Pokemon Switch should embrace online community and connection to recapture us
Much of the magic of the original Pokemon games centered around how we played with others. For Pokemon Switch, a new approach is needed.
My grade school cafeteria after 3:30 pm was an eclectic, wide-open playground for a range of age groups that largely kept to themselves. Older kids did homework, the younger ones mixed up pieces from board games with plastic farm animal toys and raced Hot Wheels. The one place where everyone from kindergarten through 8th grade mixed was in one solitary table off in the corner, where we hunched over Game Boy Advances, swapped Secret Bases, and quested to become the very best, together. For two glorious years, this was my world playing Pokemon Sapphire.
One of our favorite shared activities was finding one another’s Secret Bases or redecorating our own. I had specifically selected a Secret Base on Route 120 where the excess rainfall would nourish a small berry plot just outside almost continuously. But there came a day when, inexplicably, my berry sprouts remained sprouts. I tried planting them elsewhere, but those little mounds of dirt never grew. I had no way of getting new berries. And when I checked with NPCs who gave a free berry once a day, they insisted they had already given me one.
Gradually, my friends who had bought the game around launch with me began to experience the same problem. Any event that happened on a day-to-day basis had ceased to occur. That meant no free TMs, no sales at the Department Store, and the weather never changed anywhere. One day, we noticed that the Mossdeep Space Center was no longer launching rockets at all, even though they had successfully launched one weekly since we got the game. It was as if time in Hoenn had frozen completely.
Generation 3 of Pokemon hovered on the edge of our Internet experiences. It had launched right as my generation discovered the rabbit holes of online game communities, guides, and discussions, but still just early enough that wild rumors of the St Anne-Mew-truck variety could still flourish on the playground. I’m sure anyone who played the earliest generations of Pokemon has a story like this from one of the games, back before we could swing by the official Pokemon Twitter account for a logical explanation to bizarre happenstance. But for my after-school friends and I, bereft of Serebii or other news sources, there was no logical explanation for why time had stopped. So, being kids, we made our own.
We quickly concocted an elaborate narrative as to how all this was, somehow, part of the game’s story. Our focus centered on the rock at Mossdeep and the center’s reset countdown. Following hints and rumors from older kids and bits of text in the game, we determined that all this meant Deoxys was somehow coming. After a certain amount of time, or if we did events in a certain way, the legendary DNA Pokemon would surely appear from space, we would capture him, and time would be restored. For weeks, we obsessed over this. We tried beating the Elite Four one hundred times. We ran circles around the rocks outside the space center, battled certain trainers repeatedly, and looked incessantly for Mirage Island (its appearance was also frozen, but we didn’t know). Nothing worked. But every day, someone showed up at the after-school program with a new theory, and we all eagerly spent hours trying to make it work.
Eventually, I ended up at GameStop, found the kiosk to unfreeze the “Berry Glitch” and returned, a little melancholy but triumphant, to school with a shiny Zigzagoon, a new berry, and time restored at last. The mystery was solved; Deoxys had eluded us. But through our adventure, speculation, and play together, we had grown closer. Even after the oldest of us moved on to high school, our bonding over Pokemon together kept us in touch for years, swapping stories and gossip about what we were doing in our favorite game series. Despite the enormous gaps in our ages, experiences, and other interests, Pokemon brought us together.
In the coming months, I would discover gaming forums online and would rarely wonder again for more than a few hours at a strange gaming happening. Anything could be Googled if I wanted to, and growing maturity would tell me that such phenomena would never appear in Pokemon games anyway. I learned how to trigger MissingNo without fail and catch a Mew in Pokemon Blue sans a truck. I learned how to make any Pokemon shiny in Pokemon Gold and Silver. And I learned, over the years, that Pokemon games would continue to keep me hoping for a story beyond the story, all the way up to the Ruby and Sapphire remakes, where I still wish a model of a Battle Frontier would one day be built into a real one.
While I still love Pokemon and am pumped for Pokemon Switch, the series lost some of its capacity to surprise and delight me when I left that cafeteria table and began to experience its world almost entirely alone, without the elaborate, collective rumor stories my friends and I told one another. I don’t think that Pokemon’s potential is diminished by its aging audience and quick, constant flow of information, but I can’t help but look back at the last few generations and wonder why the formula hasn’t shifted much to match it. The days of meeting up with your friends to trade across colored versions and play in person are, for many Pokemon fans, far behind us. But the Switch lies ready and waiting with online capacity for social features beyond anything we’ve ever experienced before. Where once we met around a table after school, soon, we may be able to meet across oceans, online, and adventure together again.
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Write for us!My hope for Pokemon Switch is that whatever it may be, Game Freak stops holding back. It’s time for Pokemon, Nintendo, and Game Freak to fully embrace (beyond detached battles and trades) the methods of communication and connection that the rest of the world has adopted to make Pokemon, once again, into a game you play not only with strangers and new friends but with those close to you. Pokemon GO and a generation of nostalgic adults sharing the game with their children have already proven this to be a successful approach. Pokemon may never be the kind of game willing to stretch itself into ARG-levels of world building and secrets, but as long as friends play side by side together, our Pokemon communities will keep creating stories of our own.
The views expressed in this article explicitly belong to the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of, nor should be attributed to, App Trigger or FanSided as an organization.




