The Healthbar

Why Play Pokemon?

During my rambling, barely coherent post about Elite: Dangerous and my preference toward games that offer the player freedom in how they approach them, I was struck with an unexpected question. Namely, how can I claim to enjoy freedom so much and still be a fan of the Pokemon RPGs? I've played through at least one game in every generation of the series except for generation five (Black and White), and put over 200 hours into X alone. I've been playing the games since I was a little kid, I've got Pokemon on a handful of my desktop backgrounds, and my messenger bag is speckled with various Pokemon-themed buttons.

I'm a fan of the series, is what I'm trying to say. And I'm hardly the only one. Even the most cursory Internet search will turn up a veritable bonanza of fan art, cosplay, music remixes, fan fiction, competitive analysis, and speculation. The vast majority of it done for free, out of the massive amount of love that the nerd community has for the franchise. My 12 year old brother has been playing Pokemon for years, and I sometimes overhear him chatting about it with his friends with the same wide-eyed enthusiasm that I had. Among all entertainment, I cannot think of a property that has such wide, cross-generational appeal, let alone on that's maintained it for over 15 years, with no end in sight.

 

And yet, the more that I think back over my time with the series with a critical eye, the more I realize that the Pokemon series has never really appealed to me from a gameplay perspective. This isn't going to be another opinion piece about how much the series has stagnated. From generation two onward, everyone know they've pretty much been the same game with new critters and the occasional gimmick that can be quietly discarded if it doesn't stick. But that's not what I'm arguing. I'm here to say that the games that Nintendo have been selling for the last decade all share a common problem, that they build the entire game on the backbone of a terrible combat system.

As I've immersed myself in the mindset of a game designer, the turn-based, menu-driven combat systems of many popular JRPGs have struck me as a particularly lazy way to balance a video game. Lists of moves with stats attached seem to be better suited for a board or card game, where the player's mechanical skills cannot be well translated, given the format. In those instances, the player's ability to create and execute strategies is what is being tested. But there is no strategy in Pokemon, simply one-off combat instances where the better type wins. Maybe this is a problem of an earlier time. The original games debuted on the Game Boy, where the simplistic style certainly was more appropriate. However, even on the ridiculously powerful 3DS, we are still stuck selecting from a list of four moves in a paralyzed back and forth series of blows.

And making the problem worse is the fact that the Pokemon games offer virtually nothing that isn't connected to the combat system in some way. No matter how far out of your way you go in Pokemon, the game will be steering you back into that damned battle menu. And then, in the most obnoxious of dick moves, even if you sigh and decide to play the game it wants to be played, raising a team of perfect battlers to defeat anyone who stands in your way, it makes the path horrifically complex and obtuse. Raising a competitively viable Pokemon requires you to get a Pokemon with the right combination of nature, ability, and, for some species, gender. All of these variables are tied to random numbers generated by the breeding system, with the punchline being that you're forced to ride your bike back and forth past the damn Day Care Center to hatch the eggs just to find out you rolled poorly and are going to have to do it again. Once you have your Pokemon, it's time to get their stats perfect. In the past, this required that you take them to specific locations and fight specific Pokemon literally hundreds of times. Thankfully, Nintendo heard the complaints that this system was bullshit and decided to fix the problem in generation six. How so? By replacing it with a handy minigame that you have to play a hundred times in a row to achieve the same result.

Really?! To me, this alone is worthy of an entire rant. You have a problem where people are annoyed that they have to waste time training their Pokemon's stats, so you replace the system with a different one...that still bores them to tears and wastes huge chunks of time?! Anyway, once you've got their stats right, it's moveset time. Depending on the species, this might require leveling, travelling to specific locations in the world, or having specific parents. The Pokemon also has to be leveled to its final form, requiring a long chunk of grind and/or trading, specific items, or other esoteric stats, none of which the game is kind enough to tell you about. And last, but not least, the Pokemon's held item needs to be selected. Most of the good ones are held in the postgame combat town, which is all experience free, lest you get ideas of streamlining the process slightly. Repeat six times, and you've got a team that you can take into battle. Horrible, boring, turn-based battle with long animations and the constant possibility of a single RNG result wiping your entire party.

But if the combat system is garbage, why have I sunk so many hundreds of hours into the game, and why does my 2DS still tempt me to put in a couple more every time I look at it? The answer is right on the front of the box: Pokemon. No matter how much teeth-grinding tedium and frustration the game heaps on me, I still keep coming back for the Pokemon themselves. Even if I have to endure a mindless endurance test of a JRPG, the fantasy of having a team of Pokemon at my command is strong enough to make me overcome it. But I'm only human. For the first time, I'm questioning if I'm going to get the next Pokemon game. My nostalgia for generation three wasn't strong enough for me to pick up Omega Ruby or Alpha Sapphire (I remember that two bike bullshit), and I didn't buy X or Platinum until months after release. They need to shake up the formula a great deal before I'm enthused by the prospect of a new Pokemon game again. Of course, the chances of that are right around the chances of them announcing a new Starfox game. Pokemon will continue to make the bestseller charts with each release, but I think it's in spite of the gameplay, not because of it. It remains accessible to the newbies while maintaining some amount of depth for the competitive players to enjoy. But it's old, it's stale, and I've personally had enough of it. Give me a release that takes the Pokemon concept and expands upon it. Give me a deep, emotionally touching story with lots of memorable characters. Give me a title that takes the original RPGs and references them without being bogged down with all their baggage. Give me a game that actually gives the Pokemon more than one word of personality each. Give me that game, and I'll snap it right up, along with all the other adult nerds with disposable income who love Pokemon but are sick of the same old game every few years.

My Time With Elite: Dangerous

Elite: Dangerous is an insane game.  How, in this world of cookie-cutter sequels and reboots did we get an experience that feels so fresh and new?  I had a dim idea of what the Elite series was before I bought Dangerous.  Supposedly it was some old space trading simulator designed to be played on typewriters, or something like that.

But Yahtzee Croshaw's review piqued my interest in the game.  I always appreciate it when a game gives me freedom.  Not just freedom as in "choose one of five weapons to use while running down this linear level," but freedom to fundamentally choose how I experience the game.

Now, this is not a criticism of games that offer the player only one way to play.  I grew up playing Crash Bandicoot, and Spyro the Dragon.  And more recently, games like Bioshock Infinite, Dust: An Elysian Tail, and Cave Story have provided me with some great experiences.  Above all else, linear games shine at presenting their players with a cohesive experience.  Whether that be a nail-biting stealth-em-up like Mark of the Ninja or an adrenaline-pumping murderfest like Hotline Miami, a good linear game knows what it's trying to be and delivers on that experience to the fullest extent of its mechanics.

I should be clear here:  I'm not using linear in the traditional way when it is used to describe games.  VVVVVV has an open world, and exploration is a key component of playing it, but I would describe it as mechanically linear.  Perhaps "one-dimensional" would be a better way to describe games like those.  They have a small number of gameplay mechanics, and they're used throughout the entire length of the game with few alterations.  When they work, they create unique, memorable experiences that can sometimes be played again and again.

When the game fails to draw me in, however, these mechanically one-dimensional games quickly start to lose my interest.  Borderlands is a game series that relies on two mechanics to draw their players in: first person shooting and loot gathering/management.  Wrapped around this is an appealingly stylized and (sort of) comedic world.  I know quite a few people who can play Borderlands for hours on end, arguing about builds and farming bosses for the chance to receive the best gear, but the experience was quite dull for me.  It was entertaining enough to shoot bad guys and collect the shiny weapons that flew from their gory remains, but after a few hours with only the occasional change in scenery to liven things up, I just couldn't continue.

This brings me, at long last, to Elite: Dangerous.  For those unfamiliar, the game takes place in the Milky Way a thousand or so years in the future, after we've already gone out and colonized a chunk of it.  You start off in a crappy little fighter with barely two credits to rub against each other and...that's it.  That's literally the extent of what the game does for you.  No main quest, no antagonist, no leveling system, and very few rules that cannot be broken.  It's massively multiplayer (though you can play by yourself), and you'll occasionally see a player ship darting along, doing their own thing.

I absolutely adore the game for having the courage to give their players so much freedom.  At first glance, dropping a player in a huge sandbox with no goal seems like a terrible idea.  In practice though, I found that the lack of structure allowed me to create my own stories, and the ample travel time gave me plenty of opportunity to do so.

And the game comes packed with different ways to experience it.  You could take jobs on the space station mission boards, advancing the goals of a particular faction until they dominate a system, or fighting their rivals.  There's trading, where the basic laws of supply and demand become your most powerful weapons for making cash.  There's mining, a tense, skillful affair where you need to balance careful control of your ship, management of your systems, and looking over your shoulder for plentiful player and NPC pirates.

If you're into combat, there's bounty hunting, assassination, and mercenary work available, each quite different from the others.  Piracy is its own beast, requiring you to select a prime target, pull them out of FTL travel, and negotiate with them at gunpoint for their valuable goods.

And finally, there's exploration.  If you're sick of competing with other players for credits, there's nothing stopping you from packing up and...flying out of civilized space.  If you zoom out on the galaxy map, you'll discover that there are about a million billion systems that no player could have possibly been to yet.  You get paid based on how valuable your finds are: floating rocks are worthless, and Earth-like worlds are each worth a small fortune.

 

This is how I've been spending my time in Elite, mostly.  Cruising through an endless, beautiful sea of stars and planets, sipping tea and listening to podcasts.  Yeah, it might be a direct copy of what Yahtzee said, but shut up, it's a wonderfully relaxing experience.  And I enjoy it all the more knowing that any day, I could turn back to the civilized part of the galaxy and pick up where I left off trading or bounty hunting.  The game simply has so many different ways to experience it, it's been hard for me to put down lately.  And with the prospect of bigger ships and shinier gear on the event horizon (hah), I'll be coming back to this game for a good, long time.

This Blog

This is an experimental blog I will be running over the summer to gauge my interest in writing about the video game industry.  As of now, my planned content will consist of new game reviews, opinion articles, and perhaps some retrospectives on a few nostalgic properties from my past.

 

Let's get to it, shall we?