#I just didn’t expect Californians to be so over represented on tumblr

[fiat-veritas]

I feel like this storm has showcased to me how many Californians I follow, which has been funny to me for some reason

[gascon-en-exil]

The interminable generation war of the Pokémon fandom is not something I’m inclined to wade into, not least because I am one of those strange individuals who play the games in part for their stories and worldbuilding. As reliably underwhelming as those attributes of any given game in this franchise may be, it’s nonetheless evident that Gamefreak puts some effort into elements of the franchise that aren’t competitive tournaments or Battle <name of building>s or gimmicky mini games. Sometimes. 

As such, in the spirit of my modest contributions to the FE and Zelda fandoms on this blog and as further proof that I am capable of judging aspects of video games aside from the desirability and inferred sexual prowess (or lack thereof) of their men, here follows my current opinions on each of the regions of the main series...so nothing about Orre or those Ranger spin-offs or whatever. And yes -  regions rather than generations, so the remakes will be grouped with their originals.

So. Very. Blaaaand. As with Archanea from Fire Emblem and the NES Zelda games I can respect the historical significance of the Kanto games; hell, unlike FE and Zelda I was actually following the series back when RBY were in their prime...and yet they are so unremarkable. Kanto feels utterly devoid of distinctive personality despite appearing in all of the first four generations, and even today there’s really nothing I can say about it beyond the relatively realistic villain team and the emphasis on modernization in contrast to Johto. Supposedly, anyway...it’s more like Kanto cares less about historical preservation which I suppose is probably the closest these games comes to commenting upon the real world inspiration for the region. Combine this with a contentious roster of Pokémon - some are great and still hold up today, some are meh, and almost all of them get disproportionate amounts of exposure and new toys in later generations, for better or worse - and an infamously loud fanbase wearing some very thick nostalgia goggles and you’ve got a setting I have no interest in revisiting. I absolutely wouldn’t put another round of remakes past GF, though 

(But having the protagonist and his rival hook up in their later years was a nice twist.)

Not much more developed than its predecessor, but the Johto games benefit immensely from throwing in Kanto as a bonus (sort of) postgame region, both for the aforementioned contrast and for the additional content. Sure, the level curve is kind of screwy, the Pokémon could be better (Johto has my least favorite starter line-up, for instance), and Kanto feels half-formed in Gen II, but it’s not bad for what it is. I like that these games are set three years after the first ones, in that it conveys a sense of the passage of time - something that would only get more vague as the series progressed. I’m not much interested in the nods to Japanese culture and folklore strewn throughout Johto, but at least the region is identifiably Japanese. Also, the implementation of elements like a day/night cycle and days of the week appeal to me, even if in practice they’re more annoying than anything else. And I know the entire internet agrees with me, but HGSS did substantially more for Johto and Kanto than FRLG did for Kanto. That’s kind of sad, honestly.

While I’m bringing up remakes, I would however like to disagree with most of the internet and say that ORAS were good remakes - good enough to where I could actually finish Alpha Sapphire when the original left me so unimpressed that I actually stopped playing the series outside remakes until Gen VI. The beloved Battle Frontier (which doesn’t seem all that interesting? Someone explain the appeal of this thing to me) may be missing and you can’t re-challenge gym leaders and various other things you can only do in Emerald, but on the flip side the story development is much improved and better paced - yay for convenient cutscene warping - and the Delta Episode provides a decent postgame capstone. What’s more, Hoenn is absolutely beautiful in the remakes, looking as lush and tropical as it ought to and no longer bogged down with water routes that are a slog to traverse or much backtracking. Soaring is a wonderful addition as well that shows off the region and cuts down on HM usage, and the DexNav is excellent for reducing the tedium of catching them all (or some approximation thereof when stupid things like event legendaries and untradeable-on-GTS version exclusives still exist).

I haven’t even mentioned the villain teams. I know full well that Tumblr is ahead of me on this one, but they are so gay. I picked up the gayer version with Matt outright professing his love for men (somewhat ruined when you consider that he’s talking to a ten-year-old...ick), but via extensive research *ahem* I’ve learned that Omega Ruby has its moments too and that Teams Magma and Aqua are best enjoyed as a pair. Their goals may be patently stupid, but they all learn something at the end of the day and can go home and have an orgy together. I haven’t even mentioned the Steven/Wallace subtext one of my mutuals cued me into, which is sweet revenge indeed for Emerald fanboys whining for years about femme Wallace with his predictable team becoming champion in that game. It’s enough altogether for me to forgive the game for constantly teasing Brendan/May - because obligatory heterosexual romance doesn’t have to wait for a little thing like puberty.

The only region for which I can’t really give a full assessment. I started a playthrough of Platinum on emulator, but the game felt so slow and clunky that after the second gym (which I’ve read is an especially dull and pace-breaking stretch) I couldn’t bring myself to play any more. I’ve watched speedruns and video reviews of this game, and they’ve only confirmed my initial opinion and caused me to hope that most of Sinnoh’s copious issues will be addressed in the inevitable remakes. The over-reliance on HM slaves (poor Bidoof...), unintuitive region layout, periods of severe environmental slowdown in the form of marshlands and deep snow, and other factors do not appeal to me at all, and while I know Platinum fixed this particular problem I assume that the Diamond and Peal remakes will not have to contend with a limited roster as they did. The characters could do with some work as well: Barry seriously needs to calm down, I still don’t know how to feel about Fantina (will she be Kalosian? What about in the Japanese and French versions where she’s apparently from an English-speaking country?), and Cyrus really doesn’t work as the charismatic leader he’s built up to be. Say what you will about the Hoenn villain teams or Team Flare having idiotic goals, but at least I can say what those are. I still got nothing on Team Galactic caring about Prof. Rowan’s evolution research or stealing energy or what have you. Sinnoh is severely in need of a second - or third, I suppose - draft. 

Confirming that Volkner and Flint are a couple would also be nice. Just throwing out ideas.

When I downloaded White and Black 2 for emulator I didn’t expect to be very impressed by these games. Unova is the MURICA FUCK YEAH region, as we all know, and I shouldn’t have to point out to my regular followers that that fact alone would be enough to unfavorably prejudice me against the place. And yet, in spite of that, it works for me. A big part of that is that Louisiana is absent from this loose celebration of the US as interpreted by Japan; there’s an oil baron dressed like a cowboy, a Californian or Hawaiian surfer bro, a gay (or straight hipster, hard to tell these days) artist with a loft gym in Castro the Village Castelia City, a Southern mammy for some casual racism that was actually too casual for international release, counterparts to Coney Island, Broadway, Hollywood, and American sports, and numerous Pokémon like the Trubbish and Vanillite* lines inspired by the shallow consumerism that passes for culture in the US, but nothing representing my own stubbornly French state. I’m actually warier about the bizarre attempts to insert bits of medieval and early modern Europe into the region via PETA-by-way-of-the-Knights-Templar (what) Team Plasma and the trio quartet of legendaries based on les Trois Mousquetaires. Did whoever came up with those not get the memo about where the series was going next?

With that said, although I’m not as enamored with N as some people his characterization was if nothing else a step up from anything that had come before. While Ghetsis and Plasma make no damn sense aesthetically until the sequels they are intimidating villains who raise serious questions about how humans treat Pokémon...that are naturally never considered in their full complexity because friendship or something. As I stated with Johto I do like the sequel model of region development since we get to see how Unova has changed over two years. I also appreciate the season mechanic that only appears in these games for lending some variety to the geography, though in execution it’s kind of a pain.

*But hey, I’m thankful at least that this is I think the only region that lets you catch (decent) Ice types before lategame. I will absolutely take the ice cream with a face.

Perfect, or rather just imperfect enough to perfectly capture the essence of France and its culture in this silly world of fantasy cockfighting. Unashamedly biased I may be, but as Kalos gets a lot of hate online I feel the need to push back against popular opinion a bit. X and Y were in my opinion the first games where GF really went all in on characterizing a region, because everything from the preoccupation with aesthetics (Character customization! Dog Furfrou grooming! Petting and pampering your Pokémon! Meticulously kept jardins à la française! Serious philosophical discussions on the fleeting nature of beauty! Team Flare...ok, never mind, they’re kind of dumb) to the discerning restaurant culture to the general ambivalence toward glorious and gloriously wasteful institutions like monarchy and their lavish châteaux feels so familiar to me. And how could I forget the Fairy type, a type tailor-made to vex the sort of posturing bro gamer sorts who somehow maintain their bro-ness while openly playing Pokémon. Could any region but Kalos have delivered that so beautifully? Well, now that I think about it, are the Japanese aware that the French are characterized as feminine in the English-speaking world? Regardless, I could go on, but this post is long enough as it is.

As I said before, Kalos isn’t entirely without flaw. Team Flare might be a hair less ridiculous than Team Galactic, but that isn’t saying much. The troupe of rivals, such as they are, aren’t much better, and others like Sycamore and most of the gym leaders are woefully underutilized. The Kalos Pokédex is overstuffed, and while I enjoy its subdivision into three regions that not-so-coincidentally recreate the Tricolore it is nevertheless a pain for those who like to fill up the Dex as they go along in a game. The developers were still clearly learning how to deal with the camera in a 3D space as is evident in certain areas like Lumiose, and certain features like the roller skates are awkward to use. Not the Exp Share, though - call me a lazy casual, but that thing makes team-building so much easier and actually incentivizes doing so rather than just relying on one overleveled Pokémon with good coverage to solo everything. Oh, and we never got a Pokémon Z, or more importantly an extension of the map that would include southern France. Poké-Gascogne, please, Game Freak.

Really, it’s hard for me to criticize X and Y because I quickly come back to everything I love about the place. I’m actually replaying X right now, inspired as I was by this project and lacking anything else to play before USUM comes out next month. Speaking of which...

I may not have any personal attachment to Hawaii, but I have to give GF serious props for taking the best gameplay and worldbuilding elements of Kalos and replicating them on an even greater scale. Alola is a vibrant and extensively-realized setting for a game, and I’m not even taking into account that we’ll be getting an AU version of it or something like that in the upcoming games. Sun and Moon fascinate on their own with their deep characterizations that touch on such surprisingly dark topics as child abuse (in a variety of forms) and the failure of community and, er, social programs, or whatever you’d call the Island Trial and the whole sending-ten-year-olds-out-to-enslave-wild-animals thing this universe has going on. 

There aren’t really any duds in the cast, either: Kukui is drool-worthy, Guzma and the rest of Team Skull are thoroughly silly and also thoroughly sad, most of the kahunas and trial captains are entertaining in their own ways (special props go to Nanu, Kiawe and his hiker boyfriend, and Acerola the fallen aristocrat who’s entirely too perky about it), Lusamine is a demented mother figure so of course I find her compelling, and Hau...taught me what a malasada is? It’s basically a Portuguese beignet, from the sound of things. Lillie is the real star however, and I don’t understand why some fans criticize the games for making the story more about her than about the player character. One of the biggest drawbacks of silent protagonists, and especially silent protagonists that never emote, is that it’s difficult for them to be a part of character-driven storylines, and in a first for the series unless you count N in BW Sun and Moon are exactly that kind of story. Lillie gets a voice and a distinct place in the world and in the lives of the other major players in the narrative, and she has a development arc that follows along with but stands independent from the standard one followed by this protagonist and all others in this series. Meanwhile, the player character...is from Kanto, and is Kukui’s cousin, and Kukui is probably fucking their mother. That’s pretty much it.

I’m a little less enamored with the Ultra Beast plotline as it’s a little too sci-fi for me, and Aether’s presence and purpose in Alola feels unexplored, but there’s still a chance that USUM may woo me on either score. I’m fairly indifferent on the Mega Evolution vs. Z-Moves argument, and I can take or leave Alolan forms - except Ninetales *pets* - but SM made one substantial gameplay improvement I absolutely adore and will hate to see be removed from future games: ride Pokémon. No more HM slaves, yay! Compound that with surfing between islands and some new areas and they’ve sold me on the next games. If the story is as radically different as trailers seem to be promising I can only hope that it’ll be just as engaging as the first time around.

So, if I had to provide a tl;dr by dint of a simplified ranking, it’d probably go as such:

Kalos > Alola > Hoenn = Unova > Johto > Kanto = Sinnoh

I’d expect Sinnoh to get bumped up a few notches in remake form, but otherwise that’s about right.