The Wide World of Dirt

Pocket Monsters, commonly referred to as Pokémon, routinely made their presence felt throughout my early life.

Whether it was getting toys in my Burger King kids meal or receiving my first set of cards from my older cousin Stephanie, the allure of Pokémon surrounded me at every turn, especially after I started watching the anime.

I got my first game in 2004 for my eighth birthday, and it was perfect. As someone that only knew the Kanto anime, Pokémon LeafGreen presented a golden opportunity to tackle a familiar region.

Rather than holding a Charmander card, I raised a digital fire lizard into a digital fire dragon within a week. I was spellbound.

My trials and tribulations through Kanto didn’t end with a victory in the Elite 4 because, like most elementary schoolers, I failed to comprehend that raising your non-starter Pokémon helps make your team more well-rounded.

In fairness to my younger self, the anime doesn’t do a great job in the Indigo League series of showing evolutions as Ash’s team consists of a Pikachu, a Bulbasaur, a Squirtle, and a Pidgeotto.

Whether I lost the game or lost interest, I am unsure, but I didn’t pick LeafGreen back up until I was in fifth grade. More mature and holding a better understanding of team dynamics, I grinded a bit more in Victory Road, this time bringing along a Blastoise as my strongest member.

Three long years after getting the game, I finally beat my rival and became a Pokémon League Champion while playing my GameBoy SP on my mom and dad’s bed, a memory I look back on fondly.

Less than a year later, it took me just a week to take down Sinnoh’s Pokémon League when I got my Nintendo DS and Pearl version. Cynthia was no match for Flamer the Infernape’s wrath.

I’ve mentioned this in prior pieces that my family didn’t exactly grow up with much discretionary money, so I skipped Platinum, HeartGold and SoulSilver (a game I sorely missed out on in the moment), and all of Unova.

By the time Gen 6 rolled around, I had been out of the Pokémon game for many, many years. I gave away my cards to my younger siblings and couldn’t keep up with the anime anymore if I wasn’t playing the games.

When I switched schools prior to my junior year of high school, my aim was to have my new school represent new beginnings.

Within a year, I had finally played Pokémon Ruby via an emulator on my phone and beaten the illustrious Steven Stone after years of hearing about how great Ruby and Sapphire were.

My family was in dire straits financially, and since I focused on my studies in high school, I was unable to acquire a job to help buy my own things.

For my 18th birthday, my friends at my new school pooled money together to get me a limited edition Smash Bros. 3DS. I was floored and so grateful to have such amazing friends that would think to do something like this for me.

I received Pokémon Y and OmegaRuby for Christmas that year, and I got to pick a starter Pokémon on a console for the first time since elementary school.

My Finnekin and I (later joined by Charmander, of course) ran through the brand-new Kalos region, and the place enchanted me.

Exploring locales like Shalour City’s Tour of Mastery, the Reflection Cave, Geosenge Town, the Power Plant, Santalune City, and the capital, Lumiose City.

The long wait between gyms 1 and 2 gives trainers a lot of time to train up their Pokémon for the rest of the game and time to explore a region that’s packed with great scenery and side quests to indulge.

It was battling Lysandre and putting a stop to his world-ending mission that brought me fully back to the series I loved so much as a little kid.

OmegaRuby furthered my renewed obsession as I got into breeding and trying to make competitive Pokémon to battle my friends with, and those were some of the best times I had with any of the games.

I only ended up getting Pokémon Sun when Gen7 dropped. While I enjoyed it for what it was, its roster of new Pokémon didn’t spark the same joy that Kalos did, dissuading me from returning to it.

Because I didn’t buy a Switch until June 2021, I didn’t play Sword and Shield until last year, and I haven’t exactly finished it.

This could extend back to one of the sadder moments in my life where a close friend of mine passed away suddenly right after BDSP came out, as we were playing it alongside one another and actively trading Pokémon.

What started as an attempt at having a very innocent discussion about a child’s game between two adults turned into a truly awful conversation with my friend’s mother where she broke the news to me.

I finished Brilliant Diamond, but my heart was no longer in Pokémon.

Over a year later, Pokémon Legends: Arceus wound up on sale. I purchased it and started playing.

Within an hour, I started crying because this new approach to Pokémon made me fall in love all over again.

Sinnoh used to be known as the Hisui region. This was a time where people and Pokémon didn’t have many positive interactions with one another, living in abject separation.

Your mission in this pre-industrial society was to research different Pokémon species through capturing them in Poké Balls. Not only that, it introduced an open world where players could physically run from battles and throw Poké Balls in order to make the game more interactive and intuitive than past entries.

Outside of gym battles and burning through the Pokémon League, this was what I always wanted a Pokémon game to be, and while it broke my heart a little that my friend Sam wasn’t alive anymore to enjoy the game we always dreamed of, I did my best to savor it for us both.

Like Sword and Shield before it, I purchased Scarlet and haven’t played it through yet because I want to finish Gen8 before moving onto Gen9. I’m also trying to finish HeartGold and Black on an emulator for my Steam Deck to get up to speed.

Something that spurred me into playing Pokémon again was the reveal of a new Pokémon Legends game taking place in Kalos, my second favorite region.

While the reveal trailer for Pokémon Legends: Z-A did mostly mention Lumiose City as a focus, I figured that to mean that we would see a more fleshed-out version of the region’s capital while getting to explore the rest as we had before.

After today’s latest trailer, the last embers of that dream were extinguished.

In every mainline Pokémon game, we have had some form of gyms (or trials that acted like gyms) en route to defeating an evil team and eventually taking down the Elite 4 to become the region’s newest champion.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus was certainly a departure from this, but there was a clear and distinct reason why it was a departure: we are in a time before Pokémon and people interacted regularly, before we knew much about these creatures.

Whether Pokémon Legends: Z-A takes place in the modern day, right before modern day, or sometime afterward is completely immaterial because of one simple and glaring fact: we are confined to the limits of Lumiose City.

The Hisui region was largely unexplored and had five distinct areas to comb through to find and document new species of Pokémon.

The same cannot be said for Lumiose City, as it takes place in what appears to be a super-industrial society where the goal of the game appears to be helping Pokémon settle into these “renaturalized” areas within the city.

It’s a novel concept of course, but in a world where the Pokémon League and gyms exist, why would I be interested in this game?

Oh, and let’s not forget the kicker: the Z-A actually refers to a battle ranking system. When trainers go to the wild areas at night, they unlock the ability to test their skills against other trainers in an attempt to improve their rank.

The worst part of all of this is that they were appealing to me this whole time with the lead-up to this trailer, revealing two Johto starters as starters for this game, Totodile and Chikorita.

Then, today’s trailer dropped, and all of my suspicions from the first two trailers were confirmed: we’re not exploring Kalos in any meaningful way because we’re trapped inside the walls of Lumiose City.

Clemont, what have you done to this place?

Quasartico Inc. is behind this renaturalization plan, but it makes me wonder how much the industrious gym leader of the city, Clemont, had to do with this initiative.

Speaking of him, I haven’t seen him involved in any of the trailers thus far, so it makes me wonder if gyms even exist anymore.

We are three trailers deep, yet we know so little!

I, for one, won’t be wasting $70 on this game, and neither should you.

No matter what the “hook” of this game is (and it’s probably just the battling enhancements, which are admittedly cool), the stark fact that we are getting an 1/8th of the content (at minimum!) than we normally get is insulting.

It almost seems like when we ask more of the Pokémon Company, they always come back and manage to give us even less than we had before. It’s truly immaculate how they keep pulling this off.

I thought we were on a path to making multi-regional games, but reducing an entire game to a single city seems like a huge step in the opposite direction.

No, I cannot say I am completely out on this game because there will undoubtedly be another gameplay trailer prior to its release later this year.

What I can say is that I’m extremely dismayed by what we were shown in today’s Nintendo Direct, and it makes me sad for the state of Pokémon .

I couldn’t have been the only person clamoring for a return to Kalos that’s disappointed with today’s reveal, and I can only hope we’ll make it back to explore the whole region again sometime before we reach the 15-year anniversary of Gen6 in 2028.

Nintendo, you’ve broken me this week, but I look forward to getting broken again next week when I find out the Switch 2 is dropping with a $500 price tag.

(Top Photo Credit: Rare Gamer)