Pokemon X/Y - What Am I Doing With My Life?

I don't like Pokemon. Look, I don't hate you for loving this stuff, so don't jump down my throat for being a blasphemer. But when Pokemon suddenly became a thing in Germany, it was the dumbest crap I had ever seen. It started when they aired a few episodes of the anime on German telly and I just couldn't stand it. First of all, the Pokemon themselves pissed me off. Maybe it was the shitty German dubbing, but all I heard was grown-up voice actors shouting, squeaking and squawking the names of Pokemon, since apparently that's all these creatures can say. Their own names. You know, like the meow, the moo and the whyareyousmellingmyhair in real life.

The only other thing I remember from the show was some guy who never opened his fucking eyes! How he got around without constantly walking into things I'll never know. Maybe he used the force or something. Did he even have eyeballs? There was also a red-haired chick and a bunch of nurses, which inspired a ton of late 90s rule 34 stuff, long before rule 34 even existed. Internet was slow and expensive back then, you know.

That's her in the North American version.

As far as the games go, I played one of the first two on the Gameboy Classic, but I just didn't see the appeal. I believe I got as far as the first gym, but my army of zubats and rattatas couldn't handle it. And yes, I know, rock-paper-scissors, bring the right type and all that. I just didn't care enough back then and we simply didn't know about that stuff at the time. There was no Google, there were no smartphones, we actually had to figure shit out on our own and couldn't just watch some screaming 14 year old walk us through stuff on Youtube.

I was willing to give Pokemon another chance on the N64 a few years later. I went and got Pokemon Stadium, which looked really impressive for its time. I didn't have any powerful Pokemon I could have transferred over from the Gameboy version, so you can probably imagine how my experience with this game went down. I actually made it through all the easy and medium battles on there using only stock critters, but once you get to the harder stages you're pretty fucked. It was really frustrating, because I started to like the game up to that point, but I wasn't gonna grind a bunch of levels on the Gameboy, just to stand a better chance at the more challenging stuff on the N64.

His name looks French to me.

I have lived a happy, Pokemon-free life since then. I avoided the movies, I didn't touch any of the games that came out. And then Claire moved in.
Not only does she own every Pokemon game in existence - she has also been transferring her entire collection, legendaries and all, from one generation to the next, again and again. Like a fucking hoarder. Which is fine when you're a kid, but modern day Claire has to go to work, she has errands to run and a whole lot of other boring shit to do, which drastically reduces the amount of play time you can put in a day. So when Pokemon X/Y came out for the 3DS, the initial reaction was depressingly reasonable - getting both games seemed a bit expensive and she probably didn't have the time, anyway.

So she went without the new game for a while, but money isn't as much of an issue as it was (for now, thank fuck) and regarding time, I offered to help. I told her that, if it really meant that much to her, she could just pick up Pokemon X and I'd play Pokemon Y at the same time, so I could just send her all the exclusive stuff she couldn't get in her game, effectively catching 'em all, which seems to be a big deal in the Franchise.

This might take a while.

I ended up with Pokemon X, because Claire wanted Y for its cooler legendary or something. The first thing I noticed is how this game looks really good on the 3DS. I like the 3D camera angles, the many different towns and the battles, which are really well-animated. The game also features some of the best lighting I've ever seen on a handheld device. Yeah, I'm a sucker for stuff like that.

With that said, I found it difficult to take the game too seriously. I'm not gonna make any of the irresponsible parent jokes and other obvious stuff which is as old as Pokemon itself. But I named my character 'RAAAAAAAAAAGH!1+*#', so it looked like people were always screaming and swearing at me for no reason. My starter Pokemon was nicknamed Furrrnurrrkin. He was later joined by Purrrkurrchurrr.

Churrrrr....

The plot is as dumb as they come. The game's main villain is worried that the world will run out of ressources due to overpopulation, so he creates an ultimate weapon, hoping to shrink down the amount of living things to a safer size. Pretty dark for a game aimed at kids, but the whole thing is so goofy, it's difficult not to cringe whilst reading through all the game's text.

It didn't bother me too much, though, as the gameplay was genuinely fun, if way too easy. My starter Pokemon turned out to be ridiculously strong, so I just ended up taking down most enemies with a single attack. It only took a few minutes until I had a pretty strong and diverse team, which simply never lost a battle, so there was zero reason to ever change anything. The only time you ever really need to mess around with your setup is when the game forces you to move a boulder or swim through some water, which requires Pokemon with certain special abilities. Most of them aren't super useful in combat, though, so I constantly had to switch out decent fighty Pokemon with those who had the utility moves, which was really annoying. Why can't they just give you two or three extra slots for critters, which stay out of combat, but can be used to smash rocks, climb waterfalls and the like?

Easily one of the best-looking games on the system.

I really don't know much about Pokemon or about the strengths and weaknesses of each type, but I never really had to. I just plowed through the entire game, league, elite 4 and everything else without ever having more than one or two of my guys defeated. This surprised me, as I remembered the classic titles to be hard as balls. Sure, the series is mostly targeted at kids, but the game is bound to attract a bunch of generation 1 fans, which are all old farts by now. And they keep making things more complex with new types, mega evolution and other advanced features, so why is the game such an absolute cakewalk?

I won't rule out that maybe I got lucky with the stats of my pokemon and I did spend some time deliberately raising certain stats even higher through the super training feature. Ironically enough, my team even beats up Claire's Pokemon and she has been playing since gen 1. For the most part, I have no idea what I'm doing, but I have yet to lose a match against her team. You can tell I'm clueless when you look at the video, where I repeatedly try to punch one of her ghost pokemon, which does precisely nothing. I'm probably just winning because I try and max out the speed stat for my guys, so I can get the first turn whenever possible, but I still think it's funny a complete idiot like me can defeat a seasoned veteran on dumb luck and wild guesses.

It feels to me as though this game requires about as much "skill" as Hearthstone. In my matches against Claire I didn't win because I'm some kind of tactical mastermind. I just happened to have the right Pokemon at the correct time. It felt more like luck of the draw than anything else. I'm not saying you absolutely cannot tip the scales in your favour when you're a good player, but it seems that a huge part of the battle is simply out of your hands. If you start with a water type and the enemy player has a faster electric type pokemon, your starter will get oneshot before it even gets to make a turn. Sure, you can change to a ground type from there, but that's not gonna stop your opponent from switching to whatever counters ground type pokemon. I believe there's a whole lot of luck and random chance involved.

One thing I like is how insanely busy this game becomes when you go online. I pass tens of thousands of players in every session, many of which want to battle or trade. I see people from Japan, South Korea, Germany, Australia and all over the globe and while I usually hate having to put up with other people in my games, Nintendo actually makes player interaction fun. You can't troll or grief other players as far as I can tell, but you can send them random buffs or just have a quick, friendly battle. It's not super invasive and really adds to the game. Way to go!
I finished the entire game and I didn't hate it, so there's that. Time to move on.

AAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

I don't think I'll ever become a fan. I'm not gonna start watching the anime and I won't look up Delphox on rule34.xxx anytime soon. I'm not "gonna catch 'em all". In fact, I don't have to, because I can just download them using homebrew. But you know what? I think I'll join Claire on her playthrough when Sun and Moon come out. And I'm sure the two of us will have more battles and we'll play more Super Multi Team Battles together. Or whatever that stuff was called. Yay for jolly cooperation!