Level 100 Feelings

Doesn’t matter how much you’ve grown. Doesn’t matter if you drink whiskey now and have opinions about cinema. Somewhere in the back of every skull that spent serious time with a Game Boy there’s a soft patch that never fully closes, and mine lights up embarrassingly bright the moment Pokémon appears in anything.

Japan never really fell out of love with it the way the rest of the world did. The franchise stayed woven into daily life there—plushies in crane game cabinets, Pikachu on convenience store packaging, dedicated Pokémon Centres doing steady business decades past the initial frenzy. So it makes sense that the collaboration between the franchise and designer Shinzi Katoh happened there first. The resulting line is called Pokémon Tales, and it is aggressively, almost offensively cute: bags, keychains, notebooks, pencil cases, all rendered in Katoh’s soft storybook illustration style, every corner rounded, every palette pastel. The kind of object designed to make a grown adult make an embarrassing noise in public.

Most of it only ships from the Japanese market, which means import fees and currency conversion and the particular joy of navigating a foreign-language storefront for something completely frivolous. Worth it. I had a level 100 Charizard I trained with an obsessive patience I’ve never since managed to apply to anything genuinely useful. Pika pika, bitch.