why i quit pokemon

i’m loathe to admit it, but for many years in my youth i was a hardcore pokemon fan. throughout high school and college, i put hundreds of hours into the games and dutifully purchased every new installment, even going so far as to buy both versions of each game. especially exceptional is that this was during pokemon’s awkward 3DS era when the franchise was in clear decline… sales of the games were falling steadily, its place in the cultural consciousness was fading, pokemon merch was becoming harder to find… it felt like me and my small circle of pokemon friends were the last stubborn adherents of a dying faith. but, perhaps the dire circumstances would finally force the franchise to finally reinvent itself…

despite the stagnation, i still got embarrassingly excited for every new release and 2017’s pokemon ultra sun/moon were no exception. based off of absolutely no evidence whatsoever i’d built them up in my head as this pair of epic sequels to the original pokemon sun/moon with completely new storylines and an extensive postgame on the model of black and white version 2 (where i believed the series peaked). so, when they came out, i picked up ultra moon right away and ran through it at a breakneck pace to get to the new content, putting in 20 hours over the course of a couple days. it’s just ahead, i kept reassuring myself as i continued slogging through a game that was pretty much carbon copy of the one i’d already played through twice a year or so ago (since i’d bought both sun and moon. before i knew it, i’d finished the game without encountering any significant new content… ah, must all be in the postgame, i coped, despite the fact that no pokemon game in years had had a substantive postgame. not too long after that, i completed the meager postgame, and it gradually dawned on me… that was it, that was all the new content, that was all they’d done to justify an entire new release.

to my sheltered teenage self, this was the Greatest Betrayal Of My Life. pokemon, my trusted companion for years, had promised me the world as always, and instead they had shamelessly FUCKED ME. they had TRICKED ME into shelling out another FIFTY CLAMS and wasted TWENTY HOURS of my PRECIOUS YOUTH playing the SAME MID GAME a THIRD DAMN TIME. i was genuinely furious, and my anger was so strong that it broke the spell and suddenly snapped me out of a years-long mindless pokemon consumption trance. suddenly, i saw things clearly for the firs time, and realized: wait, pokemon has actually been shit for YEARS, ever since they transitioned to 3D. the basic gameplay is boring now and they’ve been churning out the same game for decades now (and i’m not even counting the remakes)… the other major nintendo franchises like mario or zelda have completely reinvented themselves half a dozen times or more over the past few decades, meanwhile the best pokemon does is introduce a new gimmick every gen that’s immediately ditched for another one during the next gen. sometimes, they’ll even get around to finally fixing or removing some dumb minor mechanic everyone’s been complaining about for years and get endless praise for it because they’re graded on a generous curve (don’t even get me started on how the switch games all look like shitty unity games).

the worst part is, there doesn’t seem to be any hope of things ever getting better, the games are more popular than ever and people still buy them regardless of quality. though there had been a downturn while i’d been most into the franchise during the late DS and 3DS era, it’s bounced back in a big way… and NOT because it’s gotten any better. as far as i can tell, the pokemon revival is due to structural factors and pure dumb luck, it all started when pokemon go (developed by an outside company, incidentally) became a global phenomenon, then was helped along by a general wave of millennial nostalgia and the new switch console being a huge success. nowadays pokemon is bigger than ever and they did nothing to deserve it, pokemon merch is everywhere again and sales of the last two switch games were so good that they nearly eclipsed the sales of the original blockbuster gameboy games… it feels like there’s no hope of things ever getting better, the developers have no motivation to improve because people continue to buy the games in droves regardless of quality…