Every so often someone will pitch a 'Pokemon game for adults', and what follows will be the worst idea for a game you ever heard. There will be suggestions that instead of battling jugglers and boy scouts, you should fight drug dealers and pimps. The series, which has long been built on love for you fellow creatures and a cutesy approach to combat, should become hyper violent and see Pokemon impaled on one another, their flesh ripped asunder in an orgy of blood and viscera. It should be set in dark alleyways overflowing with street crime, and Poison-types should be able to kill or mutate you if you get too close to them. These ideas are desperately uncreative and lacking any cohesion or purpose, but that doesn't mean a Pokemon game for adults is inherently a terrible idea.
I always think it's interesting to see what fans would create if given the reins to their favourite games. Fans are outside of the development bubble, and are unaware of potential limitations, so tend to have a wider range of ideas - ideas that devs can learn from and tweak, giving them more to consider. Of course, this can quickly turn toxic. A lot of fans feel quite entitled these days, and their suggestions of a litany of unrealistic features often come across as demands. If the devs don't do all of them immediately, it's because they're lazy and don't care about the game at all. It's easy to mock these would-be creators then, and easier still when they're suggesting Charizard should fight some drug dealers, but the demand for an adult Pokemon game isn't going away.
There are actual fangames too, which deliver versions of this ‘grown up game’, though obviously without the legitimacy. Emerald Kaizo offers a super-hard gameplay experience, while FireRed Team Rocket lets you play as Team Rocket. Still, these are inversions of the typical formula as opp🐎osed to growing it to tell a more mature tale.
In Pokemon, we universally play as children and complete a drawn-out tutorial which not only supposes we have never played a Pokemon game before, it also positions our protagonist as a complete newbie - it would be easy to bring some experience to the table without fundamentally changing what the games are about. Then there's the structure, where we go from a nobody to the very best like no one ever was. It's an oddly childish ambition, and while the last three games have all played around with the formula, the end result is the same. A smaller, more personal quest could reposition the game without the need for using Hi Jump Kick on pimps.
Narratively, it feels as if Pokemon has been moving in this direction for quite some time. Scarlet & Violet, for all of its faults, had some of the series' most touching moments, and there has been a growing maturity to the ways the games have incorporated themes and ideas that have always existed in the anime anyway.
There are, of course, alternative suggestions to this. Rather than imagine what a Pokemon game for adults could be, there are a few series that tick a lot of the boxes anyway. The closest game to Pokemon at the moment is Temtem, and way back when it launched TheGamer singled it out as a sensible answer to the 'when are we getting a Pokemon game for adults?' question. You have to squint a little, but 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Shin Megami Tensei is another option, dealing with strange creatures you🦩 collect inside dungeons, while offering much darker themes and punishing difficulty.
If I could be so bold, I might even suggest the Yakuza series. While there are no creatures to catch and battle, Yakuza's tone of joyful silliness juxtaposed with heartbreaking crime sagas and its themes of loyalty, togetherness, and dedication in the face of doubt line up a lot with the ideals of Ash Ketchum. In fact, when Like a Dragon came out, I wrote 𒈔abꩵout how Ash and Ichiban had obvious parallels.
A Pokemon game for adults sounds like a bad idea, but that's only because most of the ideas pushed to the forefront are bad themselves. A game that moves away from the stale structure and offers a more complex protagonist feels like it's worth trying, especially as the narrative grows in depth. Until then, I guess we've got Yakuza.