Pokémon is no longer just a game — it’s a lifestyle
A normal person in a rural town has dreams of becoming a master. As they come of age and spring approaches, it’s time for them to begin their journey to chase that dream. After saying goodbye to their mother and hometown, adventure awaits. They open the front door and take their first steps into a world full of new experiences and things to uncover.
That’s right: it’s time to enter the workforce!
The Pokémon that existed when Game Freak and series creator Satoshi Tajiri kick-started a phenomenon in 1996, and the one that premiered its first live-action TV series in Japan with Pack Your Pocket With Adventure (Pocket ni Bouken o Tsumekonde, or PokéTsume for short) last month, are almost unrecognizable. Which makes sense when you go from creating a game in a home office to a franchise more lucrative than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Harry Potter, and Nintendo’s own Mario combined.
More than 25 years since the original game’s release, multiple generations of kids have become adults under the watchful eyes of Pikachu and friends, and the series has grown to encompass everything from anime and merchandise to card games and Hollywood blockbusters. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, with the growth in popularity of trading card games like Pokémon in a postpandemic world and the record-breaking sales of the recent generation of titles despite quality concerns, it only seems to get more popular by the year.
For a franchise to retain relevance for as long as Pokémon, it must evolve — and not just evolve but interweave its ideals into the fabric of daily life. Those early generations of kids need to pass on their love of Pokémon like how Disney animated classics often serve as a formative childhood introduction to film.
Perhaps
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