The Paradoxical Symbiosis Of Pokemon – The Curse Of Game Freak

gameranx.com:

The headline of this article is kind of silly. Heck, it might not even make sense once broken down into its core components. It’s there for a reason though –  it’s there because Pokemon, as a franchise, is just as ludicrously nonsensical. So much so, that Game Freak has no chance of actually breaking the curse brought on by decades of success. So totally not clickbait. Probably.

I was the generation that got sold the original concept for Pokemon. I was a ‘Gen One Kid’, and you better believe single-digit me lapped this series up and helped finance a near-monopoly on cute animals fighting to the not-quite-so-death. As time has passed, Pokemon has changed as much as it has stayed the same. Here’s the thing though – the community has changed drastically. So much so we have a disjointed ‘fiction vs reality’ scenario on our hands, and I would love to dive into all of that.

Since the dawn of time, otherwise known as the late nineties, Pokemon has sold itself on one thing – catching them all. But at the same time, not really. That is the ultimate mechanical goal of early Pokemon – the intended ideal. But the intended and the publicly perceived are two very different beasts. It’s like comparing a Clefairy to a Jiggly Puff. Both are pink little weirdos, both share the same DNA (Type), but they are very different in execution. 

I think it’s safe to say people went into Pokemon on the premise that catching a bunch of monsters was awesome, but what ended up happening was people caught the ones they thought were cool. You know, the funky stuff. Beedrill, to this day, is a staple in my team because that goofy bug speaks to me on a deeply emotional level. Awful stats and poor Typing be damned.

Game Freak gave players a world of