Well, surely there’s no harm in figuring that out for myself.  After all, I can hardly be nostalgic about something I’ve never played before.

…

…huh.

That… yeah.

They kinda do.

Can I be the Pokémon Emperor?

Link for other readers.

It is my friend.  Most things that give Unown additional power and sense of purpose are my friend, and I like that Renownd is just as inscrutable and bizarre as its younger brethren.  It’s also nice that Renownd actually provides a useful reward for collecting all of Unown’s forms, and I’m obsessed enough with Greek to appreciate the Α/Ω thing.  I don’t think I would have made it Ghost/Psychic, but since unused type combinations are BoltBeam’s entire raison d’être, I’m okay with that.  It’s probably one of my favourite designs from them.

There’s a debate on that?

…huh.

To be honest, I never knew it was in question.  All the big fansites that I know of always capitalise them, as do the games themselves, the official website, and promotional materials.  Frankly, I’m not sure I can think of any actual evidence that, in-universe, the names of Pokémon species are not capitalised.  I suppose the easiest way to account for this is by saying that it’s simply a point of convention specific to the cultures of the Pokémon universe.  They capitalise Pokémon names because they do.  Rules of capitalisation are not universal by any stretch of the imagination – German, for instance, capitalises all nouns, while French doesn’t capitalise days of the week, months of the year, or nationalities (however, it does – I have just checked pokemon.com/fr – capitalise the names of Pokémon), and Japanese (like most languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet) has no equivalent to capitalisation at all, as far as I know.

(Also, purely as a point of incidental interest, by convention species names should not be capitalised; genus names should be – so humans, for instance, are Homo sapiens, capital H, minuscule s, chimpanzees are Pan troglodytes, capital P, minuscule t, and so on.  Attempting to apply this distinction to Pokémon is probably a waste of time, though, since according to strict biological definitions most Pokémon are actually subspecies or breeds of only thirteen species)

You know, I never have.  I watched the show when I was a kid but I never actually played a Digimon game.  I don’t think they were ever as popular in New Zealand as the anime was.

What kind of games should I be thinking of here?  Are we talking about the Tamagotchi-style thingies that Digimon was originally based on, or the stuff that was developed later as spin-offs of the anime?  Seriously, if anyone wants to recommend something so I can go and grab an emulator, I’m all ears.  The anime had some really nice characterisation and, although I don’t have as much fun with the themes as I do in Pokémon, it’s a cool world to play with.

Found it!

http://bulbagarden.tumblr.com/post/46036478839/yesterday-when-we-asked-on-twitter-and-facebook

I’m sorry to disappoint, but in general my opinion on these things is “it’s possible but I don’t think there’s sufficient evidence to decide either way.”  I honestly don’t understand why people get so invested in speculating about something we’re all going to find out in a few months anyway.  I agree with many of the points the authors make:

– Adding a new type with so many Pokémon in existence already would be difficult, but by no means impossible (if it were me doing this, I would want to make as many as half of the new Pokémon members of at least one of the new types).
– There are many existing Pokémon and moves that could become Love- or Sound-typed, mostly by stripping down Normal to a saner volume.
–  The choice of revealing Sylveon on Valentine’s day is interesting.

The reason I’m still not convinced is that the affirmative evidence basically comes down to “it’s not impossible and we don’t know what type Sylveon and Xerneas are.”  Also, speaking as a classicist, I think that linking Artemis, a goddess of chastity, with a hypothetical Love type is fundamentally absurd.  Furthermore, no actual evidence for the existence of a Sound type is presented here, let alone any evidence for identifying Yveltal as a member of it.

The authors are correct that Apollo is in one story associated with a satyr, Marsyas, in a music competition.  What they do not mention is that Apollo subsequently flayed him.

Well… not really, no.  I hate to break it to you but I’m really just a Pokémon guy.  I think I’ve heard of Shin Megami Tensei, but I always thought it was, like, a manga about magical girl superheroes or something.

Um.  So yeah.

I used to watch Digimon as a kid.  That $#!t was legit.

*shrug* Well, live action movie versions of anime franchises often don’t turn out well (witness the widespread rage against Shayamalan’s Avatar: the Last Airbender adaptation).  Of course, there’s no reason it couldn’t be done well, but do we need that?  As I understand it, in Japan cartoons aren’t considered culturally or intellectually ‘inferior’ to live action as they regularly are in the West, which I think makes it unlikely that anyone is going to recognise a need for live action Pokémon any time soon.  Personally, I think they have a point.

I’m sorry I’ve taken so long to get around to answering this one; it’s been sitting here for goodness knows how long and I keep thinking I’ll come up with a good answer if I sleep on it, but I never do.  Honestly, I don’t really have my finger on the pulse of the Pokémon community, so to speak, so I don’t know that I’m qualified to judge how its popularity has waxed and waned over the years, or talk about the reasons for it.  I suppose I would guess that Pokémon ‘works’ as a franchise for two main reasons.  The first is that its game mechanics are easy to learn (good for the little kids) but difficult to master (you can keep getting better and better at it as you grow up).  The second is the sheer variety and whimsicality of all the different creatures (an impressive selection even in the first generation, let alone now), which manages to capture, I think, just a little of the bewildering complexity of nature.  I don’t think it’d be bold to say that there really is a Pokémon for everyone now, and a fan for every Pokémon (even if I do like to spend an inordinate amount of time bashing some of them).  I suppose it makes sense, when you look at it that way, for Game Freak to focus so much of their efforts on continuing to expand the Pokédex.

Hmm.  I will think on this.

Hrm.

Well, they do already allow a degree of customisation by allowing you to choose your avatar for multiplayer functions from a list of trainer types, but further than that…?  I don’t think it’s likely.  Game Freak seem to take the whole ‘silent protagonist’ thing very seriously; I think they regard it as a point of philosophy that players be encouraged to imagine as much as possible about their own characters, rather than actually see it on the screen.  Besides that, the focus is always on the Pokémon anyway.  Not that it’s impossible, or that it would be a bad idea necessarily, but I don’t think they’re likely to do it.