Quoted By:
Don't give him money!
A very enraged Satoshi.
Image: TV Tokyo
Now that we’ve all seen the trailer for the first live-action Pokémon movie, it feels like it’s time to voice some...concerns about some of the newer pocketable monsters Nintendo’s been stealthily incorporating into its games for the past few years. To put it simply: Nintendo’s been trying to pass off Digimon as Pokémon and it’s time for the treachery to end.
It’s not that Nintendo has ever literally tried to pass off one of Bandai’s Digimon as a Pokémon, but rather, the more recent generation of games have introduced new monsters that, to people familiar with the Digimon franchise, come off as being more digital monster than pocket monster.
Ever since the public first learned about the Johto Region and the fact that Nintendo pretty much always planned to unveil more Pokémon than the original 150, there has been a vocal contingent of fans insisting that the new additions simply don’t qualify as “real” Pokémon. It’s easy enough to understand where that feeling comes from, given the significant impact that the Pokémon franchise had on the collective childhood of the ‘90s. But while people might not like the monsters Nintendo’s rolled out after the first generation, the point stands that they’re the creatures the company has decided to immortalize across its video games, television shows, and films.
That being said, it’s difficult to deny that, post-Red/Blue/Green/Yellow, something changed about the kinds of Pokémon that Nintendo was willing to put its stamp of approval on. And while a great deal of them are absolutely delightful (Empoleon and Aegislash come to mind), many of them are...well, questionable because they don’t exactly look like Pokémon.
