As part of a 2016 game jam “That Pokeyman Thing Your Grandkids Are Into” was released, a browser game made to parody Pokemon Go where you play as an old man discovering the fad. With the recent announcements for the new “Pokemon: Sword” and “Shield” loads of people I knew where losing their minds, but I realised I didn’t care. The franchise had been shuffled into that space of my mind where things I have no interest in live, like “Game of Thrones” or “Warhammer”. At some point I had become this old man, I don’t understand Pokemon anymore.

Pokefever hit me as hard as any other as a kid. I remember watching the first episode back in 1999 as a four-year-old with little discerning taste and it blew me away, I’d heard about it being popular in America (as the fad had made the news) and knew it was from this strange place called Japan. I think the reason it hit me so strongly was that it was my first experience with another culture that could resonate with me at that age, it was very distinctly foreign and broke the wave of ultra-violent 90’s anime that was the pushing point of the decade.

The franchise was huge and merchandise was everywhere, the success of the franchise was built around accessibility. Though shows like “Sailor Moon” and “Dragon Ball Z” had proved popular in the past they had more of an overarching plot which meant you had to stick with it from start to end. In comparison, though “Pokemon” did have on overarching plot it was pretty thread bare, concentrating more on a “monster of the week” format, except you could collect these monsters too through merchandise. It’s an odd amalgamation of shounen ideas from the 90’s that just seemed to work, with a more relatable cast of 10-year-olds rather than the usual high-school aged protagonists, it was the right amount of fantasy with foreign culture so as to not alienate Western fans. They may be fantasy creatures but they replicate things familiar to us, like pigeons or Bruce Lee. All this except these kids didn’t need to go to school!

This was no different with the games too, being aimed at a younger audience was not usually in line with JRPGs as text heavy number games. Instead the games focused on simple exploration and collection. Again the card game was the same, simple rules yet no one bothered to learn how to play, instead focusing on collecting and showing off to the other kids at school.

I even saved up for a Gameboy Advance just to play Pokemon and pretty much repeatedly played Blue, Leaf Green and Mystery Dungeon… the latter I never finished. Due to Nintendo games being so expensive why would I spend money on a GBA title when I could get numerous flashy Playstation games for the same price, especially as at the time review scores weren’t as readily available. Children such as myself who didn’t know better were burnt by shovelware like “Monster Inc” and “Simpsons Road Rage”, just look at this password screen, I still have nightmares about it! Pokemon games were particularly expensive and rare, so money savvy James stuck to the 3 for £20 section.

Pokemon acted as a gateway for me. From the anime I went on to see stuff like “Cardcaptor Sakura” and eventually seek out things like the Studio Ghibli catalogue, while with JRPGs I moved on to Final Fantasy and grew an appreciation for slower paced titles. However with this I outgrew the series, I got a PSP and started watching the big boy anime instead.

Jump forward to when I was 19 and trying to find anime to watch with my little sister. We’d gone through “Princess Tutu” and “Sailor Moon” when I stumbled across “Digimon” and decided to revisit the show on nostalgia. I was shocked by not only how well the show held up but by how much better it was than in my rose tinted memories. The characters weren’t just two-dimensional, it tackled darker themes and tried to do more than be just a kids show. With this I thought that I had to visit “Pokemon” again too, because surely that’d also be just as good as I remembered.

Now I’m not saying that the “Pokemon” anime is bad per se, it’s just not particularly good. Outside the well written and directed first episode and movie the show doesn’t have much going for it, a never-ending repetitive adventure of an eternally 10-year-old boy. It has its memorable moments and decent comedy but in an age where binge-watching on Netflix is the norm, an episodic show with no emotional pay-off doesn’t really hold up.

Jump forward to my time at university and the announcement of “Pokemon Sun/Moon”. A lot of people I befriended at university were still mad for “Pokemon” and got extremely hyped when it came to the new games, they even had a tournament at our yearly convention with a “Pokemon” battle league even being attempted. As such I just assumed that the anime was regarded as the bad nostalgia fueled part of the franchise and the games where were the franchise truly flourished. When one friend was talking to me about the franchise and I mentioned my limited experience with it he said “I have to lend you “Pokemon Ruby”, it’s my favourite one”.

As such I borrowed the game, excited to finally get the chance to play something that had escaped me during my childhood. I got about 20 hours in. What had made the game appeal to me as a child made it a bore as an adult, the game was just one huge grind. I guess this game had more of a story, but it was still threadbare which is a rarity for an rpg. You don’t need a story to have a good game, you could argue that here the emphasis is placed on the exploration and journey itself as you travel between minimally distinct towns having few reactions. The game is almost like a fetch-quest, except a self-serving one in which you collect hundreds of Pokemon that you will never use. The way the one-on-one battle system works it means some are just undeniably better than others, there’s no point in using most of them.

The game is incredibly easy, with tactics coming down to just using the strongest attack repeatedly as long as the enemy isn’t immune to it. I’ve heard the arguments that Pokemon at a competitive level is actually very deep and difficult, but I’m not about to grind for hundreds of hours just to fight people using all the same teams. It’d be like entering a fighting game tournament and everyone is using the two highest tier characters and playing them the exact same way. There’s no downside to healing whenever or minimal issue with losing, any problem in the game can be solved with a simple level grind. The music and visuals are decent for the hardware however, I can’t deny that. I remember the point I quit, just walking across a bland desert fighting a Geodude or Sandshrew every few steps, which took an annoyingly long time to kill.

This just left me incredibly confused, asking why so many people at my age were obsessed with a game I saw as bab’s first JRPG? Maybe stuff has changed in the newer titles, maybe the franchise has rolled with the times, but it was such a slog and a chore of a game that provided no challenge. It wasn’t terrible, I was just so bored. The designs of the Pokemon are generally good but nothing too interesting, especially most of the newer ones that seem to be coming out, like keys or ice cream. It doesn’t even seem to be young children that are fans of the franchise now, it’s more my own age group who grew up with the series. In addition, the fact that they released two copies of essentially the same game always bothered me, it’s just a way to make money by walling some of the content away. If the content from the other game was kept as microtransactions that cost less than purchasing the other game then people would be in uproar. I mean the last entry in the franchise was a remake of a remake, except now it had mechanics from the mobile game.

Does this make me an old man now, shaking his fist at the youth of today for liking game mechanics he doesn’t? Maybe, but this is my hill to die on. I don’t think the “Pokemon” anime or games are very good. I don’t understand “Pokemon” anymore.