pimmermen

Reflections on Pokemon Day Presents 2021:

As time goes by, I find more and more that I am growing distant from the Pokemon Franchise in general. Each pre-release hype season has become less intense and less substantive, the titles have been good but not great, and the fact of the matter is that the Pokemon series is growing within its own commercial sphere, while I am belatedly growing out of it. This is not a lament, I always knew that at some point I would have to relate to Pokemon with more ambivalence than I ever did in my childhood or youth. Truth be told, this late coming development has not been prompted by the disappointing content GF has put out in the last 5 or so years, but rather the fact that no matter how good the content they delivered would have been, I was growing away from Pokemon despite myself. In a sense I am not sad about this, after all, this growing apart will by no means be total. I will almost certainly buy Pokemon Legends Arceus and whatever the next main series title is. In so doing, however, I will be relating to Pokemon much like an adult relates to a nostalgic film from his childhood that he ordered on Netflix and enjoyed for a night. In other words, I can’t stay in the Pokemon World anymore, even if I do intend to visit it from time to time. Again, this is not so much a reflection on Pokemon or GF itself. I’ve noticed the same phenomena happening even to how I relate to Super Smash Bros Ultimate. When the second wave of DLC for that game is finished, I intuitively feel that the Smash Bros Chapter of my life will be more or less closed for good. Growing up, I suppose…

Of course, the fact that I am growing apart from Pokemon doesn’t mean that I don’t have thoughts to share on today’s news. Hopefully my reflections on the announcement of Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl and Pokemon Legends Arceus will convey more than just my first impressions and explain the present situation within which the franchise finds itself more generally.

As I have written elsewhere many times before, GF has for more than five years now been in an existential dilemma: the future of the franchise must, by necessity, be directed at its traditional demographic audience (5-13yo) but at the same time does not want to explicitly repudiate the demographic of fans who have been with the franchise from the beginning and who are now adults. Further complicating this problem is the fact that GF has realized for some time now that it has to reinvent and reinvigorate the franchise. Because Pokemon as it has been has been a multi-billion dollar franchise the attitude at GF over the years has been fundamentally conservative. The old “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” rationale. And yet, the target demographic of the franchise is not the same today as it was in the 1990s. Technology and entertainment have evolved alongside the Pokemon Franchise, and in almost every respect, evolved alongside it more rapidly, leaving the Franchise’s core features a seemingly misplaced anachronism in the world of contemporary video games and entertainment. GF must, therefore, change the franchise’s formula in pretty significant ways, but do so without the guarantee of continued commercial success. It is true, I think, that the strategy of biding their time has worked for GF and can work for a little while longer, but it will not remain evergreen. My sense of the state of the franchise – admittedly only a sense, I have no empirical data to back this up – is that the declining profits of each new installment of the franchise reflects the fact that today, kids in the 5-13 age bracket have an unlimited amount of options when it comes to games and entertainment that can occupy their time. In the 1990s, at the dawn of the handheld video game era, this simply was not the case, and hence Pokemon became almost a cult like phenomena amongst children. Today, it simply will not suffice to deliver a (more or less) 2021 graphically equivalent rendition of a formula that was best suited to 1997. The attention of today’s kids are more catered to than ever before, and the observed trait of “childhood obsessions” can no be irrationally fixed upon any of the new options available. Minecraft or Apple Apps can become the defining feature of one’s childhood easily, and Pokemon has not kept up sufficiently to pose a significant challenge to its many competitors and thus be a candidate for that role like it was in the past. GF, then, could continue to put relatively little effort into its games and maintain decent profits from an increasingly diminished 5-13 y o demographic whose attention is increasingly distributed amongst many other types of games and entertainment, all the while relying on the franchise merchandise to remain the revenue generator that it always has been. The wisdom of such a course is not something I feel the need to speak about again, but based on today’s announcements, it seems to me as though GF has finally accepted that they have to break with convention and start innovating if they want to maintain their profits and cultural hegemony. In that sense, however, today’s two announced titles seem somewhat paradoxical and suggest to me that GF is still reluctant to break from its conventional low cost development model for the games.

Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl:

It had long been understood that the time for delaying Diamond and Pearl remakes had well and truly run out, and thus, after SWSH, GF had to consider how they would go about finally handling this long anticipated development. The principal dilemma, it seemed to me, was whether to cater to the traditional age demographic with these remakes, or to cater to the adult demographic that had been waiting for these titles for 15 years. In that framework, the choice would have been between Pokemon Let’s Go Bosly & Happiny and Pokemon Adamant Diamond and Lustrous Pearl (SWSH-esque remakes of Diamond and Pearl). The adult demographic clearly favored the latter. Indeed, I doubt if there were any longtime fans who wanted their long awaited Sinnoh remakes to be consigned to the dreaded fate of Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu & Eevee. The traditional demographic of 5-13 y o, on the other hand, couldn’t have cared less what form Diamond and Pearl Remakes took because those games have no sentimental resonance with them. Thus the prudent choice for GF seemed obvious; do justice to these remakes in the way that those who have really been anxiously awaiting them expect rather than “ruining” them by making them Let’s Go titles.

Credit must be given to GF for defying convention and making a decision that came completely out of left field, however, the decision they made seems to have mistaken the formula-breaking shock factor for the positively nostalgic and innovative factor. They decided, or so it seems, to split Diamond and Pearl Remakes between the two choices; one Let’s Go-esque title and another SWSH type title, only one that has radically broken from convention to the point that it is hardly even recognizable as the remakes that were expected. As the Pokemon Company seems to have dubbed it a DP “remake” and “premake.” A near-1-to-1 remake of Diamond and Pearl in a 3d rendition of the traditional graphical style and Pokemon Diamond and Pearl “Catch of the Wild” (the resemblance to BOTW is really quite uncanny).

I can’t really say that I think GF made the wrong decision, only that I think the formulae they’ve decided on may prove inadequate to meet the split concept they seem to have been going for. What I mean by this is that if they wanted to deliver these split Diamond and Pearl Remake products, the most obvious way to have done so (at least it seems to me) would have been to produce Pokemon Let’s Go Sinnoh – a Let’s Go title with Let’s Go Graphics but without as much babyish emphasis on Pikachu and Eevee equivalents (including the starters and such) – and Pokemon Legends Arceus (though I have more to say about this in a bit).

It seemed to me that the least they could do in terms of effort for a Sinnoh Remake would have been to remake the Sinnoh Region in the graphical equivalent of Let’s Go Pikachu & Eevee. This graphical style requires less development time as it is far closer to the original, and avoids the monstrous task of remaking Sinnoh along the graphical lines of SWSH (this point will be important later). I would have bought a Pokemon Let’s Go Sinnoh! Instead, though, they’ve gone with Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl, which is being developed partly by an outside company (curious to say the least). Was outsourcing the game’s development to a third party a way of cutting down on costs and resource constraints? If so, I fail to see the appreciable difference in the requirements that would have been necessary for a Let’s Go equivalent as opposed to these obviously much lower quality remakes. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of returning to the traditional graphical style of the original games, but this is returning a little to faithfully to the originals.

The chibi NPCs just look awkward, and the transition between in battle and overworld just feels like a Frankenstein mix between two different games. Between a graphically remade DS Diamond and Pearl and a Let’s Go Sinnoh. With that being said, it seems absolutely bizarre that they didn’t just stick with a Let’s Go formula overall as far as the graphics are concerned. After all, their similarity to the original games are not that different than what we seem to have gotten, which is an awkward more round/3d version of the graphics from the originals that were sort of the maximum of where you could go with that sprite based graphical style without it looking weird. Well, it does look weird, the overworld at least. It gave me simultaneous Club Penguin vibes, and mobile game MMO vibes. Perhaps the biggest problem I have with it is that you’re dealing with a more 3d sprite based environment, but your character has the full 360º movements of a Pokemon Colosseum Game. It’s like being a round 3d character in a square sprite based world. Furthermore, the chibi graphics are just weird. At the very least a concept like this could have (and should have been) done with ORAS-esque chibi, the graphical precursor to Let’s GO graphics. But then that raises the obvious question, why not just go with full Let’s Go graphics.

In short, why does the graphical environment seem like what would have been the best GF could have done with the DS? Whether these games will be good and worthwhile, whether they will be worth $59.99, whether I will buy them, and whether they will ultimately accomplish the one side of the split purpose of these two titles is not yet clear. I expect that if I do buy one of the two, it will simply be because I’m nostalgic to replay Diamond and Pearl but can’t stand the snail’s pace of the engine of the original games on the DS. As always with GF, I’m hoping for the best but expecting the worst.

Pokemon Legends Arceus:

Here is where I have slightly better impressions to share…

I think the concept is great! As any good Pokemon fan who thinks about making fan games, the idea has often come into my mind of making a Pokemon game set in the past– in a pre-industrial age a la the Celebii movie with young Sammy Oak – but I must confess, I should have put two and two together sooner in realizing that with the success of BOTW, this was a highly plausible model for a Pokemon game. The only Pokemon game, so far as I know at least, that makes use of this concept of being set in the past, whether pre-industrial or ancient, is Pokemon Conquest, a game which, while I liked it well enough, obviously didn’t meet the full potential of the concept. Moreover, it wasn’t a traditional Pokemon RPG, but a strategy-based game wherein the concept itself was of little utility.

Of all the regions to get a pre-make BOTW treatment, Sinnoh does seem one of the most logical choices. Of all the sprite era titles, Sinnoh very much felt like the most naturally diverse and wild region, the best suited to be rendered a la BOTW. With that said though, this would have been a great new innovation to see alongside a game that at least reproduced the original games in graphic on par with Let’s Go Pikachu & Eevee (though in my ideal world there would’ve been two Sinnoh SWSH titles; one a remake along the lines of SWSH and the other a premake along the lines of Pokemon Legends Arceus. One can dream…). Thus, it feels as though the well-intentioned split choice for the remakes has fallen flat. Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are neither the minimum that the Let’s GO age demographic will have expected, and Pokemon Legends Arceus, while novel and intriguing, is neither the SWSH type remake that the long time fans expected. To put a finer point on it, as it stands now, I don’t see many in the 5-13 age demographic rushing out to get Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl as if we were back in 2007 when me and my brother went first thing in the morning to Toys R’Us to get the original games. So it seems like while the idea was good, the delivery has gone disastrously wrong, and it is honestly quite puzzling why GF thought that the course they opted for regarding PBDSP was a good idea.

Now, on the topic of Pokemon Legends Arceus specifically I have a bit more to say. Again, the concept of a premake is a good one! No problems there. As far as graphical fidelity, it’s great for Pokemon standards and I can find relatively little to complain about. To further elaborate, the idea of exploring the unexplored and uninhabited Sinnoh Region while (seemingly) recording all of its Pokemon in a notebook, just as Sammy Oak did in the Celebii film is something I might have dreamed up as a kid (in fact did more or less dream up, as I am sure many other pokemon fans did). Now, if my intuition is correct, the “bustling village” that the narrator of the trailer speaks of must be Celestic town, so at least we got a 2021 SWSH rendering of at least one of Sinnoh’s memorable locations. As far as Sinnoh’s other towns, however, it is very safe to assume that they do not yet exist, and if they do, they will likely look a lot like the frontier settlement depiction of Celestic Town from the trailer. That much is not problematic, and indeed, is something I would expect, but the point is that Sinnoh as it has been known will never be rendered in the SWSH graphics that so many longtime fans had been expecting and hoping for.

If I may digress for a moment, I’d like to proffer my explanation of why this is. Why, that is, Sinnoh was not and will not be given a SWSH remake. It has to do with GF conservative attitude toward development and their unwillingness to take substantial risks, which I believe is clearly still bleeding through despite this radical innovation. If GF had gone to the effort of recreating Sinnoh with SWSH graphics and a SWSH map with limited wild areas, they would have delivered the game that longtime fans wanted and expected. Even the ostensibly meager costs and resource requirements to do this, however, it seems, was something GF was unwilling to do if it entailed Diamond and Pearl Remakes following the same declining trend in profit as main series games, and especially remakes. In other words, to recreate Sinnoh along the graphical lines of SWSH would have required its complete reimagining. It would have been a monstrous task, and one GF clearly wanted to avoid at all costs. It’s hard for me to construe this as anything other than laziness (even though I have been very apprehensive of impugning GF motives), especially because the effort that they saved from having to expend in this type of endeavor was merely spent outsourcing the actual PBDSP remakes to a third party and having them deliver a product that, at least graphically, clearly is not up to standards that have been set by the Let’s GO games.

Now, in the most charitable interpretation is that they had to avoid remaking Sinnoh in SWSH graphics because they wanted to devote all of their time and money to really making the Pokemon Legends Arceus Sinnoh region something as unique and expansive as the trailer seems to suggest it is. This would mean, at a minimum, in my mind at least, that Pokemon Legends Arceus will have a map as expansive and diverse as BOTW, with clearly discernible environmental features (besides Mt. Cornet) that can be paired with the undeveloped locations from the original games. One segment from the trailer seemed to be showing one of Sinnoh’s three lakes, so at least part of this expectation seems due to be fulfilled. This raises another problem though, and one which seems to be suggested by the gameplay shown in the trailer. While the Sinnoh Region is one of the most wild feeling regions of the sprite era, its environment is not suited to many of the pokemon that are native to it. This was easy enough to suspend disbelief about when they simply popped out of the grass in the original titles, but for a game like this, it may be harder to cope with. Case and point: the segment of gameplay from the trailer that shows the trainer attempting to catch Chimchar seems totally out of place. Where in the Sinnoh Region might a fiery chimp like Chimchar be found? That’s just the problem. In the trailer he seems to be found in an undifferentiated vaguely wild environment where he sticks out like a sore thumb. This is perhaps further illustrated by the gameplay of Garchomp and Gallade fighting on the flowery hill with the wild in the background. Whereas in BOTW the moblins and other enemies are imaginatively consistent with the world’s environment, many pokemon, and many Sinnoh Pokemon specifically can’t just be transposed into a BOTW environment. To make matters even worse, GF, true to form, seems to be using the same models that it has used since XY. Round of Applause for effort! Those are just my brief impressions, however, and beyond that, as always with GF, I am hoping for the best but expecting the worst.