Pokemon Generation 8's Laziness

Man, even by Pokemon’s low standards, Game Freak really, really phoned it in on Generation 8.

Look, I knew, deep in my heart, that Generation 7 was going to be a singular, happy outlier.  A 1-time miracle.  I know I did that rant in which I expressed hopeful optimism that the themes and quality of Sun and Moon’s writing represented the first step to the series evolving into something compelling, and I did hold that hope in my heart, but realistically, I never did expect to be vindicated.  Sometimes a Lufia 2 happens.  You just have to be happy when a Wild Arms 3 drops out of the sky, because you won’t see it again.  Every now and then, a game comes along whose high quality makes it a bizarre outlier in the rest of its series, and you just have to enjoy these Dragon Quest 8s when they come along and accept their passing.  I get that, and I did not expect Pokemon Generation 8 to continue 7’s remarkable, out of character quality.  I fully expected that, when Sword and Shield came, we’d see a return to the usual bland, shallow, careless writing that has typified the Pokemon experience since Red and Blue.

What I really didn’t expect was that Game Freak would manage to be even lazier than that.

When you play a typical Pokemon game, there’s a plot.  I mean, sort of.  There’s a general stab in the dark at a plot, at least.  It’s not always good, but it’s there.  Maybe there’s a team of bad guys out there stealing Pokemon for the sake of crime.  Perhaps there’s a group of exceptionally stupid morons fighting each other to completely needlessly rearrange the planet’s continental feng shui.  Could be that there’s a bunch of pretend animal rights activists who are actually basically just Team Rocket with a better PR department.  Possibly there’s some guy trying to undo the universe, become God, and then remake all of creation as he sees fit.*  But whether it’s barely written, badly written, poorly written, or unexpectedly sort of halfway decently written, there IS a story going on in the Pokemon titles prior to 7.  There’s a narrative in which the protagonist of the game DOES become involved, throughout the game’s course, and plays a sustained role in resolving.

Generation 8 decides to take a different direction with things, and actively tell you to mind your own goddamn business whenever the subject of the plot is brought up.

Seriously!  During the course of Sword and Shield, there are some events** going on in the background, which you will occasionally...well, the term “cross paths with” implies way too close a facsimile of involvement.  Let’s say instead that there will occasionally be times during Generation 8 in which you can see from a distance that something is actually happening in the region.  But without fail, every time this happens, you’re told by a nearby NPC not to worry about it, and just concentrate on your stupid, generic badge-collecting journey.  It’s like every single person in the region is a cop parroting the cliched “Move along, nothing to see here,” line, throughout the whole game.

Think about that for a second!  Just, like, really take in the fact that Pokemon Generation 8 is a game that makes an active effort to excommunicate the protagonist from the plot.  Because with the exception of a few moments of learning some vague, generic snippets of lore for the region with Sonia, whose archeological and investigative skills are more on par with those of a bored tourist than a professor’s assistant, that is the entirety of the Sword and Shield experience right up to the final 2 hours or so.  It’s a game that excludes the player from its story.

Imagine if the first 70 minutes of Star Wars was just watching Luke walking to Tosche Station for those power converters.  Occasionally he’ll see some distant indication that there’s an intergalactic war going on, but every time he notices it, Uncle Owen (Leon) pops up out of nowhere and says “Don’t you worry none about all that hoo-hah, boy, you just mind your own (Com)beeswax and keep gettin’ on over to Tosche Station. Power converters are ALL that should matter to ye, ya blue milk-swillin’ chump!”  Interspersed by a rare visit from Obi-Wan (Sonia), who’s just there to sprinkle a couple historical factoids about lightsabers and the Force around.  Oh yeah, and for some reason Jar Jar Binks (Hop) is always around.

And then, finally, in the last 11 minutes, Luke gets to fly an X-Wing and blow up the Death Star, but only after Uncle Owen had had a go at it first and widened the exhaust port, and only with Jar Jar jammed in the cockpit with Luke to help pull the trigger, thus significantly lessening the scope of Luke’s accomplishment.  Because Arceus forbid Generation 8 gives us a break from Hop or stops Lickitunging Leon’s ass for a full 2 minutes.

At the very least, I guess it’s a unique approach to treat the interaction between plot and player like that of popular girls excluding some kid they disapprove of in elementary school.  Not quite what I meant when I said I wanted more creativity in the writing for this series, though.  Just...imagine being so incredibly lazy and incompetent that the effort of writing a story as mundane and careless as Pokemon Generation 1’s plot is STILL more work than you’re willing to do while on the clock for the better part of 2 years.  Imagine looking at the bare outline you’ve made for a story, and deciding that it is also the final draft.

This isn’t the only stupid, annoying flaw of Pokemon Generation 8, of course.  Hop is an uninteresting, boring, pointless waste of space.  A mechanic of having random-encounters try to chase the player down is annoying; the whole point of tall grass in Pokemon is that the player has some agency in deciding whether he/she feels like catching more Pokemon at that moment.***  Bede is basically the antagonist version of a fart--unpleasant to experience for a couple seconds, and yet, in spite of how unlikable he was, utterly and completely forgotten a few moments later.  Even considering that the player is basically shoved violently away from him at every opportunity, Rose is still surprisingly empty and boring, and Eternatus may be the least remarkable Legendary Pokemon to date.  The new Pokemon themselves, for that matter, are the saddest bunch of blah since Generation 2.  The post-game content is tiresome, stupid trash--I sincerely don’t give a shit about Hop’s self-esteem, the villains are shallow, dithering morons who put Dr. Wiley to shame when it comes to immediate and insincere defeated groveling, and is it just me or does Sonia get disproportionately bent out of shape about the betrayal by her intern when the intern is brand new, has a generic character model, and doesn’t even have a name?****

Plus, of course, there’s Leon, who is a happy-go-lucky dipshit well worth a rant all on his own.  Expect that one in the very near future.

Nonetheless, even if Generation 8 is otherwise a meaningless, unappealing mess as a whole, what truly stands out about it and makes it the worst entry of the series is this baffling, lazy, utterly counter-productive exclusion of the protagonist from their own adventure.  Some players complain when an RPG railroads them from 1 plot point to the next; Sword and Shield, by contrast, railroads the player into the middle of nowhere, away from their destination.  Generation 3 might have been dumb as hell, Generation 1 might have been stale and threadbare, Generation 5 might have been a cowardly betrayal of its own premise...but in none of them did the Champion of the region essentially hide the story behind his back, hold the protagonist away by the head, and sneer “Stop thinking about nerdy shit and go play some more sports, dork!” for the whole game.  Pokemon Sword and Shield is a true testament to sloth, a waste of time defined by its writers’ uniquely assertive take on avoiding the labor they’re paid to perform.





















* Is it just me, or did the stakes with Cyrus seem wildly higher than they were for any other conflict in the series?  It’s like a real RPG villain had to make ends meet and took a side gig with Nintendo in his free time.  Seriously, the guy just basically is Hikawa from SMT3!


** Although I would like to take the opportunity to mention that these events are NOT especially big or interesting.  It’s basically a business guy, Rose, freaking out about the fact that there might be an energy crisis 1000 years in the future, and the region’s star athlete, Leon, telling him to chill the fuck out about it.  Not so much because Leon believes that there’s enough time in the coming millennium to find a solution to the problem, as would be reasonable, but more because Leon doesn’t want to delay Sports! for even a moment to deal with the issue.  You can bet your butt(erfree) that Leon would give not a tenth of a shit more about this issue if the lights were gonna go out in the region the next day.


*** Credit where it’s due, though: it IS a good thing that we finally see the random encounter Pokemon on the main screen.  In a series that’s all about catching the Pokemon you want and avoiding the ones you don’t like (or avoiding duplicates if you’re out for a half-of-Noah’s-Ark approach), that’s a pretty great quality-of-life feature.

...Of course, you wouldn’t think it’d have taken 25 years to figure out how to give the player this small, obvious piece of autonomy, but hey, cut Game Freak a break, we can’t all be as technologically advanced as Chrono Trigger was in 1995.


**** Although I suppose I have to at least acknowledge that the post-game adventure represents the first time in this game where you’re actually allowed to be a part of the plot.  Yeah, apparently it took until the game was over for Nintendo’s writers to feel like opening a word processor.