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august 30, 2014
Pokémon: Letting Go
it’s all about managing expectations.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet came out today. i haven’t bought them yet and know almost nothing about them. on purpose!
i got Pokémon Blue from Media Play in Rockford after getting a taste of it at a family friend’s house. i probably would have been 7, and up until that point i had only played Tetris and Super Mario Land on my red Game Boy Pocket. my first starter was Squirtle, and i got stuck in Rock Tunnel without Flash for a while, but i’m pretty dang sure i eventually caught Mewtwo.
we were on vacation in Orlando in January of 2000 when i left my backpack sitting outside of our rental car during a visit to Downtown Disney. inside was my CD player with a copy of Smash Mouth’s Astro Lounge , my red Game Boy Pocket, and Pokémon Yellow - the one where Pikachu and that pesky Team Rocket were always following me around - sitting snugly inside the cartridge slot. i remember i had saved my game in front of Articuno in the Seafoam Islands. i was so, so bummed. but it ended up being replaced with a lime green Game Boy Color ( sick ) and another copy of Yellow. (i got another copy of Astro Lounge , too. all was well.)
the next generation was on its way, and all we had was dial-up internet, which meant i was waiting precious tens of minutes to geek out over the latest news and magazine scans on late ‘90s Pokémon fansites. every little bit of new information was a thrill. there was maybe going to be a skateboard you could ride! there were going to be a boatload of new Pokémon to catch! after waiting for what felt like an eternity (which - in hindsight - was the result of a chaotic, scrapped, reworked, and rushed development process), Pokémon Gold and Silver finally came out on November 21, 1999 - in Japan.
i managed to download a Japanese ROM of Pokémon Gold onto our old, grey, Dell Windows 98 tower knowing fuck-all about how any of that worked at the time and somehow got No$GMB in DOS running the ROM. the colors were vivid. the blown up pixels on the computer monitor were unlike anything i’d seen. this was the first set of Pokémon games to take full advantage of the Game Boy Color hardware and they came out swinging. the chiptunes out of the PC speakers sounded incredible. i was in awe… for 5 minutes, until a message popped up telling me to register the software. turns out Game Boy Color game support in No$GMB required a payment. more like Yes$GMB?! i was either too unaware to look into alternatives… or there may literally have not been alternatives at the time.
so i played that first 5 minutes of Pokémon Gold - in a language i did not understand on the desktop tucked into the closet between the kitchen and the dining room that sat empty for almost 2 decades - over, and over, and over. those 5 minutes consisted of:
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setting the time (with the real-time clock. felt like magic in a Game Boy game)
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waking up and checking the PC in the room
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your mom saying a bunch of stuff to you that you don’t understand because it’s in Japanese
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talking to the boy with the red hair peeking into the professor’s lab
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the boy with the red hair peeking into the professor’s lab literally kicking you back on your butt
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going to the first town and being shuffled around
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visiting the little townhouse with Professor Oak (whoa! i knew that guy!) and getting a call ON A CELL PHONE outside the door
and that was it, but boy, was that fucking it. jam-packed! that’s 5 minutes i still think about weekly to this day.
i was scouting the Sunday Best Buy ads the weekend Gold and Silver finally came out in the US about a year later. i told my dad we had to get there right when they opened - what if they sold out? there have been so few times in my life that i’ve ever felt the way i did that Sunday morning: strolling into a near-empty Best Buy in Rockford with a few other dudes to the row of Game Boy games absolutely stocked to the brim with plastic-security-sealed copies of Pokémon Gold and Silver. the boxes were holographic , like self-contained, excitement-wrapped gifts. it was better than Christmas.
i’ve anticipated just about every game since then hoping for that feeling. almost every generation on (since Ruby and Sapphire ) i’ve only lasted about 2 to 4 gyms before losing motivation. even in HeartGold and SoulSilver - the remakes of my favorite games of all time, and the set that many fans feel was GameFreak’s absolute peak - i only made it to just before the 8th gym. i’ve still got my cart and save file somewhere that i think about picking back up every now and then… and then i don’t.
none have them have shaken that feeling that i’ve been there before, but better. why would i play this one when i could just play that one that triggers memories with feelings of unrivaled joy? when they had no competition to not feel like the biggest thing in the world? when they are one of the defining examples of something in my life i anticipated, thinking they couldn’t be possibly be any better than my imagination- and then they were.
i’ll be thankful to ever feel the high i did walking into Kanto after beating the Elite Four in Gold. it might have been my introduction to the concept of nostalgia as a reference in media, and it’s certainly one of the best to ever do it. surprise! here’s another chunk of game, you lucky duck! just because! few games since that generation have had that “one more thing” that got me. something that really makes the game more than the expected 8 gyms and the Elite Four. it’s not the games i started anticipating anymore - it was what they could really wow me with. their Doc Brown Spider Monster.
then Pokémon Let’s Go came along. after Pokémon GO didn’t hook me, the thought of the series catering to a GO crossover audience was like the the Thing I Feared Could Happen, Happening. then i gave it a shot because it’s what i’ve done every time out of masochistic, blind trust and fucking loved it. Let’s Go ’s redesigned wild Pokémon battles made me realize i was truly burnt out on the core series game loop. it certainly didn’t hurt that it was Red and Blue (technically Yellow ) all over again - sneaking back to that “walking into Kanto” feeling like they’d done already with FireRed and LeafGreen (which i of course ate up). but the experience leaned more into the concept of exploration than that dusty, often egregiously slow battle system. a Pokémon game was willing to get a little weird. the Let’s Go games ended up selling absolute gangbusters. then Game Freak said they weren’t planning to do more of them in favor of “new things”. i love that in theory! give me new things! (to be fair- they did shortly after. Pokemon Legends: Arceus was pretty weird and new. my interest waned after the initial shock, but if it’s a sign of things to come, neat! yes please!)
they said this during the lead-up to Sword and Shield on the Switch, which i again anticipated and pre-ordered. new things! maybe they’ll get kinda weird with it. it wasn’t, and they didn’t - and to top it all off they were slow, kinda ugly, and a lot of the same again. and that just kinda sealed the most drawn-out deal for me - this finally had to be it for me with this ridiculous, “get excited because it’s what i do, they’re new Pokémon games!” attitude i still hadn’t let go of yet.
so here i am. after years of anticipating, i’ve finally decided to stop. i’ve been almost completely media-blackout on the new games. i’ve seen one weird new coin Pokémon. it’s pretty cute? i’ll probably watch some people streaming the games, take the temp on the vibe. i’m gonna let it have a chance to pull me in, but i’ve been feeling okay sitting this one out until it’s had some time to settle. to get a sense of whether it has that spark - that spider monster. i feel like i read something about being able to do gyms in any order, which is neat i guess, but it’s probably still 8 fucking gyms, right?
“just like games past”. but you know what? it can’t hurt me this time.
let’s… go?
best,
C D