Interlude: Final Fantasy VII

So, I’m not totally sure exactly how long it will be before I can actually play X or Y (could easily be a few weeks).  In the meantime… Final Fantasy VII, which Jim has been telling me for a long time that I must play, is on sale for $6 on Steam this weekend.

On the theory that writing something is better than writing nothing, let’s see what happens.

Jim says it’s among the most perfect games ever, and that I’ll laugh, I’ll cry, and it’ll change my life.  I’m a little vague on what the game is about – I think the main characters are terrorists, and the bad guys are an evil power company?  And I know that Aeris dies, although I’m not exactly sure who Aeris is, which I think is rather the reverse of the way one is normally supposed to approach this story.  Nonetheless, I shall press on.

These are going to be more reaction pieces than my usual polished commentary, but I’m sure I’ll be able to work in some analysis somewhere.  Think of it as a stylistic experiment on my part.

Hello I just found this blog and I ask this one. :) I read this fanfic called, “Almost Like Flying” by Starlingnight. It made me very sad for liking pokemon which made me think, “pokemon don’t rebel because they don’t know any better”. What do you think? :)

I’m not totally sure I understand what you’re asking, but I’ll give this a shot – I’m taking this to mean “why don’t Pokémon rebel against trainers who do bad things?”; is that about right?

I don’t think Pokémon are like most animals – their comprehension of language and abstract concepts seems quite advanced.  Most of them clearly aren’t of human intelligence, but it seems like we’re looking at something much more like a dolphin or a great ape than a lizard or a pigeon, even concerning the… shall we say ‘less gifted’ species of Pokémon out there.  Ash’s Pikachu, at any rate, clearly has at least some degree of understanding of human morality, and the other main human characters’ Pokémon in the anime generally do seem to ‘get it.’  On the other hand most species aren’t concerned with that sort of thing at all in the wild.  They’re perfectly capable of understanding conventional morality, right and wrong, and so on, but it’s just not something they care about unless they’ve specifically been taught to, because their wild communities don’t function in the same way as human societies do.  I suppose what I’m getting at is that saying “they don’t know any better” is one way you could put it, but I don’t think it really gives them enough credit.

You could take a look at these two articles if you want more on the subject:

http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/post/27548748071/anime-time-episode-54 

http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/post/34093585438/the-ethics-of-pokemon-training

If I Were In Charge: You teach me and I’ll teach you

Last entry in this series, so let’s hope it’s a good one.  I’m going to be dealing primarily with battle mechanics here, so odds are good everything I say here is going to be superseded completely the moment X and Y are released in a couple of weeks (hell, for all I know, some of it has been already, since I deliberately pay very little attention to pre-release material), but that’s not going to stop me.  Here we go!

Earlier in this series I talked about my notion that Pokémon is actually two different games http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/post/56511544854/if-i-were-in-charge-i-will-battle-every-day-to-claim – a single-player one defined by the game developers, and a multiplayer one defined by the community.  Here I want to talk about one of the big differences between the two that has a nasty habit of bringing about all kinds of plainly unnecessary spite and ill feeling – whether or not Pokémon are any ‘good’ competitively.  Talking about game balance in Pokémon is unavoidably problematic because it seems likely that, early on, Game Freak never really cared whether the games were ‘balanced’ at all, and possible that they still don’t even now.  This then must lead us to question whether game balance is even inherently desirable.  My instinct is ‘obviously it is.’  It is a well-established point of the series’ philosophy, expressed consistently by a variety of positively-portrayed characters throughout its incarnations, that any Pokémon can shine and become a powerhouse with the right kind of love and dedication.  As a child, my favourite expression of the sentiment was always Karen’s: “Strong Pokémon. Weak Pokémon. That is only the selfish perception of people. Truly skilled trainers should try to win with their favourites.”  Read carefully into what she’s saying, though: she’s not denying that some Pokémon are strong and others weak; she’s saying that whether this actually matters is a question of perspective.  We only care about whether Pokémon are weak or strong because we use them to battle (unfortunately, battling is difficult to avoid).  Taken this way, her comment that “truly skilled trainers try to win with their favourites” could be seen as an exhortation to pick weak Pokémon on purpose for the challenge of it – and, indeed, in the single-player game this can be a worthwhile and fulfilling pursuit.  It’s only when we come up against the single-player/competitive dichotomy that Karen’s rhetoric starts to become painfully obstructive.  If your favourite Pokémon happens to be Ledian, Mawile, or Seaking, you should probably get used to ignoring her.  This doesn’t seem fair to me.  Why punish people for liking Ledian while rewarding people for liking Dragonite?

Continue reading “If I Were In Charge: You teach me and I’ll teach you” →

Some new bits of Pokémon X and Y info got me thinking: being a self-professed dinosaur nerd, what kinds of dinosaurs and/or prehistoric animals would YOU like to see get made into Pokémon?

You know, I would really like to see some more of the weird-ass Cambrian Explosion stuff like Hallucigenia (an animal whose name means “I really gotta lay off the special mushrooms”) played with.  Or, from the Mesozoic, maybe a Spinosaurus, just because I’d be curious to see where Game Freak would take the ‘sail’ thing.  A Spinosaurus’ sail is generally thought to have something to do with regulating body temperature in a hot climate, so the simplest interpretation would be to give it fire- or sun-related powers, but you could take it in other directions too – like thinking of it as a literal sail and working with wind- and water-related abilities.

If I Were In Charge: A heart so true, our courage will pull us through

Damn, this one was hard to write…

Who among us has never once felt a little cheated by our inability to respond “yes” to the Team Rocket recruiter’s offer in Cerulean City on Red and Blue?  One of the more persistent demands fans make of Pokémon is the possibility of being able to ‘swap sides’ as it were – play for the bad guys once in a while.  Many RPGs allow this; some even focus on it, so it’s hardly without precedent, but Pokémon games do not do this.  Even outside the core series, there are (to my knowledge) no games where playing as a villain is an option.  Surely this is somewhere that offers a lot of potential for future developments?

Well, yes and no.  The fact is, I think that Game Freak’s reticence to explore those paths is, in many ways, entirely justified.  So before talking about how I’d do this, let’s first think about whether I even would.

Continue reading “If I Were In Charge: A heart so true, our courage will pull us through” →

You keep mentioning that you’re into Classical mythology but don’t know much about Japanese mythology, so I was wondering if there any other mythologies you’re interested in?

Well, classics is sort of my job (or the closest thing I have to one, anyway – I’m a graduate student, but I have a fellowship, so the university pays me for it, rather than the other way round), and knowing the mythology is an important part of the background, so I’ve actually studied a lot of the major texts, like Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Homeric epics (and, for that matter, some of the texts that are important to our understanding of ancient reception of myth, like Plato’s Republic), at an academic level.  I’m also a TA on a classical myth course at the moment.  Nothing else really comes close to that.  Having said that, when I hear a mythical story I tend to remember it; I guess I know quite a bit about Norse myth (I bought a copy of the poetic Edda the other day; it’s just a matter of finding time to read the damn thing), and probably more than most people about Maori myth (I’m guessing those stories don’t get a lot of exposure outside New Zealand).

Perhaps something along the lines of telescoping generations in aphids? Some species reproduce asexually as well as sexually- females are born pregnant with a genetically identical daughter, and that unborn daughter is already developing a daughter of her own. When mating with males, they lay eggs which can hatch into either males or females. Maybe each newly hatched Kangaskid is already parthenogenically pregnant and gives birth when she becomes Kangaskhan offscreen.

Well, that seems to be more or less what happens, except that there are no male Kangaskhan, which would mean that actual Kangaskhan eggs are a weird anomaly that only ever happen with hybrids, and most of them just clone themselves ad infinitum.  They’re just… kind of a strange species.

I have a theory about why Kangaskhan has a baby in its pouch as soon as it’s born. When a Kangaskhan egg hatches, the baby inside replaces the one in the Kangaskhan’s pouch, while the one previously in the pouch instantly matures into an adult Kangaskhan, complete with baby in pouch. Baby Kangaskhans themselves are simply multicellular versions of egg cells and get genetic information from the father through the mother Kangaskhan’s milk. Thus all Kangaskhan are perpetual mothers. Your thoughts?

So… what you’re saying is that the egg doesn’t actually hatch into a Kangaskhan at all; it hatches into a ‘Kangaskid’ or whatever you want to call it, and that prompts an existing Kangaskid to leave its mother’s pouch and ‘evolve’ (offscreen, as it were) into an adult Kangaskhan, producing another Kangaskid in the process?

It’s… an interesting idea; the trouble is that, in the games, there doesn’t actually need to be another Kangaskhan present in order for an egg to hatch.  You can be wandering around with nothing in your party but a Kangaskhan egg and, say, a Magcargo, and when the egg hatches, you’ll still get a complete set of Kangaskhan + baby (in the anime, on the other hand, there’s nothing all that unusual about seeing a Kangaskhan without a baby, so there’s nothing that needs to be explained anyway).