I’ll never learn.

     It’s been over a decade since the pocket monsters “took the world by storm,” which is a curious phrase unless you can somehow picture the legions of hyper brats, high school girls taken to drawing pictures of ponies or waifish princes in their notebooks, and the poor, malformed Nintendo minions causing severe property damage and compounded dystopia. Yet here I am, having only missed a single generation of Pokemon core games, but just as quixotically capturing and coercing cute, often poorly designed monsters to take whacks at others of their ilk for ‘fun’ and in-game profit. It’s a turn-based RPG just as cloisome, slightly frustrating (but never frustrating enough for me to just keep the title shelved), and mind-bendingly addictive as any other entry in its somewhat bloated, stagnant genre.

     For all its flaws, perhaps the formless, clay-like je nais sai quois of Pokemon is best grasped and pulled into smirking pair of lips that eventually parts and laughs at you. Wherever you go, you generally find banal, daft little people espousing the virtue of working with the myriad critters that populate their colorful, happy world, but your interactions are mostly limited to finding various, creative ways to make them beat the E-loving crap out of whatever barely-animated sprite happens upon your shared path. Oh, sure, there are also confusing, whimsical contests which your beasties can participate in, but they seem hollow and out-of-place. Why is this? Because you’re ordering a creature capable of either incinerating the very stage they prance upon at a whim or electrocuting an unimpressed judge into ashes put on bows and dance. This is all possible because you threw some magical sphere that trapped it, which apparently earns its eternal servitude. This is great for encouraging me to feel like the family-friendly equivalent of a badass, but makes whatever fantastical backdrop to the game seem even more sugary and irrelevant. It actually makes me yearn for getting back into battles, which are really a pretty depressing and minimalist affair. The text, routine splash of color and motion, and rather broad selection of moves want very much to show me that what’s going on is exciting, but I don’t need a reminder every fucking turn that it’s still raining, or that the attack that just fainted the enemy was “not very effective.” I acknowledge that this series is meant to be accessible and probably always will be, but why can’t we simply have a backdrop animation of rain falling for every turn it’s active, for instance? And can the computer controlled Pokemon often have “strategic” approaches that are creative and challenging, rather than something that seems more designed to annoy me by prolonging the match? Yeah, my Pokemon’s life may be ticking down every turn, or he may be paralyzed and miss a turn now and then, but I’m still slow-roasting you to death, clod. Most of the time, if you know each type’s weaknesses and strengths, then you’ll be able to win what amounts to a glorified match of paper, Rock Slide, X-Scissor. For all the little improvements, I’m still playing the same game I was back in 1995.

     Perhaps I’m just too old to catch ‘em all. The attempts to broaden the series has resulted in a creepy kid’s show that cooks my neurons in such a way as to bring up displeasing recollections of the Care Bears, a manga that I have no interest in reading, and legions of collectible figures and cards that probably don’t sell quite as much as Nintendo wants them to. Still, something in me wants to peer through the window of my DS into a strange, fanciful land full of animals that don’t eat each other, pee on the bathroom mats, or scrape and mewl at the screen door to be let in at five A.M. in the fuckdamn morning. It is, however, a strange contradiction, as the gameplay at times takes me back those twelve years or so when life was simpler and the world was a lot stranger, though with more teenage angst and being tossed into dumpsters. Is it escapism? Is it nostalgia? When am I going to learn? What am I supposed to learn? Is this what Professor Rowan meant when he said the true goal of my Pokemon quest was to grow as a person? If so, then they should have forgotten about online trading and battling, because actually meeting Pokemon fans in the flesh is generally as jarring a cause for self-exploration and indictment as any other.

     Oh, well. See you at the Pokemon League, fellow men-children.