If you’re reading this then chances are extremely high that you’ve played quite a lot of videogames or computer games, I’m not here to argue semantics. You’ve probably played plenty of games with disturbing ideas; rated M for Mature or 18, for Adults Only, but sometimes the most disturbing ideas come from the most innocuous sources.

 

All you really need to do is think, just a little bit harder than normal, then things don’t seem quite as nice as they use to be.

 

 

 

 

Let’s start with elephant in the room with Pokémon, what are you actually doing in the game? Well you’re collecting animals shoving them in a small confined space only releasing them to fight in battles or to heal them so they can carry on taking the beatings. These kinds of things happens in real life; like Dog fighting and a lot of people don’t like that, but hey they’re all the same species and generally of similar breed to give each other a sporting chance and offer us some nice bloody entertainment. Pokémon isn’t like that though, you’ve got a wide range of species and some are just better fighters than others. I think it’s more on the same level as when they would get a hungry Lion and shove him in a cage full of dogs. How many times you come across a random trainer and proceeded to wipe the floor with all of his Pokémon with just one of your powerful pocket monsters?

 

 

Oh and you’ve got to catch them all, that includes all endangered species and you’ll often have “one time chances” with Pokémon in all of the games. So are you capturing the last (or at least one of the few) remaining wild type of the species just to have something showier at the competition? Hey but it’s not like you’re using all your Pokémon to fight, most of the time they’re just chilling...you know in those metal balls or stored in a PC. Yeah, have you ever seen animals stored at a zoo in a really confined space, they go a bit crazy and then their mind gets turns to pulp. Thankfully zoos are bit better when it comes to this sort of thing now but you do still see it especially with the older animals. So think what you’re doing to your Pokémon? We don’t really know what happened when they go into that magical hammer space; at best they’re placed in form of suspended animation where they’re not aware. At worse they’re stuck unable to move, eat, or anything else you might care to mention.

 

Come on, get up. What are yah, a man or a mouse! Oh right.

 

But it’s not like you actually killed any of them though, right? I mean you’re just stealing endangered species from their natural habitat to fight and/or file away in a computer system for the sake of completion, you’re not a monster. Ah well its heavily implied that you did in Red/Blue when you fight your Rival he has a Rattata in his collection, he later evolves it up to Raticate and you beat it senseless on the S.S Anne. When we next meet Mr. Rival he’s looking over a lone grave, he makes a comment (paraphrasing) that “none of your Pokemon look dead” and when you fight him you notice that Raticate is no-longer in his crew despite their fact there is a slot for him to fill.

 

 

One of the oddest things in Pokemon is the breeding. Yep we all like a good breed don’t we; its how we get Golden Chocobos, how else would we get Knights of the Round, save maybe with our massive floating airship? But I digress. In the world of Pokemon all creatures are spilt up into egg groups like; Fire, Bug, Fairy, Water, Indeterminate, etc (god bless the man that came up with the Indeterminate group) and as you can see from this table the groups vary quite a bit. The best know such unfathomable sin against nature is with a 47 foot Wale based Pokémon Wailord and two foot pink creature called Skitty. Woe-betide anybody that wants to figure out how you end up getting eggs out of such unions, but at least it’s generally the female’s species that pops out.

 

 

Generally though, the most disturbing thing about Pokémon is the age of the main character. I think they’re all either 10 or 11. I get it, I really do. You want to appeal to the young audience and as such you’ve made the character a young independent child that doesn’t need his mother’s permission to stay over at Gary’s for the night or spend the rest of his life roaming around the world tackling organised crime with your small electric-rat-thing. It’s just that your mother just doesn’t ever seem to care “Bye Mom” Red tearfully calls “I’m going now, to become the best, better than the rest. You may never see me again” pausing at the door, hopeful that she’ll call him in for some fresh Miltank burgers (just what the hell do these people eat anyway?) only to receive an emotionless “wrap warm, oh and I put a potion in the PC for you”. Off you go, a ten-year-old in a world with killer creatures hidden around every corner and where strangers go out of their way to attack passers-by. Good luck to yah kid.