#plus I love skull designs and black and red soooo

[cashmerecrow]

141 Poster Boy

[jaybug-jabbers]

Top 3 Generations: Gen 1 - Gen 5 - Gen 7

Top 3 Human Characters in Pokemon: N - Guzma - Cheren

(Warning: this post contains LARGE SPOILERS.)

Soooo. Back in 2010 (holy butts, seven years ago), gen 5 came out with Pokemon Black and White. I fell utterly in love with everything about the game. Without a doubt, I hadn’t enjoyed playing a pokemon game that much since Red and Blue. The number of new pokemon was insane (the most new pokemon introduced in any generation, even gen 1), and the designs for all these new pokemon were fucking fantastic. The UI was sleek as fuck and a sheer joy to use, the sound effects and music were truly lovely, the locations were so different and creative, and imparted a true sense of travel like the games before never did. They really felt like little ecosystems you were stepping into. The lack of old pokemon made it truly feel like an exciting new world, and everywhere you looked, there were awesome new things. We got our first female Pokemon Professor (about time!), who was really cool, and most exciting of all … we had AN ACTUAL honest-to-god decent plot and fleshed-out characters.

That was always a weak point in the pokemon games. Gen 1 gets away with not having fleshed out characters and a very simple plot because it was the first of its kind. It was still a novel concept. And the relatively simple plot was iconic– archtypal. It allowed you to imagine all kinds of things on your adventure, your childhood imagination filling in the gaps. But it’s a reasonable thing to expect future pokemon games to start introducing new, interesting plots. However, that … took a while. For the most part, Pokemon was too afraid to stray from their formula, and so they recycled the same basic plot until it became extremely tiring to hear the same thing over and over again. They stuck with a minimalistic plot with very little variation, and extremely shallow, 2-dimentional characters.

In my opinion, B/W had a far more complex and unique plot. The writing was actually solid (dialogue is usually another weakness in these games, tends to be pretty awful) and the story was truly compelling. It looked at the pokemon universe in a new way, asking questions the games never dared to ask before. And, holy cats, characters with some actual dimensions? You had multiple rivals for once, and they were actually interesting in their own rights. For the first time, I didn’t hate or feel intensely indifferent towards my rival and actually felt like they were people. That’s not to say they were perfect or intensely complex, but for once, they had some degree of interest and appeal to them.

You’ll see one of the characters I listed as my favorite was Cheren, one of your rivals/friends. I related to his nerdy, logical style much more than the scatterbrained Bianca, but I did feel a fondness for both of them. The character I listed as my top favorite, though, was N.

I was intrigued by this guy the moment the player character meets him and his quirky theme music plays. He was a truly fascinating mystery to me, and I looked forward to running into him again and again. Something about this character really caught my imagination on fire. (Heck, to such a degree I even ended up writing a fanfic. I hadn’t written fanfic for anything in years.) They continued to develop his character and I was enchanted– the scene in the carnival where he asks you to join him on the ferris wheel still stands out in my mind so clearly. It was a rush of fascination and fear and curiosity (I recall shouting at my character to not join him on the wheel, ahaha, ‘Are you crazy?!’ yet simultaneously wanting to join him). That’s another thing I forget to mention– he was a truly tough trainer to go up against, so it was a little intimidating, and I recall training hard, worried about the next unpredictable time I’d run into him.

The climax and resolution of the plot didn’t disappoint, either. I definitely think he’s the most interesting character in a main series Pokemon game, and I was happy as buttery butts that there was a sequel to Black and White. I know my intense love of Gen 5 places me in the minority. But I stand by my reasoning.

In my mind, Gen 6 was a step back in a lot of ways from Gen 5. The plot and the writing for the dialogue was total shit again, and I hated your irritating rivals, which I think were supposed to be patterned after the formula of Gen 5 but just fell flat. For a 3-D game, it sure had 2-dimensional characters. I know a lot of people praise gen 6 for its technological advancements, but to me, that’s one of the least important things. Gen 6 tried to recapture the feeling of travelling great distances and entering mini ecosystems, yet I found its city intensely frustrating to navigate (whereas I found Castelia City very intuitive and fun) and it just didn’t have as much charm. There were very few new pokemon introduced, and completing the National Dex with ALL current pokemon to that date was quite the daunting task. The best thing about X/Y’s plot, quite frankly, was its post-game story, done in chapters with the Looker character.

(Note: I never picked up ORAS, so unfortunately cannot give my perspective on that.)

Then came Gen 7. I’d say it’s probably my third favorite generation, at least at the moment. The technology admittedly is nice– damn those graphics are nice. (I realize at this point, the 3DS can barely even handle the graphics; for example they originally had planned on walking pokemon following you like in Heartgold Soulsilver and that’d be SO COOL but the game would not have been able to handle it without hardcore lag) And the character models have normal proportions, (unlike the rather extreme chibi-proportions of Gen 6), which I gotta say looks really nice. The movement is so smooth, and ride pokemon are incredibly enjoyable to use and free up the need for HM slaves/HM move slots, which I think most people agree is a smart modern change. The game is just beautiful to look at, no denyin’.

It’s also a bit of a fresh breath of air, though, when compared to some of the more formulaic gens. The tropical theme was novel, and the Alolan forms gave a fresh new look at some old pokemon. They actually were bold enough to depart from some of their precious formula and try new things, abandoning traditional gyms and experimenting with totem pokemon and ally pokemon. I fully embraced these changes. The writing and plot are also quite decent, as are the characters! And that’s a huge plus. The more organic style of the routes and various points of interest on the islands does sometimes make navigation a little difficult (hard to recall where stuff is), but it suits the theme of the game well. Shiny pokemon were made easier to hunt in this gen, and quite frankly, I’m OK with that. I know hardcore shiny hunters may not agree, but I never ran into a shiny before Gen 7 and had very little interest to hunt them at such crazy odds. In this gen I actually get to enjoy some shiny pokes, though. Was Sun/Moon too easy? Yeah. The difficulty curve was definitely pretty low. But that’s probably my biggest complaint about the games.

You’ll notice in my list above, I have Guzma as my second-favorite human character of all Pokemon games. And how! Incidentally, Team Skull are easily my favorite villian team of all the games. (Plasma would be second.) I legit find myself considering getting a lil Team Skull necklace. Anyway, Guzma is frickin’ great. It’s not JUST because Bug type is my favorite type and he’s a bug boy. Although that’s a pretty nice bonus. <3 I also loved Gladion a lot! I actually liked him a lot more than his sister.

Anyway, this, err, this post has gone on for plenty long enough already tonight, so I’ll wrap things up for now.

This is a repost on a new blog. The original post was on Feb 24, 2017.