Cloan Club Forums

We have forums for discussion of Pokemon, Nintendo and Science here.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

493 Pokemon?

493 is a lot of anything. To ask people to memorize 493 names, how they correlate with images and how those images match up with other images is rather outlandish, yet it is being done, and nobody seems to be bothered.

GameFreak has been coming out with one generation every four years with about 125 Pokemon each generation. These Pokemon evolve into new Pokemon, previously created Pokemon or neither. They also introduce more moves, items and game mechanics. Shouldn't they be running out of ideas?

Probably not. The human imagination can generate thousands of pictures in an instant. Even if Pokemon has a certain 'style', they could still do a lot with that. A pre-evolution here, an evolution there. You could make some new Pokemon easily.

Point is, the people that say the '493 Pokemon is too many!' are just being lazy. 493 is a fine number, and once it gets to 800 people can be talking.

5 comments:

  1. 493 is a bit much for little children. I feel it will scare away newcommers who will need to learn 500 plus pokemon to have a lot of fun with pokemon. Then they also need to learn the moves, items and everything else little children learn in school.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, they only do need to learn the 150 of the current generation. Which isn't even that much in terms of the evolution chains. If you can remember one, you can remember another one or two. And as for the other Pokemon, they are only for the dedicated veterans that continue their journeys past the standard game. Plus, do we really think some 4-year-old is gonna be a competitive battler?
    (500 a lot in english, try learning another 500 in japanese...)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Actually, I think that you guys undermine child intelligence. I can remember memorizing Little Bear when I was little. (But that was Little Bear.)

    So, I guess it depends on how much they WANT to learn.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I still think it will be a challenge.

    ReplyDelete
  5. There isn't a certain number of Pokémon that new fans NEED to know, though. If they don't want to bother learning them all and would just rather learn new ones as they're introduced to them, through the show or the games or whatever, then that works out just perfectly. No one's going to give anyone a "How Many Pokémon Do You Know?" quiz and say that they can't be a Pokémon fan because they didn't get a certain score on it.

    ReplyDelete