#but im glad i finally got around to legends arceus at least

[lesbiten]

arceus obtained. god horse contained in my pastures

[marinecorvid]

been thinking abt pokemon a lot lately (dylan bore a rant of all my gripes and complaints the other day. hi dylan) and now that i have gotten all my pains out of the way i am thinking about all the things i have liked about pokemon recently! while gen 4 with a dash of 5 is the closest thing we’ll get to horror in a pokemon game (distortion world, arceus events, cosmic unraveling, ghetsis’ whole thing, haunted houses - though sun/moon def gave em a run for their money with the whole cosmic horror everything, and XY with the whole genocide thing but they barely got into the meat of it and bc there wasn’t a Z there wasn’t an opportunity to fine tune things :/), PLA got really close to that feeling, which i adored! froslass sidequest, being straight up told you’ll get exiled and die if you can’t pull your weight in the field, dialga/palkia getting corrupted, dialga/palkia being worshipped as gods and psychically communing with their chosen, volo pulling a fast one on us with giratina coming out of nowhere to wreck our shit, the erratic and tense nature and soundtrack of the arceus fight - it’s rad as hell and getting into the potential guts of the pokemon world is what i live for, and im glad we got into it. (i am unsure if we’ll get that in SV. so far it has a very cheery vibe to it so i do not hold out hope)

anyways writing this post just to get my thoughts out into the world. i really hope they decide to bite the bullet (as nintendo would probably see it, as it would be sacrificing that E for Everyone rating. pg-13 at least) and make a horror-esque pokemon game. some real legend of zelda: twilight princess shit. subnautica “we didn’t intend to make a horror game but it sure did come out fecking terrifying” shit. pokemon infinity fangame shit. 

something modern day, but similar to PLA’s theme of “this is a wild land that is largely untamed and hazardous to your health” and exploration/mapping out a region (that is in my head, somewhere also cold. norway based? northern europe? maybe even extending to the hostile arctic, something that makes you appreciate just how civilized/terraformed/domesticated the rest of the main game regions are). starting areas that are safe, of course, but nearby areas are suddenly host to aggressive pokemon guaranteed to be stronger than yours. large stretches of land that are devoid of any/little indication of human life - a land that once held human life, but now only holds you (like the poems you can dig up with ursaluna, implied to be written by cogita about the exodus of the celestic people). the eeriest ambient music and landscape you’ve ever heard and seen. MASSIVE lord avalugg type pokemon that appear both in cutscenes and in the overworld that you have to navigate around (insert shadow of the colossus easter egg here). certain resources are rare to come by, even as you get stronger. there are inexplicably haunted locations, places where you hear echoes of screams and half-second glimpses of glowing eyes in the shadows. you trek out for a nighttime expedition and something stalks you through the trees, only coming closer when your camera is faced away from it (not your avatar, your camera). something eldritch is wandering this land, wandering the sky, the sea, and pray to arceus it doesn’t notice you. pray to god you never learn more about it (SWSH could’ve done this with Eternatus’ design, but i feel SWSH dropped the ball on a lot of things, so). think this kind of thing. this.

even for something like this tho, it’d have to be a different engine than the ones we’re familiar with - the landscape would have to have so many more actions cues (how pokemon behave and navigate the landscape), but it doesn’t feel impossible. pokemon colosseum came out during gen 3? the first 3d pokemon games i think with a remarkably darker storyline and threat with a kickass final battle vs shadow lugia. something similar with botw-level support and care w twilight princess art direction would be *chef’s kiss*