One lunatic's love-hate relationship with the Pokémon franchise, and his addled musings on its rights, wrongs, ins and outs. Come one, come all, and indulge my delusions of grandeur as I inflict my opinions on anyone within shouting distance.
So what are these games about, anyway?
We want to be the very best, of course! You know, like no-one ever was! Become Pokémon Masters!
…right?
What… what is a Pokémon Master, anyway? How do you become one? Why does everyone want to? What are we doing with our lives?
Okay.
Let’s do this.
You all hear me complain on a regular basis about how such and such an aspect of the Pokémon games is totally mismanaged, or how such and such an idea is neglected, or such and such a concept is just setting things back and needs to die in a fire. I really can be such a whiner sometimes, am I right? Well, I think it’s time to put my money where my mouth is. If I’m so damn clever, how would I run these games?
I want to establish here, first of all, what I’m not doing in this series of entries. I’m not planning out a whole Pokémon game from scratch, although I may write stuff that could be part of one, and I will talk about how I would structure a new game. I’m not creating any new Pokémon, although I will talk about where I think new Pokémon are necessary and beneficial. I’m also not going to attempt anything really radical, like completely replacing the battle system or transplanting the games to an entirely different setting, because that way lies madness, but I have a lot of little tweaks in mind. Most importantly, I’m not critiquing or building on any preview material of X and Y. Most of the ideas I hope to talk about have been at the back of my mind since well before generation 6 was announced. I have no interest in speculating about how X and Y are going to be handled, and I am not going to start reviewing them before they’re even released.
I want to try to think about every aspect of the games, how they contribute to their overall themes and aims, how often they fail to do so and why, and what can be done to change that.
And just to make sure I don’t leave anything out, I’ll be organising my thoughts according to the lyrics of the season one theme song.
Here goes nothing.
I’m an academic! I study and teach ancient Greek and Roman history, language, and archaeology. I’ll be starting my MA later this year. Basically, this involves making a lot of fuss over details no-one else has ever noticed, drawing conclusions based on cripplingly limited information, and inflicting my views on students who couldn’t care less.
In other words, exactly what I do on this blog!
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.
I didn’t; Tumblr did. It is a capricious beast at the best of times.
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)
I’M NOT READING THIS QUESTION BECAUSE I’M AVOIDING EVERYTHING ABOUT THE NEW POKEMON GAMES THAT IS ALL
I sit in a picturesque little restaurant overlooking Undella Bay, surrounded by the smell of the salt breeze, the sound of chattering holidaymakers, and the warmth of the sun. I tap my pencil against the table, musing over a passage of the letter I am drafting on the back of a menu.
“…and furthermore,” it reads, “I cannot imagine what possessed you to hide something as basic as a difficulty setting behind something as ———- as the key system, nor who you imagined would use an ‘easy mode’ unlocked only by completing the game; this all but undoes the admittedly excellent work you have done in presenting these options in the first place, especially for players of Black 2, and serves no readily discernible purpose. And another thing…”
Uncooperative? Needlessly complicated? Demented? I chew the end of my pencil and gesture to a waiter for another glass of water. I’ve been here for nearly an hour and have ordered only a small tasting plate, which I have long since finished. I suspect the staff are growing tired of my presence. Hopefully I won’t have to keep them waiting much longer.
I’m not in it, no, nor am I in the cast and crew intro (I was busy when they shot that). I’m strictly behind the scenes, since I just plain can’t act.
So, remember how I was the chef for an amateur film crew? This is the short film my pizza muffins fueled.
(N.B. The first half minute is our team’s introduction clip; the actual film starts something like 35 seconds in)
That… sounds really hard, but I guess it might be worth it. Who the hell would I put on there? And would I be considering design only, or mechanical strength as well? Hmm…
Jim and I warp into a spacious office at the prow of the Team Plasma frigate, sparsely but tastefully furnished, and lined with monitors displaying live security feeds from around the ship. The office’s sole occupant, a tall green-haired man in long, dark grey robes, has his back to us, his eyes fixed on one of the monitors. Colress is visible going about his business on the security feed. As if conscious of his observers, he glances up at the security camera and waves cheerily before returning to his consoles. Ghetsis – for it is he – quietly curses Colress for his obsessive devotion to the principles of science, before turning around to greet us.
So, update on the last entry - our team’s other script concept recovered and developed enough in time to be chosen over mine (the fools!) and the film is well on track to being finished by the 7pm Sunday deadline. We cannot actually make any video available, since the competition rules state that any team whose film is released in any form before the official screening (some time in the next two weeks) will be disqualified. I’ll give you a link when our director uploads the finished product later, though.
However, some of you have expressed an interest in my pizza muffin recipe, which is not restricted from public use at all, and which I will share with you now. I have never actually tasted these, since one of my dietary peculiarities is that I don’t like cheese (not lactose intolerant or anything, I’m just not fond of the stuff) but I’ve had positive comments from everyone who’s ever tried them, so I must be doing something right.
Ingredients:
2 cups grated cheese (I use a commercial blend of mozzarella, cheddar and Parmesan marketed as being specially made for pizza)
2 cups plain white flour
3 tsp baking powder
1 tbs sugar
1 spring onion/leek, finely chopped
50g salami, finely chopped
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1 tbs tomato paste
3 tbs water
1 cup milk
1 egg
Method:
Mix cheese, flour, baking powder and sugar with a wooden spoon.
Add salami, spring onion and oregano and stir lightly.
In a separate bowl, mix tomato paste and water until smooth.
Beat in milk and egg.
Fold together the two mixtures.
Spoon into a greased muffin pan.
Bake for 12 minutes at 220 degrees C.
I often make it as a sort of loaf instead, in which case I line a loaf tin with baking paper and cook at 180 degrees C until the top is golden brown (I guess about 25-30 minutes, but use a skewer to make sure the inside is cooked before you take it out). Also, I imagine you could vary the ‘toppings’ considerably if you had a mind to, though I’ve never tried it.
I am currently being drowned in a flood of undergraduate Greek history essays, which is why I’m not rambling about Pokémon at the moment. Can I not take time out of marking my clueless students’ misshapen diatribes against history, you may ask? Is not my Pokémon blog more important than this?
Well, sort of. The trouble is that I’m already taking time out of marking essays so I can make pizza muffins at five o’clock in the morning.
This is because I am participating in a short film competition.
You understand now that I am not merely affecting insanity when I write about Pokémon on the internet. This is actually what my life is like.
…huh.
You know, I didn’t specifically have Lord English in mind when I wrote that, but I suppose, now that you mention it, that there are some marked similarities in concept. They are also both green.
