Pokemon Is Just A Horse Girl Game

thegamer.com:

I wrote last weekend, somewhat jokingly, about the new mechanics in Pokemon Scarlet & Violet. Namely that the game would let me shower with my mangosteen queen, Tsareena. For all the open world adventure, ‘experience the story however you please’ angle has been front and centre of the marketing up to this point, the latest trailer showed off all of the stuff you could do in your downtime. While getting soapy and steamy with Tsareena is perhaps overselling it a mite, the game is going to great lengths to allow you to see your Pokemon not just as tools to help you in battle, but as friends and companions who are alongside your adventure as partners. The more I see of it, the more it reminds me of a forgotten genre of my childhood - the horse girl game.

The horse girl game is a genre that sadly no longer exists, at least not to the extent that it once did. I played Horse Tales at Gamescom and felt it was a major advance on the horse girl games I used to play, but that was 20 years ago or so and Horse Tales does not feel like 20 years worth of improvements have gone into it. Sexism has moved in odd ways in gaming. In the '90s and '00s, general gaming publications were extremely sexist, making crude jokes and objectifying women. Even as Lara Croft ruled the world, she was heavily fetishised by the press and many in the audience, while magazines frequently came with stickers, posters, and other miscellaneous merch that signalled gaming as an edgy activity for teenage boys and men who never grew out of their teenage phase. Even the Game Boy was marketed as an alternative to masturbation.

Related: I Already Hate Pokemon Scarlet & Violet's Far Cry-Style Enemy Outposts

Girls weren't entirely sidelined though, instead they were