My Pixel Friends

                Pokémon. It’s a pretty easy game and pretty fun too. It’s nice to lie back on a couch and mindlessly run around for a while, shiny hunting, breeding, secret base building (Oops. Sorry. SUPER secret base building). Well, at least it appears that way, and then you apply the concept of permadeath to it.

Years ago some person thought it’d be fun to apply a short set of rules to the games to add challenge. The main one, if a Pokémon faints it is considered dead and must be released (or permaboxed). The idea is to make the games harder and to encourage the player to use Pokémon they normally wouldn’t, but really it just turns the game into either a bloodbath or hours of excruciating training. It’s also pretty depressing (this is called a Nuzlocke challenge and you can find out more by watching this).

It’s because of this hard mode that I am responsible for the deaths of many. But Niki, it’s just a bunch of pixels! It’s not like, real animals or people or whatever! Yeah. You say that until you see the HP bar on your favorite bunch of pixels fall to zero. It’s amazing how attached to something inanimate I can get, but perhaps more understandable if I consider how attached I am to a stuffed penguin. I am attached for the typical sentimental reasons, but also because of his personality, the one I gave him when I was just a kid and found him sitting next to my stocking Christmas day.  

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a writer or just have an uncontrollable imagination but I can’t help but imagine those Pokémon’s characters as well. One was a happy, carefree, clumsy and innocent creature. He was like a cute little (actually, not so little) kid. So when he died because of weather damage that I set up, it felt horrible. It was like watching my favorite character die. And it was my fault. I spend so long training up these little (once again, not literally little most of the time) critters and I watch them shine by smashing their enemies into the ground (Or incinerating them. Or drowning them. Or whatever). But then some other Pokémon gets lucky, or carries a move I don’t expect, or I make a horrible mistake, and I have to say goodbye. So yeah, it’s pretty awful. But at the same time, it is so much fun.

There is so much satisfaction in completing a challenge run. After putting in so much time training, and carefully picking out movesets and creating a balanced team, you finally beat the champion and avenge the fallen. It took me so long to break my bad playing habits (no training, ignoring special attack and physical attack split, etc.) that when I finally completed a challenge instead of giving up, I felt ecstatic, uplifted, and even relieved. And now, I have a million different stories I can’t wait to tell, about a trainer and his (or her) team trying to succeed in a world far more dangerous than it originally seems.