The Mycenaean

Pokémon is an amazing series of games that formed many nostalgic memories. Today, games are still being released and there is an active community of players who still have a great love for the game. (Photo Courtesy of Francis Fleming)

Many people across the world can admit to playing a Pokémon game at least once in their lifetime. With over 300 million games sold, Pokémon formed a lot of great memories for players that played it. It provides a great way to escape from the real world and focus on something other than the stressful reality that plagues most people’s lives.

Pokémon is a series of Japanese Nintendo games released in 1996 and came to the US in 1998. Pokémon are animals of all different shapes and sizes that the player trains to battle other Pokémon and their trainers. 

The two goals of the game are to defeat the champion to become the best Pokémon trainer and to catch all of the Pokémon to complete the Pokédex. Along the way to facing the champion, the player has to go from city to city capturing Pokémon and defeating gym leaders to collect all eight badges they need to face the elite four and eventually the champion. 

The game has many amazing features such as phenomenal music, the vast world to explore, and the fantastic storylines that bring the whole game together. The music on its own is great to listen to and is quite relaxing, it is instrumental music composed by Junichi Masuda. There is different music for every section of every game, and the variety over the years is astonishing. There are hundreds of different songs over all of the games, and each fit perfectly with the environment in the game.

The storylines in the games are another fantastic part. In most of the games, there is an evil group that tries to either capture, manipulate, or use Pokémon for evil, and it is the player’s goal to stop them. As the player progresses through the game they must thwart the evil group’s plans, defeat all eight gym leaders, and defeat the elite four and the champion at the end of the game. However, once the champion is defeated, there is also a post-game storyline that the player can complete. 

As time has gone on, there have been a total of eight generations of Pokémon, nearly forty mainstream games, and more than eighty spin-off games. The players mainly focus on mainstream games, however, and tend to agree that the earlier generations were better than the newer generations. 

The majority of people who play Pokémon started when they were younger and grew up adoring the game. A lot of young children used it to get away from bad things going on in their lives such as conflicts with their parents, while other children used it as a fun break and a source of leisure. Players loved their Pokémon to death which fueled an intense passion whenever they battled with them. 

Some of these players even play competitively in tournaments and in international championships. These competitions are usually held once per year, and thousands of players attempt to qualify for the championships. The variety of Pokémon also increases with each generation as over 100 Pokémon are added and game mechanics are altered every generation, so there is always something to improve.

Although the main Pokémon games are on Nintendo consoles, there are also other types of Pokémon games. One is the trading card game, where players can collect cards with different Pokémon on them and battle with them — however, a lot of players choose to only collect the cards. Another form of Pokémon is the mobile game, Pokémon Go, where players can travel around the real world and catch different Pokémon they find. Pokémon Go blew up in the summer of 2017, as many players wanted to revisit Pokémon or even experience it for the first time. As of May 2020, the game had roughly 147 million active users, although the player count fluctuates throughout the year.

Today, there are roughly six million players still playing the Nintendo versions of the game, and a lot of the reason they continue to play is the nostalgia that Pokémon can bring with it. Loading into a new game with no knowledge of it, and seeing lots of new beautiful creatures is something that players can not get enough of. 

However, the main reason that people love and adore Pokémon is that it allows them to escape from the stressful reality that they live in. Many kids around the world grew up in bad environments, whether that be parents in a rough relationship, a bad neighborhood full of violence, or any other horrible thing that kids should not have to deal with. Pokémon was a way for kids to escape that stress and hide inside their own made up world with all of their favorite Pokémon. Even teens and adults find that sometimes they need to get away from the chaos plaguing their life and spend some time recuperating with a game like Pokémon. 

The peaceful environment that Pokémon formed for people as kids is still with a lot of them as adults. Many people who played the games as children in the early 2000’s have come back to reexplore the nostalgic world they once lived in. The songs, storylines, intense battles, and every other outstanding feature of the game, on their own, can make the game better on paper, but the environment they create combined for kids and adults alike to turn to when things may not be going their way is the true power of Pokémon.