Tag: Pokémon

Anonymous asks:

Long time reader of the blog, I went back and reread some of your black and white reviews and noticed something. In your Genesect review, you showed the picture of a lot of robotic pokemon and said in the picture that all of them, bar Magnezone, are done better than Genesect. Which leads me to what I wanted to ask, are you not a fan of Magnezone? If so, why is that? Is it purely from a design standpoint, or is it something mechanical, or just personal hatred that I’m not getting?

You know, I honestly don’t remember what exactly was going through my mind when I wrote that particular caption.  It was some years ago, after all.  I do prefer Magneton’s design to Magnezone’s by quite a lot, not even so much because Magnezone is awful, but because Magneton is sort of fine without it.  Magnemite evolving to Magneton makes sense and is kind of neat; they’re magnets, they attract each other, so they evolve by moving together and coordinating.  And then… they turn into a flying saucer?  Why?  I mean, it’s not even a horrible idea, and Magneton was already associated with cosmic phenomena, albeit loosely, but… why?

Also I was a great deal snarkier back then.

thephilosophicalsheep asks:

War has been a concept alluded to several times in the pokemon games, but has never outright happened. What would you think of a pokemon game in which the whole premise was that a war has started to break out, and your job was to stop it? War in the pokemon world sounds like an interesting concept, and using pokemon as tools of destruction could eventually be shown to be an unspeakable sin.

Well, we do have Conquest, don’t we?  That’s not really what you’re asking, but I think that would be Game Freak’s answer, that they don’t want that kind of theme in the core series; Pokémon’s preferred tone is a good deal more optimistic than that, and in fact even in Conquest war is pretty seriously declawed, from what I’ve seen of it.  Which is the problem, of course; Pokémon’s been around so long that you have people like me who’ve grown up with it, and wish it could have grown up bit more with us, and think that something exploring themes like that would be really interesting, but then you also have Game Freak, for whom Pokémon is (I think) a vision of what they wish our world could be like.  Evil exists, but it can always be overcome; people get hurt, but they can always be healed.

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Anonymous asks:

I miss douchebag rivals like blue and silver. Why dont they make more characters like that? Do you think they should?

Hmm.  Well, it sort of depends what you mean by “douchebag rivals.”  

I think rival characters should say something interesting about what it means to be a Pokémon trainer, and sometimes characters with major negative qualities can be good ways to do that.  “Nice” rivals like Bianca can do the same thing in different ways, though.  Blue was a douchebag because he was supposed to illustrate what a good trainer is not; Silver was a douchebag because he was supposed to illustrate how being a trainer changes you.  The closest thing we’ve had to that since Silver is Hugh, who isn’t really a douchebag but does have his troubling anger issues, but he’s sort of doing something different because the point of him is to reframe the Team Plasma conflict with a new perspective.  So I suppose I think it’s a matter of whether you can do something clever with it, and what kind of message you can use the character to create.