This is a post for all of you Pokemon fans out there. I've been using the term glitch for the past couple of days, and it got me to thinking about a summer from two years ago, when I had first captured the legendary Pokemon, Mew. I actually wrote down the experience that same summer to better preserve the memory. So today, I thought I'd share that experience with all of you. In the grand scheme of things, capturing Mew might be a minor accomplishment, but for me it is a memorable one. This is a story about how I discovered something new about a game that I thought could no longer surprise me. This is also a story about how I did battle with summer boredom. With that said, let me take you back to the summer of 2009, and why I shall probably always remember that summer as the summer of Mew.
As some of you probably know, I'm not as into Pokemon as I once was. My dad had once told me that people sometimes out grow things. I think that's true, but I also think that things can outgrow people. Change is a fundamental part of life, and everything, not just living things, change in some way every so often. One unfortunate effect of change is that it sometimes causes things and people to grow apart. One way this happens is for one thing or person to not change and become repetitive. Another way this happens is the thing or person in question makes a change that is disagreeable. With the Pokemon franchise, it was a little bit of both. While it was true that I was getting older and my taste in certain things was changing a bit, it was also true that the Pokemon anime wasn't changing. I liked the first few seasons of the anime, as well as the first few Pokemon movies, but after awhile, the anime became stale and repetitive. By the time the anime got to the setting of the third generation games, I was rather sick of the whole show. It wasn't just that the Pokemon anime had become repetitive, it had made changes that I didn't like. Changes such as replacing Misty with that girl May.
As for the games, I had bought Pokemon Sapphire and Pokemon Ruby just for laugh, and to see what they were like. They were okay, but they had several flaws. One major flaw was that the games were missing a lot of the Pokemon from the first two generations. But the bottom line was that the games had changed, and when they changed, they lost something I liked. Something that I can't quite describe with words. I think that by the time of the third generation games, Pokemon had lost some of its popularity. The anime and the rest of the franchise still appealed to a much younger set of children. As for the games, I'm sure there might be a few people my age who play the new games, but I'm not sure how many of them there are. As for me, I check up on the franchise from time to time out of curiosity. I found out only too late that the Red and Blue games were remade for the Gameboy Advance to bridge the gap created by the third generation games.
Everything was being made for the Nintendo DS at that point, and there was soon a fourth generation of Pokemon out there. When I read about the features of the fourth generation games, it seemed to me that they lost there simplicity that the first two generations had. So while I did find the Pokemon of the fourth generation interesting, the games themselves had lost that simplistic charm. As for the anime, I'm sure that Ash and his faithful Pikachu will still be on their journey when I'm fifty. So the Pokemon franchise had grown apart from me, but let me say this. If I was given the chance to watch the first four episodes of the anime again, I probably would, and the same goes for the first three movies, and the special that was a sequel to the first movie, Mewtwo Returns.
