A wild Pokemon video that I liked
This video explains a bunch of different bizarre phenomena within the Pokemon fan community:
- The network effects created by the ability of different Pokemon games to link to and trade with one another, across titles and game generations
- Hacking Pokemon for use in competitive Pokemon battles
- How you can tell whether someone hacked a Pokemon for use in a competitive battle
- The immense burden of precise RNG manipulation needed to get "perfect" Pokemon without hacking the game
It gets pretty jargony but I did enjoy it.
Pokemon is so good and one of the biggest reasons it's good is that it's old as fuck and all these games talk to each other in rickety, eccentric ways that people have completely figured out how to exploit and manipulate. I love this shit.
Part of the reason it is this way in the first place... and the YouTuber above gets into this at the end of his video... is that it's too hard to make good Pokemon for use in MP combat. The game makes it very hard on purpose. People want both freely unlocked multiplayer teambuilding/buildcrafting, AND a big frictiony fantasy of animal-raising and adventuring, and GameFreak routinely fails to unite both those needs... even though there are a couple ways they could do it. Look... just make a machine in the final zone of every game that makes your Pokemon "perfect!" Just make, like, a juice bar that gives them the self-actualization smoothie.
(I'm not being flippant. Drinking a smoothie that makes you perfect is very Pokemon-coded stuff. Steal my idea, GameFreak!!)