How the Pokemon Company Just Sold Me a Nintendo DS

Well, I may very well be a little late to the party but Nintendo definitely did just sell me a Nintendo DS when the Pokemon team announced the release of HeartGold and SoulSilver in Japan. They intend to release these versions here in the United States in Spring 2010 and I am going to have to get all of the versions from Ruby/Sapphire up (I intend to get these versions, though, from eBay). I haven’t seen any of the screenshots that are undoubtedly on Serebii or the other Pokemon websites and I have no intention to look at the screenshots or the reviews (so that I can have the best experience possible). In this post, I hope to share my expectations and desires for this game with anyone who may be reading this from the Pokemon Company as well as some of my disappointments with the Pokemon series and franchise. I will also share some of the main reasons why I have lost interest in the Pokemon series as of recent years and why I am interested in getting back into it.

One thing I would like to say about why I am excited about this release of HeartGold and SoulSilver, my favourite old version of the Pokemon games was Crystal, which was the first that allowed you to play a girl. And yes, this is about the only gender of character I started to play once this feature became available and this continued to every game I have owned (examples being Pokemon Sapphire, Pokemon LeafGreen, Pokemon Emerald, Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2). I enjoyed many of the towns in Johto, such as the Dragon Pokemon gym in Blackthorn City and the fact that Blackthorn City was the first city I have seen where you can actually have a chance to catch a Dratini. I also enjoyed many of the Pokemon such as Miltank, Chikorita, the Red Gyarados (and shiny Pokemon in general) and the Unown were a very interesting species of Pokemon. There were also a lot of events that I enjoyed such as the Blue Card event in Pokemon Crystal, the numerous interactions with Team Rocket (yes, I am a Team Rocket fan), custom Pokeballs based on these berries you collect across the Johto regions and even the Suicune events in Pokemon Crystal. In other words, Johto brought a lot to the table that wasn’t there before and it essentially rocked the Pokemon world. Of course, it made Kanto look really bad because some of the legendary Pokemon of Kanto and some of the cooler things about Kanto weren’t working as well as they should (such as the Safari Zone, which was unfortunately closed).

You see, the reason I got into Pokemon so well was because of the fact that I used it as a way to escape my horrible family and the hell of a male puberty. When the home you live in is full of screaming, fighting, anger and all sorts of horrible emotions, you look for any escape possible so that you do not become like the monsters that you are living around. I am thankful that I had Pokemon as a way to escape from my family and it is for this reason that I am forever grateful to the inventors of Pokemon for giving me that way out of my family life. When I started working, I purchased my own Nintendo Game Cube (which I later sold on eBay) and had also preordered a copy of Pokemon Colosseum and of course, got the special Jirachi event disc (which I will discuss in a moment). It helped me to ignore my family and cope with my gender issues that were bubbling up to the surface because of going through the wrong puberty. I even made a few interesting friends through my Pokemon fandom, but since I came out as a transsexual atheist, they are either not allowed to talk with me or stopped talking with me willingly.

There are a few things that irk me about the Pokemon franchise but nothing irks me more than the way they treat many legendary Pokemon. Of course, when I say this, I am of course talking about Pokemon that no one can access by any means other than going to an event or special pre-order privileges. This is a horrible practice simply because it is not sustainable and relies on the continuity of the events and Pokemon industry so that we can “catch them all” since there are some Pokemon that we cannot even catch on our own. This decreases the value of the games and makes it literally impossible to even live up to the slogan in the game. Of course, this could be fixed by future releases of these games and regions which will have events in the games that one can do in order to get these legendary Pokemon. I doubt they are willing to change this practice, which is sad considering the fact that this practice is one that seriously does need to be changed.

The main reason why I lost interest in the Pokemon franchise was simply because I really didn’t have the time for it anymore. I was transitioning, I had to think up new ways to pay for my treatments and surgeries and plus, when I moved here to Denver, someone stole my digital camera and my Nintendo Advance SP (they didn’t get the charger though, which made me pretty happy). Now, I have less time than I did before because of the fact that I am trying to get back into blogging and also I am in college now and I have to focus on my degree programme. Plus, someone whom I had met in the Pokemon community has mentioned the idea of combining his super-awesome design skills with my coding skills and working together to fight crime earn some money and avoid working in some design shop run by crusty old geezers who think HTML2 is the way to go and design their websites with tables. Ugh, table-based designs are so 2000, but I digress. However, I do think I have the time to play maybe a hour a day and if not, a half-hour shall suffice.

So, what is your Pokemon fandom story?

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Tags: blue card, female character, female character choice, Goldenrod City, HeartGold, Hoenn, Johto, Kanto, Nintendo, Nintendo DS, Nintendo DS Games, Pokemon, Pokemon Crystal, Pokemon Gold, Pokemon Silver, Radio Tower, SoulSilver, Team Rocket, video games