![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlSo! Remember when I said this:
"It is while doing this gym that Mint starts trying to evolve. I have JUST ENOUGH Pokemon knowledge to whap the B button a couple times and stop him. If I don't evolve him, he'll learn a cool move. I'll explain why in a different post, it's not just that I want him small and cute forever, I promise."
...in today's post? Well, we're at that different post now.
Mint the Treecko will in the future learn "Giga Drain", a move that sucks health out of the enemy and gives part of it to us. It's one of the strongest Special Attack-based moves he's going to learn, and only his adorable dinky no-evolutions form learns it at level 21. If he'd evolved in that last post, we would not learn this move, as neither his Grovyle form nor Sceptile form learns it.
To understand why they'd give a pokemon a move it can only learn by deliberately NOT getting more powerful and becoming a stronger form, we have to go back to a man named Satoshi Tajiri in the early 1980s, when he was writing a fanzine about arcade games called "Game Freak".
1980s Japan was flush with arcades and arcade games, it was the biggest boom of the video game bubble. Arcade games were a new and exciting frontier and one of the best ways to keep people playing YOUR game was to make it obtuse and secretive.
It started with Space Invaders, where if you shot 22 shots that hit nothing before shooting the UFO you earned a major point bonus. Eventually you had games like The Tower of Druaga or even Bubble Bobble, which were layered with secret after secret.
As a direct result of this secret-based gaming economy, gamers started sharing secrets with each other any way they could. In the schoolyard, in fanzines, in official magazines or in fliers taped right to the arcade cabinet. There was this atmosphere, like in UFO culture or cryptid fandom, where if one little detail turned out to be true or if someone discovered something new and unexpected, it sparked a rush of pet theories and "MAYBE I WASN'T WRONG AFTER ALL! I NEED TO TRY THE THING!" breaking out. People shared and talked and theorized right there in the arcade, trying out everything they could think of to be That One Player who Knew A Thing when it was fresh. It was a wild new frontier and they were at the edge of it.
Satoshi Tajiri grew up in this culture and thrived in it. Game Freak, his personal fanzine project, grew into a real business and started making games, and as you probably guessed if you didn't already know, they created Pokemon.
Part of the purpose of Pokemon is an attempt to recreate that early-arcade culture: Notice you're always a young kid in a world full of exciting creatures that inexplicably nobody knows much about? With this comes that same secrets-based economy: Some Pokemon have weird evolution requirements. Some secrets require you to talk to seemingly unrelated people and go back to a place you have no reason to go.
More to the point, sometimes they have their best moves buried away at the bottom of their starter's learned-move list, because unless someone told you not to evolve them or you were That One Player, you would NEVER KNOW... but when you know, you've got exciting new esoteric knowledge you can share.
These things need to exist. I mean, Pokemon 151 was never supposed to be seen by the public. Mew appearing in people's games was an accident. Yet...
Iwata: "There was a really incredible response to CoroCoro Comic’s announcement of the Mew offer. I feel that’s really when things turned round for Pokemon."
Ishihara: "I believe so too. The monthly sales we’d had up to then began to be equalled by weekly sales, before increasing to become three then four times larger."
Discovery, surprise and the joy of sharing... or just the joy of showing off what you've got. That's what finding secrets is all about, isn't it?
Even with the Internet making it as easy and cynical and boring as "ugh just look at a GUIDE because the game's full of cryptic CRAP", I still feel a kind of delight in these little details. It's part of the core of Pokemon, and taking it out would make it feel... hollow, somehow.
SO THAT SURE IS AN UNNEEDED 600-WORD SIDEBAR I BANKED AGAINST THE HOPE OF Y'ALL BEING INTERESTED, BOY HOWDY. *cough*
"It is while doing this gym that Mint starts trying to evolve. I have JUST ENOUGH Pokemon knowledge to whap the B button a couple times and stop him. If I don't evolve him, he'll learn a cool move. I'll explain why in a different post, it's not just that I want him small and cute forever, I promise."
...in today's post? Well, we're at that different post now.
Mint the Treecko will in the future learn "Giga Drain", a move that sucks health out of the enemy and gives part of it to us. It's one of the strongest Special Attack-based moves he's going to learn, and only his adorable dinky no-evolutions form learns it at level 21. If he'd evolved in that last post, we would not learn this move, as neither his Grovyle form nor Sceptile form learns it.
To understand why they'd give a pokemon a move it can only learn by deliberately NOT getting more powerful and becoming a stronger form, we have to go back to a man named Satoshi Tajiri in the early 1980s, when he was writing a fanzine about arcade games called "Game Freak".
1980s Japan was flush with arcades and arcade games, it was the biggest boom of the video game bubble. Arcade games were a new and exciting frontier and one of the best ways to keep people playing YOUR game was to make it obtuse and secretive.
It started with Space Invaders, where if you shot 22 shots that hit nothing before shooting the UFO you earned a major point bonus. Eventually you had games like The Tower of Druaga or even Bubble Bobble, which were layered with secret after secret.
As a direct result of this secret-based gaming economy, gamers started sharing secrets with each other any way they could. In the schoolyard, in fanzines, in official magazines or in fliers taped right to the arcade cabinet. There was this atmosphere, like in UFO culture or cryptid fandom, where if one little detail turned out to be true or if someone discovered something new and unexpected, it sparked a rush of pet theories and "MAYBE I WASN'T WRONG AFTER ALL! I NEED TO TRY THE THING!" breaking out. People shared and talked and theorized right there in the arcade, trying out everything they could think of to be That One Player who Knew A Thing when it was fresh. It was a wild new frontier and they were at the edge of it.
Satoshi Tajiri grew up in this culture and thrived in it. Game Freak, his personal fanzine project, grew into a real business and started making games, and as you probably guessed if you didn't already know, they created Pokemon.
Part of the purpose of Pokemon is an attempt to recreate that early-arcade culture: Notice you're always a young kid in a world full of exciting creatures that inexplicably nobody knows much about? With this comes that same secrets-based economy: Some Pokemon have weird evolution requirements. Some secrets require you to talk to seemingly unrelated people and go back to a place you have no reason to go.
More to the point, sometimes they have their best moves buried away at the bottom of their starter's learned-move list, because unless someone told you not to evolve them or you were That One Player, you would NEVER KNOW... but when you know, you've got exciting new esoteric knowledge you can share.
These things need to exist. I mean, Pokemon 151 was never supposed to be seen by the public. Mew appearing in people's games was an accident. Yet...
Iwata: "There was a really incredible response to CoroCoro Comic’s announcement of the Mew offer. I feel that’s really when things turned round for Pokemon."
Ishihara: "I believe so too. The monthly sales we’d had up to then began to be equalled by weekly sales, before increasing to become three then four times larger."
Discovery, surprise and the joy of sharing... or just the joy of showing off what you've got. That's what finding secrets is all about, isn't it?
Even with the Internet making it as easy and cynical and boring as "ugh just look at a GUIDE because the game's full of cryptic CRAP", I still feel a kind of delight in these little details. It's part of the core of Pokemon, and taking it out would make it feel... hollow, somehow.
SO THAT SURE IS AN UNNEEDED 600-WORD SIDEBAR I BANKED AGAINST THE HOPE OF Y'ALL BEING INTERESTED, BOY HOWDY. *cough*
no subject
Date: 2017-07-21 01:33 am (UTC)That sort of stuff is awesome, and is why I actually kind of lament that games have gotten better at error handling now. If a game tries to load a map or Pokemon data or just about anything and it gets slipped a wrong address, it just throws up a prompt and maybe crashes. Gen 1 Pokemon just went with it and tried its best, which is how you can feed the enemy encounter data your player character's name and have it spit out some glitchy eldritch terror for you to fight. They just don't make games like that anymore. In that they make games with sturdier code now, but I kind of miss gen 1's broken charm. Like, in gen 1, you can confuse the game so hard it gives up and lets you fight basically whatever. In gen 6 you can... uh... accidentally have some held items go off twice? It's just not the same.
As for secrets they put in there on purpose, I feel like this is a large part of why I initially loved then eventually grew out of Pokemon. As I said, back in the day I was all over this stuff. Then somehow that urge to see beyond the veil slowly and gradually turned from "investigate the truck for clues on how to get behind Bill's house" to "bike back and forth for like eight goddamn hours shitting out eggs looking for the one Chosen One with perfect IVs." Shinies used to be these mystical things, so rare that you may as well not even lose sleep trying to find them on purpose but boy is it so cool if you just happen to win the lottery and see one. Then they came up with ways to manage the odds and farm for them and they somehow went from "I was minding my own business and just happened to see this amazing thing" to "I've got like twenty of them but it's kind of a sloggy grind."
Maybe it's not the games themselves, but the Internet replacing the schoolyard rumor mill--like you said, it's easy and cynical to just go find a guide for all the cryptic crap. Still, the magic undeniably disappeared for me when I went from not understanding why Rare Candies make you less powerful than having trained to 100 the hard way, to understanding exactly what EVs are and why they're such heinous bullshit to try and manage properly. On one hand, Super Training and the like go a long way to ease the pain of that particular issue, but on the other, a part of me wonders if maybe that's solving the wrong problem? I don't know.
I am actually very excited to get back into the series again someday, possibly with Sun/Moon, but I will have to try very hard not to fall into Optimization Hell, and much like any given Lovecraft protagonist, trying to go back to living normally after having seen beyond the veil presents its own set of problems. I'm looking forward to trying, though! I, uh, may need you to help like tie me down or something if I ever have the urge to look up anything though.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-21 03:41 am (UTC)Even in face-to-face discussions, I feel like the spectacle started to outweigh the mystique - amongst people I managed to actually talk to about video games without wanting to punch myself in the face about, somewhere in the late 90s, concurrent with but maybe not caused by the rise of accessible internet? Topics shifted almost imperceptibly from "there's a Mew hidden under the truck in Vermillion" to "
Snape kills Dumbledoreoh man Aeris dies". Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, video games became more "legitimate" as a storytelling medium, but in the process they lost a bit of their puzzle-like nature, both in design and in public perception.EDIT: Even keeping it in the same series, try to think back. The big urban legends for FF6 and FF7 were reviving Leo and Aeris, repectively, right?
Nobody does that for Tellah in 4, or Galuf in 5. Not because they're handled better narratively (though they are), but because there were other things that had more mystique. The "secret" dummied out Adult Time Room in 4, the mystery of the Brave Blade and Chicken Knife in 5. And so on.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-21 04:07 am (UTC)But yeah, you're right. Minus World type stuff kind of went out of style in that series, too, didn't it? That's really too bad.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-21 04:13 am (UTC)But yeah, that was also a mythical thing about... not the coding or design of the game, but the writing. The sketch glitch, meanwhile, got amazingly little press for what it was, and nobody knew for seventeen years that you could actively break the game's scripting by not saving through the entirety of the World of Balance and then game-overing in the Floating Continent.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-21 04:20 am (UTC)Other times I am sure.
[EDIT]
I've still never seen Shadow dream about anything in person. I've seen it on Youtube, but I never have triggered it in real life.
no subject
Date: 2017-07-21 03:07 pm (UTC)