20 years of Pokemon: An outsider's perspective

Welcome back, my beautiful freaks, to the Assassin's Den!  As most of you know, Pokemon turns 20 this year, in Japan at least.  In the west, it turned 18, due to it being released in 1998.  But still, that's impressive.  Few kid friendly franchises have both the worldwide appeal or lasting power of Pokemon.

However, I never got into the series.  When Pokemon came out in 1998 in the west, I was 15.  I was more leaning toward games like Mortal Kombat and Doom, violent and "edgy" games as I tried to reject all things "kiddy".  There also wasn't a gameboy in my household either until I graduated high school in 2001.

I didn't actually pick up Pokemon game until 2004, with FireRed for the GBA, mostly because I was traveling a lot for the military.  I wanted an RPG that could get me through long plane rides and downtime with no tv or internet access.

So by that point, I wasn't thinking about how cute these monsters were, or about the journey, or any of that.  I captured a lot of Pokemon specifically for dungeons, gym battles and the elite four.  I was minmaxing, building teams to soak up damage and exploit weaknesses of my foes.  I never named them, I never bothered to form a bond with them.  I also never EV trained them, due to me not knowing about that metagame aspect at the time.  The only Pokemon I kept in my team the whole time was my Blastoise, due to it being able to soak up damage while I learned strategies.

FireRed was both my first and last Pokemon game.  I stopped traveling a year later due to getting out of the Air Force, and my GBA eventually broke.  So I'm not really a fan of it today, though I have kept up on it a bit.

But that doesn't mean I don't recognize the significance of the series.  Pokemon has brought people together in ways I'd have never thought possible when I was a kid.  My brother told me about how kids with a link cable became the popular kids on the playground due to the games requiring trading to get certain evolutions.  And today, with wifi, you can trade with people all over the world!  And that's not even counting the trading card game, side games, toys, and all the other stuff.

Pokemon is big, and for a good reason.  It's upbeat, and, like Pope John Paul II, it is “full of inventive imagination,”and does not have “any harmful moral side effects” and was based on “ties of intense friendship".  It's a fun game that is both simple and surprisingly deep, bringing people of all ages and nationalities together.  It deserves its popularity, and it deserves this celebration Nintendo is having for it.

So happy anniversary, Pokemon! Here's to 20 more years of friendship and fun!