Video game ramblings: the unecessary sequel

 Again, it's time for more random rants about stuff that's been on my mind and I can't find a real excuse to write it up, so I'm just going to collect it all into this blog post and hope no one notices.

Below the jump you'll find more stuff about Pokémon (although surprisingly not about Scarlet and Violet this time), Digimon, Zelda, Super Mario Bros., filmmaking, and web design just because.

I stumbled upon an article from 2021 reporting on a supposed upcoming Netflix live-action Pokémon series (which I can only assume either never happened, or maybe turned into Pokémon Concierge), and was rather amused (and bemused) by how much I totally disagreed with it.

First off, it's one of my journalism pet peeves when articles use the word "we" in the title, because, who exactly is "we"? I totally get if the article is the author's opinion, or maybe the views of her and her friends. But I'm not okay with articles treating an entire fan community as a hive mind and making bold proclamations as if it's something everyone wants, without consulting them first. At least define "we" so I don't have to feel included in an opinion without my consent.

Because no, I don't want to see excessive amounts of CGI. In anything. That's a whole rant unto itself, but suffice to say that I grew up in an era before CGI dominated our lives, and I miss stuff like puppets and stop-motion which I feel were more visceral, tangible, and convincing than wiggly textured polygons. As someone with a background in animation (albeit drawn animation), I'm aware I sound like a huge hypocrite, but I like CGI more when it's used sparingly, for effects you just can't possibly create any other way, not as the easy out for inserting elements into a film where using anything else would be more expensive. That's just lazy and sloppy. (Why pay for a real Domino's pizza for that one scene, when you can CGI in a pizza for dollars less!) This Studio C sketch does a hilarious job of calling out everything wrong with actors having to pretend their eyes really hard in a greenscreen nightmare.

And, you know what? I did not like how the Pokémon looked in Pokémon: Detective Pikachu. I thought they were unappealing and sometimes dipped into uncanny valley territory (that Mr. Mime, seriously). It's like the animators were trying to make Pokémon look more realistic, without bothering to take into account things like actual animal biology and physiology, and the fact that Pokémon were never designed to look like real animals (or plants, or whatever Magnemite is). Detective Pikachu was an uncomfortable mashup of Japanese stylistic aesthetics being shoehorned into the Western obsession with making things look realistic. You can't just stick some advanced fur texture on a Pikachu, make its eyes a little less shiny, and call it a day at the studio. You can't just plaster snakeskin all over a Charizard. And again, Mr. Mime. 

For the most part, Pokémon simply do not work in the same way real animals do, and you can't get them to resemble real animals without way more redesigning than Detective Pikachu bothered with. It's like if Disney (and I shudder to say this because they might actually do it) decided to make a live-action Mickey Mouse film and gave Mickey, Donald, Goofy and co. super-realistic texturing on their definitely-not-realistic animal bodies. It would just look absolutely horrible.

(And don't get me started on the CGI Mewtwo Strikes Back remake, which I'm still scratching my head over why that even happened. I've boiled it down to a) they couldn't come up with any more original ideas for Pokémon movies and b) kids these days are so enmeshed in CGI-everything that apparently all you need to do to sell a film is make sure it's CGI'd enough.)

(Speaking of unnecessary live-action things, a live-action How to Train Your Dragon, seriously? Are we really doing this? The original film was already good, and it's only twenty years old. If you're going to live-action HTTYD, at least don't retread a plotline. I feel like Dreamworks is trying way too hard to just give HTTYD fans more of the franchise and assuming they'll just eat whatever dragon-shaped item is thrown in front of them and they don't have to try to be original anymore. Aren't there a bunch of books in that series that they can draw more material from?)

That said, to be fair, I think there are times when remakes/reboots/re-etc. are worthwhile and merited. For example, there's just so much to the Harry Potter books that there was no way even eight long films could cover everything, so to me it makes perfect sense to do a Netflix series that can take its sweet time delving into all of the plot intricacies and pacing everything better. (Although Emma Watson will always be Hermione forever and ever.)

And I'd really like to see Disney, instead of extravagantly live-actioning (or realistic-CGI-ing in the case of The Lion King) its most popular and beloved films, use that time and energy and money to revisit good ideas that flopped. For example, Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain would be an amazing series to base some really spectacular animated films on, and I think it would wash away the bad taste that 1985 feature-length travesty left in our mouths. (No shade to Richard Rich, though, he's an awesome guy and we all make early-career blunders.)

(Fun fact: In Between the Salt Water and the Sea Strand, it's mentioned at one point that Carnonos, the king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, is actually also Arawn, the Welsh lord of the otherworld Annwn. This has real historical basis, as it's thought that Welsh mythology borrowed quite a bit from Celtic beliefs and Arawn was culturally cognate with Carnonos/Cernunnus. But I also mentioned the affiliation because I felt bad that Arawn was sort of pigeonholed as the big bad dark lord in Chronicles of Prydain, and thought it would be fun to instead cast him as a loveable goofball who just happens to rule the otherworld. Actually, his role in the novel is a little more akin to how he's portrayed in Welsh myth than how Prydain uses him, but Alexander openly admitted that he was not trying too hard to follow mythology closely in those books.

In general I am rather tired of mythological psychopomps and underworld rulers being typecast as villains in fiction. They're just misunderstood, people.)

As another example, I think The Great Mouse Detective had some fun ideas for retelling Sherlock Holmes, but was executed a bit clumsily. I think it would make an excellent animated series; there's plenty of material to draw from, and I like the idea of Victorian London with adorable talking mice, and of course I'm just saying that because I was obsessed with Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers as a child and wanted to be Gadget when I grew up, but still. (Also, can we please stop typecasting rats as villains? I love rats. I had a pet rat in elementary school. Rats are cool.)

You know what I think would be better, if Pokémon ever decided again to venture into live-action (even though I don't think they will because they're already doing a lot with animation)? Just make the Pokémon look like their usual cartoon selves. Do you know why? Because the Muppets do this and make it work.

Boiled down to their creative essence, the Muppets are cartoons in real life. They don't pretend to look biologically real (I'm not talking about stuff like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth here, just the actual Muppets). They are unashamed of how glued-on their eyes are and how obvious the sticks on their wrists are. But that's part of the magic. When a Muppet interacts with a human or with their environment, there's this glorious suspension of disbelief, a temporary forgetting that these sorts of creatures shouldn't actually exist, a childlike willingness to play along with the fantasy of a frog strumming a banjo and an eight-foot-tall yellow bird walking the streets of New York City. By not trying hard (or really at all) to seem "real" in an aesthetic sense, the Muppets invite their human co-stars and audience to psychologically engage in a make-believe world come to life, in a way that I believe is more emotionally impactful than attempting to draw the character designs closer to the expectations of the "real world", with disturbing results.

So I think it would be fun to see live human actors adventuring around with CGI Pokémon that actually look like their canon designs. Sure, it may not be the gritty realism that the West keeps thinking it wants and needs, but it would sure look better and be more appealing than trying to mutate creature designs into something they were never meant to be. (The Pokémon in Detective Pikachu kinda look like what would happen if you told an AI to generate realistic-looking Pokémon. Totally artless.)

And speaking of grit, another thing I (most heartily) disagreed with the article on is the idea that Pokémon should go in a darker direction. I am not at all a fan of making things dark (or darker), and one of the reasons I love Pokémon is because it consciously tries to keep itself a franchise that everyone can enjoy, a happy place set in a world that doesn't have as many problems as ours. I'm an irascible old coot, I'm probably older than the person who wrote this article, and I don't want to see darker Pokémon.

(Honestly, I think it would be so hilariously ironic if this supposed live-action Pokémon that the article was discussing did turn out to be Concierge, because that series is the total opposite of literally everything this article lists. Including grittiness and CGI. *mike drop*)

And speaking of monster franchises, let's discuss some recent developments on the Digimon front. I've also been a huge Digimon fan since the very beginning, the keychain V-pet days (which actually came out before Pokémon in the US, so Digimon isn't as much of a Pokémon ripoff as many people claim), but contrary to Pokémon, Digimon feels to me like it's experienced a bit of an identity crisis past its first few years. I think this is mainly due to the fact that it just can't figure out which demographic it wants to target, and unfortunately isn't going the Pokémon route of trying to include everyone.

I was absolutely enthralled by the first three seasons of the Digimon anime. (Although, in retrospect, Adventure and Tamers were excellent, but 02, though it had its good moments, by and large feels like a really bad Adventure fanfic most of the time.) Then Frontier came along and was a complete disappointment that apparently decided to simply throw every single overdone preteen-boy-oriented-anime trope into a blender. And they didn't even have Digimon partners, they just turned into Digimon. Uggggghhhhh. And after that, it just felt like the entire franchise lost any sense of direction it was starting to have.

Perhaps part of the issue is that Digimon, unlike Pokemon, never started off with any consistency. The V-pets had zero storyline. The anime got a good ball rolling with Adventure and 02 and then decided to straight up switch universes with Tamers, and nearly every series after that has basically tried to reinvent Digimon all over again. Contrast with the Pokemon anime, which had the same main protagonist for 25 years, and is based off of a game series with a very clear plot progression that is easy to adapt into a TV series. And no Digimon video game has ever been quite the same as the last one. It's like Bandai Namco has the monsters but can't quite figure out what to do with them.

Whatever they do figure out, though, I really wish they'd go back to the franchise's roots of being kid-oriented. I feel like there's been far too much Digimon stuff lately that's trying to appeal to nostalgic adults, but the problem with this is a) that means you're not doing enough to try to attract new, younger fans to keep your fanbase population stable, and b) maybe not all nostalgic adults want you to "adultify" their beloved childhood. A big part of the reason why I liked what I liked when I was a kid wasn't just because it was cool and fun, but because it was safe content-wise, and as an adult there are still things I just don't want in my entertainment. And on a psychological level, I don't want to see grim stuff happen to characters from my childhood. I find that kinda messed up. An IP that can't keep a consistent tone is a frustrating IP for me.

So I'm pretty disappointed to see that the upcoming Digimon World game is rated T (and doesn't even look that interesting). Hard skip for me. I am, though, excited about the Digimon Alysion mobile game, which might be more all-ages-friendly, and even though it's a TCG instead of an RPG (RIP Digimon: ReArise), it looks like it's going to have an actual storyline, which is way more than I can say for Pokémon TCG Pocket which I still think is a totally pointless ungame. I'm also just really psyched that we're finally getting some global Digimon game releases after so much stuff that's been exclusive to China, and an MMORPG that came out in Korea but never anywhere else. (I love China, but it's just not fair to gamers everywhere else when we hear about fun games that are out there that we're not getting because of flimsy market reasons.)

Speaking of upcoming games, I like how I opined a short while back that we really needed more games set in the Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom Hyrule, and now we're getting Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment. Clearly Nintendo have been reading my blog. (Although if we're doing this, I really hope it's another one of those alternate-history-where-nobody-dies things. I found the whole Imprisoning War business in TotK really sad and I don't care if it ruins the entire plotline, just bring Sonia back arrrrggggh.)

And I wonder if I'm literally the only Zelda fan on the planet who is not excited about the upcoming live-action film. Look, I understand that The Super Mario Bros. Movie* finally proved, after 40 years, that films based on video games can be box office successes**, but do we really need films for all the games now? It just feels totally unnecessary. If I wanted to watch Link doink around a fancy CGI landscape and defeat a fancy CGI Ganon, I'd go play a Zelda game. That's what they're for. (I miss the days when filmmaking was about expressing original ideas, not trying to wring as much out of a franchise as possible.)

Finally, not related to any of that at all, my new web design pet peeve is websites that are made to look good on mobile devices and thus are way too blown-up on actual PC monitors. I prefer having as much information as possible on my screen at once, so it drives me crazy when I access a website on one of my large dual monitors, and have to scroll through images the size of small cities and text so large I can read it without my glasses. Now even YouTube is just showing me six behemoth video thumbnails--at least give me the option to change the thumbnail size so I can adjust how much shows up on the screen at once. (Also, don't fix what's not broken just to give your developers something to do.) (And yes, I end up using my browser's zoom function to make the overall layout more condensed, but it sometimes has the side effect of making certain text too small. Just bad design, people.)

If you made it this far, you deserve a medal.

*Speaking of that film, why in the world is Nintendo so obsessed with Bowser wanting to marry Peach and Mario having to rescue her? I get that Shigeru Miyamoto enjoys stock character archetypes and the damsel-in-distress plot hook, but as much as I respect that man's mad video game design skills, honestly, it gets old fast and do you really have to keep using it for every. single. Super Mario thing? (That's part of why I never played Super Mario Odyssey, besides the fact that I'm miserable at platformers; I just couldn't stomach the plotline.)

I have seriously written a tongue-in-cheek fanfic where Peach takes Bowser to counseling to help him work through his issues, they start dating, and end up having a really solid relationship. Maybe I'll post it to this blog one of these days. It's pretty ridiculous but I think it makes more sense than most Super Mario Bros. storylines.

I also wrote a sequel fic where, in a twist of irony, an unused Mario Tennis character kidnaps Mario and tries to marry him, and newlyweds Peach and Bowser have to save him, but they end up trapped in a glitch dimension due to Bowser taking the wrong Warp Pipe, and man I have a weird sense of humor.

**This is not to be confused with the Pokemon movies, which are really movies based off an anime that is based off a video game.