the (nerdy) kids in my 4th/5th grade class were playing Pokemon Blue/Red way before the cartoon. those games were perfect for what they were. I, too, was obsessed. the plot was so unimportant? how can anyone criticize those games for their writing? like that is literally the least important aspect of it. the story/writing is GO CATCH POKEMON AND DO BATTLE AND BE THE BEST. that’s all it needed to be. jeeze.
My first JRPG experience was when I rented Shining Force 2 from Blockbuster because it looked like Dragon Crystal. I let my sister play it first and she loaded a save file because neither of us knew anything about saved games, and so she was in a late game area with no battles just wandering around endless fields.
Pressing the buttons just made undecipherable text boxes appear everywhere, and so after a few minutes she tossed the controller at me and said “You got a shit game” and walked away. I managed to work the game out after that and had my mind blown by the possibilities of games telling engaging stories, which I had not encountered up to that point, and now it is still one of my top 5.
Anyway now with Pokemon Go, we have situations like the other day I saw a woman in her active wear jogging with her dog, stopping every few seconds to catch imaginary animals. I felt tempted to tell her there was a Hitmonchan back the way I came, but I was still too pissed off at having lost all my balls trying to catch it.
Also I was walking behind two teenagers and one of them gestured to a dark empty entrance way to an underground parking area, saying that Mr Mime was down there. Made me think of Stephen King’s It for some reason.
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yeah, I was gonna say, at least sega localized their halfway-decent SRPGs in the 90s, unlike square and nintendo
Now I can’t stop imaging Prof. Oak as an angry, tired football dad, who just wants you to play outside and leave him alone for a bit.
God, it’s so good.
I think a big part of it was probably that Europe just didn’t get a lot of the big 16-bit JRPG releases at all. No Final Fantasy until VII, no Chrono Trigger, no Earthbound and no Super Mario RPG. Then there’s also the issue of the ones that do come out may not even be in your native language and with something as text-heavy as a JRPG that’s a real issue. I could probably count the number of old console games that were actually translated into any nordic language on one hand.
Pokemon’s simplicity really helped it overcome the language barrier I think. There’s really very little you can’t overcome with a little grinding and understanding how the HMs work. Remember getting real stuck when you had to rub the captain for CUT and needing to get the Saffron guards some juice though.
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I wouldn’t criticize the writing if it wasn’t there but it is so it’s fair game. I know that the story is to outside and catch pokemon but the way even this simple message is delivered is just entirely lacking. I get that a deep story is not the draw of the game.
So basically what I’m finding out is that GO is a good representation of a pokemon game - if it had trading and player battles. In both there’s no story, the battle systems are shallow, they’re about going outside and catching things and leveling up
Huh. That brings up an interesting question, actually.
I’m pretty sure I saw commercials for the Pokemon anime before the games were available. But then, I was an avid anime fan and got really hyped any time I saw that a new anime was actually going to be on TV (boy was I disappointed by Samurai Pizza Cats). So the minute I saw anime colors I got super excited.
I associate Pokemon with airing on the Kids WB channel, which is kind of funny in retrospect. The WB has always been the low budget network, though their kids’ programming in the 90’s ended up being pretty high quality (Animaniacs, Freakazoid, Men in Black). But I also associated them with playing Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z–both of which were sold in syndication packages. This maybe me think, “Wait a minute. Was Pokemon originally sold in syndication?”
The wikipedia article mentions it being aired in syndication, as a Kids WB network show, and also on Cartoon Network. But it doesn’t actually discuss when it aired in these formats or if there was overlap between regions.
Come to think of it, though, I think in Pennsylvania (where I grew up), it started on the Kids WB and then eventually went to Cartoon Network, but yeah: after, like, a year or two of initial penetration on the WB.
Okay: this probably isn’t interesting to anybody, but starting in syndication kind of points to Nintendo having a hard time getting their foot in the door in US television. I’d be interested to know who actually cut those deals and how it went down.
That explains things of course. I didn’t know that these games weren’t even brought over
my memory of Pokemon as a media phenomenon was that a few of us played red and blue (I was the only one who already owned one of those ancient GB link cables) but the cartoon was immediately embarrassing and I wasn’t willing to watch it, and I only played gold and silver via emulator and then nothing beyond that
The anime had the same effect on me. I don’t know if I already “knew” what anime was but I had certainly already watched a lot of Japanese cartoons. I think me really discovering anime started with Akira some years later. Pokemon is like all the worst parts of anime rolled into one
Yeah, this is interesting. I had no idea that JRPG’s had so little penetration throughout Europe.
It’s kind of crazy! A whole genre (or sub genre, I suppose) that only made it to a few countries.
For non-Americans, the history of JRPG’s in the US is basically that Nintendo tried to get Dragon Quest (“Dragon Warrior” in the US) to catch on by…I think they literally gave it away for free with a subscription to Nintendo Power. Like, I think you sent in a card or something.
At the time, DQ was an undeniable phenomenon in Japan, but it just didn’t catch on here. Some people have blamed the translation. It’s done in a kind of faux “medieval” style: awkward and formal. It probably made it less attractive for kids, but it was obviously a deliberate choice, so A for effort, I suppose.
After that, Nintendo Power gave pretty heavy coverage to the first Final Fantasy. I think they included a strategy guide? Not really sure. Again: it didn’t really take, but being a more “modern” game (I think DQ was, like, two years old by the time they localized it), FF got more traction, and many of the people (like my older brother) who would become America’s JRPG diehards fell in love with the genre through FF1.
I think Mother 1 was even previewed in Nintendo Power before Nintendo decided to scrap the localization, and I know Earthbound was covered, along with the many popular SNES JRPG’s.
But yeah: even during the SNES era, JRPG’s were basically a niche genre that fell far below Square and Enix’s goals.
It was definitely FF7 that actually made JRPG’s viable for the masses in the US, and the various factors that made the PSX a great home for JRPG’s created some sticking power.
But–uh–I’d say the relative mainstream appeal of JRPG’s in the US basically only lasted for the PSX generation. The best JRPG’s of the PS2 generation weren’t big names, and at this point JRPG’s are deep in niche territory, complete with moe pandering.
I wouldn’t say the battle system was shallow. is Dragon Quest shallow? sort of, but the depth in Pokemon came from the sheer amount of different teams you could make, and the thrill of seeing what your opponent would throw at you. switching in and out according to weaknesses, or just guessing, etc. each new pokemon you saw really felt like discovering a new species or whatever. it was thrilling!
Can you name them because this is the most interesting thing anyone’s talked about in here so far.
maybe I’m wrong. I see now that the anime debuted in the US September of 1998, which was a little earlier than I thought. I just know I was aware of the game’s popularity before the show was a big deal, and remember my friends bringing the strategy guide to class. I also remember dismissing it as “dumb” before I had played it.
Yeah. I was in third grade when the show became popular, so Pokemon became the show you made fun of other kids for watching because it was a “baby” show. Daphny once told me that Power Rangers was that show in her school, so I guess it’s a common thing. So, in my grade, you literally couldn’t talk about watching the Pokemon show, or you’d be made fun of, and–sort of unrelated–nobody was really interested in the game.
'Course then Pokemon cards somehow became huge, and I was like, “What the fuck, guys? I literally sold all of my Magic cards, because none of you would play with me, and I’ve been done with Pokemon G/S for months now! No way am I getting into some baby version of Magic.”
I should probably mention at this point that I wasn’t some outcast that nobody wanted to play nerd games with. I was well-liked and had lots of friends, but I just also had lots of nerdy interests that nobody shared and was used to other kids not being on the same wavelength.
I was actually really surprised when I got to college and discovered that Pokemon was some kind of generational touchstone.
I thought it might be an art school thing, because a lot of kids in art school are a little nerdy or interested in anime or whatever.
I think I just lived in this pocket of America where Pokemon was as minimally popular as it could possibly be. Like, a few kids played it, but we didn’t talk about it, or trade pokemon, or battle. A few times, but not really. It wasn’t a phenomenon where I lived, which is kind of weird in retrospect.
Yeah, I think you’re thinking of when it hit Cartoon Network. That might be when it hit the radar of a lot of kids.
The only one I actually ever owned for a while was a Game Boy game called Bamse that only counts technically. As I later found out it’s actually the Game Boy port of the A Dinosaur’s Tale genesis game with a Bamse-reskin. Bamse being a Swedish very long running series of newsstand children’s comics.
Counting only console games up to fifth gen (by sixth gen a lot of bigger publishers like EA and Sony started including nordic language options as well. PC games have always been all over the place with language options):
For NES there’s was Deja Vu, Shadowgate and Maniac Mansion
For Game Boy The Sword of Hope
For Genesis 2 localized NHL Hockey games
For SNES Shadowrun
For PS1 Diablo (even had a real bad/funny dub)
Could probably be a few more but that’s all I can find from casual research. No idea what it’s like in Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland but I would imagine about the same.
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Oh man, the cards. Everyone at my school collected them but since as per usual were printed in English nobody had any idea how to actually play with them. I once attempted during a break to get a teacher to come by and translate everything while we tried to figure things out but she very quickly lost patience doing so.
And guys, if you wanna hear people explain why they love Pokemon we had 2 pretty good podcasts where we got together to do so. I was even on one!
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red and blue are adorable jrpgs, mechanically and otherwise, and they are not overly simple, and their writing is dumb and great
some of the games are better than others, but i probably can’t think of a series so relentlessly lovingly put together (maybe dragon quest). it’s easy to be cynical about everything else in the pokemon brand universe, but the games themselves have always sincerely felt removed from all of that.
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