(Originally titled: "Why Pokemon Go Feels Off")

In case you haven't been on the internet the last few days, Pokemon Go has just released. From the average redditor to NBA and NFL teams, people are out and about, finding pokemon wandering around in their daily lives. As a pokemon fan myself, I'm thrilled about the new resurgence of love for the franchise, but I'm also a little disappointed by the game itself, and that makes me worry about the future of the game as a whole.

Now, many people within the Giant Bomb and Friends umbrella (such as Dan Ryckert and John Drake) have expressed a complete lack of interest in the series, and while the site has taken some time to appreciate pokemon in the past, that time is ancient history now, as is evident in the Bombcrew's reaction to the mere mention of Pokemon: Sun and Moon in Nintendo's latest E3 livestream. In the newest bombcast, however (at 1:15:15), Jeff mentions that he downloaded Pokemon Go and briefly touched on a big issue:

Jeff: "When you go to a gym, even if the gym is controlled by your color, you can go fight your pokemon and train your pokemon against the pokemon that are holding down that gym for your team. And it's weird, it's real time-ish, you tap to attack and swipe to dodge, so it becomes you watching the enemy pokemon animation and trying to swipe out of the way of its attack, and then tapping to attack, which, when you think about what Pokemon is, it's very much more of a "rock-paper-scissors" with the elemental stuff, plus...you have multiple attacks, and all this other stuff."

Brad: "It's not a timing-based thing."

Jeff: "Yeah, so...it felt inauthentic to the Pokemon brand, I guess I would say."

Will: "It's like the Mortal Kombat clones. They took the wrong part of the Pokemon games."

Jeff: "Yes, definitely. They did not capture the feel of real Pokemon at all in this thing, it just feels like a game that they slapped together, and they just happened to have the Pokemon license, so it's pokeballs and Koffings and Pidgeys."

In the interest of time...

Jeff: "The interactions felt really flimsy. Its attachment to the source material also just feels really thrown together. Like, I'm not some Pokemon purist. I think the head of Niantic got out there and said, 'Hey, our goal's not to catch 'em all,' like every other Pokemon game that's ever existed, probably in the wake of some of the criticism out of this beta getting out to some of the media, but, it just seems like a bad product. Or, you know what: it feels like a really good first beta of a product, but they're launching it this month..."

"...I just feel like it doesn't capture any of the feel of Pokemon along the way, it just feels really off, in a way that just feels like a game made by some other team that doesn't really understand why Pokemon is great."

Now, many Pokemon fanatics can talk to you about what makes Pokemon great. Oftentimes they'll talk to you about the intricacies of battle, the work that goes into breeding pokemon, the never-ending struggle of searching for new pokemon and shiny pokemon, the importance of EVs and IVs and natures and type strengths and type weaknesses and immunities and resistances and abilities and berries and other held items and the various battling strategies that incorporate all of that and more...

But other than that hot Brentwood Productions joint, I never really got interested in any of the nonsense above. None of it was ever what drew me to the game in the first place, and I believe that none of what I listed is what got kids into the game initially. But let's go back to the very basics of Pokemon, and work our way forward.

In Pokemon, you adventure through a region filled with pokemon, battling your way through gyms, factions, and dangerous routes with the intent of becoming Pokemon Champion, as well as catching every single pokemon in the region. There are plenty of turn based battles between wild pokemon, and other trainers and their pokemon.

But that's about as simple as the serie's dialogue. Let's go deeper.

In Pokemon, you start as a boy who has seemingly never left his hometown, knowing very little of the world around him. As you attempt to leave, a pokemon professor stops you and tells you how dangerous it is to go into the wild alone; not only are there wild pokemon out there who will attack you if they feel threatened, but there are trainers who are sitting and waiting to battle people and apparently take their money. I mean, I'm sure most trainers wouldn't try to battle you if you didn't have pokemon, but there are some unsavory characters in Pokemon, and I'm not just talking about Team Rocket...

So the professor takes you back into town to give you and his dick relative one pokemon out of the three he has. Like many, you take a look at all three and pick your favorite, and Pubehead picks the one with the strategic advantage over yours. After the professor gives you both a Pokedex with the mission to log every species of pokemon in the Kanto region, you go out on your adventure with no one but your starter accompanying you. As you advance through each route, you encounter wild pokemon and wandering (lost? bored?) trainers looking to battle. As you battle and work your way through each route, you are catching more pokemon to add to your team, as well as training your pokemon to become stronger with each battle. You eventually run into your first gym, which you learn is the only way to progress to the next route and to more new pokemon and gyms. Along the way, a team of pokemon thieves crosses your path, and they recognize your very existence as a threat to their operations, so you battle them as well. As time progresses, you add gym badges to your collection, showing how far you have come as a trainer. Not only that, but your collection of pokemon has grown more and more over time, and your team has slowly become more powerful and defined. You share with your pokemon the various experiences that come with exploring the region, and start to bond with them. After lots of battling and training and searching and collecting, you finally reach the Pokemon League, where you and your pokemon's skills are put to the ultimate test against the Elite Four and the current Champion, which just happens to be Cocknostril. Once you defeat Eatmyass, you begin your reign as Pokemon Champion with the Pokemon team you've trained and loved and cared for forever immortalized as one of the many Champions of the Kanto region, left only to catch every species of Pokemon in the region to complete the professor's work. After that, your work is basically done, at which point most Pokemon fans reset their save and go again.

Now let's get into some real subjective, symbolic shit.

Pokemon (to me!) is about becoming an adult. You start merely as a child, who's given a couple different ultimate goals to choose from (become pokemon Champion and/or log every pokemon in your pokedex, or whatever the fuck you want once you unlock the whole region). You are given a limited selection of three pokemon to pick your first pokemon from. But there's more to this choice.

You're not just picking a pokemon; you're picking a trait that comes to define you at your root. And while a third of all players picked Squirtle, that portion separates more when you ask why. Maybe you just like (identify) with the color blue, or maybe it's because you like (identify) with the element of water, or maybe you like (identify) with turtles, or maybe you know the evolutions and like (you get the idea) Blastoise the most, or maybe you know the type of the first gym, and you want to pick the easiest route past that gym while you're still getting your bearings. We all have our reasons. Now expand that list of three to a seemingly limitless number. While you're likely not exposed to more adult-intended influences in the world, there are many things that can come to influence who you are, even at a young age, and this choice reflects that important moment.

And it doesn't stop there. As you start to grow and mature, you gain more pokemon to add to your arsenal, with some falling to the wayside as you explore and find more that fit who you are and how you play, and sometimes you take on a pokemon simply according to your needs. This is pretty similar to the journey towards becoming an adult: someone who eventually gains the skills needed to not only function in everyday independent life, but to work towards and hopefully achieve their goals. The best trainers tend to be the ones who work towards intimately knowing as many pokemon as they can, so that they can make the best decision on how to move forward based on their situation. As you progress through your journey, you find gyms that are meant to test you, that you can't progress past until you defeat that gym, learning new skills from the experience of challenging and defeating them. On top of that, while some are willing to help you (Bill, gym leaders, etc.), others work against you (Team Rocket, asshole trainers like Joe Burglar up there), and others remain indifferent. You have friends and peers that you progress and compare yourself with (like Snotbreath, or like in later games, actual friends), and you always have family back home that checks in with you and offers advice. Your team slowly becomes stronger and more defined as you find what works for you, and you work and work until eventually you reach your end goal: being Champion.

When I started playing Pokemon, I was the first born, which meant I was the one that was kept inside the cul-de-sac, never allowed past the curb towards the rest of the neighborhood and the rest of the "dangerous" world that awaited. Knowing only a few kids within the cul-de-sac, I found myself dreaming, spending a lot of time imagining countless worlds and a number of amazing things that I would do in them, and it only got worse when I spent four years being homeschooled. Pokemon, coming out a few years before that, was the first game I had that let me explore the world and let me choose my path. Progress was obviously controlled in the game, but I could customize my team of six however I wanted. I could go backwards to cities I enjoyed if I wanted to, while still catching and working on my own team of pokemon, a group that I could call my own. It eventually spawned a love of roadtripping and exploring new places when I finally moved out of the house, and the various obstacles I've overcome or moved away from, and the harsh lessons I've learned so far have made me look to pokemon and this vague similarity between it and the experience of becoming an adult as a way of keeping me on track towards my goals in life, and through that initial inspiration from that first copy of Pokemon: Blue has continued to influence me and how I progress through life. And I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

So! Pokemon means a lot to me, and it means a lot to a lot of people out there in this way, on top of the fun that can be had with battling and trading and all that. I'm sure I could draw more similarities, but I've been working on this article for hours now, and I'm not even to the part that this stupid post is even about. Let's get to that now, shall we?

- - -

After four days of traveling, working, sleeping way too much, and extensively playing Pokemon Go, I've finally returned to dish out my feelings on Pokemon Go and tear the game apart for butchering the traditional Pokemon formula.

Well, that was the initial intent when I first wrote this article.

First, I was going to tear into Niantic for trivializing the player's first pokemon choice. It matters in the core games because your first pokemon usually sticks with you from the beginning to the end, often being the most powerful in your arsenal, and the one you're most attached to. It puts your journey from simple beginner to Pokemon Master into real perspective, and makes that first choice a notable event in your experience with the game. This choice means absolutely nothing in Pokemon Go because the only way to improve your pokemon is to catch more of them, which can screw you over if you're like my roommate who picked Charmander, with nearly zero Charmander here in our neck of the woods. And with a low combat point level, that makes your starter utterly useless to start with. Guess who you're favorite starter is now? Pidgey, 'cause he's fucking everywhere and Pidgeot is pretty cool.

The evolution system, which is instead of training that one pokemon to become better, is more of a meat-grinder that has you catch and transfer and catch and transfer, casting off one pokemon for another with 10 CP more than the last, making the process more impersonal and less like Pokemon the way I and many others have played it.

The battle system is simplified and in real time, taking away some of the strategy, customization, and suspense that Pokemon battles tend to have, that makes the battles that much more memorable and fun. There's nothing quite like that moment when you hear the two-note sound of your pokemon being near death, and pulling out the win after sitting for a moment to think about your next, potentially last move, and that's lost in this current system, especially with phones that aren't technically up to snuff for real-time gameplay, causing stuttering and timing issues.

There's also the matter of finding pokemon, which during the beta provided information saying how many meters you were away from that pokemon in increments of 20. The final version has switched to a system of one to three footprints, which is very vague and gives you little idea of where the pokemon actually is. There are times it seems like a pokemon three steps away might as well be in the next state for all I know.

Once you see that pokemon, they simply stand there and wait to be caught, with the occasional smack of a thrown pokeball, or a jump, or sometimes even running away after an attempt or two at catching them. In the games, you were in the wild. They attacked to survive a potential threat, and you had a pokemon to protect you. All of this is out the window now.

Throw onto that the fact that they erase any existence of pokemon centers so that they can charge you for reviving and healing services if you aren't mining pokestops.

Then there's the gym system that bears zero resemblance to how gyms are handled in Pokemon in any way. They are simply used to be controlled by factions so people within those factions can rake in a pitifully low amount of money, and you earn no badges for beating any of them; instead you earn tiered medals for milestones like hatching ten pokemon, or catching 10 electric pokemon, and so on. They don't feel nearly as rewarding or worth doing at all.

And yet...

I could not stop playing Pokemon Go for the last week. My roommate and I drove from Seattle down to Tacoma and over to Bremerton, then took the ferry back, solely for the purpose of finding and catching pokemon. Instead of sitting at home like we usually do on the weekends, we were out exploring areas we had never been before, and finding numerous people driving around playing Pokemon Go alongside us. Complete strangers would happily approach us and skip the pleasantries to talk pokemon and what they found where, and where people are camping to mine pokestops. We soon found ourselves in the middle of a little celebration in Bremerton, with live music and people enjoying themselves as we and other strangers found ourselves wandering through it all to find this Kabuto we saw on our radar. We cheered when we each found and caught a Lapras mere minutes before our ferry took off, and we laughed as my roommate somehow found and caught a Magmar in the middle of the waters of Puget Sound on our way back to Seattle. And earlier today, we made a gym ours, and what we found was simple, but it was an amazing feeling.

We walked the path through this area, never knowing that this place existed until today, and it was an awesome little moment. Pokemon got us to explore and find something wonderful that we never would have had we stayed inside.

This is what Pokemon has always wanted, but could never fully achieve. One of the intended purposes (from the dev's perspective, anyway) of two versions for each generation was to give each version exclusive pokemon so that kids would get out and socialize with each other. The only way to get all pokemon was to either cough up more money or trade with another player. One generation gave us a PokeWalker to encourage us to walk to level a pokemon when we weren't playing. And if that isn't enough, the recent live-action trailers for Pokemon really push it.

The whole point of Pokemon, in fiction and out, was to get out there, explore, socialize and share in life with the people around you, united simply through Pokemon. And after roughly two decades, they finally realized it through a pretty flawed phone game, and that dream coming to fruition is worth more to all us Pokemon fans than them making a perfect realization of Pokemon that might've scared off the more casual fans.

Because let's be honest. If you want to give your starter value, you can hold onto them and search for an area where that starter spawns, then camp and catch until you level them as high as you wish. Yes, it'll take some traveling and time, but it can be done. The biomes are dispersed in such a way that you don't have to go to a very specific region to get a starter, or really most pokemon out there. Collecting and hatching eggs are great for getting starters too. And prioritizing your starter can make the evolution system easier to swallow. Yes, pokemon three footprints away tend to not be found, but many others can be tracked down, and enough cross your path to make it okay. And yes, while the microtransaction stuff sucks, you can mine even a single pokestop long enough to get everything you need, since it refreshes in five minute increments, and people who have the ability and are willing to give money to Niantic are in effect helping ensure the future support and development of the game. The faction stuff is just carried over from Ingress and doesn't really apply well to Pokemon, but people are playing it, so it seems to work for most people.

But two important issues, being encountering wild pokemon and battling pokemon, were changed for one reason: to appeal to those who otherwise wouldn't play it. A lot of people who grew up playing that first generation of Pokemon stopped; they never really cared much about strategy, never memorized type advantage charts, never put a whole lot of thought into move sets. They just played because they loved Pokemon. There's a lot of work and grinding that goes into Pokemon, and while a lot of fun and enjoyment comes from that for many of us, it turns others off, and the only reason (I believe) Pokemon Go became as big as it has become so quickly is because they reduced what barriers they could while still bearing some semblance to the Pokemon world, and it's a balance that, at the end of the day, does work.

I will take this moment to say this, though: If the people at Niantic were reading this right now, I would make two requests for the game as it continues to grow and develop.

1. Give players the ability to take pictures with pokemon they already own. To have pictures of places we visit with our pokemon would be huge in growing a relationship with the player and the pokemon they've already caught. People are taking AR pictures with wild pokemon, but I couldn't take pictures of our little road trip with my boy Squirtle, and that bums me out a bit. I want to travel with my pokemon, and I don't want them to spend our adventures together sitting in my pocket, but in the photos I take like the ones of our gym area above. Contrary to the name Pocket Monsters, they're meant to be companions in our journeys, and this would help achieve that.

2. Gym badges. Defeating gyms is core to the Pokemon experience as a way of showing off what we've conquered and achieved, and the current system does no such thing. If I take down a gym, even if I don't take it over, I as a trainer should get a badge of that gym as a way of saying that I beat that gym. If the gym is "The White House", and I beat it, I'd like to be able to open up a tab that looks like the little badge case, showcasing "'The White House' Badge", along with potentially dozens or hundreds of gyms I've beaten, with the location's picture, and maybe the gym level, faction, and then-gym leader when you click on that badge. If the gym was beaten with other players, those other players should be listed in the details area as well, and maybe some way of indicating whether that gym has since been taken to a higher level than when you last beat it, just to add a reason to go back to gyms you've beaten. Some people may not be into the faction stuff (like me), and this would be a good way to keep people playing for a while. The medals aren't going to cut it. Badges mean something.

Well that's it guys. I hope you all enjoyed reading and tolerated the time it took me to finish this. I don't think I'll have much of a future as a writer for any websites anytime soon. Anyway, it's 4am here, I'm gonna sleep and get ready to catch more pokemon tomorrow. Good luck to all you trainers out there. :D