Thursday 27 February 2014

BREAKING NEWS: Pokémon Game Made for Youkai

Pokémon X and Y, released last year for the Nintendo 3DS, appear to have been engineered specifically for youkai. After all, it is only youkai, and possibly some other supernatural creatures, that can use some of the features present in these games.

It does sound quite strange, given that many of the creatures present in the games to be captured and trained are themselves based on youkai (such as Ninetales and Mawile). However, given that some of them are based upon humans, such as the martial artists Sawk and Throh, this is not as out of place as one might expect.

A prime example of a feature that requires the player to be a member of the supernatural is the 'Making Faces' game in Pokémon Amie. In this game, you must hold the 3DS such that your face is within view of the system's camera, and make the expression requested by your Pokémon. Many of these are simple enough, such as closing your eyes or tilting your head to the left or right, but some of the requests are difficult, or indeed outright impossible with normal human anatomy.

One example of an expression which is difficult for most humans to do sounds much more simple than it is; your faithful companion creature tells you to "Open your mouth!". However, most humans cannot open their mouths wide enough for the game to recognize without a few seconds of struggling at best.

There is also the issue of "Make a medium smile!" and "Make a huge smile!". As a player of this game myself, I can attest that only the small smile is likely to be possible to most players who are not some sort of supernatural entity. The large smile would presumably require highly different facial anatomy from what most of us have, or alternatively some sort of bizarre surgery, or the splitting of the sides of the mouth via butcher knife.

Another one of the games included in the Pokémon Amie feature is a puzzle, on which the player's scored is based off of how quickly they solve it. This puzzle has, as one possible mode, "Unlimited", meaning that the game will continue until the player fails to complete a puzzle under its time limit. It is impossible for the average human to get a five-star rating in this mode, unlike for the other games which have it. Certain Poké Puffs (treats which can be fed to Pokémon) can only be obtained via getting a five star rating on a game in Unlimited mode.

Most other things present in Pokémon X and Y are possible for humans. However, these ones do rather call into question what Game Freak's intended audience really is.