Pokemon was easily one of the dullest franchise in the history of video game franchises. Each game following the young trainers and their Pokepals from the starting town as they fight assorted villain "teams" has been indistinguishable from the others. Aside from the fancy imagery, the series only consistency has been its lack of excitement, originality and ineffective use of gameplay elements, all to make adventures harmless, to make action seem inert.

Perhaps the die was cast when Tajiri vetoed the idea of Kojima directing the series; he made sure the series would never be mistaken for a work of art that meant anything to anybody?just ridiculously profitable cross-promotion for his games. The Pokemon series might be anti-theological (or not), but its certainly the anti-Nethack series in its refusal of wonder, beauty and excitement. There are no "good", "creative" or "unique" monster designs, they simply don't exist. No one wants to face that fact. Now, thankfully, they no longer have to.

>a-at least the anime is g-g-good though
"No!"
The writing is dreadful; the plot is terrible. As I watched, I noticed that every time an episode neared to its end, the scriptwriters wrote that "Team Rocket's blasting off again."

I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Tajiri's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that he has no other ideas of creativity. Later I read a lavish, loving review of Pokemon by the same Nobuo Uematsu. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are playing Pokemon at 7 or 8, then when they get older they will go on to play Final Fantasy." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Pokemon" you are, in fact, trained to play Final Fantasy