This piece includes minor spoilers for Pokemon Sun & Moon
To say nostalgia influences pop culture would be an understatement. There is, of course, the natural inspiration a creator may get from remembering or revisiting a beloved property, but we see it in much more overt ways as well; the recent years have introduced hugely successful films based on Transformers and G.I. Joe, children's cartoons from the 80s, and J.K. Rowling is still writing stories based on her Harry Potter series. Games, ultimately, are no different, with companies like Nintendo using their established properties and the strong feelings people have towards them to sell products. Just because a game uses nostalgia doesn’t mean it’s just empty reminders of the past, however. Good nostalgic games, like good nostalgic movies or books, will go “Okay. What here is essential? What needs to be the same to invoke what we’re trying to evoke? What needs to be different for this to work in the modern day? What should be changed, but can’t be altered for fear of backlash? What’s disliked, but essential for what this game was about?”
Take, for instance, the Pokemon series. For over twenty years, the games have delighted children the world over, and with a twenty year legacy comes a swath of fans now in their early to mid-adulthood. I myself, very young at the release of the first generation, grew up with the games, and consider them a very dear part of both my childhood and my adolescence. To this day I love the series and eagerly await this Friday, when the latest generation of Pokemon, the seventh generation, Sun & Moon, will be released and (with a convenient day off of work that I swear I didn’t ask for) I’ll be spending the whole day exploring the new Alola region, and discovering all the new Pokemon and people to challenge and befriend. As the day fast approaches, I look back and consider the best and worst of the series, at least in my opinion; the worst being the most recent installments, X & Y; the best, their predecessors, Black & White. Why? It all comes down to nostalgia, or to be exact, how those twenty long years of nostalgia are used.
X & Y tried to make you remember the past in the same way a parent might reprimand you; harshly and unsubtly. The third Pokemon you see in the games, after the local professors Gogoat and your mothers Fletchling, is a Rhyhorn; not only one of the original 151 Pokemon from Red & Blue, the first games in the series, but the pre-evolution (a prior form) of Rhydon, the very first Pokemon ever designed! A nice deep-cut for the real, old school fans. Later, when you enter the tall grass where wild creatures roam, what’s the first Pokemon you’d find, guaranteed, with 100% programmed certainty? Why, it’s a Pidgey! The bird you find in the grass in the original Red & Blue, right at the start! It’s like you’re playing those great old games from your childhood again! In the following area, a forest (and oh boy, a forest as the first dungeon! Just like Red & Blue!), you may encounter a Pikachu, the mascot of the series. What’s this? Replacing the electronic noise of a typical Pokemon call is a voice clip of “Pikachu!”, pulled straight from the cartoon you surely remember from when you were a kid.
It feels like the games are trying to distract you from the new, as if they’re afraid you won’t like what they bring to the series, so better to bury it amongst trite reminders of games and experiences long past. Indeed, the game seems reluctant to allow you to see any of it’s new Pokemon. On the first route you can find Pokemon on in the game, barely over half of the encounters (statistically speaking) will be with new Pokemon. In the following area, the aforementioned forest, there’s a measly 30% chance of encountering a Pokemon original to the sixth generation. X & Y lean on the old, and it works at first glance, but once you notice their crutch, you can tell how close they are (or feel they are) to falling over.
In sharp contrast, Black & White’s use of nostalgia was finessed. They didn’t hide their new Pokemon behind old; in fact, no old Pokemon appear in the games before you’d beaten the main story. Much like the experience of the original games, you had to traverse the land and meet new Pokemon to befriend and battle with. If you’re looking for references to the anime, then they certainly did work in the game to characterize the gym leaders and make them important characters in the story, doing the work in-game that would normally be kept for the television screen. Compared to the gym leaders in X & Y, who I felt were largely forgettable and only one of whom had lines outside of their gym battle to my recollection, the leaders in Black & White were downright nuanced.
Black & White were willing to step away from the norm in some pretty big ways as well; instead of only occasionally changing which Pokemon you encounter, the aesthetic of certain areas are entirely different depending on which game you get. Pokemon Black looked to be a Tron-esque future and Pokemon White appeared to eschew technology in favor of more natural beauty. There’s even an entire location that was different depending on which game you had, with players being able to battle a rotating cast of trainers in Black City, or capture rare pokemon in White Forest. A geographic difference between the two versions had never been in the games before, and certainly didn’t make a return in X & Y.
In addition, the story of Black & White were a step up from their predecessors as well, with the opposed Team Plasma being dedicated to freeing Pokemon from what they claimed was the tyrannical control of man. Admittedly, the game did little besides pay lip service to this idea; after a quick anti-Pokemon-capturing rally, you next saw Team Plasma grunts kicking a defenseless psychic tapir, presumably to assure children that no, the evil team doesn’t have a point and you don’t have to worry that you’re being cruel to Pokemon. But the fact that it even brought up something so often joked about in a semi-serious way was somewhat startling, and for all the harm his cronies may do, it’s made clear that your primary antagonist, the young idealist called N, sincerely believed that to be a trainer is to oppress Pokemon; capturing and controlling them against their wishes.
Compare and contrast this with the story in X & Y: a bad man wants to destroy the world. Stop him. Also, friendship.
I turn my eye towards the upcoming Pokemon titles and wonder which direction they’ll go in. I have ample reason to be skeptical; the main Interesting Thing™ of Sun & Moon are Alolan forms of existing Pokemon which grant different appearances and skills; dataminers digging through the released demo and copies of the games acquired early show these only exist for Pokemon from Red & Blue. In addition, there has been plenty of fussing and discussion about the inclusion of NPCs from previous Pokemon games, especially the titular protagonist and rival from Red & Blue. Once again, it seems as though the games will be trying to make up for deficiencies with blatant and poorly made appeals to players’ childhood.
And yet, at the same time, so much of what Sun & Moon are doing, or seem to be doing, are off the beaten path. For instance, the standard rhythm of the games, wherein the player goes to defeat eight different gyms, before facing off against the final challenge of the Elite Four and regional Champion, is gone. In fact, it’s an element of the story that the traditional Pokemon League is still in the process of being founded in Alola. Instead, players will go through the Trials of each of the four islands of the region, consisting of various tasks assigned by the island’s Trial Captain, followed by a battle against the island’s Kahuna. There’s also been a focus on the story of the games in trailers, involving mysterious Ultra Beasts and the Aether Foundation which works, in part, to study them (and who have, for their efforts, been treated with much suspicion by the Pokemon fandom at large). In addition, Team Skull is fulfilling the Team Rocket role of the game by stealing other trainers’ Pokemon. How this will all play out, and how all these pieces will play off each other, remains to be seen, but I’m looking forward to finding out for myself.
Pokemon is uniquely nostalgic for a new generation; I think it’s fair to say it may be to my generation what G.I. Joe or Transformers were to the generation before, the beloved childhood series that did no wrong as far as we can see looking back. This legacy gives Pokemon the ability to excite fans in two ways: It can merely show us what came before, content to retread old ground and confident it will suffice. Or, it can show us the best version of that, evolving and growing better with age without losing what made the games so loved in the first place. Game Freak, the developers of Pokemon, have both succeeded and faltered in taking those original games, the first generation, Red & Blue, and improving and modernizing them for the needs of the time. We’ll see soon enough if Sun & Moon can step forward, or if they’re too busy looking behind.
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