By Hannah Hecht– This Friday, Nov. 21, many Morningside college students will rush to the nearest Gamestop to purchase the newest must-have video game title. No, it isn’t another violent, Mature-rated first person shooter; it’s Pokemon Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby for 3DS, remakes of the popular GameBoy Advance games.
If you’re over the age of 25 and the Pokemon phenomenon has you scratching your head, you’re not the only one. If there’s one thing that the previous generations will never be able to understand about ours, it’s video games. Actually, let me make that more specific. Maybe they can see the appeal in dressing up like a Rambo-esque soldier and taking out a bunch of un-American bad guys in Call of Duty. Maybe they can understand edging toward that next level in Candy Crush or farming out that final square of corn to pay for your new barn in Farmville. Maybe they even can get why you would pretend to be Eli Manning taking on his older brother Peyton in Madden.
However, our parents’ generation may never understand why grown men and women spend their time hunched over a purple Nintendo 3DS playing games from the Pokemon series. In fact, and this might surprise you, the majority of people who play Pokemon games are aged from 19 to 24.
Here at Morningside, the Pokemon tradition is alive and flourishing. A Facebook group dubbed the “Morningside Pokemon Fan Club” has 74 members and is still growing. Last year, a campus Pokemon group met up a few times to talk about the newly-released Pokemon X and Y and organize wireless Pokemon battles. Members still post on the Facebook page from time to time to discuss Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby or to talk about ways to obtain rare Pokemon.
And I get why some adults don’t understand the phenomenon. On the surface, Pokemon is pretty much about screaming at your giant, mutant, fire-breathing lizard to make it attack and kill a 10-year-old’s one-foot tall electric mouse.
And, on a deeper level, it’s… Actually, it’s still about forcing your gargantuan mutant dragon to fry a kid’s sparky rodent to the core. But isn’t that a dream come true?
For Morningside College senior Michael Andrlik, Pokemon definitely a game worth playing as a 20-something.
“I would be the first to admit that I was addicted to [last year’s Pokemon game] when it first came out,” he said. “In the first three weeks after I got it, I put about 240 hours into the game.”
Andrlik has been playing Pokemon since he was in elementary school.
“By now, pretty much, people our age grew up playing Pokemon, and it’s something they’ve just never put down.”
Are you still confused by the Poke-mania? The storyline is pretty similar across all 24 games, so let’s try it this way. You wake up one morning and go down for breakfast. You trip on the stairs and realize that you have grown a couple of feet shorter and have lost the effects of puberty. Congrats! You’re ten. Darn it. Your mom is making breakfast. She tells you that you’re running late for a meeting with a local biologist.
Oh no! You run to the pixelated, brick research lab, conveniently located right next door, and the man inside introduces himself as Professor [Insert Tree Name Here], the region’s foremost Pokemon researcher. He then offers you a choice of three adorable monsters: a fire lizard, a water turtle, or a grass dinosaur. How adorable. Or, depending on the game title, maybe a grass gecko, a flaming chicken, or a water salamander? How about water otter, a fire pig, or a grass snake? Or maybe a fire fox, an Internet Explorer, or a Google Chrome? (Just kidding, browser joke.)
Anyway, you pick your adorable little demon and go back home. Your mom is very impressed and proud of you. In fact, she decides that you are responsible enough to leave the house, take your little Buttlicker (you can’t help but exploit the name customizer), and go on a backpacking expedition across the entire country. By yourself. With no supervision.
Okay, so I may not yet have inspired anyone to go buy a $200 Nintendo 3DS console and a copy of Alpha Sapphire (although, if you’re interested, I would recommend the $100 2DS console and Omega Ruby), but Pokemon games are very popular among college students. And Nintendo knows their market. The most recent Pokemon games cater to older players in a host of different ways. The games offer an ever-increasingly complex battling system that dives deep beneath the surface rock-paper-scissors interface (water beats fire, fire beats grass, grass beats water). 718 Pokemon of 18 different types can learn 617 moves and hold 60 different items, resulting in an almost-infinite number of battle strategies. The newest games even allow for internet connectivity, so you can trade, battle, and chat with friends and players all over the world. There are even professional competitive Pokemon players who compete in international tournaments.
Josh Karel, another Pokemon-playing Morningside senior, thinks that the game developers know that older players are the perfect market.
“Once they see that the people who were kids when it first came out are playing it, they’ll do whatever they need to do to keep them playing,” said Karel. “The ability to connect to the internet and do whatever you want with the game with people all over the world is a huge draw.”
While on your Pokemon journey, you will amass an army of lovable monsters and train your favorites until they evolve into more powerful and badass versions of themselves. Your primary goal is to defeat the gym leader in each town to become the Pokemon Champion. However, along the way, you will develop a strategy that will make you completely unstoppable, defend the weak with your might, take down a nationwide terrorist organization, and uncover the mystery of a legendary Pokemon with the ability to bend space and time. Along the way, you’ll scale the mountaintops, dive to the depths of the sea, explore the forests, and probably descend into the an active volcano. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll fall in love. Just kidding again. I mean really, you’re only ten.
For both Karel and Andrlik, the storyline is the biggest reason to play Pokemon as an adult. In addition, they both think that Pokemon is a good way for college students to make friends, whether it’s through the on-campus club, or just in their daily lives.
“Another big part of Pokemon is the social aspect,” said Karel, “You know, if you find a group of people who are interested in playing the same game, you can establish a friendship group that way.”
While both students love the newest Pokemon games, nostalgia is a huge part of their enjoyment of the series. Each one picked an original Pokemon as his favorite.
“I’d probably say Lapras,” said Karel, picking the Loch Ness Monster-esque water and ice Pokemon from the original games.
“Definitely Charizard,” said Andrlik, “I’ve always liked Charizard. I just feel like he is the most badass Pokemon out there.
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