posted: 2024-10-14
"It’s Been 11 Years…"
An Oral History of the Pokemon X & Y Pre-Release Season
The evening of October 12, 2024, my fiancee and I were chatting about Pokemon. We do this a lot; chatting about Pokemon is a cornerstone of our relationship at this point. In 2022, we (along with a couple other online friends) replayed the Generation 3 Hoenn Pokemon games, to much delight. Not that we've run out of things to discuss, but this was a fun conversation starter between us. It was a lovely chance to partake in a shared gaming experience in our own separate, yet parallel worlds. I would absolutely recommend doing something like this with your partner if they’re interested (but do it for yourselves, no need to make a podcast out of it). In any case, we were talking about Pokemon, and the evening’s topic had shifted towards Kalos.
I admit, I don’t have many positive memories of my first adventure through Kalos and more generally the sixth generation of Pokemon, but it didn’t start this way. The games released on an unseasonably cold autumn morning my sophomore year of High School. I had enough money from summer jobs and parental allowances that when the world-wide launch took place, I was there at my local Gamestop bright and early at 7 AM to pick up both versions of the new generation. Pokemon X would be my primary file, and I figured that at some point I would want to replay Pokemon Y, so I bought it as well. I don’t believe most people can laud their teenage self’s forward-thinking without a bead of a liar’s sweat running down the back of their neck, but I’m no liar. So I have to do the only thing I know how to here and congratulate myself on a job well done. “Thanks for thinking of me, fifteen year-old me. It’s just a shame that you didn’t do this for Heart Gold and Soul Silver instead”.
Pokemon X and Y were the first games to truly disappoint me, but then again, I don’t think they ever could have lived up to my expectations. I was a fiend for anything and everything related to Generation 5 Pokemon. My middle school mornings involved reading the newspaper, then going on the family computer to check serebii.net. I gobbled up every single CoroCoro magazine leak about how there were new protagonists and rivals. I devoured every episode Pokemon Sunday I could find on YouTube that showed the grainiest gameplay footage. Imagine the most annoying early teen Pokemon fan you know learning about how every single gym leader AND CHAMPION was back in a Battle Frontier-like facility. That was me. You're welcome.
A good CoroCoro leak was like Christmas morning
I didn't understand a single thing, but I could watch the new Pokemon footage which was enough.
This was my obsession. This was the height of my Pokemania.
And then it was January 8th, 2013 and this shit happened:
It was fucking OVER. I had literally just gotten off Winter Break, still trying to drum up focus in my third hour calculus class, and suddenly a tactical missile had launched out of nowhere and obliterated any kind of attention span I had cultivated. Again, it was fucking OVER. Who were these characters? Chespin? Fennekin? Froakie? And a world-wide launch! that was something I had dreamed of ever since I started following Pokemon releases back during Pokemon Platinum in 2008! Everyone was going to get the game at the same time! This would be the game that launched the thousand ships!
While my patterns of interest didn’t change, they were much more concentrated on any and all information leaks. I suppose it ages me to say this here in 2024, still in the wake of literally all of Game Freak’s data being leaked to the internet, but that was the reality of our situation here. Here is where I must admit, dear reader, that I frequented multiple image boards in this period of time specifically to read “the leaks” (I think my favorite had to be the one where someone tried to pass off Iggy from Stardust Crusaders as a wild Pokemon). Everyone knew the Pokebeach leaks: there was a new type: “Fairy”, and Sylveon was a Fairy-type evolution of Eevee. There was a new Pokemon named “Inkay” that evolved into “Malimar” by leveling up while the 3DS was held upside down, et cetera, et cetera.
I really believed this one for a while up until the Fairy type was revealed. It's fascinating to look at this list now.
These ones felt so real to me. I believed in Y bug. Shoutouts to Fake CoroCoro scans for sustaining me through my youth.
This is such a strange period of time to reflect upon. All of it is very clearly maintained in the annals of 2013 Pokemon Youtube, but it feels so distant at the same time. I was a time where someone could make a set of daily videos entirely speculating about what the hell Mega Evolution was, which Pokemon would have it, and what it might mean for the greater Pokemon universe. And when I speculating I literally mean, they’d make ten minute videos about a single screenshot. We were THIRSTY and we were willing to tongue-slather drink from even the rustiest faucet.
People seriously thought Sylveon would be a Bug type.
So I repeat, Pokemon X and Y were the first games to truly disappoint me, and it all started with the pre-release hype. It’s my own darn fault. So please, allow me to attempt to explain myself.
Why was I disappointed? One particular reason I can point to is that they revealed about 70% of the new Pokemon lines in the pre-release information! Of course, the Pokemon company kept their cards close to their chest when it came to the starter evolutions. Unova’s starters had leaked online months before Pokemon black and White were launched in Japan, and clearly the company’s MO was “do not let the starters leak under any circumstances”. That didn’t stop any even-moderately capable artist from making their own reditions of what they expected the final eevolutions to look like. If you could draw any kind of Pokemon-esque design in Ken Sugimori’s style, you could easily have a “new leak!!!!!!” on your hands.
I remember seeing these ones and REALLY hoping they were real.
So it’s the first few days of my sophomore year, I’m walking from my locker in the basement hallway of my high school, checking my LG Volt and I see this jackass:
It couldn’t be real. No, it just couldn’t. You’re telling me that Froakie evolves into this? It has to be fake. I mean, look at it. Where did Froakie’s bubbles go? The bubbles turned into a TONGUE?
Of course, we all know this lovable frog to be THE face of Generation 6 Pokemon. Greg Ninja.
These shitty early 2010s iPhone quality camera photos of gameplay screens kept coming in. Hawlucha was also discovered this way, much to my chagrin. I recall anonymous users complaining about how “Hawlucha [was] so obviously a fake, look at its crotch flaps! The number of wings it has doesn’t match! You’re fucking [insert ableist slur here] for believing this is real”.
There's a reason so many fake leak images look like this kind of photo.
Look at this shit! Just take a second picture you dipshit!
Chespin fans laughed at Greg Ninja, but of course, their time would come... after a smoke break, of course.
By the time the games were slowly actually leaking on the image boards, the only new Pokemon to be discovered were Klefki, Goomy, the evolutions for Doublade, Clauncher and Skrelp, and a few other missing evolutions. It was so bad dude, people were losing their minds that the one dude who had the game couldn’t find any new Pokemon, but instead was finding non-stop Kanto Pokemon. And if you thought it couldn’t get any worse, the leaker decided to take a smoke break instead of revealing what Chesnaught and Delphox looked like.
But the writing was on the wall. The leaked Pokedex was filling up with old Pokemon line after old Pokemon line. The rumors that had claimed that there would be more than 100 new Pokemon were being proven false by the hour: Kalos was only introducing an all-time low 87 new Pokemon. This after Unova’s 156 new Pokemon, people were furious. I was furious. “That’s it? That’s all the new Pokemon in Kalos?” It was like I had opened up all my birthday presents in the days leading up to my birthday and then wondered why I only had one to open on my actual birthday. But then again, “ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY SIX NEW POKEMON WERE MADE LAST GEN!”
Or maybe it was because there were so few new Pokemon. My teenage brain didn’t count Mega Evolutions as “new Pokemon”, and in my defense, why should have I? This was unprecedented; there had never been a fourth-stage evolution for any Pokemon. Sure there had been inter-generation evolution lines, but those stuck to the rules. They were retcons of sorts. This was completely different! “They’re not new Pokemon! They’re just souped-up old Pokemon! They don’t count!”.
Then again, I and every other average image board poster couldn’t fathom how much effort went into making 3D models for all now-721 Pokemon + Mega Evolutions + varying Pokemon formes + trainers, and everything else. The X and Y development process began right around the Pokemon Black and White launch as I understand it now, 11 years after X and Y’s launch. That was three years to make every single Pokemon and new Pokemon into 3D models, rig them properly and then still create a compelling video game alongside them.
Whatever the case may be, I couldn’t see the facts for what they were. I thought Game Freak was being lazy after constantly hitting home run and home run in Generation 5. Generation 6 felt lazy and unsatisfying. It felt like some sort of unspoken contract had been broken, and I had just pre-ordered both versions of these games. I had bought the ticket, and I was going to ride the ride, goddamnit.
These memories all came flooding back as my fiancee and I talked about the Kalos games over dinner. We proposed then that maybe it would be good to give them another shot. It had only been a little over a decade. It wasn’t until we had backed up any save files with my hacked 3DS and the “Checkpoint:” software and started up new save files that we realized it. The date was October 12, 2024. Pokemon X and Y launched worldwide on October 12, 2013.
I’m not a believer in fate, but I do believe in taking advantage of happy coincidences. So here I am, talking about what Pokemon X and Y mean to me as someone who has since grown up since last playing these games. ’m not making a podcast about this experience. I don’t plan to milk this for content beyond writing about what feels natural. I intend to chronicle some of my thoughts and experiences I have while on this playthrough in a type of column of sorts. This won’t be any kind of “so I caught a Pansear and named it Dragoon and it beat three Pokemon and also it beat viola’s entire team, wow nice job Dragoon!”, that’s not interesting to me. I want to write about everything else that comes with playing Pokemon Y. The experiences of a year presented through landscape. The process of playing these games amongst others. My high shcool days. I want to try and share what feels appropriate as I go. I can only hope that you might find these chronicles as interesting as I do.