I am playing Pokemon Sun. I would like to write that this is the fist time I’ve touched the franchise since the 90’s, but that’s not true. I played Pokemmo, and completed Leaf Green and Omega Ruby on the servers. However, in the franchise’s latest instalment, the graphics are a lot more beautiful and colourful and I get to see and walk through a whole lot more. In terms of graphics, shows how far we’ve came from the pixelated interface of the ’90s.
There are no longer gym leaders, but trials that one has to go through. I also have to defeat totem Pokemon, which are powerful creatures, if I want a crazy crystal to power up my beasts. I like the game. It’s fun, and keeps me amused for hours on end.
But one thing I don’t undestand is this–in every single reiteration of the game, we are taught to love our Pokemon as pets, but the nature of collection all 150 or however many Pokemon there are now, you cannot love all of them equally because your time and resources are put into the 6 that are in your “dream team”.
Then, there’s also battling, and going competitive just makes it worse because Pokemon are discarded on the Global Trade Link. Pokemon, animals essentially made out of bytes and lines of codes, are thrown away because they were too common, or didn’t have the perfect stats, and so on. It pretty much parallels how people breed animals in real life, to be honest. In nearly every iteration of the Pokemon games, there is a recurrent theme of how human beings exploit Pokemon to their whims, which does serve as commentary in real life. In fact, if there’s anything Pokemon has taught us, it’s to be kind to our animals and the environment they live in.
Every single time I play Pokemon, I encounter this dilemma, and I end up becoming very elitist, steering away from catching yet another Zubat or a Fearow or some kind of common Pokemon because dangit, there’s too many of them. I suppose, at the end of the day, Pokemon is a test in treating all the creatures great and small well, even if they are pixelated iterations of their real-life counterparts.
But dangit, no more Zubats, please.