Lopunny Lovers Associated
You’re eight years old. Your family hasn’t been home for over 12 hours, and you’ve only managed to have a few breakfast bars to eat. After all, you can’t cook for yourself yet. Maybe your mother has told you “Video games won’t feed you,” but she hasn’t either.
Once you have a breakfast bar when you feel hungry, you return back to your Nintendo DS. You’ve been playing Pokémon Platinum and attempting to catch them all. Sometimes, when you watch TV, you see Ash smiling with Misty and Brock on his journey. He doesn’t always win, but he is always having a good time with his friends. Will purpose help you become special and happy like Ash is? Even without his human friends, Ash still has Pikachu by his side. Even without your family here to take care of you, you still have Piplup by your side. Is he enough to rescue you from your loneliness?
You can’t beat Gardenia because Piplup’s your only good Pokémon, so you keep on leveling him up until he has enough levels on Gardenia to defeat her nasty Roserade. Prinplup now is well above any of your other Pokémon, and sometimes in the real world, you think about Prinplup being by your side like Pikachu is by Ash’s when you’re all alone.
In role-playing games, you’re supposed to imagine yourself in the character’s shoes. How many lonely people have been comforted by the presence of their resolute Pokémon? Isn’t it a lovely thing that even in this world where isolation is omnipresent, our fictional friends can stave off the worst of its effects? Of course, that’s only when we’re young.
Look at the current backlash against Sword and Shield. Is the game missing half of its features and roster? Certainly. But another issue people have said is the difficulty. Our Pokémon companions don’t struggle like they used to in part because we’ve grown up. We’ve gotten better at the game, but are we any better at life? We can’t be distracted by the challenge of Gardenia’s Roserade and Whitney’s Miltank anymore. Our Empoleon isn’t enough to fend off our misery anymore. We’re frustrated at the game, but we’re most frustrated at ourselves. Though we could distract ourselves from our loneliness when we were young with Pokémon, we can’t do that anymore. The games aren’t what has changed. We have.
When we imagine our Pokémon beside us nowadays, all we can taste is ash. The ashes of our lonely childhood providing nutrients for our lonely adulthood. The neglect turning us into malformed beings hasn’t left us. It’s the only thing we can trust to stay by our side.
