The Updated PokéRap

Remember when you had to prove yourself to a specific friend group by reciting all 150 Pokémon in one go? You’d sit on someone’s bedroom floor, rattling them off without stopping, and if you made it through without choking you were in. They weren’t particularly cool, but at least they understood obsession.

Someone made a new version with all 718 Pokémon. I made it through about twenty before my brain just shut down and refused to continue. And I’m sitting here wondering what changed—not the rap itself, but me. Why does it feel impossible now when the original felt like something you could actually pull off?

Half these new ones I don’t even recognize. Klefki. That sounds like a furniture store, not a creature that lives in the tall grass. There are so many of them now, creatures from generations I stopped paying attention to, with designs that get more unhinged the further down the list you go. At some point the creators just started combining random shapes and calling it a design.

The crazy part is that someone actually made this work as a rap and not just a list. It’s mechanically coherent, which is pointless but kind of impressive. The original was perfect because it was achievable—you could memorize it, own the skill, be someone’s entry ticket. Now it’s just an endurance test that nobody’s going to finish, and if they do, it won’t mean anything.

I don’t know when I stopped being the kind of person who could do that. Probably somewhere around the time the Pokédex numbers got too high to count.