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I find it disappointing that Pokemon's setting drifted away from the motifs established in the original.
The first gen made repeated reference to genetic engineering, sometimes in morbid or humorous ways (bill's teleporter turning him into a pokemon a la 'The Fly,' mew & ditto, etc). Pic related is a Sugimori concept of a shopkeeper with a fetal pokemon in a tank. I'm not suggesting Pokemon should've been 'darker' or 'more mature,' just that it was originally intended to be a little rough around the edges.
Of course, combined with the 'evolution' motif, jokes about genetic engineering were a tough sell for early 2000s American tastes, so it's understandable they walked it back a bit.
There's also the aesthetic of the first gen, rural towns juxtaposed with technology that incorporated the design of mid-90s gacha and vending machines. It combined a sort of boxy retrofuturism with a fairly rural world, the sort of thing that might spring up if animal training had lessened our reliance on tools.
These motifs in the originals didn't disappear, we still get the occasional man-made Pokemon and the style of some of the staples, like the Pokemon center, hasn't changed a whole lot. It just seems like choices that were originally made to give Pokemon an unusual and startling world have been sanitized over the years. If you'll forgive my language, it never really developed the 'biologypunk' setting that it set out to create. I know this board is just for porn but /v/ isn't going to humor a discussion like this.
