Originally published on Trevor Trove on February 26, 2016
Well that was disappointing…
A roughly six-minute video to announce a new pair of games Pokemon Sun and Moon as previously rumored (with nothing to show but a bit of off-screen designer work) and the fact that the Virtual Shop re-releases of Red, Blue, and Yellow will be able to connect to the Pokemon Bank to bring Gen-1 Pokemon to the modern era.
This still doesn’t solve the problem that Pokemon has always had where Pokemon can only travel one way. Obviously in the days of the cartridge-based games, the developers couldn’t anticipate all of the prospective new Pokemon and put code for them in the game. But since the DS games, or at the very least now the 3DS games, The Pokemon Company could be patching in updates to include new Pokemon to be compatible with the previous versions.
In an era where developers frustratingly have an over-reliance on fixing a game with patches, The Pokemon Company and Nintendo could be using the technology to actually build upon their existing games rather than fix them. Even if it had to come in the ugly form of Paid DLC (which the Pokemon Bank already essentially is), I have no doubt players would be willing to pay an extra $5 or $10 to make the “newly discovered” Pokemon found in Sun and Moon compatible with X, Y, Alpha Sapphire, and Omega Ruby.
This gets a little bit back to what I discussed yesterday. The Pokemon franchise has simply become too complicated for me to care and almost defiantly refuses to respect the work I put into previous generations of the game. If they gave me one or two (as is the nature of the franchise) games where I could catch every Pokemon between the two AND just build upon that game with downloadable updates/expansions when they actually had ideas for new Pokemon and weren’t just adding faces to items around the office, I’d be willing to jump back in. Instead, if I really wanted to “catch ’em all” I’d have to dig out link cables, original Game Boys, Game Boy Advances, DSes that could read GBA and DS cartridges, 3DSes, and more than 20 different cartridges. No thank you. I had a half-baked scheme to do that back in the summer of 2008 and quickly abandoned the idea when I realized what a headache that was going to be.
And since Pokemon Sun and Moon will probably just add a few more Pokemon and some kind of irrelevant mini-games to the same worn out formula, I’ll probably just play something else. Thanks anyway, Pokemon.