Everything about Pokemon (in my opinion) part 1

Almost everyone has heard of Pokemon (or in Japan, Pocket Monsters).  Among popular and successful franchises, Pokemon is one which is very well liked by both children and adults (it should be noted, many of us young adults were in fact children when the franchise came to being). Pokemon is known in several mediums. While originally and primarily being video game based, it also has an animated series, a card game, and of course there's a lot of collectible merchandise for this franchise. Now you might be asking what kind of appeal does this franchise have which might make it so successful. That might be best explained by understanding the premise of Pokemon.

Pokemon as I stated was originally a video game, specifically an RPG. In the world of Pokemon, trainers catch, train, and battle with creatures known as Pokemon (hence the title). There are many kinds of Pokemon that inhabit the world, and your goal as a trainer is to catch all the Pokemon and be the best trainer there is. In this RPG, you do not have typical party members which join you at specified points of the story, but rather your team of Pokemon is determined more by which ones you choose to capture from the wild. At its fundamentals, the world of Pokemon is one which encourages its players to explore and discover. Given the huge variety in Pokemon you can encounter, there is also a large degree of customization in building a team. So not only is there discovery in finding new Pokemon, there is discovery of new ways to create a more powerful team for battling. Competitive players like myself in particular take great interest in Pokemon battling due to the depth of customization possible in building teams.


Now before I start rambling about competitive Pokemon, I will acknowledge that not everyone is into the nitty gritty details about competitive battling.  So I'll quickly give a few thoughts on the other facets of Pokemon in this part of my ramblings.

To be frank, I'm not a fan of the anime as an adult, but back when Pokemon was new, I do remember finding the anime quite interesting. For one, its English voice acting is in fact quite good. Furthermore, as I've stated, Pokemon at its fundamentals strongly emphasizes the element of discovery.  In a way, I believe that makes the show fascinating, bringing up logical fantasy elements that come together to explain how creatures in this world interact with one another. It becomes exciting as Ash Ketchum either encounters new never before seen Pokemon, or when the ones he's caught suddenly learn new game-changing moves. The anime by all means intends to follow a similar purpose as its video game routes. The thrill of discovery defines its entertainment.

I have a few problems with the anime however. For one, the anime does a pretty awful job at being consistent with the laws dictated by the video games.  Most notably, the many times Pikachu beats a Ground-type Pokemon with Thunderbolt, such as vs Brock's Onix, vs the trainer in the beginning of the first Pokemon movie and his Golem, yeah.  I mean sure, the video games gave Pikachu an exclusive item that actually makes it hit like a nuclear bomb, but my point still stands that it's a pretty dreadful inconsistency.  Oh and the time when Sabrina's father told Ash to look for a Ghost type so he could rechallenge her.  Well, that's fine and dandy, except Alakazam in the actual game counters Gengar (and its pre-evos Haunter and Gastly) pretty hard given it is faster and hits super effectively on their secondary Poison type.  Don't get me started either on how the only Ghost type attack in R/B/Y was Lick, and it actually had no effect on Psychics. Yeah.

Maybe I shouldn't be too hard on the anime for taking liberties for the sake of thematic entertainment. But speaking of entertainment, a lot of it comes from Ash and Pikachu's interaction with the series villains, known as Team Rocket.  Well, if Jessie, James, and Meowth could be called villains.  While they are devious, they are much more comical and stupid to be frank. Their entire goal is to steal Ash's Pikachu (big deal, right?). Evidently in episode 2, they came to the conclusion that Pikachu was OP simply because the combination of Charge and Thunder (I made that up, shoot me if I'm not funny) swept them. I mean, seriously? They really were only blown up by massive amounts of setup favorable to Pikachu to be frank.  At any rate, the consistency at which they fail to capture Ash's Pikachu pretty much explains their incompetency.  They do however get points for exiting with style.  No episode is complete without Team Rocket blasting off again, right?

Let's be real, you do have to be kinda badass to survive
both the explosion and the resulting trip to the stratosphere.

Ultimately however, I can't take the anime seriously as an adult.  It is rife with inconsistencies, and its plot progression is repetitively simplistic and uninspired for the most part. It's just the same thing every episode as Ash encounters some new Pokemon, saves Pikachu from Team Rocket, and generally through some corny means proves how he's usually somehow a more skilled and caring trainer than all the miscellaneous side characters he runs into (not that he never loses battles nor randomly fails, but Ash and his Pikachu are most definitely pretty damn glorified). Don't let me tell you that you shouldn't watch the anime though.  You have to at least listen to Eric Stuart in the unleashed manliness that is Brock and James' voice. Trust me, the voice acting in the show is definitely good. Also if you are a fan of the video game, you will at least love the soundtrack.  Very powerful remixes of familiar in-game themes. Go look it up on youtube!

Totally not related and totally NSFW,  but totally recommended to read.

Moving onto the card game...I'll keep my opinion on this one really quick.  Firstoff, I don't actually know a whole lot about it given it has changed a lot since the R/B/Y era.  Secondly however, I fundamentally think trading card games are lame because collecting cards is a pain in the ass.  Starter decks will only get you so far.  You have to really work and shell out cash and quarters to really get a solid variety of cards to optimize your deck just in general. I guess the other way to treat the trading cards is like any other merchandise, as collectors items to admire. Depending on how you want to approach this, this can still either be fun or tedious. There's basically a never ending supply of cards and merchandise to collect, and realistically you probably will never get close to acquiring all of it.

One thing that is interesting about the card game is that unevolved Pokemon tend to be far more valuable than evolved ones. This is due to how the energy system is designed.  It takes a larger number of energy cards to perform actions with most evolved Pokemon in the card game, so thus the best Pokemon in the card game are usually non-evolved or stage 1 evolution Pokemon that have cheap but reliable abilities. As I recall, Haunter had a guaranteed sleep status at the cost of only 1 or 2 energy cards?  Koffing likewise I think had a 10 damage attack that either confused or poisoned at the cost of 1 energy card. Legendaries on the other hand like Moltres are gutter trash in comparison when you basically need 4 energy cards to do an 80 damage move that might fail half the time, or something awful like that.

Fortunately, there are some significantly more reasonable alternatives to the madness that is known as collecting petty rectangular slips of laminated cardstock. There is a Game Boy Color adaptation of the card game, which I actually own a copy of and found moderately enjoyable, though it is only up to date with Generation 1 cards.  Better yet however, there is in fact an online Pokemon Trading Card Game simulator that is completely free to play.  I personally am not motivated to invest any extra skill into it though, but I will say from personal experience that having a computer do the work for you in playing the game is infinitely convenient when you no longer have to rely on messy tokens and pen and paper to figure out the math for everything.

I'm actually somewhat surprised Nintendo hasn't made a sequel to this on the DS.

Aside from collecting cards, as I've stated that the other way to show your appreciation for Pokemon is of course buying other assorted merchandise for the series.  Again, I'll try to keep my opinion on this one pretty brief.  The first thing to note is there are currently 649 Pokemon in Pokemon Black and White series, not counting extra formes for specific Pokemon.  As you can imagine, this is a ridiculously large number of potential creatures that could be made into figurines, artwork for notepads/binders, toys, and other collectibles.  This has a few implications.  The first being that having a really complete Pokemon merchandise collection is either impossible or requires you to spend outrageous amounts of money.  The second being what you pick can really personalize what kind of Pokemon fan you are.  Thus, I would recommend buying wisely.  Pick specific things that you know will make you happy if you want them.

Trust me, there was once a time where I really tried to be a hardcore Pokemon merchandise collector.  Some of you young adults in my age group may remember a time when Burger King had Pokemon themed toys with their kids meals, right?  Well yeah, my family and I actually went out of our way to collect them all. If we didn't succeed, we came extremely damn close. There were 60 different toys to collect.  Imagine all the junk food we ate back in 1999. Trust me, it's much healthier to be happy with collecting your absolute favorites.

Yes, these actually came in Poke Balls.  Serious business I tell you.

In general, you can see that I don't really place a whole lot of value on the Pokemon anime, card game, and its merchandise.  Ultimately, I don't feel these are the most important parts of the Pokemon franchise anyway.  Pokemon's roots ultimately are in its video games, and it is in my next blog post you will learn more how I feel about the video games, both on a casual and competitive level.

RPGs

If there is any particular genre of video games that deserves to be highlighted, I would give the nod to Role Playing Games.  Firstoff, I should note that role playing games are not strictly limited to video games, as table top RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons represent a precursor to future electronic RPGs.  As for what RPGs generally consist of, they are defined by the fact that in these types of games, a player will be given control over a character or team that is driven through a story by structured decision making. This fundamental type of game design has several implications.

As I explained, the RPG genre is one that is story and decision driven. Now before anyone cheeky tries to ask what separates this from plain old Visual Novels, to be honest, it's not uncommon for those to overlap with each other. Off the top of my head, examples like the Rance series and Kamidori Alchemy Meister fit both genres. Visual Novels however are characterized mostly by the fact that they are stories, while RPGs are in fact actually games with some element of interactive mechanics as well as characters and a story to accompany them.  The decision driven nature of RPGs causes the majority of them to be turn based battle strategy games of some sort. This isn't always the case however, as seen in games like Kingdom Hearts and Star Fox Command, where in addition to being decision and story driven, technical action oriented gameplay is also a large focus.

At any rate however, this blog post will mostly focus on turn based battle strategy RPGs given they are in fact the most common and well-recognized type of RPG in existence.  Most of these games share the following common elements.

• Some kind of epic adventure (okay, a lot of games have that. RPGs however practically NEED this)
• An interactive overworld where characters travel from place to place, and where the player can interact with non-player characters and run into battle encounters
• Gradual acquisition of more important team members as the story progresses
• A combat system with rigidly defined rules and limitations 
• Menu driven battle selections
• Character growth by winning experience from battles
• Varying levels of customization often via equipment or occasionally path decisions

Probably the easiest way to feel the significance of an RPG is by design, they typically are among the most time consuming of video games to play especially if tackled without assistance of any sort.  A standard non-optimal playthrough of many such RPGs can take at least a good week or two of serious effort, or say 20-50 hours.  If the game has actual replay value, then you can at minimum double that figure and imagine a dedicated player possibly spending a month or more beating such a game to death.

The time spent on RPGs at any rate depends on a variety of things which may differ either slightly or significantly from game to game. For instance, battles play a huge fundamental role in RPGs, and their execution naturally will affect the time players need to complete objectives. Certain games may make battles difficult to the point where the player is required to grind out the battle system for experience to properly prepare for a certain boss battle. Also annoying are older RPGs, particularly from the well known Final Fantasy series, where the most popular method of making plentiful battles available is making them randomly occurring as the player moves across the map, which also artificially increases game length by forcing the player into encounters that are not strictly necessary for completing the game. This is probably the least fun way RPG length can be extended. Thankfully, this trend seems to be increasingly less common in newer RPGs, and while the need to grind may vary from player to player and game to game, being able to pick and choose your fights regardless is important in allowing players increased control over the game and reducing unnecessary tedium.

Another time intensive element in RPGs is exploration. Because well, in every epic story, the hero has to travel to places abroad in order to do stuff presumably.  Stuff not limited to and including saving innocent bystanders and looting monsters, dungeons, and homes. Yes, in many an RPG, one of the other fun things you get to do besides mindlessly killing monsters for experience and valuables is collecting treasures from the overworld in every town and dungeon you navigate. And typically you will have to travel to many such places, meaning the game developers have many opportunities to hide surprises here and there wherever you go. Whether or not the items are actually of any use is presumably up to the player to find out and experiment with, so especially if you are the type of person that is very thorough about knowing your game in and out, RPG exploration can become especially time consuming.  It gets even better (or worse, depending on which variation of "time consuming" you prefer) depending on how many hidden passageways the developers want to sneak into their game. Being a completionist for such games is a true scavenger hunt.  Especially if you're playing old SNES era 2D RPGs where many such treasures require you to find hidden passageways that are literally made invisible due to tall objects if you are not playing these games with graphic layer disabling on emulation.

So already, RPGs by default are clearly among the most time and effort intensive of all games due to the nature of decision driven gameplay leading to developers to focus more on a style of gaming where the player continually develops over time either as the story progresses or as a result of trecking through the battle system.  Could it demand any more commitment? You better believe it if said RPG has competitive replay value.  Let's take a look at Pokemon, probably the most well known of all competitively played RPGs.  The thing that makes Pokemon competitive is the battle system and the fact it is multiplayer.  Now what might you ask makes Pokemon actually a decent competitive game?  Well to answer it simply, there is a lot of depth to the battle system. Depth to put that simply comes from how many customization options the characters have.  Pokemon has a ridiculous amount of customization, both in the party members you acquire by catching Pokemon, the variety of battle commands you can have your Pokemon learn, and even the methods of stat training you choose for any particular Pokemon.  Before I turn this into a blog post about Pokemon, returning to my original point about the time intensiveness about RPGs, let's just assume for a moment that 50 hours is a fairly "long" time for a serious first playthrough of many RPGs, and that figure may be at least doubled if the RPG has reasonable replay value.  Now let's take a look at my Pokemon Diamond version, which has over 590 hours logged in.  Besides the fact that this should evidently prove that I used to play Pokemon competitively, let me blow your mind and tell you this figure of 590 hours is actually misleadingly small, because this figure doesn't count the number of hours I spent restarting my game to recapture legendary Pokemon until I got them with the stats I wanted!

With all these things being said, I'm not necessarily trying to imply that RPGs are everything and that everybody should play them because they are universally amazing.  As I've also stated earlier, RPGs often tend to share common design problems that ultimately conflict with having fun.  To list a few:

• The necessity of grinding, or repeatedly abusing a battle system to prepare for later challenges
• Random battle system constantly interfering with overworld movement
• The difficulty of creating a battle system that has depth and good customization, but is not hugely abuseable in-game and thus too easy
• Limited interactivity outside of menu-driven gameplay, which usually conflicts with action oriented gameplay
• Advanced battle mechanics that are either not explained very well, or at all

Now the good news is, a lot of these problems are actually becoming less and less of an issue over time.  This is another reason why I believe RPGs especially deserve notice over other games, because over time, they are a genre that has constantly improved, unlike say...platformers, where some of the best platformers in existence like Super Mario Bros. 3 came out in the NES era (well, 3D platformers are a slightly different story, but this post is about RPGs).  Regardless, some of the most popular RPGs are in fact older ones due to being revolutionary for their time. Look at stuff that Square Enix released for the Super Nintendo if you want to get an idea of what I'm talking about.  Games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 even today are very popular.

Now let's talk Final Fantasy 6 in particular, partly because I've recently played it.  Final Fantasy 6 by its own right is one of the most amazing games in existence.  Regarded by many as the best of the series for pretty good reasons, due to the characters, story, and having above average gameplay for its time.  This game however embodies practically all the problems I bullet pointed.  It is not a particularly easy game, and the battle mechanics are very complicated and only briefly covered in a specific location that the player has access to early in the game, and the menu navigation is both confusing and non-self explanatory.  Now while the player probably does have to grind to some extent anyway to fight against various bosses reasonably, the random battle system is well...random, and ever prevalent in every important location you have to travel to, and the player doesn't have many options to really work around this especially early on. These independent problems do not solve each other. And remember when I complained about hidden passageways being hidden by tall objects that obstruct your view in a 2D environment? There's plenty of that in Final Fantasy 6, which is not helped by said random battle system interfering with exploration constantly. And while this game does have pretty high quality interactivity for an SNES RPG in a few events that require some time sensitive objective completion, well, you can't really compare that interactivity to Street Fighter, Super Mario World, Tetris Attack, and others. The game at its best is still mostly feels limited to its menu-driven roots.

Now for a slightly more contemporary RPG for the Gamecube such as Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, this game practically has none of the problems that I listed. It completely lacks a random encounter system, because all encounters are visible on the overworld and can be avoided with smart positioning, or better yet, the player has the option of entering battle with a free attack if you can ambush the enemy appropriately with an overworld action such as a hammer swing that could also be used to break blocks. Speaking of the overworld, many RPGs fail to actually make your characters able to do anything interesting while you travel the overworld.  Not Paper Mario, where the game is both and RPG and a platformer, and you need party members to actually traverse formerly unpassable terrain. The player also does not really need to grind partly because of the lack of forced random encounters, and also because enemies are not made too artificially difficult for the player to handle with unfairly high base stats to overcome.  Now probably the main somewhat valid criticism of this game is that the enemies at times are in fact too easy to defeat. You have to keep in mind this is because the battle system has a TON of depth and customization, AND action oriented interactivity where the player can deal more and receive less damage through a very wide variety of timing sensitive skilled inputs. So ultimately, the game is easier if you play it skillfully, which I feel should be the point of games in the first place.  If you can play it skillfully, then a lot of your problems are solved. The battle system even is such that if you wanted to be a complete badass, a 0 damage run would be technically feasible. While this might be a hint that completing the game normally could be too easy for some, my point is this game does allow a very high skill cap. Besides, the game is already being more than just any old RPG where you point and click what you want to do on the menu and profit. The menu is also very very easy to navigate with easy to understand icons and detailed and precise descriptions accompanying all your options.  This game is both user friendly and rewarding, the best possible combination.

In my opinion, RPGs will probably remain some of the most potentially attention grabbing games in existence. As a gamer, I look upon them fondly as a serious appeal to the avid gamer. A quality RPG to some extent I feel carries a statement like no other genre of games. I feel as if the developers demand greater expectations from both themselves and their fans when you consider the work put into these games on both ends. Finding and playing an RPG you enjoy is a real adventure, with a world to explore, opposition to overcome, and development that defines both who you and your characters truly are. It is an experience I would highly recommend for anyone with a lot of time on their hands.

Why does this blog even exist?

If you're reading this post to be entertained, unfortunately that is not its primary purpose.  This post like the rest of future posts I create in this blog are meant to be informative. In this post, you will learn bits and pieces about the kind of person I am, and what I intend to share with my viewers.

To begin with who I am, all you need to know for now is that I'm a young adult man in my 20s, and I really like video games (especially Nintendo ones) and anime.  I wouldn't be me if I didn't have an interest in these particular things.  These areas of interest have served me well as sources of entertainment, intelligent discussion, socialization, and building blocks of my combined knowledge and identity.  How much do they matter in other areas of the world? Probably more than I expect, but less than I would prefer. Do I really care about that? Not that much at the moment, but something regardless compels me to believe it would not be healthy to simply drop all interest and knowledge of these very things which I have absorbed as an important part of my identity.

The other part of me that matters is that I have a huge interest in intelligent discussion and teaching.  Combine this with the above listed interests that identify me, you might be able to somewhat infer why I recently decided to create a blog concerning these topics. Indeed, I feel that video games and anime are something that adds to my purpose in life. Before people tell me I should pursue actually teaching about these subjects, maybe I should, but I'm not actually informed nor driven enough to find out more about teaching in such a narrow area that is not particularly valued by the current K-12 public education system. Besides, I'm pretty sure if I try hard enough, I can find a way to fit these things into almost any other subject as a way to relate to  other students. Believe me.  I did a Comparative Religion project on the Sunnis and Shiites that used Mario sprite comics, and got an A+ for it.  If you want to see that, then you can simply download it from here.

You may have also noted that this blog has a mature content warning.  That's because my target audience is in fact adults. I'm a pretty open-minded person, and I do in fact like talking about adult-rated topics quite a lot, especially concerning well, hentai for video games, anime, and of course actual hentai anime. Of course, I cannot and will not make any real attempts to prevent curious kids from seeing everything I have to say, but you have been warned that my discussions will occasionally delve into rather...fun areas.

Before this introduction post gets too out of hand, I guess I'll conclude it by listing other random possibly fun tidbits about me that may help explain a few of my common tendencies.  Think of it as a tl:dr sorta.

• I'm in my 20s
• I am male
• I am straight
• I love Nintendo games
• I love anime of almost all kinds and genre
• I like male-oriented pornography. Go figure.
• I like teaching and intelligent discussion
• I'm a bit of a science/technology nerd. If I leaned towards any other particular category besides games and anime, it would be biology.
• I am very accessible in many more places across the internet, because I use the unique username A2ZOMG in many other places (notice the URL of this blog? yep).
• I only speak English. I vaguely understand some common words and phrases in Japanese, but if you talk to me in any other language, I'm going to have to use those unreliable online translation tools to get anywhere.