And also recognizing that I am unlikely to ever finish a full series worth of blogposts...
Pokémon Shield Version begins here!
A problem of mine is partly that I love starting projects and planning them out, but never finishing them. The real artists and creators are those who can write or create even when things suck and they are beginning to hate what they do. I know plenty of people who can get over this part of the writing cycle: they are the real artists (even if they are financial journalists). If you want to call yourself a writer, you have to actually finish your damn projects.
I will absolutely finish it this time.
It is important for anyone to have some sort of creative outlet, be it music or painting or even just writing casually or sketching. I have been sketching more often recently and I feel that I have had more of an appreciation for design as a result. I want to apply this same method to my writing. I will likely never be published, but writing could be a great tool for me to get better at explaining myself logically or expressing myself emotionally. Pokémon
What have I been up to as of late? Teaching science still, reading books still (mostly pulpy action books like The Count of Monte Cristo), exercising, playing Pokémon Go, and hanging out with my brand new real-life Pokémon Don Diego de la Vega.
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| Don Diego de la Vega in his grumpy forme. |
Okay, I took some thera flu and I think that I am in more control of my rambling thoughts.
It is impossible to bring up Pokémon Sword and Shield without addressing the main controversy that has been the topic of discussion past few weeks. The game designers at Nintendo Gamefreak revealed, a few months ago, that the game would not have a complete National Dex. This means that not all Pokémon will actually be in the game.
In previous titles, there have been cuts to the Pokédex. Indeed, Pokémon Black and White didn’t have any of the older Pokémon in it at all until the National Dex is unlocked. Even afterwards, most Pokémon were still completely absent from the game. This is not an uncommon thing: Nidoking was absent from Pokémon Sun version. This is only one small example, but damn you I like Nidoking, so it is the most important example possible.
The difference is that Gamefreak has implied that these Pokémon that are absent from the National Dex are not only just missing from the game in terms of you being able to find and capture them, but also non-transferable from previous games as well. This means that your Typhlosion from Heartgold won’t be in Pokémon Sword. This means that your Beedrill from Firered needs to stay in the Pokémon Bank. This has made a lot of people very angry. Or so it seems.
In reality this doesn’t really affect people much. As a matter of fact, it affects such a small number of Pokémon Sw/Sh players that it barely deserves mentioning. The only reason that it has blown up as a story at all is because “None of Your Favorite Pokémon are in Pokémon Sword” is provably the most clickable link ever imagined.
Just think about this: the percentage of people who would be affected by this at all would be limited to the percentage of players who use the annual subscription service “Pokémon Bank” (the service which is used to store and transfer Pokémon to and from different game generations). This is a tiny percentage of potential players, basically only including the hardcore players of the games. Even amongst series fanatics, Pokémon Bank users constitute a negligible percentage of the Pokémon install-base.
Amongst that small percentage, the players who would be most affected are those who have actually transferred Pokémon vertically from Gen 3 or 4 up. The process for doing this is time-consuming and frustrating, requiring multiple Nintendo DS devices in addition to the previously mentioned Bank service. I know this because I have actually done this with Pokémon going back as far as Sapphire version.
I’m not saying that I am too keen on a limited Pokédex, but you have to have some perspective here. Gen 3 limited the Pokédex to only two hundred something characters with the remainder of the monsters only becoming available in the spinoff generation. Gen 4 only allowed full dex completion for players who had games from Gen 3, the Gen 3 spinoffs, and the Gen 4 games as well. Generation 5, the worst generation of Pokémon games, removed all of the previous Pokémon from the Regional Pokédex entirely, only funneling them in in the post game and via the previously mentioned methods of vertical upload. The only difference that this method will have is that they won’t be svailable for vertical transfer via the Bank.
And you KNOW that Gamefreak will be including a complete National Pokédex in the inevitable spin-off releases of Pokémon Greatsword and Towershield in 2021.
If Gamefreak’s reasoning for excluding Pokémon is actually what they say it is, that it was done so that they could spend time on designing models for other game objects and other Pokémon, then I am okay with this. The cut changes little and affects basically nobody. Most of the outrage, I am sure, is only due to the visceral reaction that any Pokémon fan would have to seeing a deliberately inflamatory article titled “Gamefreak Hates Your Favorite Pokemon”.
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