One of my greatest childhood fantasies was that the world of Pokemon could be real. I would have loved nothing more than to travel around, catch pokemon, train them, evolve them, and battle them. That was the dream.
"Pokemon Go" is a counterfeit dream. It was sort of fun and novel at first, but it has quickly lost its appeal to me. My favorite thing about the Pokemon GameBoy games was leveling them up and having them learn new moves to use in battles, but you can't level up your pokemon in "Go." You can evolve them, but it's not the same. There's not much strategy to the process of procuring high level (high CP) pokemon in "Go," it's just a matter of spending lots of time playing the game and catching lots of pokemon (lots of the same pokemon...) so your character will level up and higher CP pokemon will show up, and the process continues.
Boring. I want to choose my starter pokemon and level him up, not wait until I find and catch 20 more Charmanders (I haven't seen another one since the first) before I can evolve one into Charmeleon. That's lame. I want to come across a Ghastly and be stoked to battle with him and level him up to eventually evolve into Gengar. Instead, I just have to catch a bunch more Ghastlys. I was pumped when I hatched one of my first eggs and an Onyx popped out, but it was like 136 CP. I haven't seen another one since, so he sits forgotten at the bottom of my pokemon inventory.
Pokemon Go is a cool idea, but for all of its grand claims to "augmented reality," it's not even as immersive as an original GameBoy game. It is a shell of what it could be.
So last weekend I found an old GameBoy Color that was lying around our condo and started playing Silver and Gold Versions. Similar to my experience reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the new stuff just wasn't the same. It only made me remember and want to re-experience the original.
