Everything After Gen 2 Was a Mistake

Somewhere in the App Store, around early 2012, a man named Daniel Burford decided he was going to make some money off the rest of us. He uploaded what was purportedly the Game Boy Yellow edition of Pokémon for 99 cents, let the reviews fill up with five-star testimonials he’d apparently written himself—"Exactly like the original, only better!"—and waited for the wallets to open. Mine would have opened immediately. I love Pokémon. I’d spent an embarrassing hour of my life just calculating the ceiling on what I’d pay for a legitimate version on my phone. Ten euros? Twenty? More, probably.

Burford’s app crashed immediately after the title screen. A man named Faustino Angel left a review that read, in essence: "I want my money back and if I don’t get it I’ll sue the person who made this into the ground. This is pure fraud." Daniel. You had it coming. You and your strange little company called Home of Anime.

Nintendo then issued a statement: We will continue to fight unauthorized releases of our games, programs, and promotional materials that deceive our fans and make them pay for something that doesn’t meet our quality standards. Lovely sentiment. Doesn’t solve my problem, which is that I still don’t have a working Pokémon on my phone.

Square did it with Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger. Rockstar did it with Grand Theft Auto III and Chinatown Wars. Sega did it with Super Monkey Ball and Sonic the Hedgehog. So what’s the hold-up, Nintendo? Be cool for once. Bring Pikachu and the original 250 to my phone—everything after Gen 2 was a mistake and I won’t hear otherwise.

And since we’re already making requests: either full retro 16-bit pixel graphics, or a completely unhinged colorful anime 3D world with fluffy clouds and manga girls with massive tits. No middle ground. I want to build my own character. I want the game to detect nearby players over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and let us battle on the subway like God intended.

Multiple editions. The Elite Four. Team Rocket. Magikarp. The Great Ball. Viridian City. Missingno, still unexplained. Brock. Misty. Mostly I want to be a pimply teenager again, wasting entire afternoons on a tiny screen, crushing my useless friends at Pokémon and feeling genuinely good about it. Nintendo knows this. They’ve always known. They’re just choosing not to let us have it, which at this point feels personal.