COMMENTARY: ‘Pokemon’ Is The ‘Madden Football’ Of J-RPGs

Pokemon is the Madden football of J-RPGs. We get one just about every year, and when it comes out, it’s not that different than it was the year before, or the year before that. You get the expected “roster update” with some new Pokemon, but you’re also getting a lot of the same Pokemon that have been in previous games. Just like Madden, in spite of players complaining how substandard and lazy the series has become, it sells millions of copies every year.

I like Pokemon well enough, but I can only play the same game so many times. Pokemon Legends: Arceus might be the exception. It’s the first game in the series that’s caught my eye in quite awhile, but when there are so many other more compelling and forward-thinking RPGs out there, it’s hard to justifying spending time and money on a series that refuses to innovate.

Pokemon has never fully shed its ‘my first RPG’ approach. It’s geared towards younger players who typically don’t have a lot of experience in the RPG genre. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the result is that the games themselves aren’t much of a challenge. They’re a lot like the Kirby games in that way. They’re charming, and the story is usually amusing, if not silly, but they’re not going to stretch your gaming skills.

If Pokemon had to get by strictly on the innovation of its systems, mechanics, and overall gameplay, the series would likely have died a long time ago. Not because they’re bad, but because they’re stale. I always keep all this in mind when a new Pokemon RPG comes out and any part of me is tempted to buy it. I usually arrive at the same conclusion of ‘but it’s the same game’.

Part of me wants to think Pokemon is a scam, but when you have people willing to plunk $60 down for the same game every year, can you really call it that? Can you blame Game Freak for not innovating when the fan base clearly doesn’t seem to care about innovation enough to stop buying the games?

I’m playing the original Deus Ex on PC right now, an RPG that came out over twenty years ago, and from its story to its mechanics to its systems, it’s astonishing how ahead of its time it was – but that’s for another blog post.

Nintendo and Game Freak are always very clever in how they present the games. Every Pokemon game has a legendary Pokemon featured on the cover. What they don’t tell you is that you won’t encounter that Pokemon until the end of your adventure when you’ve already put dozens of hours into the game using many of the same Pokemon that you’ve seen and used in previous games – and even though your starter Pokemon are different each game, they’re not nearly as impressive as the legendaries. That’s why they’re on the cover, and your starter Pokemon, who you spend the most time with, is not. I believe the only exception to this was the first Red/Blue/Yellow generation on Game Boy that did feature the starters on the cover. That’s probably a big reason why players remember Squirtle, Charmander, and Bulbasaur so fondly.

If the Pokemon were completely new every game, and there weren’t so many carryovers from previous generations, I would feel more compelled to play more games in the series. At least then you would have a facet of the game that’s exclusive to that version of Pokemon that you’re playing. How many times am I expected to catch a Zigzagoon or a Pidgit or a Pikachu and level them up?

I’m not what you would call a serious Pokemon fan. I have no skin in the Pokemon game one way or another. However, as a Nintendo fan, I do pay attention when a new game in the series is announced, and I’m always curious to see if this is the game that Game Freak shakes up the formula and does something different. The Pokemon series needs its Breath of the Wild. It needs that game that retains the essence of the series, but shakes everything else up and presents it in a new paradigm in the same way that Breath of the Wild did for the Zelda series, and Metroid Prime did for the Metroid series all those years ago. The series is being held back by its own success.

With a few minor exceptions, Game Freak as a developer has been doing nothing but making Pokemon games for over 25 years. They desperately need fresh eyes and fresh ideas. If they’re determined to put out Pokemon games at this frequency, they need at least one other developer working alongside them, much in the same way that Activision has multiple developers working on the Call of Duty series simultaneously.

In a typical successful RPG series, much of the change and innovation from one game to the next is in its systems and mechanics, usually in the battle system. With Pokemon, all of the change and innovation goes into creating new Pokemon. If Game Freak spent as much time innovating on the gameplay as they do in creating new Pokemon, the series would likely not be stuck in the rut it’s in and be much more attractive to lapsed players like myself.