malymin

dvillines26:

The original Pokemon games always felt haunted because the programming was held together on chewing gum, string, duct tape, and prayer. The abundance of glitches, eccentricities, odd design decisions, and unexplained lore that would later be sanded out is vaguely unsettling and intriguing on its own. Like, there are multiple references to real world locations and events in the original games, and 'Kanto' is just based on the Kanto region of Japan, suggesting at least that Red/Green take place in an alternate reality Japan. Gold, Silver and Crystal aggressively retcon, essentially making the Pokemon Universe its own thing, while adding some troubling and unsettling implications of its own, like the silence of Red, Mt. Silver being sealed off, the Cinnabar disaster, the revival of Suicune/Entei/Raikou, the rival being a cruel, petty thief of unknown origin, Eggs, Celebi and the lost GS Ball event, etc.

The thing that makes the Gen III games such a radical break is how much less unsettling they are. This is a function of the GBA inherently being less spooky than the GameBoy/GameBoy Color, but also of design decisions opting for more vivid colors and a lot of more straightforwardly 'cool' Pokemon. Ghost, Dragon, and Dark actually became more standard types with a huge expansion in the available number. The Pokemon series is the series established by Ruby and Sapphire, I would argue. In a sense it's true that Pokemon, as we knew it in GSC, did not continue. It mutated into something with fewer edges, something bright and fun and increasingly lacking in the jank that gives the early games their unique appeal. For Pokemon to survive it had to move beyond that. They never became exceptionally well-programmed, but they weren't janky until Sword/Shield and then Scarlet/Violet, and those are different types of jank. though S/V can be unsettling in their own right especially when you fall through the world or go somewhere you shouldn't be able to. The unclimbable landmass always disturbs me a bit, like I know there's nothing, but it feels like there should be something there.

The 'haunted' energy isn't usually captured by romhacks that use the Gen I/II engine because they're trying too hard, and the people writing them are brain poisoned by creepypasta and 'edgy' media. I think if they want to make something genuinely unsettling, they need to play at least Earthbound, if not also Mother 3, to get some idea of how to generate an 'off' vibe. The best horror is left partially to the imagination. Rather than gore or explicitly fucked up stuff, which usually triggers disgust rather than fear, the point of a 'haunted GameBoy game' should be to give you the increasing sense that something is Just Not Right. It'd be funny to just do a Red/Green mod that 'fixes some of the bugs', and not tell anyone that it's a romhack that gets increasingly weird the deeper you get into it. like, you encounter Pokemon or items in the wrong location, some doors or ladders take you to places they shouldn't, some trainer AI will be extremely odd, things will randomly appear in your inventory that you didn't pick up, and sometimes a text box will pop up, unprompted. You're Running Out of Time. There's never any explanation or pay-off for that message, nor does it correspond to playtime or anything. At the end, instead of silence, Mewtwo talks to you, but what they say doesn't make any sense. But it has Implications. you can't help thinking about what Mewtwo said. however, Mewtwo only speaks the first time you play the romhack, and never again. Also, you can't actually catch Mewtwo. The player character refuses to throw the ball. A message pops up. 'I can't do this anymore.'

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