Nostalgia and Pokemon: How Much Is Too Much?

For anyone who was a child or young adult in the late 90s, Pokemon should require little to no explanation. For those unfamiliar, Pokemon is the wildly successful Japanese video game that took the rest of the world by storm. It involves capturing small creatures and raising them as partners, then battling them against other people who have raised their own Pokemon. It is much more complex than that, preying on the human love of collection as well as growth, but that is a basic working summary and probably all you'll need to understand this blog post.

Believe it or not, this is a Pokemon. It's not what most of them look like, but it's my favourite example of just how odd they can look.

Needless to say, the 1990s were a long time ago. By all rights, the Pokemon craze should have died out, or at the very least have nestled into a nice, niche market that was no longer ridiculously profitable. Sort of like Tamagotchis.

If you ever managed to keep one of these alive for longer than a few hours, you probably have a calling in nursing.

Instead, Pokemon is still going strong, releasing Pokemon X and Pokemon Y on October 12. This is the sixth generation of Pokemon they've made, a generation in this context meaning a set of 150 unique Pokemon in a game. This means there are roughly 900 Pokemon in existence now. 

The Pokemon series has received criticism before for simply rehasing the exact same formula that existed in the first game, and to some extent this is a very valid stance to take. The series will always feature a young protagonist leaving home for the first time to begin a journey to capture as many different Pokemon as they can, and the end goal is always to defeat both an evil though oddly civil organization attempting to take over the world in a vague way using Pokemon, and the Pokemon Champion, eschewing the title to the protagonist.

So why do people continue to buy Pokemon games? For me, having bought every generation and planning to purchase the next one as well, it has to be the nostalgia factor. Pokemon remains one of the few links to my early childhood that is still interesting to me today. Whereas the collection aspect of Pokemon was so intriguing to me when I was a child, and still remains an interest today, now there is the science behind building the best 6 Pokemon team for in game and online battling. The nuances are as varied as they are subtle, and it is a difficult thing to do well. 

I can't read the same books that I read when I was six because I find them too simple. The same goes for the television shows I enjoyed and the games I played in the park with friends. Pokemon offers the unique ability to inhabit the same feeling I had when I was so young, the feeling that there is an entire unfamiliar world for me to explore and countless creatures to find and befriend. I can still remember sitting in the car while my parents went to get groceries in the rain and playing my game contently. I think the memories are so fresh because I'm able to remind myself every few years what it felt like.

Maybe Pokemon is no longer innovative, although the newest series promises to bring the most new concepts since the series began. Maybe Pokemon is no longer the most popular gaming franchise, and maybe it isn't being played by all my friends. The one thing no other game has ever done for me, though, is offer me a gateway directly back into my childhood...and for that, I'm incredibly thankful.

I'll see you soon, old friend.