Second Drafts: Reflections on Alpha Sapphire and #TooMuchWater

The last seventy-two hours have been a hallucinatory blur of rest stops, slow fast food, landscapes swirling by in the window, Pokémon Contests, gym leaders and berry harvesting. As I write this from the balcony of our beach condo I am feeling wholly devoured by Hoenn. It is one of the most vibrant, multifaceted and living worlds out there, shared in the handhelds of elementary school kids and starving college students alike. Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire have injected fresh life into the first Pokémon games to be called repetitive. I cannot get myself away from them now, and organizing my awe is proving fruitless.

I was a skeptic going into Alpha Sapphire. The game had a lot to stand up to, and it still does in my playthrough because I'm writing this thinking on what I've seen in the first three badges. In the first place, ΩRαS are remakes of very weak entries in the franchise. The only harder job would be to remake Diamond and Pearl, a task I still don't think Game Freak is up to. There is a preconceived idea of what Hoenn as a location is, what the games set in Hoenn represent and how they will play out. Ruby, Sapphire & Emerald were the first games in which the player was following a formula of acquiring eight badges, defeating an evil gang, becoming regional champion and catching legendary Pokémon to restore order to the world because "that's what you do in a Pokémon game." The franchise was a cliché in 2002, and it took years for it to recover from that image of being strictly formula. The first task for Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire was thus to overcome the preconception of Ruby & Sapphire.

The second task was to overcome the limitations artificially placed on the 3DS games by their developers. The lack of trainer customization was a swing factor for many players in whether or not they would buy into the latest Pokémon games, and regardless of Game Freak's other achievements with ΩRαS this is a step backwards. The creative strength of the Pokémon games is self-expression, and limiting a form of expression that fans have been clamoring for from day one (a form of expression that was the only selling point for Pokémon Battle Revolution, quite probably the biggest critical bomb in franchise history that still broke one million sales) is a self-destructive decision. There is reason to do it beyond Masuda citing Kalos' specific identity, namely that the clothes from X & Y can't be blanket applied to the player characters of Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire and so would require more development time to remodel, but in face of players being unwilling to buy the games based on customization not making the cut these aren't good reasons. Throughout my playthrough of X & Y my first priority in every new town was not to make a beeline for the gym as in past games, but to see what new fashions were available. It speaks volumes that the ultimate rewards in X & Y, a 2013 JRPG, are not some kind of ultimate sword, armor or those items' pocket monster equivalent, but clothes. Boutique Couture's hundred thousand yen blouses and jackets are the apex of material status in those games because one's visual appearance can be shared with others as a marker of their achievements. How much time do you think the world's elite Pokémon players spent picking a virtual outfit they felt comfortable in for the world championships?

What I was startled by was how ΩRαS applied itself to these tasks. Certainly, some locations lost their significance in the transition from 2D sprites to a 3D plane, with the once-dazzling water effects surrounding the bridge on route 104 coming off as lame in the remakes. But in other areas, ΩRαS is more alive than its predecessors. The gyms are exemplary of this; in RSE the Rustboro city and Dewford island gyms are abstract spaces in which Pokémon battles take place because you need to beat eight gym leaders to earn eight badges to get into the Pokémon league and prove that you are The Very Best There Ever Was. There is no sense of place about why you are there or what kinds of spaces these are. What purpose does a gym serve? Why are they created, why do people wait in them all day fighting every person they lock eyes with, who stands around in the dark on an island worshiping the very ground some beach bum with Fighting-type Pokémon walks on? They are no better than the castle dungeons and evil overlord palaces of medieval fantasy RPGs. What ΩRαS does is inject these dungeons with place. Roxanne's gym is a fossil museum with a secondary purpose for the public, an extension of the Trainers' School that does something other than host a boss battle. Brawly's gym is more clever, being an actual work-out club with a reception lobby, stairclimbers, yoga mats and a working vending machine next to the trainer certification listings. Wattson's is easily the most abstracted of the gyms because it's obviously the workings of a bored old electrician fooling around in his retirement, but compared to the other gyms this has an effect of giving Wattson more character.

Those are only the modifications made to the gyms. Granite Cave now serves a much stronger purpose in advancing the storyline. Instead of just introducing Steven arbitrarily the caves foreshadow the rise of Groudon and Kyogre, and the wall murals hint at the ideas that Archie (or Maxie in Omega Ruby) will espouse not long after in Slateport city. The dialogue has been carefully rewritten to carry a greater symbolic weight. Archie seeks to "return everything to its unspoiled beginnings" and Kyogre's mural depicts it with an α carved into each arm, the oceans now embody the origin of all life and the land its terminal destiny. There is a palpable conflict between the harmonious primordial forms of life beneath the sea, and the chaotic land-dwelling life that is struggling to break into the heavens and reach for space.

Ever since Black & White, Pokémon has been on the ascent. The legacy of Ruby, Sapphire & Emerald as the slow death of the franchise and the destruction of Gold, Silver & Crystal's golden age has been shattered. At the moment those games hit internationally in 2011, the veil was torn from top to bottom. Black & White were the best Pokémon games ever. Black 2 & White 2 were the best Pokémon games ever. X & Y were the best Pokémon games ever. Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire are the best Pokémon games ever. Any opposition to this view is easily dismissed as the counterfactual nostalgia of genwunners. ΩRαS has taken some steps back, but every step back is accompanied by ten forward, by the tempering revisions. Alpha Sapphire strikes me as something unique in Pokémon history, a polished second draft that fully surpasses its former self in every regard, far exceeding the nebulous accomplishments of the third and fourth generation games. You can easily tally the number of video game remakes that pile content over content like some bad fanfiction given life in RPGMaker, but it is comparatively rare to see video games that cut content that needed to be cut. The Granite Cave mentioned before has been revised. Steven is now accessible directly from the ground level. The darkened lower floors that players need the Flash move to light up are now optional, pushed to the side behind a special road they need the bicycle to access. The one-note town of Mauville city has been cut entirely and replaced with a new multistory underground mall/apartment complex that reinvisions Mauville as a metropolitan society. There is concision and flow to the environment and narrative of Alpha Sapphire that wasn't there in vanilla Sapphire. Effectively the process that Red & Blue started which was carried over to Gold & Silver was resumed eleven years after by Black & White, and the torch has continued to be passed up to Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire. The legend of Gold & Silver is almost out of sight, and once it's gone Game Freak will no longer have its legend to live up to--they'll have written a new legend.

The imminent question is of when the golden goose will stop laying. Nintendo's old anniversary Game Boy commercial made some inadvertent commentary on just what Pokémon was doing for the company, and the sudden end to Pokémania was not taken lightly. In the past it only took one generation to discredit the entire franchise as the passing fancy of small children. Whatever follows Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire will only either carry the torch for another year to come, or discredit the games once again. There's virtually no other path for such a polarizing series. Whether what follows is Chaos Delta Emerald, seventh generation games or Sinnoh remakes, ΩRαS will be a tough act to follow. In this moment, the Hoenn remakes have taken the games that formerly spelled the beginning of the end, and rewritten them into a masterpiece that has tapped into the psyches of fans everywhere.

There are some things I doubt ΩRαS will ever live down. Maxie and Archie's baby boomer redesigns, including the bad glasses and campy Sentai villain outfits, are just the tip of the iceberg. Hoenn is a region without clothes. The act of carting around a Zigzagoon (nicknamed Pickup) that knows Rock Smash, Cut and soon Surf, is an activity I never missed and will be glad to say goodbye to. Yet if such concessions come in exchange for a cohesive work that approaches a literary quality and advances the medium, then these casualties of development can be written off as acceptable losses.

(And speaking of cutting, the first chapter of Pokémon Blue is currently sitting at 6500 words and I'm agonizing over where to partition the beginning of the second chapter and what to trim from the first.)

Tajiri's Box, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and Se Jun Park: an Introduction

In 1996 Satoshi Tajiri unleashed a terrible and profound chain reaction that threw world culture off its axis. I cannot imagine going into a 2015 without Pokémon; the franchise has deeply affected my generation's views on materialism, morality, animal rights and competition. Between 1996 and 2000, 46 million first generation Pokémon games were sold, and much of the intrigue behind the Twitch Plays Pokémon social experiment earlier this year rested on the 1.16 million people that collectively participated in a playthrough of Red and Blue. The rapid, ravenous growth of the video games into a global phenomenon and its subsequent deathgrip on humanity can be understood as a kind of Pandora's Box from which all things Pokémon spread. While the nostalgic appeal of the original games may be reduced to mobilizing just 1/46th of its original audience and the much-maligned "genwunners" were already being discredited as they came into being, the relevance of Pokémon in contemporary times is indisputable.

To claim otherwise would be to ignore that Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire's first week in 2014 sold approximately five times the units of Red and Blue's first week twenty years ago. Every day new trainers are recruited into the ranks of Pokémon Leagues around the world, participate in a global trading network, and compete for regional titles at Nintendo and fan-sponsored conferences. Each year a handful of successful trainers are cheered on at the World Championships while their matches are streamed live to anxious fans, and are then awarded scholarships worth several hundred thousand dollars for their skill at the games.

Artwork by 12m, used with permission.

Pokémon has changed the ways in which people relate and interact with one another, and attracted a periphery audience of onlookers vastly exceeding the scope of the 1990's arcade audiences. Consider the success of the 2014 Pokémon World Championships. Illustrating the climactic moment in which, against all odds, a squirrel held up the entire world on one finger quickly became a rite of passage for Pokémon fanartists. The livestream of the 2014 world finals drew over 4.6 million views and almost 450 thousand more between its multiple YouTube recordings afterwards, making it the most watched Pokémon battle in the world. World champion Se Jun Park has become a minor cultural icon to South Korean fans. For the Karenites, a faction opposed to traditional competitive values comparable to Super Smash Bros.' "tiers are for queers" crowd, Park is a heroic example of a trainer that plays their favorites instead of what's strongest.

(This last point is counterfactual to history. Se Jun Park was and is a competitive player who carefully selected and bred his Pachirisu for a deliberate strategic purpose that catered to the VGC's double battle format.)

Artwork by pictolita, used with permission.

Park's achievement shook the world much like Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky's 1972 chess match. More people were tuned in to a single Pokémon battle than ever before. Any trainer that sends out a Pachirisu in-tournament again will be doing so in his shadow. Competitive Pokémon has become a spectator sport that fans bite their nails over, rather than being confined to the competitors' experience.

Going back to the Twitch Plays Pokémon example, no one would be worshiping Lord Helix if Ken Sugimori hadn't sat down and drawn an ammonite Pokémon in 1990. The popularity of each respective generation in comparison was made clear during the height of the TPP streams. TPP Red averaged 80 thousand continuous viewers during its initial run, but by the time the stream got to Crystal there were already complaints about a lack of participation. Some qualia about Red and Blue still resonates with those that experienced it at the turn of the millennium, and the games stopped retaining this in Ruby and Sapphire, if not earlier.

There's been a lot of speculation about why Pokémon took off as it did, and what it was that the series tapped into in the children of the world. I'm concerned less with how Pokémon's become a front-and-center feature in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and more with the consequences of it upstaging Santa Claus. What values did Red and Blue instill on the children of the late 90's, and the adults that they've grown into today? Pokémon is part of a grandscale Japanification of the entire western world that's been going on since Voltron hit in 1984 and has continued to the present. In 1975 Japan was grappling with Americanization; forty years later in 2015 the pendulum has firmly swung in the opposite direction. Today in the United States you can buy children's jerseys with "super kawaii" on the back, when prior to 2000 the most prevalent Japanese word in the American lexicon was tycoon (大君 taikun) brought over in 1857.

I have always thought of Pokémon more as a kind of time, setting or place rather than as a story or narrative. The fact that it was born, died and gave way to a restoration of itself is testament to the games' cultural footprint. The first Pokémon games were the beginning of an experience from '96 to '04 that brought a close to the cultural 90's, the tail end of which dragged into the release of Pokémon Emerald. I'm not in a position to say whether the changes brought on by this experience were positive or negative. But I can interrogate how they have reshaped my home country.

Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire have been out for a month now, but for me they're still on the horizon. I know that once I have them I won't want to put them down for a while, so in the spirit of the season--not of Christmas nor Saturnalia but of Pokémon--I want to jump headfirst into 1998 and illustrate the cultural impact of the original games on today's USA, and to a lesser extent on a global scale. I should clarify that I am not a competitive Pokémon trainer, no matter what aspirations I held in my youth, but because of the unique concessions and simplicities of Red and Blue it's easier for me to grasp them than the later games. I am more comfortable as a Pokémon naturalist. I enjoy capturing the image, spirit and personality of the species. So my position is not one of total authority on the subject, but with all this said, I'm ready to go back down the rabbit hole.

Index

Chapter 1: Interpretation, Nostalgia & EarthBound (Pallet town through Viridian city)
Chapter 2: Forests & Representation (Viridian forest)

Shifting Gears

As I've been going through the material that I've written for the Kongokai and drafting up more, I've come to recognize the warning signs; I'm burning out on iOS. It's become a chore instead of a joy. I'm not writing because I want to espouse the ideas that I'm forming, I'm writing out of obligation to a readership.

One of the luxuries that I have with Juraku is that I can put things on hold until they're ready. I don't want to deliver anything short of the best that I can, and right now I'm headed down a road that I don't want to go--low quality, minimal effort, churning the updates out instead of analytically composing them with an eye towards the big picture. That's not the kind of ship I'm running. Nothing is allowed to be rushed here. It goes to publish when it's ready.

And right now Shin Megami Tensei isn't ready. I can't write it in my current mindset and have confidence in the work that I'm putting out. I look at the short stack of reference materials I have and dread leafing through them again for page numbers. The convenient thing about my LPs is that the documentation is heavy enough that I could practically go back and start up my ill-fated Gale of Darkness LP again if I really wanted to. I've referred to Juraku as my getaway villa, and I'm acknowledging that SMT has to be on hold while I burn this out of my system. It's sad that I can't get to it yet, but we're better off this way.

So I'll be temporarily shifting gears for a bit. It will be the same type of discourse, but on a topic I can maintain more enthusiasm for right now. Don't worry, Belshazzar's Feast is still gonna be up there in the background, I'm not dropping anything. But with winter break here, for now I want to talk about a franchise that has gradually become Megaten's boogeyman, a series of games that face demonization by its fanbase significant enough that by now you really ought to be able to summon it out of a COMP.

I'm doing a series on first gen Pokémon.

End of Hiatus and the Beginning of Escapism

I am done with my examinations for this semester and I am exhausted.

I cannot voice properly the realization of having no more obligations to meet for several weeks. The idea that I am not in school for winter break has not yet set in. But I am very ready to return to doing the things that I enjoy most. To give an idea of what I've been working on to build credits in undergrad, back in November I had written ~1200 words on executioners and the life of Meister Franz Schmidt, in comparison to a bad 2002 Matrix derivative. The film could have been improved by cutting its action scenes altogether, but it was ultimately its preoccupation with the spectacle of violence that made it relevant to the discussion of execution, torture and state control. Over the following weekend I hurriedly completed two other papers for a course on a survey of French history from 1789 to present, papers on nouvelle vague cinema and the socioeconomic changes brought about by the Great War. This was followed by another paper on structural violence and poverty in the slums of Mumbai for an anthropology course, and then one on the historiography of the archaeology of Chinese writing. Some of these papers were better put together than others, but in all I felt them to be some of the driest, most regurgitated writing I had ever put to paper. I'm sorry I wrote the one on Mumbai and made the TA sit through it, but only two days before I turned it in she had mentioned offhand to a student that she hadn't actually started reading the book yet and none of the other graders had either. This is the systematic paper mill we live in, a Frierian nightmare of inputs and outputs and meeting academic criteria for spitting up information as quickly as we can swallow it.

It's this kind of thing that compels people to escapism. We want to put ourselves in a different pair of shoes. Like Kafka beleaguered by his breadjob and wanting to pursue his true calling, people are compelled to wonder if they could be something else. If they could be born in another time, place or world entirely, and step into the shoes of someone who occupies a completely foreign social role. The allure lies in the idea that this role may be better than one's own.

This fantasy is at the heart of games like Crystal Chronicles. You roleplay in the most in-depth fashion possible, becoming a self created from the ground up from a pool of fantastic races so far removed from your own reality, that you can treasure the character without having to put a second thought to why the game was created with the idea of race as something other than socially constructed already built into its system. Myrrh is the sacred lifeblood of this game's world, and as a caravanner it's your responsibility to go out and gather it each year to keep an encroaching toxin from breaching your village's walls. Crystal Chronicles is completely noncommittal. You can walk away from this second life at any time, then come back later and resume freely at your own leisure.

In spite of it being so noncommittal, choosing your family's profession can be as paralyzing a choice as naming one's character. I remember spending a half hour or so deliberating over the options as a child. I knew what race I wanted to play well in advance because I'd been reading about the game for months in Nintendo Power magazine, but nothing I'd read prepared me for this other decision well enough that I could call it informed.

When I first rented Crystal Chronicles from a local Blockbuster back in '04, I played a solitary Selkie boy, the son of an alchemist's family, who led his town's crystal caravan out into the mist entirely heedless of the dangers at work. The Selkie race has a particular reputation as outsiders even within the villages they've settled in for generations, perpetual vagrants and thieves that will drive unfair bargains and pick the wallets of anyone dumb enough to look the other way. As I found out in a string of embarrassing letters from my in-game mother that made me grateful to be caravanning alone, the stereotypes are pretty much true. I think I received a single letter from Rah Sie that did not at some point urge me to swindle every poor sod that crossed my path, and I think I made a rather disappointing son to a clan of thieves. And for the longest time, I didn't understand everybody's complaints online about Leuda village because--well, Selkies don't steal from other Selkies.

This act of roleplay colored my outlook significantly. When The Crystal Bearers came out in 2009 I was ecstatic to receive it for Christmas, having followed the hype train for Crystal Chronicles' many sequels much as I had the original game. Yet I found myself sympathizing not with the game's Clavat protagonist, but with Keiss, Belle and Vaigali: the local Selkies. I had sufficiently internalized the race values of Crystal Chronicles to the point of excluding the other in-game races. The fictional culture of Chronicles' world had been instilled in me as it had in others, creating preconceptions about races and professions that do not exist.

The game world thus acquired a kind of presence as a location and space that people have interacted with but never set foot in. Coming out of the early 2000s push for social gaming on Nintendo's then-newest console, Crystal Chronicles has an Animal Crossing-like atmosphere. You're supposed to play with two to four other players using one of the jankiest hardware setups money could buy, plugging in up to four separate GameBoy Advance handhelds through an equal number of GBA link cables into a single GameCube. Any lesser number of players means that the houses in the starting village of Tipa are unoccupied, with only a single Moogle doing the housekeeping while they wait for residents to move in. Like Animal Crossing's Gyroids bouncing around outside of homes, waiting for new families to arrive, the Moogles encourage you to find friends to accompany you or otherwise face the journey alone.

Crystal Chronicles came out right as I was moving cross-country into a section of Orlando that was caught up in the craze of video games as being the work of the devil, so I never got to take part in the collective player experiences that Nintendo Power had been hyping me and my school friends up for. Nevertheless, I could indulge in the feeling of being part of a living world interconnected by fragile roads of trade and the exchange of Myrrh. Perhaps the most startling thing I realized about this world is that the story begins and ends inside of a self-professed dark age. With its reserves of iron long since dry, the last great civilization of the Lilty empire had already collapsed about a hundred and fifty to two hundred years before the game's start, and by its end there are no signs of the empire returning. The world of Crystal Chronicles is idyllically disconnected, barely more than a handful of settlements struggling to keep the Myrrh supply sustainable.

In finally freeing the world from the grips of the toxic miasma, and so also removing its dependence on Myrrh, you both set the stage for this idyllic setting to be destroyed by urbanization, and erase your own social role. With the caravanning done, the world doesn't need you anymore. So it becomes tempting to ignore saving the world even once you know how to do so, and instead keep on caravanning forever as part of an endless line of Myrrh-hunters. At some point though, you'll inevitably feel pressed to know how the journey ends.

I don't know how quickly I'll get back into Shin Megami Tensei, but I'm considering TJB live again.