made in terms of sullying their namesakes with misguided design choices and dodgy gameplay mechanics. These were games that gave players more fully 3D areas to explore, though even those are tame by today’s home console standards. I want those new Pokémon games on Switch to go whole hog: zoom the camera in to a third-person perspective, let us manipulate it ourselves and feel more closely connected to the in-game world.

If the idea of Pokémon looking like this doesn't get you excited...

While we’re on the subject of the game world, expand it and make that journey from one city to the next actually feel like a trek. Spread out the more heavily populated areas, pepper the various grasslands and mountain ranges with smaller towns and little nooks and crannies to really get lost in and get those aforementioned side quests in there. Also, for the love of God, don’t go back to the random encounters of past Pokémon games. Arguably the greatest change made by the Let’s Go games was that the wild Pokémon actually existed in the world; you could see them beforehand and choose whether or not you wanted to engage that fiftieth Pidgey flapping about or make a move on that Ponyta you just clocked up the road. Combine all of that with the visual upgrade of Let’s Go Pikachu and Let’s Go Eevee and what you’ve essentially got is Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age crossed with Pokémon, and who doesn’t honestly want to play that?

Gotta catch ‘em all!

Here’s something that anyone who started out as a Pokémon trainer way back in the late 90’s should have no trouble relating to. After playing through Pokémon Sun and moving on to the task of filling out the Pokédex, I very quickly found myself yearning for simpler times; times when wandering through the Kanto region and tracking down a mere 151 Pokémon actually - and really rather hilariously, with hindsight - seemed like a truly insurmountable obstacle. With the exception of Mew, catching every available creature was perfectly feasible two decades ago, provided you knew someone with the opposite version of the game. Own Pokémon Blue and need a Growlithe to complete your collection, for example? Track down a Red owner, trade them that Vulpix they’re pining over and job’s a good'un.

Fast forward 20 years, however, and compiling information on every available Pokémon is an entirely different kettle of Finneon. With the additional species introduced in Sun and Moon and their Ultra follow-ups - along with the as of now Pokémon Go and Let’s Go exclusives, Meltan and Melmetal - the full roster of monsters sits at a staggering 809, and that’s not including the various alternate versions of numerous Pokémon that can be found - Unown, notoriously, has a bewildering 26 different forms, for example. Attaining every last unique Pokémon now involves tracking down multiple games across no fewer than four generations of Nintendo handhelds, before going through the arduous process of utilising the countless Pokémon storage apps and less than unified transfer methods to get your widespread collection of monsters to your chosen platform. Not to mention that legitimately acquiring some of the rarer legendary and mythical creatures requires either having to wait for them to be doled out wirelessly during short windows or subjecting oneself to the ravenous hordes of completionists present at specially held events.

If you got all of these into one Pokémon game through legitimate means, you're one dedicated trainer.

When that duo of Switch games does eventually surface and unleashes a swathe of new Pokémon to chuck plastic balls at, it’s not a stretch of the imagination to assume that the already Wikipedia-crashing number of critters will exceed 900. If I’m being frank here, expecting anybody but the most devoted of players to actually jump through the amount of hoops required in order to accomplish the gargantuan task of Pokédex completion flew past unrealistic several generations ago. Regardless of how many new species are added, I want Pokémon Switch and Switcheroo to take more of a back to basics approach in regards to collecting, allowing every available Pokémon to be legitimately obtainable via sinking enough time into catching, training, breeding and trading between the two versions of the game. It’s time for Pokémon to stop making a mockery of its own motto. Gotta catch ‘em all? Right now, that’s sort of taking the piss.

Rant over.