Common Knowledge
Member
Just a brief disclaimer: this thread is coming from somebody who doesn't have a whole lot of direct experience with the Pokémon games, relatively speaking. I played Silver way back in the day and as a kid I collected the cards and watched the show, and then I went on a hiatus with it all the way to X&Y and decided to jump back in with those, and I haven't played another one since, though I'm planning on getting Ultra Sun/Moon. Overall, I always had more of a peripheral interest in the series, keeping up with what was new but rarely diving into it myself.
So recently I was introduced to GAF member Watch Da Birdie's extensive analysis of all the Pokémon, slowly going through it, and among the many things I've learned from it is just how many fundamental aspects of how the Pokémon universe works just kind of don't make any sense when you take them at anything more than face-value. I'm not talking about things like "how do these sometimes giant creatures get put into these little balls to carry around", or "how does this fish Pokémon fight when it's on land" which are the sort of things you just got to roll with if you want to have any enjoyment from videogames. I'm talking more about instances where the lore of the games just don't add up or sometimes even directly contradict how the games work.
One such example of this is how some evolutions work. Some Pokémon have some pretty cool backstories to how they evolve, but these never actually get incorporated into the games in any way, instead just doing the standard level-up or item-based evolutions. Some of these evolution backstories are admittedly pretty hard to implement in any meaningful way, but it's pretty jarring when the actual gameplay just doesn't make any connection to the lore we have come to known about certain Pokémon.
And then there's the Pokedex entries....I have to admit, most of these things are just dumb. It honestly seems like Game Freak just handed the designs they made to a group of people who otherwise had no connection with the game development, and said "ok, come up with some cool facts about each of them". So we get things like "lol this Pokémon is hotter than the freakin' sun!" or "lol this Pokémon can jump a mile into the air!", not to mention other ones that bring into question why some aren't completely quarantined from civilized society due to being capable of bringing mass destruction. So many of them just overcompensate so much. Like, we get it, the Pokémon is very hot. You don't have to make it 5 quadrillion degrees F or whatever to relay that fact.
Then there's some paradoxes of some them, most notably the Cubone/Marowak story, a touching background detail that just crumples apart the moment you start really thinking about it.
In a more general sense, reading about each of these Pokémon, it makes me really wish Game Freak gave more effort into providing insights into how they all co-exist in the world and interact with the rest of nature and with human society. You certainly see this with some Pokémon, serving as pets or using their abilities to help with some sort of human job, but overall they just kind of seem thrown in on top of each other and you're just supposed to not think about how any of them co-exist outside of their battle uses. I suppose in this day and age of over 800 Pokémon, this is just wishful thinking on my part, but there could certainly be some improvement I feel.
All in all, the Pokémon game world/lore as a whole seems to be one with some pretty cool little details and tons of interesting elements when taking individually, but once you put them into the greater context of the game universe, they just don't mesh well and it creates a game universe that feels somewhat disjointed and haphazardly put together. Some of this can't be helped, I perfectly realize. You have almost 1,000 different creatures of various shapes, sizes, and abilities all battling it out with each other, and at it's core that's all that the Pokémon universe really is about. And it does that well. Maybe I'm just asking way too much out of a such a light-hearted, kid-friendly series? After all, nobody really expects Mario games to follow some universal rulebook with consistent and deep lore behind them. You just play them for awesome platforming experiences. Is it the same with Pokémon? I feel like Pokémon is a little different because, for one, it's an RPG, and also, especially with the more recent games, they do actually have relatively in-depth storylines that increasingly add more and more elements that try and fit onto the already established ones. And I feel like, because of that, the inconsistences, illogical parts, paradoxes, and unexplained phenomenon stick out more than they do in, say, Mario.
But that's just me. What do you all think? Do you even care about how the Pokémon universe is supposed to function, or do you just want to catch them, fight with them, an call it a day?
So recently I was introduced to GAF member Watch Da Birdie's extensive analysis of all the Pokémon, slowly going through it, and among the many things I've learned from it is just how many fundamental aspects of how the Pokémon universe works just kind of don't make any sense when you take them at anything more than face-value. I'm not talking about things like "how do these sometimes giant creatures get put into these little balls to carry around", or "how does this fish Pokémon fight when it's on land" which are the sort of things you just got to roll with if you want to have any enjoyment from videogames. I'm talking more about instances where the lore of the games just don't add up or sometimes even directly contradict how the games work.
One such example of this is how some evolutions work. Some Pokémon have some pretty cool backstories to how they evolve, but these never actually get incorporated into the games in any way, instead just doing the standard level-up or item-based evolutions. Some of these evolution backstories are admittedly pretty hard to implement in any meaningful way, but it's pretty jarring when the actual gameplay just doesn't make any connection to the lore we have come to known about certain Pokémon.
And then there's the Pokedex entries....I have to admit, most of these things are just dumb. It honestly seems like Game Freak just handed the designs they made to a group of people who otherwise had no connection with the game development, and said "ok, come up with some cool facts about each of them". So we get things like "lol this Pokémon is hotter than the freakin' sun!" or "lol this Pokémon can jump a mile into the air!", not to mention other ones that bring into question why some aren't completely quarantined from civilized society due to being capable of bringing mass destruction. So many of them just overcompensate so much. Like, we get it, the Pokémon is very hot. You don't have to make it 5 quadrillion degrees F or whatever to relay that fact.
Then there's some paradoxes of some them, most notably the Cubone/Marowak story, a touching background detail that just crumples apart the moment you start really thinking about it.
In a more general sense, reading about each of these Pokémon, it makes me really wish Game Freak gave more effort into providing insights into how they all co-exist in the world and interact with the rest of nature and with human society. You certainly see this with some Pokémon, serving as pets or using their abilities to help with some sort of human job, but overall they just kind of seem thrown in on top of each other and you're just supposed to not think about how any of them co-exist outside of their battle uses. I suppose in this day and age of over 800 Pokémon, this is just wishful thinking on my part, but there could certainly be some improvement I feel.
All in all, the Pokémon game world/lore as a whole seems to be one with some pretty cool little details and tons of interesting elements when taking individually, but once you put them into the greater context of the game universe, they just don't mesh well and it creates a game universe that feels somewhat disjointed and haphazardly put together. Some of this can't be helped, I perfectly realize. You have almost 1,000 different creatures of various shapes, sizes, and abilities all battling it out with each other, and at it's core that's all that the Pokémon universe really is about. And it does that well. Maybe I'm just asking way too much out of a such a light-hearted, kid-friendly series? After all, nobody really expects Mario games to follow some universal rulebook with consistent and deep lore behind them. You just play them for awesome platforming experiences. Is it the same with Pokémon? I feel like Pokémon is a little different because, for one, it's an RPG, and also, especially with the more recent games, they do actually have relatively in-depth storylines that increasingly add more and more elements that try and fit onto the already established ones. And I feel like, because of that, the inconsistences, illogical parts, paradoxes, and unexplained phenomenon stick out more than they do in, say, Mario.
But that's just me. What do you all think? Do you even care about how the Pokémon universe is supposed to function, or do you just want to catch them, fight with them, an call it a day?
