My Pokemon Obsession

So I've been going through albums of my favorite Pokemon throughout the various games I've played recently. Most of these are screenshots of various accomplishments or things I've done with that Pokemon. Some of them are just of my favorites hanging out in Pokemon Camp, Picnic, or what have you. You may have noticed that I've been steadily updating the Pokemon adopts section of my website with galleries for my various 'mons. Some of them even have little polaroid icons.

To any outsider looking in, that's a disturbing amount of love for individual clouds of zeroes and ones. And I'm inclined to agree with you on that.

For someone who has railed against the Pokemon franchise incessantly for the past several years, I still care about it quite a lot. To an frankly worrying degree. And I want to get to the bottom of this feeling. Why do I still find myself this obsessive about a franchise whose quality has largely gone down the drain?

"Well clearly it's nostalgia", you might say. "You were the right age for Pokemon when it came to the west, so obviously anything that came out around that time is going to stick with you forever." And yes, Pokemon was a huge part of my life growing up. But so were Disney, Power Rangers, Transformers and Bionicle, and I don't find myself thinking about those nearly as often. Or as fondly. Even Bionicle, which I still love with all my heart, doesn't really occupy as much brain space as various other nonsense. Certainly not as much as tokusatsu.

That brings me to another possible reason. Pokemon has been trucking along for nearly 30 years now without ever stopping. The Pokemon Company has been bringing out new video games, new seasons of the anime, new trading card expansions, and ever more merchandise. And both Power Rangers and Bionicle are dead in the water right now. If something you loved is part of your life for that consistently, then surely it'll be hard to lose interest in it, right?

I can certainly follow the logic on that one. But again, look at Disney. Not counting their Marvel or Star Wars output, the last Disney movie I've watched was The Incredibles 2, I think? I haven't had any desire to watch Disney's output in the past several years. When they aren't sequels that don't really live up to the original, they're live action remakes that suck.

Perhaps looking at external factors isn't the answer here. Why don't we look at the things I'm actually interacting with. In this case, it's the mainline games and TCG Pocket.

As the only Pokemon mobile game I play with any regularity, TCG Pocket certainly appeals to my nostalgia of collecting Pokemon cards as a wee lad. I stopped collecting physical cards a long time ago. Even if scalpers haven't completely destroyed my desire to collect new cards, I find sorting them in my binders to be a huge pain because of the sheer volume of cards I have now. So having a digital version that gives me a couple 5-card packs a day for free that I can sort automatically and doesn't have a scalper problem is significantly better. However, I don't find myself obsessing over it too much. I treat it as a pack opening simulator and little else. Something I spend maybe 5 minutes on before I go to work.

No, it's the mainline games that still occupy my head. But why?

I think it boils down to the way they handle the in-game Pokemon themselves. I've become more attached to various Pokemon I've caught than entire casts of named NPCs combined. Every Pokemon you catch has a randomized gender, nature, characteristic, hidden stats and that's pretty much it. More recent games added randomized sizes. That doesn't sound like a lot to get invested in, but it was enough for my imagination to start creating more defined personalities.

That quiet Sirfetch'd that keeps landing crits on raid bosses? That is a badass that doesn't have time for anyone's bullcrap. The naive, quick tempered Obstagoon that keeps upsetting other Pokemon in Camp? He has all the social skills of a nervous badger. The brave, mischievous Feraligatr I've had since Crystal is an elderly sweetheart that is not afraid to throw down when threatened. And, of course, there's the lax Boltund that I've talked about back on Destructoid a few years ago.

Okay, but every monster taming game does that to some degree, and you don't see me making entire goddamn spreadsheets about them. What is it about Pokemon specifically that I find so addictive? Because Pokemon has done one thing consistently for decades now. Something that no other game has done to this degree to my knowledge: transferring Pokemon between games.

As far back as Gold/Silver/Crystal, you could send your older Pokemon to the newer games so that you could bring them with you on your new adventures. Gen III was a hard cutoff due to compatibility issues, but ever since Ruby and Sapphire, you have been able to send your Pokemon forward to the next game one way or another.

You might wonder why anyone would bother doing that. And it's a fair question. Outside of making it easier to complete your in-game Pokedex or wrecking the Elite Four's shit, the first couple generations didn't really give much of an incentive to bring your old Pokemon over. You could easily catch another of your favorite Pokemon and treat that the same. The game doesn't really care all that much. It wasn't until Generation III rolled around when Game Freak started giving us reasons to care.

From Ruby/Sapphire onward, each individual Pokemon can obtain ribbons by completing various challenges or tasks. Think of them like gym badges, but for your Pokemon. Most games after that have both recurring ribbons to obtain in each new entry and unique ribbons that can only be obtained that specific game. And when you transfer your Pokemon over to a new game, those ribbons carried over with them. In some of the Switch games, you can actually assign a ribbon to your Pokemon to give it a special title when it goes into battle. So if you assign the Best Friends ribbon to it, it'll go into battle as "Chungus the Great Friend".

But ribbons aren't the only thing you can unlock for individual Pokemon. In HeartGold/SoulSilver, you can obtain a Shiny Crown for your Pokemon that's permanently affixed to its profile screen. In Black 2/White 2 you can obtain a special animation that plays when you send a Pokemon into battle after using it in a Pokestar Studios movie and get a strange ending. If you get the Contest Star ribbon in Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire, that gives you its own animation. Unfortunately, these don't transfer over to the new games, but they are permanently unlocked for that Pokemon in those games when you trade them over to someone else.

Some games will flat out give you certificates for bringing a Pokemon from an older generation into a new game. Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire and Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl both have an NPC that give you a special Time Traveler certificate decorated with a sprite of your Pokemon if it was brought over from the original Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald or Diamond/Pearl/Platinum respectively. If Legends Z-A does that for Kalos Pokemon, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to nab them too.

And it's not just ribbons that transfer over. Depending on the game, some moves are permanently unlocked for your Pokemon if you use a TM on them in Scarlet/Violet, a TR in Sword/Shield, or purchase a move from the move tutor in Legends Arceus. And when you transfer that Pokemon to another game via HOME, you can assign it that move without having to re-teach it as long as that move is in the target game.

All of these are design choices by the devs to reinforce the idea that your Pokemon is special. The Porygon2 I transferred over since SoulSilver isn't just any Porygon2. It the Porygon2 that became a Pokeathlon Medalist. It's the one that starred in a PokeStar Studios movie. It's the one I used to beat various Battle Towers. Don't you feel rewarded for bringing it to all these games? To date, I don't think I've seen any other game let you transfer over characters from game to game. Certainly none this consistently. There have been games that let you transfer items and weapons over from time to time, but those are rare. And no, NFT games absolutely do NOT count.

After a while, I started writing down more details about my favorite Pokemon. What their favorite flavors of food are, when I caught them, what significant battles they were involved in, who got infected with Pokerus and who, where and when. I've even taken note of their interactions with my other Pokemon in certain games like My Pokemon Ranch. Yes, THAT My Pokemon Ranch. I enjoyed fleshing out the personalities of my various favorite Pokemon in my head.

But I feel like this can't last. The franchise itself will be around forever, sure, but I don't know if carrying over stuff from previous games is feasible long term. Pokemon Legends Arceus has only one ribbon to obtain, which isn't even visible in its own game. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future, Game Freak decides it's too much effort to keep that up and they remove ribbons entirely from all future entries. It wouldn't surprise me, considering all the other stuff they've jettisoned from newer entries over the years. Or indeed, they stop letting you transfer Pokemon completely.

And maybe that's for the best. The Switch era of Pokemon has easily been the worst the franchise has ever seen. Yeah, Pokemon Legends Arceus was good, but every other mainline title is worse than the last. Considering how well they still sell, I don't think The Pokemon Company will ever feel any pressure to change their production methods. There must always be a new Pokemon game every year so the line can go up.

Do I regret putting so much time and energy into all of this? Not really. I like the narratives these games helped me create about my weird little guys. I like reading the stories other players have made about their own Pokemon, whether it's from a Nuzlocke or someone's own Ribbon Master journey. And I'll still keep slowly updating my profile pages with more stuff about my favorite Pokemon when I find the time or when I figure out how to add more stuff to those layouts. If I ever figure out how to embed a graph of all the connections my Pokemon have with each other like I have set up in Obsidian, I'm going to have a field day with it.

I went back and forth on whether I wanted to treat this like another blog post or if I wanted to put this on an actual blogging site like Medium or Substack. This is probably the most in-depth I've gone into about a single subject in a long time. It's probably better that I keep it to my own personal blog since all of this really only matters to me, anyway. I don't think I've met anyone who cares this much about the pretend critters they've collected.

Anyways, I'mma go take more pictures of my Incineroar now. Peace.