>>45857969What Pokémon was, is, and should be varies greatly depending on what media you first experienced, when you first experienced it, and your nationality.
What was Pokémon to the original Game Freak, to Satoshi Tajiri? It started as Capsule Monsters/Cap(u)mon before becoming Pocket Monsters. The original small team at Game Freak grew up in the 60s to 80s in Japan. They watched Ultraman and Godzilla qnd caught bugs and played arcade games and early console games. Tajiri and Sugimori even started Game Freak as a magazine where Tajiri reviewed games. Sugimori was more of an otaku and always had a bit of a waifu streak but had clear inspiration from anime in his art. Masuda left company work to do music and programming. What was this small collective idea of "Pocket Monsters" to them? What can we glean from its development?
To me, that is the core, the essence of Pokémon. I think that the core did evolve in a natural way, but that it was also unnaturally shaped and molded by outside factors like the anime, international expectations, and its own success, eventually to the point it lost that core. I think the series is somewhat unrecognizable to what it started as, but that the vast majority of people just weren't around to understand that. Imagine someone who started with BW's anime and took that as the definition of Pokémon.
