Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit

> But today I sometimes feel like our culture is locked in time.

People say this often and I agree that it does feel that way.

They particularly underline "they are constantly remaking old movies!" which is also true.

However, this is not a new phenomenon. As someone who loves movie trivia, IMDB is full of "this 1980s film was actually a remake of this other 1947 film". An older example: the Victorians (~1837 - ~1901) were obsessed with the ancient Romans. This was during a time when the telegraph was connecting the world and people could talk to humans, instantly, on the other side of the world.

I was just thinking too when there are new IPs, they are completely indistinct today. Take a character from any of the past 15 years of animated movies and they are interchangeable with each other. Everyone is afraid to establish a design language beyond looking kinda-sorta like a pixar character.

90s were so different with creative freedom with the media we were exposed to. All those shows had their own art style. Characters were distinct and unmistakable. Brands were cemented as a result.

Marketing executives have lost the hat. They are like those people from the Neutral Planet in Futurama. Somehow they reigned in everything that made them successful in the 80s and 90s.

I walk past something resembling a claw machine arcade on my commute, and I've noticed that although every month the prizes in the window swap around, the anime woman figurine and the mascot plush always looks quite similar to the one from the last month.

I _think_ they're from different series, but aesthetically it's impossible for me to figure out one from the other. Trends are still changing, but I think our design sensibilities have definitely found a place to plateau.

I've come full circle to appreciating the current durability of culture.

Last summer, I played Pokémon with my neice's kid. I got to relive the pure joy of playing Pokémon with my neice, nephews, and own son. So now three generations are nerding out together. I love it.

Eh, how long has looney tunes and Bugs Bunny been around? I was watching that with my silent generation grandfather into the 2000s, and my first video games were basically my Gen X dad's first video games on the 2600 and first Nintendo, Intellivision. I think the simplicity of those games and that IP is just universally approachable for people at a certain age. Before Pokemon cards, it was just sports cards for ages.

It’s not just video games but everything… movies, music, everything has basically barely evolved compared to the prior 30 years. Compare 1965 to 1995 and 1995 to present and it’s so clear we have become stagnant in so many ways. Way fewer choices in a lot of ways even if we have more convenient options.

I try to (relive my youth and) buy my kids action figures and they could care less. Injection molded plastic hunks can't compete with the dopamine hit of Roblox or Dogman books.

While there IS innovation and novelty in the toy industry, I can tell you from experience in the field that the people with the money are the parents. So the nostalgia play is a very strong tactic. Sell what the parents had because they will INSTANTLY want to give the same to their kids.

Not exactly Pokemon related, but this would have been the coolest toy I had for a while if I had it 30 years ago.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVXryEIj8ah/?igsh=MWViMDBvZ3h...

"Block" games existed in the 90s, perhaps, but Minecraft is from 2009.

"Factorio" type puzzles may have existed, but nothing of that detail until 2016.

Part of the big advancements of the 80-90s was that the technology was advancing insanely quickly, which meant that things that were simply impossible a year ago were commonplace next year.

LEGO still exists, but the Lego of 2026 is not the Lego of the 90s (for good or ill).

Toy cars existed in the 80s, but the Cars franchise started in 2006.

Part of the problem is it's hard to see what will be huge in 20 years that already exists today.

You also have "sideways cannibalization" where something in one area never really expands to another: Harvest Moon never moved to PC/Mac and so there was an opening that Stardew Valley took advantage of, and now has moved way beyond. In a way it's "the same thing locked in time" in another it's not.

What do they say about there being only seven stories?

Maybe complain to the council and ask them to remove the pokestop if people keep doing this.

You should have seen it when pokemon go came out

I'm part of a pokemon go community, and the only time we ever do car raids is when the weather is terrible or freezing. What was the weather like?

It's usually not a question of laziness, but just path optimization. For big raid events, limited only to a few hours, Pokemon Go players will do whatever gets them to the most raids in that fixed amount of time. In places where the gyms are well placed in walkable parks, there are enough gyms that are close enough so that you can loop through the park, giving the system time to spawn new raids in the first gyms you already raided. Doing raids walking is actually preferable to driving, because in order to take down raid Pokemon, you also need a big enough raid party, and that's easier to judge with a crowd of people who agree to go in the same direction, instead of mystery players in mystery cars.

But in SO many places in the US, the gyms just aren't close enough. It's both a fault of the urban environment and the game system, but it just frequently creates situations where if you want to catch a time-limited raid Pokemon that's shiny or has high stats, driving is often the only way to play in your area.

What's funny though is that car or not, there are lots of Pokemon Go events where people don't talk to anybody. It's just a bunch of people who show up to the same spot, nod hey at each other, and then tap away on their phones in awkward proximity. Many people just have the personality type that drives them to solely play single player games, and there's no amount of game design that will push them to socialize.

But it varies - that's what it was like on my university campus, but I've also been to park events where the age range and social friendliness is extremely varied and wonderful. It is a fascinating and unexpected community.

> Why as an adult you would play Pokemon over SMT is something I can't get.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

> Why as an adult you would play Pokemon

Oh, I don't want to play Pokémon games, but every few hours, I am given the controller and told to beat the boss with a team composed of 6 low-level Pikachus and zero healing items.

i play both! there is a sort of comfort in pokemon, like watching your favorite movie or eating junkfood, but i also love me a gourmet meal too. room for both! who doesnt wanna play a game with their favorite little doods, getting see what others can become favorites and then ya know everyone else playing so its a fun community thing. i also do love the grinding especially in the older games, and the RNG is fun to me. love when that 1% encounter rate hits after 30 mins of searching.

Newer Pokémon games have way more quality-of-life such as EXP share and way faster animations so it's not a slog anymore. Recently finished Scarlet and enjoyed it very much. Currently replaying SoulSilver and I couldn't play it without cheats that make the game a bit faster (cutting repetitive animations, making the game run at 60 FPS, etc.) since everything is so slow.

I'm nearing 30 and have played a lot of JRPGs in my life.

As far as I can tell, my kids and their friends never actually play the game either, they just collect the cards. I don't think they even know the rules.

> Why as an adult you would play Pokemon over SMT is something I can't get

bro are you serious? smt is the definition of painful in terms of time sunk and the newer pokemon games have so many guard rails; i can mindlessly blast through the whole story and craft a quick crew to beat down my wife and friends and just be done ;p

now granted, would I rather play (and 100 percent complete) any SMT game? yes. how do adults do it? i watched my friend who's an RN on hospital hours + has three kids blast through cyberpunk and the answer is pretty simple: sleep is for the weak.

SMT is your example here for the anti-grind, anti-boring-tbc?

I guess SMT2 was bizarrely anti-grind in a sense, but I dropped it when it turned out that leveling up made me weaker.

Players have come up with a variety of self-imposed challenge modes to make the game more dynamic, Nuzlocke being most famous: https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Nuzlocke_Challenge

The grinding is less of an issue than being too easy. You can play through a number of the games with just your starter pokemon, playing with close to no strategy at all.

People add artificial difficulty through extra rules, which seems like a strange thing to have to do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuzlocke

"You're playing it wrong" - Pokemon can be played with a min/max grinding attitude, or it can be played as digital cockfights that you futz around with from time to time.

Some people really like relatively "mindless" entertainment that they can do while doing other things. Hell, that describes the vast majority of mobile games.

> The pokemon games are painful games to play, full of grinding, massive amounts of rng and just boring turn based combat (compared to other rpgs that exist).

As someone who was played every entry since the 90s I can't even imagine how you could come away as Pokemon games being "grindy", assuming you're talking about just playing through the story. EXP share has been a standard mechanic for the past few generations that have effectively eliminated any grinding.

I'm also not really sure where you're getting "massive amounts" of RNG from either. Sure, moves can miss but it's never consequential enough that it could ruin a run or something. At most you lose a few minutes having to run back somewhere.

Very cool, we have some Korean Pokemon cards that this would work great on. Are you planning to support other languages?

From your /en route, clicking on a card brings me to the /nl/cards route.

i mean overall the core pokemon experience has never changed, G/R/B, HGSS, Scarlet and Violet. Core gameplay is the exact thing you said, only paid differences are that now a days they do include some expansions (in the oldschool vein) that are often better than the current base games lol. But overall, outside of stuff like pokemongo, the CORE game franchise has largely been unaffected by a lot of the trends of modern gaming. And great choice, HGSS are a highpoint of the series. Might i also suggest Black and White and Black and White 2. the first time IMO they really tried to make the games more story heavy and they succeeded. The music and pixel art in BW is unmatched as well.

I don't think your parents will enjoy the current crop of Star Wars IP.

I didn't watch/play anything pokemon as a kid, I think I was just a little too old for it when it came out. My son got into it and we learned to play the card game, started going to a local game store, etc... I have fallen in love with it. Yes, the characters are cute/cuddly/goofy but if you get into the actual card game it is a deep strategy game with so many fun ways to play. My son still likes it but has moved on from it as his favorite, I now enjoy it and play it more than he does.

my wife and i were just musing to ourselves this morning about whether it was strange that the franchise hasn't died yet.

that conversation went somewhere along the lines of: "surely kids aren't interested in what their parents were/are interested in" (oh didn't we hate our parents' style) -- and then I remembered that I really wanted to see Speed Racer, which was what my dad was into in the late sixties. i still thought that the animation was about as impressive as pokemon at the time (funny how they animated more frames than one punch man these days!!!)

i think kids these days complain that their fat old parents are wearing (ostensibly 'millennial') graphic tees in public so there is plenty of generational rejection. but it's really weird how the internet hasn't developed more obvious generational 'coding' (except in language), and hasn't rejected things like pokemon entirely.

or is it pretty easy to code us? lol

their rejection of us aside (which is an evolutionary and biological thing) i wonder if our parents felt 'as connected' to us generationally speaking as we 'feel' we are to the next (socioeconomically and socio-digitally)?

Few franchises that span generations?

The entire current zeitgeist of popular media is about zombifying your parent's IP. It's Nintendo's entire business in fact. Sure, usually they are doing good work with that IP, but they are the outlier in the industry. Everyone else is shitting out remakes of what your daddy played that don't even understand the original material, or like Halo, remakes of what your daddy played which was already a mediocre remake.

Halo 1 came out the month after 9/11. It's old enough to have graduated college and started a family. It will be resold soon.

Jurassic Park was dug up out of the grave to crap out several more movies. Star Wars is inflating a couple good plot lines into an entire Universe of "Content". Even reality shows are made up of people who were contestants on older reality shows. Pixar is making yet another Toy Story.

Aliens is still going, long after it's reanimated corpse was overplayed.

One of the premier television series, that just finished, was all about nostalgia for living in the 80s, with some silly plot tacked on that apparently even the writers didn't care about.

Even our propaganda, like Top Gun, is basically the same script as an 80s movie with minimal changes.

It feels like the entire media ecosystem is designed around reselling content to my parent's generation before they finally kick the bucket or satisfying the nostalgia of that generation's early children. Even the President's administration bitches about things like the 90s USDA food pyramid that only affected that 13ish year segment of the population and was deprecated, twice, since then. Our authoritarianism is nostalgia based, for the time that generation was children, and things were "Simple" and "Good", because they were children and got to live the lives of kids.

should check out the Legacy line of romhacks, ie Crystal Legacy, Emerald Legacy. if youre ever in the mood for vanilla+. very very high quality releases made with intention and care for the base games.

For absolutely crazy releases, Pokemon Unbound is an absolutely next level romhack

In my head there are and only ever will be ~151 pokemon. I played red/blue when they launched as 8-bit wonders. I could never get into the rest of them.

Pokemon is one of the worst games for min maxing into a broken game. You go on the subreddits and everyone runs the same perfectly optimal team with the same perfectly optimal movesets. Playing like that probably is remarkably boring, but also once you learn of these patterns and playstyles it becomes hard not to consider using them. Like games that give you free money cheats, the seems great for a second then the drive to actually play the game as it was meant to be played is lost.

I've tried to keep my pokemon knowledge free and clear from this influence. I don't look up anything. I don't really understand the meta beyond basic type matchups. I fumble through the games inefficiently and slowly same as I did in the 90s.

The romhacks are definitely the way to go. I don't need much in terms of gameplay mechanics besides Gen 3 or Gen 4, what I do need is interesting and challenging dungeons/gauntlets

From what I can tell the staying power seems to be in:

1) New players. More of ‘em born every year! And,

2) Competitive play, which is a huge thing (I hate playing most games with randos online, personally, but lots of people love it). Like with any multiplayer game (call of duty, say) you need the latest entry or you’ll be looking at a ghost town in the multiplayer lobbies. Plus you get to experience the meta evolving, so it’s more dynamic than playing on an older one. They’ve got this whole graded ranking and matching system and a bunch of leaderboard stuff going on.

I only know about the latter because I know a guy who usually spends at least a little time way up near the top of the rankings each time a new one of these comes out. Seems like a pretty large scene.

Their extended popularity should be viewed closer to praying on addiction than an accomplishment of culture. The phone game, by removing the exploration of outside aspect, became just mindless collecting. If you have ever been to an event as an outside spectator, there is as much anxiety in their air as joy.

Pack opening is the equivalent of pulltabs or scratch offs. It's an asset class closer to beanie babies than baseball cards, because there is no tie to a rookie going on to have a huge career or anything but artificial scarcity.

It was a beautiful attempt to reproduce a feeling of community that came from a bunch of kids collecting beetles in the woods for fun. Kids would need to get suggestions on where to go from other kids, and they'd show off the neat bugs they found and trade with other kids. The game was carefully designed to make kids work with each other and talk to each other. That's why you couldn't get all of the pokemon in only one game, and it's why some pokemon had ridiculous tricks to evolving them. It was wildly successful at that goal.

Pretty sure gen 1 is inherently better IP and it's not a nostalgia thing. The only Pokemon I played was half of Crystal on a jailbroken iPhone as a kid.

You reminded me of this VGCats comic https://vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=258

If you still have the original cartridges, highly recommend getting a ModRetro Chromatic or an Analogue Pocket to replay them. I have the ModRetro and it has been a lot of fun rediscovering my old childhood games.

Just wait, in a thousand years archaeologists will be talking about our pantheon of monsters that were greatly revered by all.

There's Godwins law about comparing everything to nazis. Will there be someperson's law of completely misunderstanding what a word means?

When does a fad stop being a fad and start being a canon or an icon or whatever? Is Shakespeare a fad? As a 8 years old I knew all Pokémons by name their powers and I have spent literally all my pocket money on Pokémon, and now almost 30 years later people still seem to dig it. Also I don’t think it ever really went away in the meanwhile too. But yeah it could also just be millennial nostalgia and the cyclical nature of cultural products which over and over resurfaces and recycles and remixes the stuff from the past

Well with that attitude, you'll never catch 'em all!

You mean Pokemon TCG which introduced illegal unregulated gambling for millions of kids (since 1996)? Don’t forget to buy the next pack for the special holo Raichu DX Spring Edition.

Don’t pretend that Game Freak/Creatures/Nintendo are some saints.