My Life With Pokémon X And Y

I was around the age of six or seven when I first entered the world of Kanto in Pokémon Red, going against the grain and choosing Squirtle as my starter despite its evolution not featuring on the box. Over the months that followed, I found myself immersed in this world, full of fantastical creatures and incredibly deep, yet extremely accessible RPG elements.

Next came Silver, and with it one of my fondest gaming experiences – I was hooked for years, though never followed it up with Ruby or Sapphire. I returned to the series with Diamond, which I enjoyed, but a year later I was sinking hundreds of hours of my time into Platinum.

That was five years ago, and since then I’ve played a remake of Silver, Black and its sequel, but while they were fantastic games, they never resonated with me in the same way, on a personal level, as Platinum and the original Silver did, with my time being spent elsewhere.

You see, to me, Pokémon’s not just about the main story, but about what comes after that and my own, personal story – choosing my team, training them up to perfection and taking on my friends and the world in the process. While I’m not quite there with Pokémon X, having just completed the main story arc, it’s fresh enough – as Silver and Platinum were – to allow me to try to make time for it in my packed day-to-day life.

There are the obvious improvements, such as the beautifully rendered (though at times unstable) Stadium-esque 3D battling, or the newfound freedom that you have in the movement, along with some suitably epic cutscenes. I really feel as though the world of Kalos is expansive enough for me to spend hundreds of hours exploring, catching Pokémon and levelling up, even after the Elite Four and the champion are defeated.

But then again it’s much the same – I’m still going from town-to-town. Still fighting battles – be it single, double or triple or even online – and ultimately still hoping to achieve the same goals. It’s still got the heart and the soul that the series has always had, but the potential is much higher. This is fully realised, on new hardware and all the better for it.

And now there’s Mega Evolutions, a step beyond what’s possible for Pokémon strength. Yes, it totally unbalances some match-ups, and it isn’t really fair to use it unless you’ve agreed with your rival, but it’s probably the coolest thing to happen in Pokémon since Piloswine got an evolution, with plenty of creatures evolving into legendary beasts at the tap of a button.

It’s hard to explain the allure of Pokémon to anyone who’s an outsider, with many dismissing it as nostalgia. That’s certainly a factor, particularly in the top-down scenes of X and Y, but it’s more than that – it’s a genuine, persistent drive forwards, knowing that you’ll never complete this game, even if you do spend your time catching every single one of the 718 creatures now available.

Generation VI – that’s Pokémon X and Y – is probably the strongest yet. It might not feature the best collection of new creatures, but the storytelling and presentation has gone through somewhat of an evolution. I think, now that many of the fans are a bit more grown up, they explore some really interesting stuff that’s only been alluded to in previous games, and there are heavier tones in among what might seem like a light adventure to outsiders.

From the pattern I’ve seen, it’s only once every five or six years that a new Pokémon game comes along and becomes my favourite, but the wealth of improvements on the same, refined formula that X and Y brilliantly bring to the table is just what the series has needed – what I’ve needed – to find something worthy of putting literally days and weeks of my time into, spending hours breeding Pokémon and fighting specific foes in order to fine-tune my team to perfection. That’s something I haven’t done in a long time.

While I might never be a true Pokémon master due to my busy schedule, I think it’s finally time for me to at least try to catch ’em all. And maybe just the perfect time for you too.