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I had an entire entry about Pokémon Day, all readied up and YET.

THINGS GOT IN THE WAY.

It’s FINE! Things happen. But I’d written about fifteen hundred words in the waiting room of a clinic, but the time for my appointment was ******** up because the hospital gave me an appointment, but that wasn’t the time the clinic had me down for so THAT was an exceptional waste of time. On top of that, the app I was writing on crashed and didn’t save.

Your girl here is ******** up again, and I might need a biopsy. I’m also gearing up for a major operation in the spring or summer, details to be determined. This isn’t ‘getting old’ s**t, this is doctors consistently ignored symptoms and I’m the one that has to pay for it.

It’s fine. Life goes on.

So, the other day was the Pokémon Direct, and I honestly expected nothing from it, I thought a few mobile game updates and maybe a teaser for the next remake.

I want to be totally transparent with you. I really didn’t want to see Black and White remakes right now. I feel like GameFreak is in a transitionary period and making those highly anticipated remakes would definitely fall short of the massive expectations of the community. And the part of the community that absolutely do not want those games to be touched at all.

I also, really feel like the original plan GameFreak and the Pokémon Company had for the future of the franchise has been completely crumpled up and tossed because they likely were totally going to have BW remakes in the same style as BDSP, and seeing the poor sales and the backlash, and the criticism of Scarlet/Violet made them finally rethink their development cycles.

So, what could TPCI do to keep expectations low and bring a little bit of good will back into the community?

Why, just announce a new Legends game based around X and Y and slap that b***h out there! With a year until release, of course.

Of all the things that were going to be announced, anything to do with Kalos was the last thing on my mind. But before I jump into my theories of Pokémon Legends Z-A, the rest of the direct was just a small sampling of mobile content.

Everything else looked fine. That new TCG pocket mobile game is fascinating, this is Pokémon’s response to the now dead NFT craze, clearly. This little absurdity is just digital cards, doing what I assume TCGO is already doing but there seems to be some fun differences, like going into the artwork of the card and being able to acquire (buy?) TCG packs to open. I’m all for the idea of giving the art on the Pokémon cards more love. Lately, a lot of the TCG are exceptional. I recently saw some of the Paradox Rift art, the Minoir (201/182) and Yveltal (205/182) cards are wonderful and I’m gunning for them on ebay the second I get a little extra cash to pick them up.

Either way, with all the Unown bouncing around, and the Pikachu, I didn’t expect much from this direct. I actually thought they were going to reveal something for Gen 2. I thought maybe a Let’s Go! Johto game or a Legends game based in Johto. It would definitely fit the precedent they set with Arceus. I mean, even Pokemon Sleep was a special event with Raikou for gods sake.

Imagine my disbelief. I was audibly in denial when I saw Prism Tower. A legends game based in Lumiose City, an urban redevelopment plan that spans the entire city.

The official title of this new game is Pokemon Z-A. The trailer was fascinating as we see Pikachu run through this x-ray vision of Lumiose City’s architecture, and we see some familiar areas, there’s a few café’s which notably littered the streets in the game, there’s Lumiose Station, and Jaune Plaza, and I believe the exit to Route 5, since I think I saw the PR Studio nearby. There’s also two water channels that run through Lumiose City that aren’t named, but there’s a dock in the canal now.

I have three hopes for this game. One, we see AZ and discover his full story. Two, we get to use Zygarde, in all forms and they’re fully functional to the story. Three, it’s a mix of my favourite kind of game of hub world home base location and surrounding exploratory areas.

I was hoping if we did get a Legends game based in Kalos, it would have been the war from 3,000 years ago, but considering how bloody and brutal it’s described as, that’s just me being delulu. I doubt Game Freak would allow the depictions of death and mass murder of Pokémon in a game, especially since AZ made the Ultimate Weapon that killed everybody. People and Pokémon alike.

I’m also fairly convinced this game will be marketed for Switch, but will inevitably be advertised to the Switch 2, which is also slated for a 2025 release date. I kind of wonder if it will be a Twilight Princess release, where both the GameCube version and the Wii version were released back to back, just mirrored.

Now, there is a lot of crazy discussion and talks about what this game might actually be about. I’ve seen dozens of theories and hundreds of ideas. From time travel between past and present Kalos, where your decisions in the past physically change things in the future, kind of like Ocarina of Time and Chrono Trigger. People have also made comparisons to GTA and Cyberpunk. I’ve seen a lot of people saying that maybe catacombs will appear in the game that we get to explore, or maybe we get to travel outside of Lumiose into some areas to collect materials for building and coming back to create storefronts and café’s.

I’ve seen theories that this might be a future where Lysandre managed to launch the Ultimate Weapon, but still failed. The A in the logo looks shockingly like the Weapon, but I actually think it’s something different. Considering the weapon is different depending on what version you might have played, the Ultimate Weapon kind of has a bulbous base, while the A in the logo is pretty straight, and has an interesting design at the base that probably means a secret third thing.

Now, there’s a lot of conflicting information about the game. According to Nintendo of America, the game will only take place inside Lumiose City, but the other main accounts, like Pokémon Japan and TPCI don’t quite say this. Pokémon Japan says that the adventure STARTS in Lumiose City. Some trailers have listed releasing for all Switch systems, and people have taken that as a guarantee that Switch 2 is coming along with this game. Some trailers say releasing simultaneously worldwide, but that’s been on the trailers since 2012, so I don’t put too much stock in that.

I personally don’t care. There’s no way we can glean much about gameplay from a pre-rendered trailer. I honestly loved Legends Arceus, even though it had some strange decisions thrown into the mix, I loved the adventuring out and then going back to Jubilife as a hub. The one thing I wanted was a chance to decorate our little home, well, other than with Rotom furniture.

If it is going to be just the city, I totally understand why. I think the Kalos map is huge, and a legends game made with those qualifications in mind would not only slow development, we’d get another ScarletViolet debacle of an unfinished game with less than stellar graphics. I want them to take all the time in the world. With no new games since SV, and the game releasing in 2025, they have full three year development cycle without a mainline game in the works.

If Lumiose City functions the same, but on an urban scale with buildings and tunnels, I think I’m going to love it. My base hope is that we get to expand more on the story from XY, more with Looker, and Emma, and Professor Sycamore, and maybe more of Malva. There were so may characters left behind that we never got to expand on.

The trailer shows a lot of futuristic, or present day attributes while also showing off some very dated looking civil engineering sketches.

Funnily enough, my friends and I were just talking about Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann a few weeks ago, the man who recreated Paris with a staggering urban redevelopment plan under Napolean III. While his work was praised as revolutionary, and he committed to beautifying Paris, he displaced millions of Parisians, demolished thousands of historical buildings and Victor Hugo hated him. He also spent a staggering 2,115,000,000 francs like a ******** madman. Did other cities fawn over Paris, copying the wide designs and usher in a new wave of modern sensibilities for city planning? Debatable. But there’s no doubt he left his mark, for better or for worse. Honestly, between the blueprints in the trailer being reminiscent of his designs, and an urban redevelopment being the main focus, it’s hard not to draw some inferences.

Don’t mind the rest of this entry, I’m just rambling about what I remembered while I was waiting in the doctors office.

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Pokémon development for mainline games fluctuates between 4 and 3 years. Gen I to Gen II was three years, Gen II to Gen III was three years, Gen III to Gen IV was four years, Gen IV to gen V was four years, Gen V to Gen VI was back to three years. And subsequently, all titles have followed the three year release date.

That three year cycle is awful. We’re getting worse games, with worse Pokémon, consistently. It’s clear the staff doesn’t know 3D development like they knew handheld and pixel art. Pokémon used to be weird and fun with a dark tones sliding under the radar, but it feels like they’ve tried to scrub the life out of the games to be as palatable to general audiences as possible while also maintaining maximum profits with the least amount of effort. It’s obvious how much the developers struggle to keep up with the demands, especially since TPCI has been so tight fisted with how, and with who, the games are developed.

I never thought we’d see anything from Z. We know the sequels to XY were being made. That massive leak a few years ago did confirm that, it was supposed to be released in 2015, but that happened to be the year that GameFreak was trying to distance themselves from their flagship IP and branch out.

The one game that came out was Tempo the Badass Elephant, but it was a financial failure. This clearly disappointed GameFreak in the long run, but they trucked on with Sun and Moon, leaving a very evident gap in their resume in 2015 where they released an original IP without a Pokémon game in that same release window for the first time since 2005.

2023 AND 2024 marks the very first long term break GameFreak has taken from Pokémon. They’ve taken breaks before in the release cycle, such as in 2001, 2003, 2007, 2011, and 2021. And really when you’re looking over the course of 27 years as a studio, that’s ******** wild. This is not including any of the side games that have been released, like Trozei, Mystery Dungeon, Pokken Tournament, and the wide breadth of mobile games. If you count those, GameFreak has never once taken a break. Some of the side games have been produced by Creatures, Inc. and other outsourced companies within Nintendo’s umbrella, but the entire franchise practically can span mere weeks before a new release on some platform. Also, technically they took a break in 2020, but since HOME came out that year, they were technically working on this release, so I don’t consider 2020 a real break. Well, if I go that route, it could be said that 2023 also wasn’t a break since the DLC for SV came out during that time.

It’s no secret that a lot of people think XY is the black sheep of the handheld set of the franchise. I personally think Diamond and Pearl happen to be much worse, and a lot of the trade limitations in Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald made the games exceptionally difficult to complete if you lived outside of Japan or the USA, but as someone who lived in Canada for every subsequent release, XY was incredible. It was the first time wireless features could be used without the WAP2, which that type of connectivity was brutal if you lived anywhere without a stable broadband internet connection. Growing up, a lot of kids in my class and friends couldn’t use the trading or battle features unless we were inches apart. I remember a lot of my friends being unable to use the GTS. Mystery Gifts were just unobtainable.

So, when XY came out, a lot of those problems finally disappeared. After fifteen years of Pokémon and about eleven years of limited online functionality, everyone could finally trade and battle freely without the constraints of their internet or local wi-fi options. So, for me, it wasn’t about the game itself, it really was about the amount of people I could interact with and trade with. Also X and Y did have voice chat, I used it with a few friends back in the day, and it was both very bad but also incredibly novel.

My one massive disappointment with Black and White was the Black City and White Forest shortcomings. If you played online a lot, those areas would thrive, but if you took your time in the main game and didn’t have wireless, the areas would be empty. Way to punish players for just trying to enjoy the ******** game you made. White was the version I played, and what a fantastic game, but it sucks how much of the external features couldn’t be used.

It’s nice not to worry about those kinds of restrictions, and the 3DS and XY really ushered in those kinds of changes, which is probably why a small town kid like me at the time was so fond of that newfound handheld power. Mind you, my family the internet years before this, and admittedly, my family got wi-fi way before anyone else did. Like, I’m talking ‘98-’99, my dad said ******** dial-up.

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Some of this was recovered from the file I lost, because it was it saved I lost connection, I guess, some ******** aps just can’t save locally anymore. But yeah, I’ve been feeling super sick the last couple of days, and I don’t think it’s a bug, but it could just be this ******** up weather we’ve been having. Why the ******** is it 18oC in February! Stop dropping bombs and flying private jets you ********, we’re going to get toasted this summer.