Everything After Crystal Was Someone Else’s Game
My team in Pokémon Blue was Charizard, Mew, Articuno, Dragonite, Zapdos, Mewtwo. I played through the entire game probably a hundred times—not because I was bad at it but because I couldn’t stop optimizing. Every monster, every attack, every hidden mechanic. By the end my roster was so overpowered it felt less like a game and more like a proof of concept for invincibility. I was maybe eleven years old and I had solved it.
That kind of relationship with a game doesn’t survive growing up. After Pokémon Crystal I slowly stopped caring. The new generations introduced monsters that looked increasingly like product design—cute toys rather than creatures with any ecological logic. The moment I saw a Pokémon shaped exactly like a keychain, a literal metal ring with googly eyes, I understood I was no longer the target audience. Fine. Things end.
Over the following decade I made a few attempts to get back in. Sun and Moon, X and Y, Pokémon Go—none of them gave me back whatever the first generation had. Part of that is obviously the nostalgia problem: the first time is the first time. But part of it was that the series kept getting sweeter and more streamlined, and what I wanted was the original texture. The mystery of the Safari Zone. The satisfaction of grinding through Rock Tunnel without Flash because you were too stubborn to use it.
Then Nintendo announced Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield for the Switch. A new region called Galar, clearly modeled on Great Britain, with rolling countryside, industrial cities, and snow-capped mountains. Three new starters: Grookey, a curious grass-type chimp; Scorbunny, an energetic fire rabbit that looks like it was born running; Sobble, a nervous water lizard who attacks from cover while hiding underwater. Tsunekazu Ishihara, president of The Pokémon Company, called it the continuation of a journey that began 23 years earlier—which is what every Pokémon announcement says and yet, somehow, still lands.
What actually got me was Scorbunny. Something in the manic energy of the design—the red and white, the perpetual forward lean—looked like the series remembering what it used to feel like. I started thinking maybe I’d play it. Maybe pick Scorbunny and see if anything comes back.
That impulse is probably just nostalgia wearing a new costume. But Blue was always about running too, and I played through it a hundred times. Some patterns hold.