Kanto Always Calls You Back

My final Pokémon Blue team—Charizard, Mew, Articuno, Dragonite, Zapdos, Mewtwo—was so thoroughly broken that the Elite Four had become a formality. I had completed the game somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred times. Every attack, every secret, every hidden item in every unremarkable patch of grass. Then Pokémon Crystal came and something quietly closed. Somewhere after that I saw a Pokémon shaped like a keychain, and I understood that the franchise had gone somewhere I wasn’t following.

The decade after was a series of failed re-entries. Pokémon X and Y. Sun and Moon. Pokémon Go on my phone at 2am like everyone else on the planet for about three months. Nothing stuck. The games had gotten softer and rounder and more relentlessly adorable, and what I actually wanted was still the original thing: a compact team, a rival to destroy, a criminal organization to dismantle, a world with hard edges and a real sense of consequence.

Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! are built on the bones of Pokémon Yellow—Japan, 1998—and set entirely in Kanto, which means they’re set in the only version of the Pokémon world I ever fully trusted. The Switch hardware makes the region look genuinely good, and your companion riding your shoulder has a charm I’ll pretend to be above while absolutely not being above it. If you dropped off after the second generation and still have any feeling left for any of this, this is probably your way back in.