December Days 22: Pocket Monsters
Dec. 22nd, 2019 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
So we've talked a little bit about shareware and the episodic releases they have, where you got to play one quarter, one third, or some other significant part of the complete game, even though that part of the game might have certain amounts of enemies, weapons, or items withheld as an enticement to get someone to buy the full game and experience but only the full amount of content, but also the rest of the story started by the first episode, usually ending on a hook of some sort, whether it's the Doom Guy dying and going to Hell, or Commander Keen discovering a space base where his rival might be, and so forth. Shareware works on the assumption that getting a portion of the story is enough for someone to want to buy the rest of it.
Pokémon, on the other hand, works on the principle that you and a friend both want to buy the same game that only has a few differences between it, and you will both be satisfied playing the game with and against each other.
While Pokémon is an older (and extremely successful) franchise, there are always people coming to it new as they get old enough to choose their own starter, so here's a quick primer. Generally, the Pokémon core games start with a small child coming of age and being tasked with a research quest by the local Pokémon Professor to go out with a Pokédex, an encyclopedia, and gather as much data as is possible on the species of Pokémon around them. What are Pokémon? They're the local wildlife in the games, and there are special high-tech objects called Pokéballs that can be used to capture them if they are sufficiently weakened first. Weakening Pokémon sufficiently to capture them usually involves battling with Pokémon already friendly to the Trainer character, so in addition to the Pokédex, the player chooses their first Pokémon from a set of three made available by the Pokémon Professor. (In specific special editions, like Pokémon Yellow or Let's Go Eevee!/Pikachu!, the starter Pokémon is already selected and usually has a significantly greater amount of flexibility of moves and powers than a wild-caught Pokémon of the same species. The disadvantage to this is that the Pokémon selected will not evolve in any way, so some of the wild-caught species will still be necessary to collect.) Traditionally, the three starter Pokémon are a choice between Grass-element, Water-Element, and Fire-element. Elements in Pokémon work in a method of rock-paper-scissors, where certain elements are strong (to the point of negation) against others, while weak against yet other elements' moves. There are eighteen active types in the current generation of Pokémon, so anyone wanting to be extremely effective at the game has to be able to play RPS-18 with some extra hitches, as sometimes there's more than one weakness to be exploited or more than one strength to be utilized (dual-type Pokémon) and several different ways to achieve maximum damage when desired. For starter Pokémon, Grass moves are super-effective against water, Water moves are super-effective against Fire, and Fire moves are super-effective against Grass. This expands greatly as the new types come into existence.
While the Pokémon Professor offers the goal of collecting data on all of the Pokémon speies that are native to the reason, the player character also has an additional goal that will propel them through the narrative. In several of the towns in the region are Pokémon battling gyms, headed by a single Leader for that gym. Gyms generally focus on specific elements and task the player with building a team that can suitably take advantage of the type system to defeat the Gym Leader. Defeating the Gym Leader awards the player character a badge, which generally raises the level limit of Pokémon that can be safely traded. (Pokémon above that limit will refuse to listen to the trainer's directions, either acting randomly or refusing to act at all, which is how the game prevents a newcomer from getting traded a whole bunch of super-powerful Pokémon to steamroll through the game with.) After defeating all Gym Leaders for their region (usually eight), the trainer character then battles the Elite in the Pokémon Championship for that region (usually four). The Elite trainers are still usually single-type, but they use rarer types that are not as easily matched against, such as Ice or Dragon.
Also common in Pokémon games is the Rival, a child of the same age as the protagonist who is also given the same task of learning as much as possible about the Pokémon around them. They will choose their starter Pokémon to have type-advantage against the player character's starter, such that if battles come down to the starters, the Rival will have the upper hand. The Rival is almost always one step ahead of the player character, in terms of leveling and training their Pokémon, but the player character tends to end up doing more during their journey than the Rival does. At the end of the training climb that goes through the Gyms and the Elites, the player character usually has to battle the Rival as a Final Exam Boss before they can truly claim the championship and win that portion of the game.
In addition to the Rival, the player character's journey is often made more complicated through their tangles with a crime syndicate with plans for the region the character is currently in. The player character either accidentally or deliberately infiltrates, sabotages, and otherwise foils the plans of the villains through their superior Pokémon training and battling skills, obtaining useful items and ways of getting through barriers that had previously blocked their path.
All in all, the formula is the same, with new generations of Pokémon introduced generally when a new Nintendo handheld console comes out and then a few years afterward, if there hasn't been one yet. Starting with the original Game Boy in 1996, there have been eight generations of Pokémon introduced so far, bringing the full total to more than 850 things to be caught across all the games. And while each game has the goal of winning the Pokémon League of their particular region, the game itself appeals to the completionist with the idea of catching all the Pokémon to complete the Dex for that game. There's just one tiny thing standing in the way of that, though: Not all the Pokémon of any given region are available in one game. Right from the beginning, with Red / Green (and then Blue / Yellow as the upgrades and special versions), Pokémon has always released in pairs, both of which have generally the same story, but have some differences between them in terms of what they have available for collectors, and, in the later versions, which Legendary Pokémon will be available for the player character to attempt to capture. To actually catch 'em all, a player has to have other people playing the game, or another device that can run another copy of the game and trade its uniques to the player. A full Dex requires not only all the Pokémon unique to the other game, but it usually also involves having to get someone to trade you one of their starter Pokémon at their earliest evolution stage. So if someone is just starting out and will trash their game as soon as they trade it away, a player can get a full Pokédex, which means that they should theoretically have something to trade in return. Some Pokémon only evolve (and thus fill a spot in the Dex) by being traded away to someone else. There are other reasons to trade as well (any Pokémon that's been traded gains boosted amounts of experience points, making it faster for them to level up, and trading often re-randomizes the hidden values of a Pokémon, meaning that what was pretty useless to the trainer that caught it can become a juggernaut for the one receiving it in a trade.) Pokémon can also be used in Trainer Battles between friends, for those looking to be the strongest of their friend groups or to play among each other.
So, Pokémon is unavoidably a game that you have to play with friends (who have different versions) to get full value. When it initially debuted, it also showcased an important new technology for the time, the link cable that allowed two different Game Boys to transfer data and engage in battles with each other. Link Cables continued to exist all the way through the handhelds that didn't get a wireless communication chip in them, at which point trading Pokémon became possible with anyone who also had a copy of the game. Suddenly, filling out that Dex becomes a lot easier when you can tap the entirety of the player base, and not just whomever happens to be nearby and has Pokémon to trade. (This became even more ubiquitous with the release of Pokémon Go, the smartphone game, but there's still the problem that some Pokémon only appear in certain regions of the globe, forcing you to either have someone in that area that can trade you their mons or for you to become a globetrotter (or GPS spoofer) to fully collect them all, much to the consternation of completionists.) Battling is also best done among friends, as the combat system is remarkably complex and requires all of that 18-type chart to be in play at any given time. The best Pokémon battlers can remember and change their Pokémon to get best advantage at a moment's notice. But players don't have to battle their friends, they can just be trading each other or trying to complete their Dexes, and that's a legitimate goal as well. And since they're all kids at the right age, and no Pokémon ever dies from battle, just faints and needs to be revived, and the kids get to beat on a crime syndicate, there's a lot of love about Pokémon. It's another one of those games that shouldn't work, if you hear the concept behind it, but Game Freak produced a gem of a game to go along with the concepts, and so the series has been going strong for 20+ years and eight generations of monsters. And then gets people to buy the remakes made for newer systems so they can re-catch what they had before, but bring them forward into the new game and its scenarios. The franchise still makes a lot of money, not just from the games, but from all the tie-ins and spinoffs, so it's going to be around for a while still.
It's super-effective!
So we've talked a little bit about shareware and the episodic releases they have, where you got to play one quarter, one third, or some other significant part of the complete game, even though that part of the game might have certain amounts of enemies, weapons, or items withheld as an enticement to get someone to buy the full game and experience but only the full amount of content, but also the rest of the story started by the first episode, usually ending on a hook of some sort, whether it's the Doom Guy dying and going to Hell, or Commander Keen discovering a space base where his rival might be, and so forth. Shareware works on the assumption that getting a portion of the story is enough for someone to want to buy the rest of it.
Pokémon, on the other hand, works on the principle that you and a friend both want to buy the same game that only has a few differences between it, and you will both be satisfied playing the game with and against each other.
While Pokémon is an older (and extremely successful) franchise, there are always people coming to it new as they get old enough to choose their own starter, so here's a quick primer. Generally, the Pokémon core games start with a small child coming of age and being tasked with a research quest by the local Pokémon Professor to go out with a Pokédex, an encyclopedia, and gather as much data as is possible on the species of Pokémon around them. What are Pokémon? They're the local wildlife in the games, and there are special high-tech objects called Pokéballs that can be used to capture them if they are sufficiently weakened first. Weakening Pokémon sufficiently to capture them usually involves battling with Pokémon already friendly to the Trainer character, so in addition to the Pokédex, the player chooses their first Pokémon from a set of three made available by the Pokémon Professor. (In specific special editions, like Pokémon Yellow or Let's Go Eevee!/Pikachu!, the starter Pokémon is already selected and usually has a significantly greater amount of flexibility of moves and powers than a wild-caught Pokémon of the same species. The disadvantage to this is that the Pokémon selected will not evolve in any way, so some of the wild-caught species will still be necessary to collect.) Traditionally, the three starter Pokémon are a choice between Grass-element, Water-Element, and Fire-element. Elements in Pokémon work in a method of rock-paper-scissors, where certain elements are strong (to the point of negation) against others, while weak against yet other elements' moves. There are eighteen active types in the current generation of Pokémon, so anyone wanting to be extremely effective at the game has to be able to play RPS-18 with some extra hitches, as sometimes there's more than one weakness to be exploited or more than one strength to be utilized (dual-type Pokémon) and several different ways to achieve maximum damage when desired. For starter Pokémon, Grass moves are super-effective against water, Water moves are super-effective against Fire, and Fire moves are super-effective against Grass. This expands greatly as the new types come into existence.
While the Pokémon Professor offers the goal of collecting data on all of the Pokémon speies that are native to the reason, the player character also has an additional goal that will propel them through the narrative. In several of the towns in the region are Pokémon battling gyms, headed by a single Leader for that gym. Gyms generally focus on specific elements and task the player with building a team that can suitably take advantage of the type system to defeat the Gym Leader. Defeating the Gym Leader awards the player character a badge, which generally raises the level limit of Pokémon that can be safely traded. (Pokémon above that limit will refuse to listen to the trainer's directions, either acting randomly or refusing to act at all, which is how the game prevents a newcomer from getting traded a whole bunch of super-powerful Pokémon to steamroll through the game with.) After defeating all Gym Leaders for their region (usually eight), the trainer character then battles the Elite in the Pokémon Championship for that region (usually four). The Elite trainers are still usually single-type, but they use rarer types that are not as easily matched against, such as Ice or Dragon.
Also common in Pokémon games is the Rival, a child of the same age as the protagonist who is also given the same task of learning as much as possible about the Pokémon around them. They will choose their starter Pokémon to have type-advantage against the player character's starter, such that if battles come down to the starters, the Rival will have the upper hand. The Rival is almost always one step ahead of the player character, in terms of leveling and training their Pokémon, but the player character tends to end up doing more during their journey than the Rival does. At the end of the training climb that goes through the Gyms and the Elites, the player character usually has to battle the Rival as a Final Exam Boss before they can truly claim the championship and win that portion of the game.
In addition to the Rival, the player character's journey is often made more complicated through their tangles with a crime syndicate with plans for the region the character is currently in. The player character either accidentally or deliberately infiltrates, sabotages, and otherwise foils the plans of the villains through their superior Pokémon training and battling skills, obtaining useful items and ways of getting through barriers that had previously blocked their path.
All in all, the formula is the same, with new generations of Pokémon introduced generally when a new Nintendo handheld console comes out and then a few years afterward, if there hasn't been one yet. Starting with the original Game Boy in 1996, there have been eight generations of Pokémon introduced so far, bringing the full total to more than 850 things to be caught across all the games. And while each game has the goal of winning the Pokémon League of their particular region, the game itself appeals to the completionist with the idea of catching all the Pokémon to complete the Dex for that game. There's just one tiny thing standing in the way of that, though: Not all the Pokémon of any given region are available in one game. Right from the beginning, with Red / Green (and then Blue / Yellow as the upgrades and special versions), Pokémon has always released in pairs, both of which have generally the same story, but have some differences between them in terms of what they have available for collectors, and, in the later versions, which Legendary Pokémon will be available for the player character to attempt to capture. To actually catch 'em all, a player has to have other people playing the game, or another device that can run another copy of the game and trade its uniques to the player. A full Dex requires not only all the Pokémon unique to the other game, but it usually also involves having to get someone to trade you one of their starter Pokémon at their earliest evolution stage. So if someone is just starting out and will trash their game as soon as they trade it away, a player can get a full Pokédex, which means that they should theoretically have something to trade in return. Some Pokémon only evolve (and thus fill a spot in the Dex) by being traded away to someone else. There are other reasons to trade as well (any Pokémon that's been traded gains boosted amounts of experience points, making it faster for them to level up, and trading often re-randomizes the hidden values of a Pokémon, meaning that what was pretty useless to the trainer that caught it can become a juggernaut for the one receiving it in a trade.) Pokémon can also be used in Trainer Battles between friends, for those looking to be the strongest of their friend groups or to play among each other.
So, Pokémon is unavoidably a game that you have to play with friends (who have different versions) to get full value. When it initially debuted, it also showcased an important new technology for the time, the link cable that allowed two different Game Boys to transfer data and engage in battles with each other. Link Cables continued to exist all the way through the handhelds that didn't get a wireless communication chip in them, at which point trading Pokémon became possible with anyone who also had a copy of the game. Suddenly, filling out that Dex becomes a lot easier when you can tap the entirety of the player base, and not just whomever happens to be nearby and has Pokémon to trade. (This became even more ubiquitous with the release of Pokémon Go, the smartphone game, but there's still the problem that some Pokémon only appear in certain regions of the globe, forcing you to either have someone in that area that can trade you their mons or for you to become a globetrotter (or GPS spoofer) to fully collect them all, much to the consternation of completionists.) Battling is also best done among friends, as the combat system is remarkably complex and requires all of that 18-type chart to be in play at any given time. The best Pokémon battlers can remember and change their Pokémon to get best advantage at a moment's notice. But players don't have to battle their friends, they can just be trading each other or trying to complete their Dexes, and that's a legitimate goal as well. And since they're all kids at the right age, and no Pokémon ever dies from battle, just faints and needs to be revived, and the kids get to beat on a crime syndicate, there's a lot of love about Pokémon. It's another one of those games that shouldn't work, if you hear the concept behind it, but Game Freak produced a gem of a game to go along with the concepts, and so the series has been going strong for 20+ years and eight generations of monsters. And then gets people to buy the remakes made for newer systems so they can re-catch what they had before, but bring them forward into the new game and its scenarios. The franchise still makes a lot of money, not just from the games, but from all the tie-ins and spinoffs, so it's going to be around for a while still.
It's super-effective!
no subject
Date: 2019-12-23 03:48 pm (UTC)1) Eighteen types. Original fifteen, Dark & Steel (Gen 2+), Fairy (Gen 6+). The "???" type only has one move (Curse) and it's a status one anyway.
2) Currently we're up to the eighth generation of handheld games with Sword and Shield.
EDIT: gen 8 made Curse a Ghost type move, which is entirely sensible.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-23 03:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-23 04:00 pm (UTC)The point stands that it's a stupendous huge rps, and that's before adding in the wrinkles from double typing, Abilities (e.g. Levitate), and a small handful of moves that explicitly break the paradigm (Freeze Dry, most notably)
no subject
Date: 2019-12-23 04:36 pm (UTC)And yeah, it's a large matrix of data that has to be dealt with at any given time, knowing the typing of your mon, the opponent's moon, what move you're using, what field effects are in play, STAB, and everything else. People who wonder whether children can remember anything are advised to look at how kids remember the type chart. And then have to recall all of that for one of any 800+ possibilities.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-23 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-23 06:06 pm (UTC)🤣
no subject
Date: 2019-12-23 10:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-23 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-24 01:02 am (UTC)