Pokemon SoulSilver Log: Part 1

I bought "Pokemon SoulSilver" last week, and since its a rather long game, I'm hoping to begin another one of those extra long playthrough adventure things.  Only this time its going to be for a game that I actually like.  Don't worry, I'm not going to update every day.  Maybe once a week for the month or so I'll be playing this game.

But before all that, I must first tell my story:

I've had a torrid love affair with Pokemon for just over twelve years now.  It happens to be one of the very first video games I ever got into seriously, and my very first RPG ever.  But there was more to Pokemon than just a game.  It was a culture.  It was a lifestyle.  It was the closest thing to a religion that I have ever believed in. Me and every other grade schooler in all of western civilization were part of the Pokemon Movement.

Yeah, there were games, but there was also the TV show, which happens to be the first anime I ever saw.  Did spend years watching it, waiting for Ash and Misty to realize them were in love?  Was that just me?  And there was a trading card game, which happens to be the first and last card game I ever bothered with.  And there were movies, and we all went, didn't we?  While our Moms fell asleep from the mediocrity of those terrible movies, we sat back in religious ecstasy, throwing popcorn at the screen and giggling like the school kids we were when our favorite Pokemon came on screen.  Remember the Burger King toys?  Remember getting Grandma to burn like thirty bucks on a cheap 24 karat gold Poke Ball we just lost on the car ride home?  Truly, there was something to all that.  Something magical.

Steadily, however, Pokemon died for me.  First to go was the card game.  I know every child in the late 90s had to have gotten at least one pack of Pokemon cards.  Unfortunately, nobody actually knew how to battle with Pokemon cards.  What the heck did the elemental cards do?  What's the point of a Potion?  How many cards can you use?  Did we care?  No!  It was all about collecting stuff.  And I'm not a very good collector.  After playing just one round of Pokemon card battling, I immediately got bored and took out my GameBoy Color Link Cable to have some real fun.  As of this moment, my entire extensive collection of Pokemon cards (even my rare naked Misty card) is in some guy named Niko's basement.

Next to go was the anime.  It was stupid from the beginning, and we all knew it on some level.  There was no real plot, no real enemy, no real danger, and no good reason to watch.  What the anime tried to do was recreate the true experience of the games, to the expense of making a serious plot.  Pokemon is, in its most fundamental level, a community experience.  You certainly can beat the games all by yourself, but you'll never catch 'em all, you'll never get a good battle challenge, and you'll never feel the true enjoyment of these games until its done with a group of friends.  The anime tried to boil down that experience, but failed.  Yeah, its cool to see your favorite Pokemon in full cartoon life, but there was just no soul to it all.  You can't make community experience of sharing Missingno and Mew rumors into a non-interactive storyline, no matter how good.  And Pokemon the anime was not good!  The only thing that I particularly liked, even from the start, was the relationship with Ash and Misty.  The sort of back and forth "I'm not going out with him!" childlike mentality was a nice long arc you could follow along to its inevitable conclusion (they kiss)... which never happened*.  I haven't watched this show in years, but I do know that Ash has since had like two other Misty replacements, neither of which will ever go anywhere.  The show will continue endlessly, entertaining a small age demographic before they realize too "this show sucks".

At some point, I just stopped loving Pokemon as much.  There were other games to play.  I stopped drawing my own Pokemon regions in my notebooks.  I stopped designing my own Pokemon like "Mewthree" and "Charvenustois".  The world had moved on.

The games too, unfortunately began to die out for me.  "Gold and Silver", I feel, were the heights of the Pokemon experience.  After that, things began to sour.  "Ruby and Sapphire" gave me this crazy feeling of a reboot.  It wasn't a sequel anymore:  none of the old locations, characters, or enemies were back, or even mentioned.  Only half the Pokemon I had known and loved for years now were available initially, the rest were these new and weird monsters I had never seen before.  At this point I honestly was not following Pokemon all that much except for the games, so I couldn't amass an encyclopedic knowledge of every new one before the game began.  The Elite Four was replace, Team Rocket was gone, I couldn't revisit old regions like "Gold and Silver" had allowed for, things just were restarted.  It was still the same game in every fundamental fashion, but all these little details were shifted around.  We're rehashing the sound ground, yet removing a lot of things I had come to enjoy.

Even so, a few years later I did do my best to catch all 350 or whatever the insane number was by that point in my "FireRed" version.  That wasn't my most exciting summer, was it?

When "Diamond and Pearl" came out, I decided that this time I would actually look over the entire new generation before getting the game.  Only one problem:  they were all terrible.  Ugly, Ugly, Ugly.  There was maybe two in the whole bunch that I'd even consider owning**.  Piplup look cute, but then he evolves into this terrible, monstrous thing called Empoleon.  Others were these horrible evolved forms of Pokemon I had known and loved for years.  Rhydon, what happened to you?  Oh my God, Electabuzz, what have you become??  Eww...  Why in the world would I ever want to play this generation?  More importantly, it was following the "Ruby and Sapphire" standard of simply restarting everything without being a real sequel.  There's nothing to enjoy here.  So I never got it.

Instead, I eagerly awaited the remakes of "Gold and Silver", the best that Pokemon has ever been.  And now that I have them, I'm happy to see just how much the Pokemon world has changed.  Your starting party member follows you around now.  Its a minor thing, but it makes it feel so much more intimate.  They also redesigned the entire world, so that each town now has its own individual look, feel, and background music.  The world of Pokemon has never looked so alive.

At the moment I'm training up to beat Jasmine with my four Pokemon team.  I went with a Chikorita as a starter this time because I've never actually started with a Grass-type.  Then I caught a Mareep because it was just about the only Electric Type nearby.  Next up was a Vulpix because I love that Pokemon.  And finally I made a Vaporeon to both have a strong Water-type and to get across the ocean.  At the moment I've acquired a Feebas from my roommate's "Diamond".  I'm working to one day make it a beautiful Milotic.

What will my final team look like?  I have no idea.  There are so many options.  So many choices.  But that's the true wonder of Pokemon:  freedom.  So join me in my quest for freedom as I take my next step into the larger Pokemon world.

You're going down, Jasmine.  Just because you're cute that doesn't mean I'll go easy on you.

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* If only Rumiko Takahashi of "Inuyasha" and "Ranma 1/2" fame had been brought in to write the anime, things would have been different.  Yeah, the love arc would have been dragged along for a decade, but it would have gone somewhere!

** Those two, interestingly, are Eevee's new evolutions.  Especially Glaceon. I also like Luxray.  I did like Lucario, until he started kicking my ass in Smash Bros.  Now its over between me and him.  Shaymin's second form is pretty cool too.  The rest are all rubbish.