I love playing games wrong. I love games which allow you to play wrong. When you pause to look around and your support character just repeats your objective on a loop, that sucks. “Open the door”, “You need to open the door”, “Open the door”. As a kid one of my favourite games to play wrong (although I didn’t realise I was doing so at the time) was Pokémon. The phrase “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” never really sank in for me. Why bother with training up other Pokémon when you can just train one up to such a high level that you need never swap it out? My level 99 Blastoise was a sight to behold, and by the time I got to the Elite Four, which was basically the only bit of the game where multiple party members was useful, there were a bunch of easily capturable level 70s to pad out the numbers.
Always having a really high level Pokémon suited me. I used to act as a training service to other kids, taking their low level ‘mon and training them up super quickly by one shotting everything with André the Giant Tortoise. Now, if I’m honest, I can’t say that this was the most fun way to play the game. In many ways it actually makes things too easy, given that I could usually one-shot every gym leaders Pokémon even if my attacks were not very effective… It was probably about a year ago that I decided to replay one of the original Pokémon, although I elected to go with the GBA Blue Sea edition rather than the the original Pokémon Blue I played as a kid. This time I decided that I was going to do this right. Maybe I wasn’t going to Catch Them All™ but I would try a lot harder to have a varied team than I did when I was the correct age to play these games.
Having a series of long train journeys ahead of me with which to sink a few tens of hours, I set out to play through the entire game, and I discovered that I still really like Pokémon. I’m not sure I’d want to play through one now if I didn’t have some travel planned, but the game has aged far less than I expected. I never named my Pokémon as a child, but I decided to have a naming convention this time: I would name the Pokémon after whatever I was thinking about at the time. I liked the idea of having a party full of names that had no relation to each other, but that I could think: oh, “ChknCaesar”, I caught him when I was really hungry and about to pause the game to eat a sandwich. “ArnoldRimmer”, oh yeah I got her when I was trying to remember that really funny Red Dwarf line.
Notice how none of the names I just made up went over the twelve character limit for naming Pokémon? Professionalism.
I might not have quite beat whatever I named my rival (it was something mature like “TOSSER”), but I’m glad that I have now played the game that defined my childhood in the way that other people played it. It’s a fairly small thing, but when something is important to your history I think trying to re-appreciate it as an adult can help you understand its impact more. As a game designer I’ve been influenced by the games I played as a kid in ways I don’t consciously think about, so for me playing it again helped break it down in my mind and see a lot of the tropes I do or want to put in my games. Also, having entire teams of enemy Pokémon plowed down by “ArrivaSucks” tickled me.
