Pocket Monsters Again
I was genuinely obsessed with Pokémon Blue when I was younger. Knew every monster, every move, every hidden corner. Beat it something like a hundred times just trying to build the perfect team—Charizard, Mew, Articuno, Dragonite, Zapdos, Mewtwo—all so ridiculously overpowered that the whole game became almost trivial after the first playthrough.
Then after Crystal Edition, I stopped. I remember it pretty clearly. Saw some new Pokémon that looked like a keychain and just thought, this isn’t what I liked about this. The whole thing had gone too cute, too designed for someone younger, someone who didn’t care about the stuff that made it interesting.
For the next ten years I kept trying. Sun and Moon, X and Y, Pokémon Go—picked up each one thinking maybe this time it would work. But every new game felt like it was moving further away. The creatures got cuter, the whole vibe got sweeter and more manufactured. I wanted to hunt down evil organizations and face cocky rival trainers. The newer games didn’t have that—they felt like something else entirely, just wearing the same name.
Then Let’s Go Pikachu and Let’s Go Eevee came out, and it actually worked. They’re basically a remake of Yellow, set back in Kanto. Pick your starter—Pikachu or Eevee, though apparently Eevee’s huge in Japan—and go. Nothing revolutionary, but it’s straightforward in a way the modern stuff stopped being. The graphics are clean and bright without trying too hard. It doesn’t force cuteness at you.
And there’s something that just lands right about going back to where it started, with all those years sitting behind it. Maybe that’s just nostalgia doing what it does. Maybe I’m just older and different things matter now. But it works. Feels like coming back to something that mattered, and finding out it still does.