~ Estimated Reading Time: 6 min ~
This was The One for me - where the often-framed as inevitable "Pokemon sucks now" phase finally caught up with me. I hated it in the way only a young teenager could hate it, off the cusp of still kinda believing Pokemon was the specialest thing ever - this was blasphemy in comparison!!! Ironically, I think having that expectation broken early on has chilled me out on how I view the series these days, while I see new generations experiencing the same reaction I once did once every few years. Weird feeling.
And I've messed around in this one recently enough to know that I don't think it's too bad. Personal attachment to the series can make any feeling become exaggerated - love and hate are intertwined responses, etc etc - these days it's silly to me to see any of these similarly playing games as offensively worse than the others. X & Y are still an eighteen-hour long road-trip through a choose your own creature story, with a lasting impact of wanting to order a plushie of your team's MVP for about a week. We all dog on the series going 3D, but I have to admit that Pokemon Amie's cute animations kept me more in touch with my playthrough than usual, too. It's just telling of where The Pokemon Company's minds were at, when this game begins with a 1:1 recreation of Viridian Forest. You got Charizard, you got waking up Snorlax with a flute, sliding block puzzles in an ice cave. Bolstering 450 total Pokemon in its Regional Dex alone, but with only 60 new ones, it feels less like you're exploring undiscovered territory, and more like you're going on a rollercoaster ride through the vague concept of The Pokemon World. Make sure to catch a Lucario and Eevee on your way out :)
It's no surprise to me that Pokemon's creative burnout was harsh enough that an initiative to let Game Freak employees start their own in-house indie games began, around the same time as this one's release.
Mega Evolutions as a core project concept were always a symptom of overcorrection to the poor retention of Black and White, rather than an exception. They chose to advertise the game on the back of new-toy-smell versions of your favs, rather than its new setting's uniqueness. Though as a long-time hater, my biggest issue has always been that the vast majority of these designs are boring - minute details placed on existing good designs without the idea-weight even of a regular evolution. Sword and Shield's dollar store kaijus were genuinely more creative on average (to be fair, the fooly cooly lizard is cool). Though, the recent leaks showed such wilder ideas for what Megas could be - they must've been slowly sanded down until they matched The Brand©. It makes my head spin to imagine how demoralizing working on a series in which every artistic facet must be plushiefiable and mid-budget animatable would be like.
I'm conflicted about Black and White's shift in storytelling; sometimes I feel Pokemon fans give it too much credit for simply having a story at all, rather than having a good story. Other times, I think being personable and human for once is all the series needed. And in retrospect, I'm glad they tried something new, anything really!! So X & Y simultaneously retaining the increase in raw quantity of dialogue, while rolling back to a traditional Pokemon plot might be the most dire follow-up I could've imagined? The script is so dull that I have to seriously wonder if this is a localization thing. Let alone actively bad when it tries to get serious; I was kinda taken aback by this dialogue from your main rival near the end of the game.
"I've been thinking ever since that incident in Geosenge. Lysandre chose only Team Flare. You and I chose everyone but Team Flare. But since our positions forced our hands, you can't really say any of us were right. So maybe... If both sides have something to say, it's best to meet halfway..."
Lysandre's only established viewpoint is that he wants to kill people who don't conform to his values of beauty. Usually when people say a Pokemon plot is bad, they mean there isn't much plot to begin with - not that the game is engaging in enlightened centrism.... "meet halfway" might be the funniest part of this
The main thing making me feel like I still might be too harsh here is knowing that I got exactly what I needed out of this one when it came out: finished the campaign in a weekend, grinding for shinies on trips to school, wi-fi battling at home. I don't know if I should give this game credit for simply being Pokemon on the 3DS, though, especially with how easy it was for that experience to be completely replaced by its next entry in that role. But if older Pokemon game's true social experiences up to this point had passed away after a long, fulfilling life, Nintendo shutting down the servers on this one might as well have been death by public execution. The entire bottom screen permanently marked by irretrievable memories; never again will you just so happen to log in at the same time as some person you never met that you traded O-Powers with a decade ago.
Regardless of my own mixed feelings, makes sense to me this is when the series being boring became common consensus, when full party EXP share is left on by default. No longer is there reason to use your malnourished level 3 Poochyena, when the game automatically feeds it for you - you never have a reason to switch your cracked out fire starter. (maybe a harsh thing to say about an optional feature, but) It's Pokemon Forgetting What It's Even About, FEAT. a washed out 7th gen-lookin overworld, and music that sounds tinny even when you plug your headphones in. That's Pokemon XY.
The recent Pokemon leaked content is what put this game back on my mind is all. Sometimes, I do think people cling to material cut content a bit much. Maybe there are people out there who'd genuinely have loved the twice as long X & Y, but personally speaking, I don't know if more pit-stops could save this direction. Regardless, I had been following it closely, and ended up with a dump of a gigabyte of Kalos concept art saved on my harddrive. All of it was surreally beautiful - prettier than any Pokemon game has ever looked, let alone these ones. Equally beautiful drafts exist even for the Remakes they bobblehead-ify...they seem to just draw these every time. It is overwhelming and sometimes harrowing to think about how much good art goes into adequate products. It should remind us just how utterly talented the average person in the AAA space is. I think you'd be having too little faith in the goodness of people to assume your fav game developers could just lose passion from one game to the next from no external cause. Simultaneously, it gives us more reason to be mad at corporate mismanagement, at wasted potential. We should be pissed about stagnation, regression, and a lack of creative expression - but we need to direct our anger at the right place. don't call the devs lazy bro we're not cool with that