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baconpal · 5 years

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pokemon isn’t for us anymore

ya that’s right it’s time for a daytime juvenile rant cus i’m angry and finally think i can put my thoughts to words,

if you like the new pokemon then this isn’t really for you, cus pokemon is still for you. enjoy it while you can. otherwise click that read more

i’ll start by making my opinion and background immediately clear, so you have something to compare to and such. I loved Pokemon as a child, and for a long while afterward. I think the series’ highest moment was black and white in terms of art and story, and the gameplay was at its best in black and white 2. Gen 5 is also the gen where I have the most competitive experience.

And my opinion is that every single thing that’s been shown of pokemon sword and shield is really, really bad. Not even as a hyperbolic statement of “wow i hate new thing!” but as a fan who wants nothing but for the series to realize its potential, not one thing they’ve done has made feel anything besides disgust and disappointment. But this is not a normal thing, this isn’t what everyone thinks, i’m not preaching to the choir by saying i hate sword and shield. I’m the contrarian, i’m the one whose saying shit nobody agrees with, and I’m the voice who will be ignored. And that’s because pokemon is no longer being made with someone like me in mind.

The question then becomes, what is pokemon now? What did it used to be? What should it be?

POKEMON AS A BRAND

Pokemon today is not a game series. It’s a brand, a franchise, something that has weight simply by existing. Of course pokemon has been more than just games for forever, the shows, the toys, the side games, everything about it is marketable and marketed. But the main line games were separate from that to an extent. They were the new bits of source material thrown out into the world without concern for how it would all fit together. A video game was made first, and was then marketed to whoever would buy in whatever form hey wanted.

Today pokemon games themselves are a tailored product. People of today don’t care about the actual video game, many wont play it, and many won’t even realize when it comes out, but gamefreak doesn’t need the game itself to sell (though it will), they just want everyone on earth to know about pokemon and to be excited about it, it’s advertising for their brand. As long as people know pokemon exists and is out there, it will make money.

So instead of holding their cards and releasing a video game to let people mess around in, the entire game is drip fed to us on social media before it’s even out. The days of korokoro leaks and blurry photos of pokemon are over, the discussion of what they might be or do is over, and a joy in the exploration of the unknown is gone. Instead, a trailer will be split up in to a chain of individual tweets, all tailored to be as easily digestible as possible. Videos or photos that require seconds of attention, and descriptions of characters and pokemon that make it easy to form a shallow attachment, enough to repost it and say “oh that’s so me” or “love this kind of character”, and that’s free advertisement. the kinds of people who live on social medias will translate genuine advertisements into a form of speak their friends will appreciate and thus engage with the advertisements further. The job is done and pokemon is making more money than ever.

POKEMONS ART DIRECTION

Again, something many disagree with, the art is fucking awful in the new games. But that’s because its not art meant to impress me, an artist with his own design sense and standard of quality, the art only needs to be serviceable, enough for someone who can’t draw to appreciate. The standard of what will be accepted is never actually very high, but pokemon no longer makes any effort to exceed passable. Fanartists will be essentially forced to draw better versions of all their characters since pokemon is once again the hot new thing, so the actual quality of the original art will not be reflected in peoples perception. The model quality as also awful, every design manages to look even worse in motion and in game. But since the goal is not to make an enjoyable game, this is again not a problem.

POKEMONS SETTING

This extends to the clothing the characters wear as well, but pokemon no longer is its own universe. It is doing all it can to act as if it takes place in the real world, and making the clothing its characters wear bastardized versions of modern aesthetics, instead of the unique and simple sudo-sporty aesthetic the other games had, where clothing was cohesive and sleek, looked fit for various kinds of weather, and seemed generally comfortable. The new gym leaders for example, wear horribly messing and unneeded sportswear based mostly on real life soccer clothing, but without any of the benefits, as they are also loaded with unneeded accessories that go in direct contrast to what they’re supposedly doing. Nessa is the worst offender to me (and what do you know she’s the most popular), compared to misty’s attempt at being part time swimmer part time trainer, nessa looks absolutely ridiculous, and not prepared to do either swimming or pokemon battles. She wears a swimsuit, but not an actual swimmer’s suit, and she’s covered in jewelry, accessories, makeup; things that would ruin any attempt to go swimming even casually. And yet she doesn’t look like she could comfortably go on an adventure or catch and raise pokemon. She is a bland aesthetic mess of what people want a cute swimmer girl to be.

Custom trainers are a whole different problem in that no game with custom characters actually has good ones. The best result you can have is funny looking characters, which is actually a pretty good goal, but gamefreak still wants everything to be samey and appeal to broad aesthetics so people can post their own characters and share some feeling of attachment.

POKEMON THE VIDEO GAME

the quality of sword and shield from a technical standpoint is clearly very low, and this is one of the few things people have been willing to call out. The model quality hasn’t improved, the animations are sparse and bad. The wild areas are a mess and run terribly, the game crashed trying to handle multiplayer bosses live on stream. The national dex has been removed for literally no reason. The gyms have been completely gutted and reduced to just the fights (which are still nothing but bland checks for type advantage) and the new gimmick is just “make your guy strong” and is obviously best used in response to the opponent using it. the pokemon wonder around the open area and yet wild grass is still there, there’s no option to approach pokemon peacefully and capture like in let’s go, so even the few out there things they’ve tried aren’t going to be used in any meaningful way. But repeat after me, the game doesn’t matter! As far as gamefreak is concerned, the game could crash 40 minutes in and they would have done all they needed to do.

THE GOAL IN POKEMON

so i’ll end this stupid rant with something the new pokemon games don’t have, even the ones I really like don’t have em. Multiple goals to achieve, multiple ways to approach the game. Even the originals didn’t truly have multiple ways to play, but they started you off by presenting you multiple goals, which were tangled together to start but by the end of the game would become 2 very seperate things, becoming champion and completing the pokedex. Johto did it best, to complete one goal, you had to make a pretty good chunk of progress on the other, it was impossible to not “beat the game” if you actually wanted to accomplish either goal, but after that you were free to tie up whatever goals you had left. It was primitive and mostly meaningless, but it was there. The shows and the manga also put a lot of emphasis on the fact that every trainer can do something different, and their own ultimate goal is completely different from everyone else.

The closest the games come now to this idea is having your rivals go off and do something else other than fight the elite 4. Some of them aren’t even actual rivals and just like pokemon, like lyra from HG/SS. But there is no pokemon game in which you, the player, are presented a goal other than to beat the game, winning the elite 4 and defeating some evil plot along the way.

For me, an ideal pokemon game would be about giving complete freedom, start off with some explanations of what all the possible goals are, completing the dex, becoming champion, winning all the contests, defeating the evil organization, exploring the world, anything. And once the player gets an idea of what they want to do, they’re set free into a world where they can find pokemon and do whatever they want, working towards whatever goal they want. Other aspects will naturally come into play, battling pokemon and making them stronger would help you catch more pokemon, learn moves for contests, explore more dangerous areas, beat stronger trainers. So no matter what goal you have, you’d still interact with many of the systems and areas in the game, and make progress on all goals at the same time, but ultimately feel satisfied when you accomplish your own, personal goals, instead of following the straight line gamefreak set for you.

Obviously that sort of thing will never happen. That’s just what I think pokemon has the potential to become, but pokemon isn’t made for me, anymore.

Thank you for reading.

#juvenile rant #pokemon swsh #pokemon #and ye that's that feel free to disagree but atleast take a moment to really think about what pokemon is to you

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rock-and-romanticism · 7 years

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I need to warn you: I’m from the 70s.

Being from the 70s means I was born in the heyday of the vinyl era, saw its decline along with the rise and decline of 8-tracks and cassettes, the rise and decline of CDs and internet-based music, and have lived to see vinyl rise again. From my point of view, the history of music media has moved from analog (wax and vinyl) to digital (CDs, mp3s, streaming), with magnetic tape (reel to reel, 8-tracks, and cassettes) being a kind of intermediary between the two.

Vinyl has made a serious comeback that began around 2010 and doesn’t seem to be slowing down. As a sign of the strength of this comeback, Sony Music, for the first time since the late 1980s, will begin production of vinyl records again. The return of vinyl is usually explained in terms of sound quality (vinyl captures more than .mp3s) and in terms of album artwork. I’m not sure I completely buy the first reason: even if it is technically true, I suspect most people listen to their records on something like this:

If you’re not spending at least $1000 on components and speakers, you’re not really getting better sound out of your vinyl.

Now album artwork is another matter. It can be substantial, and the experience of it in a CD package or online just isn’t quite the same. But album artwork is essentially packaging. It doesn’t have anything to do with the music. That’s fine, but this second reason is also complicated by the fact that music aficionados tend to look down on colored vinyl as being a gimmick. It’s not just a matter of the best packaging winning here.

I seriously can’t wait for a new release of Dark Side of the Moon that’s advertised as the “black vinyl” edition. The gimmicks will have won the day.

I would like to suggest that part of what’s really going on is a kind of cult or aura of authenticity associated with vinyl. One component is surely nostalgic: the two low-end record players pictured above are clearly retro in design and intended to be. This aura of authenticity also privileges original pressings over new albums, much like first editions and first printings of books might be worth more than later editions or reprints.

But you need to understand that none of this has anything to do with the music either. Original pressings were on thinner vinyl that’s more susceptible to warping. That 180g vinyl thing isn’t just a gimmick. They’re more durable. 70’s albums weren’t recorded on equipment that was nearly as good as today’s, and oftentimes there would be a hiss in the background: the medium was so faithful it even captured the sound of the recording equipment. A remastered, recent pressing of Dark Side of the Moon is a much better product, at least in terms of music, than a first pressing of that album from the 70s. It would combine the best of both digital and analog.

But I’d like to take this a step further. It’s tedious to listen to vinyl, at least compared to listening to music on your streaming service, on an iPod, or on your phone. You have to stop every half hour at least and flip the record over. Now — and again, this is because I’m from the 70s — my parents had a great, wooden stereo console that took up about half of one wall in our living room. It could stack maybe six to eight records. When one finished, the next one would drop down, and the needle would queue up on the next one automatically. The turntable was on springs, so it’d just lower a bit every time the next record dropped.

See, back in the 70s, we didn’t want to have to flip our albums over every twenty to thirty minutes. We wanted good music in our cars. We wanted to listen to music while we were running or at work without disturbing anyone. And we wanted our music without background hiss. So this 70’s generation, out of a real concern for music, gave the world cassette tapes, Walkmans, iPods, digital music, and then downloadable and streaming music. It gave us $100 earbuds that have a better sound than any $100 speakers ever sold since the 1960s. The limitations of vinyl were the reason for digital music to begin with.

That by itself would make the cult of authenticity look a bit dumb except for two things:

First, the album artwork really is a lot cooler on a vinyl album.

Next, vinyl gives us our privacy back. No one is tracking your listening preferences to better serve you. No one needs to know what you even purchased, much less what you’re listening to between the hours of 1:00 and 5:00 p.m.

This close tracking of our listening preferences has changed the face of top 40 music. Digital, downloadable, and streaming music has so narrowly defined and targeted specific markets that top 40 music is for the most part now nothing but the generic listening preferences of the largest cross-section of US consumers: a banal carousel of 90’s style R&B, rap, and hip-hop. New and interesting music is relegated to indie labels or niche markets, and rock and roll seems to be dying so badly that guitar sales are dropping .

But I think vinyl sales tell us that this isn’t the whole story, and used records are coming back along with the increase in new vinyl sales. I think our listening preferences are more complex than the Billboard Top 100 would lead us to believe.

At least I hope so.

Understanding Vinyl I need to warn you: I'm from the 70s. Being from the 70s means I was born in the heyday of the vinyl era, saw its decline along with the rise and decline of 8-tracks and cassettes, the rise and decline of CDs and internet-based music, and have lived to see vinyl rise again.

#Culture #Music #Popular Music #Vinyl

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