LONG BLOG
My Dog Ate My Poke-Homework: A tipsy moment with Amxwolf
I don't anticipate that this is going to be a very popular blog post. But I feel it's kinda important that I have a dialogue with other players out there about our old friend Pokemon. Can we talk for a minute about how Pokemon has into almost turned a subject worth a degree within the last two decades?
Yes I am Amxwolf, Poke-HD.
I like Pokemon as much as the next gal; I really do. What is not to like about it? With every new adventure, the game sets you up with a world to explore, and encyclopedia to fill, and a plethora of tasks and challenges to complete. We're all out there to get the 8-16 gym badges and defeat The Elite Four;�ALOT of us out there to do even more. We are compelled to complete the Pokedex to the best of our ability and we love nothing more than spending hours and hours training our Pokemon; sweating, panicking, and working towards the common goal of being "The Best There Ever Was."
But seriously. Real talk for a second? Pokemon has become A CHORE.
I recently purchased Pokemon Omega Ruby and don't get me wrong, I've been wanting to pick this game up for a while now. I'm one of those people that is married to the first generation of Pokemon games. I grew up on Red and Blue version, and the only upgrade I enjoyed on Yellow was that the player had the priviledge of getting all of the starters in one go instead of glitching them with Missing No. or trading with a friend (on a link cable for you youngsters) for the info. Heck, I even got into Gold and Silver, back in the 250-days where filling the Pokedex was an attainable goal. And when Heart Gold and Soul Silver came out, with the ability to walk around with a sprite of every Pokemon behind you? I was in Poke-heaven.
But Pokemon has now turned from a Labor of Love to me into just straight labor.
I guess you can classify me as a Completionist, but the way I have always played the game is studying how each specific Pokemon evolves, learning the moveset, calculating it, and then bringing each individual Pokemon I add to my Pokedex to it's highest potential. But in recent titles, this has turned into a player-hositle excursion.
Alot and I mean ALOT of the Pokemon you find in generations four and onward are riddled with odd learnsets and abilities based on exactly WHEN you evolve them. Some evolutionary stages learn certain types of moves while simultaniously, an earlier evolution will learn an entirely different move you might want, at a later level. While this may be supported by a theory that "Pokemon evolving and adapting in such a way represents how living creatures in our world will adapt to certain environments based on their individual atributes," it really is not an easily translatable theory into a game which is designed (usually) to have an end game; a finality and goal.
I've had this game for about a month now and am excrutiatingly frustrated that in order for me to play the way I learned to play when I was just a wee tot, I need to go online to sources like bulbapedia.com and seribii.net to gather information that other players have provided to determine at what point I need to evolve a Pokemon to get the learnset I desire. And let's be real for a second? THERE ARE SOME POKEMON THAT I DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND HOW SOMEONE COULD FIGURE IT OUT WITHOUT A STRATEGY GUIDE. There is literally a Pokemon in later generations, that in order to get the Pokedex info, you have to have an empty slot in your team (you know? like how you always only carry 5 out of 6 Pokemon with you ever since your 3rd route) as well as a Pokeball in your backpack, in order to get.
Who figured that out? How? I weep for that person. Seriously.
Am I alone in this? I love Pokemon like a mother loves a child, but I feel...unsure. The ever-expanding Pokedex keeps getting larger and I keep up'ing the calculations on how long one must play in order to complete the Pokedex. And to top it all off there are Legendary Pokemon and Event Pokemon which cannot be bred that keep popping up everywhere, and if you don't live in the right continent, then you are fresh out of luck....it's homework it's JUST. HOMEWORK. And I'm not a fan of extra Homework.
I keep pining for the days where the strategy was to know the best move a single Pokemon and it's evolutions could learn, and then hold onto the first stage until it reached it. It was still just as difficult, but with less strain. But I guess those days are over. God forbid somoene try to do the Poke-rap. What are we at now? 700?
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