LogFAQs > #932341686

#85





Years of release: 2016 (3DS), 2017 (Ultra Sun and Moon, 3DS)
Beaten?: Yes

This is a hard writeup for me to do. There's a lot I'd like to say about the Pokemon series, and I feel like I don't have quite the energy to get to all of it right now, nor is this really the topic I want to do it in. But I'll try.

I think I'm sort of "over" the Pokemon series now, which is kind of a sad thing for me to say. There was a time, between the years of 1998 and... probably around 2004 or so where I just lived and breathed Pokemon, every single hour of every single day. When I got Pokemon Red for the first time I literally just sat down and played the game for 13 hours straight, completely nonstop - didn't even eat. Very few video games have ever done that to me. It was just so new and awesome and exciting.

Ever since then, I've loved Pokemon, but I've gradually become less and less interested in the games themselves. I've grown up, and the Pokemon series hasn't grown with me. That isn't to say that I don't think adults should play Pokemon or something, but rather that I've wanted new experiences out of the games but they tend to be the same thing over and over again, hitting the same notes, offering very few surprises, no new challenges for veterans of the series unless you play competitive, which I just haven't had the time or energy to do. (That's a lie, I've had the time, just not the energy.)

Playing through Pokemon games feels like a chore just to get to the competitive endgame now and it kinda makes me sad, I dunno. They're consistently feeling less like RPG adventures and more like extremely extended tutorials, and the increased focus on having human characters talk at you and having weird plots about legendary Pokemon hasn't really been to my taste.

It's a heavy subject, but I've long wanted the series to just throw everything out and do something completely new. There's a lot of bloat in the games now as they continue to add new moves, new abilities, new forms, etc without ever removing anything, and it's frustrating to me that they refuse to change anything. But now that we've gotten to Pokemon Sw/Sh and they've actually started to do it, I realized that it kind of feels like the end of an era. Pokemon is still here, but we've finally hit the point at which Pokemon are starting to be retired, at which certain Pokemon forms will never be seen again, at which a lot of old knowledge of the games that I've maintained since 1998 has finally stopped being relevant. I'm not SUPER UPSET about Dexit, but it has really helped set in that feeling for me that it's time to move on. Pokemon doesn't belong to me anymore, and that's fine. I still love the Pokemon themselves but now I'm treating it more like it's a merchandising brand like Hello Kitty, haha.

All that said, I still really liked Pokemon Sun/Moon (I had moon) a hell of a lot, and I absolutely had to include it on my list when I realized that gen 7 really was the end of an era, the last Pokemon game in an unbroken lineage since 1998. The last generation of the GB/DS line of systems, the last generation that had every single Pokemon, every single Pokemon form, every single move, etc.

This one actually was my favorite Pokemon game in a long time, it should be said. First of all, gen 7's batch of Pokemon is my favorite, ever, by far - I just love the Pokemon in this game. 5 of my top 10 favorite Pokemon are gen 7! I immediately loved like nearly every new Pokemon design in this game and it made me really hyped to play the game. Plus, I just LOVE the 'polynesian island' theme - it reminds me of being in Hawaii, one of my favorite times in my whole life, and that just makes me want to exist in this world so much. I doubt they could ever have another region themed after a place in the world that I'd rather be in than a sunny tropical island full of flowers and surrounded by ocean - going to like, fantasy Britain doesn't really hold as much appeal, for instance.

And as much as the game didn't really do anything new, I still felt like it sort of tried a little. They replaced HMs with riding on Pokemon, which I think was a good idea, because HMs were getting really stupid and predictable. They did away with gyms and tried a different concept, which I think was fun. The plot was kind of different and interesting - this is the only (mainline) Pokemon game that had kind of an interesting story and characters. Team Skull was fucking hilarious and awesome too - normally I hate the stupid evil teams in these Pokemon games but oh my god, Team Skull is awesome. This game actually has fun human characters, which is a rarity for the series. It's still kind of a standard Pokemon adventure but it really did make a strong attempt at doing something, and I appreciated it and I enjoyed the hell out of it.

I haven't played Sw/Sh yet, and I think I probably will at some point - I might do a nuzlocke thing because that's probably the most fun way to play it. But I'm not super excited to? I dunno. Like I said, I just feel like I'm kinda over Pokemon at this point. But S/M gave me one more good time with the series for the road.