Japan’s government accelerated economic growth with 'too big to fail' economic practices that could be compared to America’s own housing bubble. Taijri says that several of his favorite bug catching spots were completely paved over and replaced with suburban arcade centers. The rural hometown from Taijri’s childhood was completely engulfed by Tokyo’s urban sprawl as the economy exploded.

This period is known as the ' economic miracle' - a time when Japan’s economy was unnaturally bolstered by both aid from the United States and corporate bailouts from the Japanese government. The “cram school industry” started when Taijri was a kid and he wanted to make a game that could help kids relax for just a few minutes a day.īut there’s an important part of this story that can easily be overlooked: a lot of stuff happened in Japan between the 1960s and the 1990s. He discussed how these simple creative choices affect kids and their perception of the world. In the same interview, Taijri also says it’s important to him that Pokemon “faint” instead of “die” and he thinks death is treated too flippantly in video games. Series creator Satoshi Taijri said in a Time Magazine interview that Pokemon is based on his childhood hobby of catching bugs in the rural outskirts of Tokyo in the 1960s. You aren’t seeing a world that was or is about to be shattered by a giant space meteor the Pokemon world is almost always at peace. Traveling the towns for the sake of collecting badges makes each town feel like a tourism destination rather than a checkpoint between action sequences.Ĭriminal organizations like Team Rocket give the game developers a mouthpiece that can wax philosophical about systemic problems with the world, without actually showing any of those problems. The lack of drama in Pokemon allows you to explore a relatively stable world in a state of equilibrium. This plot structure sits in stark contrast with typically melodramatic JRPG storylines. (Warning: This article features spoilers for every main-series Pokemon game.) The Pokemon franchise is famous for many things, but story isn’t one of them.

Your character is almost never in danger, the world is almost never at the brink of collapse and most of the game’s conflict takes the form of friendly sparring matches. Pokemon games offer straightforward narratives in a consistent structure: You are a boy or girl that hikes from town to town competing to win badges and you somehow always end up taking down a criminal organization. This article was originally published in April 2015.

Pokemon black and white