The original Pokémon was a simple game. Simple graphics, simple mechanics--it was a game that pushed the boundaries of the JRPG genre by rethinking the role of the player: no longer a member of an adventuring party, now the sole adventurer. Building up and optimizing your party was the entirety of the game. Simply put, you wanted to be “To be the very best.” You wanted to be a Pokémon Master.
The party wasn't a collective of ragtag adventurers but strange animals with special powers doing their master’s bidding. The game stressed the term master in a peculiar way. This was not a master-to-slave relationship but a master-to-pet. However, a Pokémon Master was not merely the master of his Pokémon but a master of training, a master of the very concept of Pokémon. It’s no surprise, then, that a premium item is called the “Master Ball.”
Pokémon came out in the U.S. in 1998. I got Pokémon Blue for Christmas along with a Game Boy Color. I was absorbed quickly into the Pokémon zeitgeist. I had games, music CDs, a trading card game, a board game--it was an intense obsession for a ten-year-old, but one that quickly fizzled out. The multimedia juggernaut was like propaganda espousing the virtues of becoming a Pokémon Master. Even the compilation of Pokémon-inspired tunes was called 2 B. A. Master.
Mastery is the theme of the game. You don’t just play to the end. You play to conquer the system. Fight and train them with other Pokémon. Capture with Pokéballs. Many small steps up to the conclusion. Despite its simplicity, it’s not a game I ever fully understood when I played it. At ten, I mashed the A-button on my Game Boy so rapidly and forcefully that it’s any surprise that the button didn’t just fall out of the device. I saw the menus flash and ignored them. I was too impatient. I wanted to see my Blastoise send a barrage of bubbles from his shell-mounted cannons. Early on, the game explicitly suggests that you switch out your Pokémon so they all get a piece of the action and earn experience points. But I wanted my Blastoise to be the best. He was my prized turtle tank.
Near the game’s end, you encounter a unique Pokémon: Mewtwo. Unlike other Pokémon, there’s only one of him, and he himself is a clone of another unique Pokémon who’s never seen in the original game. He’s powerful, maybe even a game changer if you can snag him, but it’s extremely difficult unless you have a special item. I never caught him. Just as unique is Mewtwo is the special item in question: the Master Ball. Most Pokéballs could be busted out of by wild Pokémon, even Pokéballs that were designated “Ultra.” And while you could capture Mewtwo using an Ultra Ball, it required patience and precision. You couldn’t knock him out or he’d be lost forever, but you had to drop his health bar to a sliver. Otherwise, you used a Master Ball.
When you’re given the Master Ball, you’re told it’s the only one of its kind. You can use it to capture any Pokemon, but once you use it, it’s done used. I don’t remember what I caught with my Master Ball, but I know damn well it wasn’t Mewtwo. The game poses one hell of a choice to you for a game intended for ten-year-olds. It’s as if the makers were saying, We’re going to give you this special item, but we’re not going to tell you what you should specifically save it for . . . we’ll let you screw it up. It’s not a choice you get terribly early in the game, either. One of the earliest choices, however, seems more heinous.
As is the choice with every Pokémon game to date, you have to pick a Pokémon that will be your first. The three main elemental Pokémon: a grass-type, a water-type, and a fire-type. They are rock-paper-scissors incarnate--the fire-type is vulnerable to the water-type and so on. Every time, no matter what you choose, your designated rival picks your weakness. While it is certainly a way of encouraging the player to not only diversify their party, it suggests a futility in choice. No matter what you pick, a bigger obstacle awaits. It was frustrating then. It’s somehow still frustrating, even though I haven’t played Pokémon since I was twelve. No matter what I did, my rival would pick my kryptonite just to throw it at me every once in a while. But that’s why you choose other Pokémon to take care of that.
In the current generation of video games, choice is mechanically built into games. The Witcher series of games is a tragic love letter to the very idea of choice: whole levels are opened and closed based on a few difficult choices. The Mass Effect trilogy emphasizes how your decisions will affect the endgame. But none shares the audacity of Pokémon's forced choices. Those are games intended for adults who are used to critical thinking; Pokémon's for kids still working on that skill. Perhaps Japan's standards for maturity and critical thinking played into the design decision that granted ten-year-olds the responsibility of deciding what to do with a high-value item. Or maybe it was just a weakness of my own decision making skills at age ten.
In the anime, Pokémon’s main character selected his fighters with the phrase, “I choose you!” Pokémon Mastery was a series of choices. Good choices or bad, it didn’t matter. You either had a good payoff or a dire consequence. I defeated the Elite Four, the final bosses of the game, but even as the game credits rolled I didn't feel the game was done. Mewtwo was unconscious in a cave somewhere and not in my service. I had achieved victory, but no mastery.
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