Why Pokémon?
One's connection to a mass media franchise - especially if that someone is autistic - can be genuinely healing. However, if that something goes off rails, or you disagree with the community, it becomes almost like an anchor - asking yourself why you even like this thing.
I feel like Pokémon has been my oldest hyperfixation. It lives in my brain. It feels like a home to me, even with all the new stuff, even if I grow more critical as a person. However, what with the games getting ever so slightly "worse", due to trends in AAA gaming, it becomes a thing that is difficult to say. Not really because of the thing itself, although Pokemon mainstream games do have important flaws but because of the connotations.
Especially if you hang around in spaces I do, there is a massive pressure to be cool. Not in the "cringe culture" way, but cool as in being someone, who is not bound to popular stuff. And this has a lot of merit. Supporting smaller entities, which do not have massive market pressure of building towards average that gets enough purchases make the line go up. More ethical alternatives. This can, however, become a form of soft pressure. It reminds me of TTRPG spaces, where if you come in and say you like DnD, you will be scoffed at like some beginner idiot. It ultimately forgets that a person and their experience with the thing, is more in its sum than the thing itself (this cuts both ways though - a person can have life-changing time with the thing, but that doesn't absolve it from criticism).
Now, the thing is, I have been chasing replacement for Pokémon for a long time, trying to get that hit. The problem, however, was that massive amount of the games that were Pokémon-like in structure made me not care. Nostalgia is part of it, but it is a part of it in a specific way that is true for autistic people.
All these new games were stressful and their systems, as familiar as they were to Pokémon, just pissed me off. Many had bonus things, such as, breeding, generations, mixing, sacrifice, etc. And this is good. Complex systems are fun to delve into... if you care. And I found out that I don't really, care. I couldn't give a rat's fuck about Siralim. Digimon just stressed me out, because Digimon media focuses on having one partner and then the games force you to have 10 weirdos all doing a different thing (and these games want to be persona SOOOO badly). Out of the ones I succeeded, I liked SMT and Cassete Beasts, however none of them replace the core experience of Pokémon.
Pokémon has been there since I have been growing up and it filled parts of my most depressed life. When there is nothing else, there has been Pokémon in one way, or another. And as for features that work with the way my brain works - these monsters have personalities and stories I can think about, in a way that I can't with performance obsessed games. Yes Pokémon games are pathetically easy, but that means I can put ceilings whenever I want. It means I make my own difficulty curve. And yes, it usually means I am not pushing through, but I enjoy solving puzzles such as monotype challenges etc. And this is because I understand the logic of Pokémon mainline games so well, it doesn't become an anxious learning process. In other monster catching games I don't know what is optimal, what does the game want out of me. My familiarity means Pokémon always feels like a safe harbor where I understand the structure and can gradually increase difficulty inside of. Other monster tamers change just enough and add enough where the core basis becomes a question, and unless they hook me through making me care about characters/monsters/story, there is not much else there for me.
This essay was started because I had two extremely bad months. My anxiety was off the charts and I had little energy - I also was hacked, and had to reinstall my PC, and I chose to learn Linux and so I spent a lot of time yelling at my PC to stop overheating, because Linux sometimes acts like garbage in that regard. My entire creative output, both writing and pixel art stopped, and while I was solving the overheating (which actually didn't stop, I had to dual boot Windows for some stuff) my PC gaming stopped as well. Playing a Pokémon Emerald Rogue romhack, which adds random routes and then random Mighty Trainer battle really helped me mentally. At first I was worried the harder Trainers would be difficult cause I don't know competitive Pokémon, but I managed and it got seriously fun. It kept me afloat during extremely stressful time period, despite not being easy, but since I already had connection with Pokémon, starting to learn the nuances and movesets as I played became easy and I stopped being anxious. It was a hard game I genuinely enjoy,
The big point here is, I think, the massive failure in how we recommend stuff to people, especially if they want to move away from something that matters deeply for them. Think abandoning fandom because the creator is problematic. A common recommendation is just find something else, but for many autistic people, this usually is just more noise which doesn't resolve. Not easily. It has to be something with low floor and high potential ceiling, so it can become comforting to us, while offering us a chance to grow it outwards. This is not just neurodivergent thing either. Recommending single player RPG to someone who desperately wants a social aspect of MMOs is also reductive. We do tend to think in genres as the thing that the person want, but usually it's something else.
But beyond that, there is social performance at play in many of these alt experiences communities, where they want to wholesale replicate or replace the original experience, letting people keep their hands clean. And I don't think this approach will ever truly work. It's not that we shouldn't make monster tamers, because clearly, Pokémon already did it perfectly. It's that the whole concept of these communities and groups imposing their own experience with certain thing fully over someone else's. I don't like Pokémon because it's easy, here is a hard complex game where you make a monster team from scratch with three new subsystems. You don't like it? Oh you must be stupid then, just a stupid shill. Again - mistaking the way someone experiences something with how flawed it is, and making that experience out to be just as flawed. There is also a specific thing in video games where better = more hard, as if other forms of engagement or depth-building stopped mattering.
This was a first writing in a hot while and it's messy and meant to be. I feel a bit whoozy and riding the first wave of energy in a long time. Basically, I love Pokémon. Maybe in a way that will never be replicated, but that is fine. There are always more experiences on the way, and for the Pokémon they will also always be there.