Pokemons! I Choose You!

I choose... ah, who cares.

Pokemon Platinum: the must-have game of the season.
I was pretty ashamed to get so much enjoyment out of Pokemon back when it first came out and I was about 14 years old. How sad is it that I still play the games now that I am a grown man?
Worse than that is the fact that I persist with the Pokemon series even though quite early on I gleaned one important truth about the Pokemon games: they’re all the same!

I can’t be the only person who has noticed. And yet, review sites applaud the developers’ ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality. I think those reviewers are just searching for a reasonable explanation for why they still enjoy this repetitive mass-marketing gimmick of a game. Incremental changes happen from one iteration to the next (what? Pokemon ribbon contests? Where do I sign up!) But the core mechanics remain very much the same.
But this is not even the problem. After all, how many great series have been ruined by ill-advised changes to the mechanics?

What irks me is that you can’t apply the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality to story. Sure, themes, settings, re-occurring characters. That’s all fine, but the whole thing? Why is there even a Japanese guy’s name listed under story in Pokemon credits nowadays?!

Seriously, watch this:
Boy (or girl. Next gen addition!) lives boringly in small village.
He meets professor who gives him a choice of three pokemon (grass, fire or water only!)
Boy is tasked with finding, like, every damn pokemon on the planet AND at the same time becoming the super pokemon master of the world. This is the manga equivalent of winning the Ultimate Fighting Championship with the aid of a paperclip while simultaneously locating the Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti in the undersea kingdom of Atlantis. Make something a priority, Professor!
Your best friend, and also hyperactive pain in the butt, vows to prove that he is better than you like all best friends and runs off to do the exact same thing you are doing. Now I’m no scientist, but if you have two massive tasks that you would like taken care of, and two fresh-faced young scamps to do those tasks then why wouldn’t you give them a task each?
Boy goes to all the cities in his tiny world, facing the challenge of the Pokemon gym leaders who, despite being the best pokemon trainers on the planet, haven’t mastered the concept of elemental strengths and weaknesses. How did you climb to the top of the competitive pokemon industry by using six pokemon made of grass? It takes one fire-breathing pony to utterly destroy you! The gym leader’s explanation for their ridiculous choice is that they ‘like’ that type of pokemon. You know what type I like? The ones that let me win! That ‘I like them’ attitude is not how winners operate.
Oh, meanwhile you somehow get involved in stopping some conspiracy haphazardly thrown into play by Team INSERTSCARYGANGNAMEHERE to kidnap every pokemon on the planet and have them print money or defraud the government or something equally horrid.
Having slaughtered the gym leaders, and demolished some plot to do something dastardly with Pokemon, Boy goes all the way to the Final Four – Four trainers who – despite having no gym of their own – kick way more butt than those lame gym leaders. This might be because you have to fight all four of them in a row. Then you become the Poke Champ or something and you win. Because you abandoned the ridiculous ‘Find all the pokemon’ quest hours ago.

See what I just did? I wrote the story of every Pokemon game ever, including any subsequent sequels. Some royalties please, Nintendo?
Would it be too much to ask that something, *anything* could change in the typical Pokemon storyline? But Pokemon is not about story. And they’re shifting units so what’s the harm, right?

At the end of the day, I tell myself I won’t bother with the next one, but I still do. I still play them. I don’t know why!