Text | Game Pizza, author | Chen Shoucheng, Editor | Zhou Yabo
Pokemon, Pokemon, Pokémon, before the official pokemon's Chinese translation name was determined as "Pokémon", these three names were from folk games Chinese, mainland translation animation series, and Taiwanese translation animation series, each of which is comparable to the voice volume of independent big IP.
In 1996, Pokémon Red & Green & Blue was released, and the first generation of the series eventually sold 31.38 million copies worldwide, a game genre that had never appeared before, conquering players around the world with its unique gameplay, setting off a decades-long wave of Pokémon.
In the past 26 years, the Pokémon game series has sold 20 works, of which 14 works have sold more than 10 million, and the sales of series works have ranked first in the global game IP. In addition to games, Pokémon has also made great achievements in the fields of animation, movies, and exchange cards, making its influence continue to expand, in various statistics, Pokémon is not only the "best selling" game IP, but also in the highest position in the list of IP gold absorption ability that has joined movies and comics.
However, in recent years, Nintendo subsidiary Game Freak (hereinafter referred to as GF), which has the world's first game IP, is recruiting players to question.
The biggest crime is "not thinking ahead." Technical lying flat has been ridiculed for years, and finally reached a climax after the cycle of the previous generation's Pokémon Sword & Shield. With rough modeling, fixed perspectives, and clichéd gameplay, players vented their dissatisfaction with the game on the Metascore score, which ended up averaging just 4.6/10. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary, Pokémon directly faced the replica of the Pokémon Pearl & Diamond released by the Society, and it was because of its almost unmodified copy, which caused a round of anger among players.
The biggest reason for GF to lie flat is that even so, Sword & Shield still sold 25 million copies, and Jane & Diamond sold 14 million copies, selling almost the original. Lying flat can still earn, and GF seems to have become the person who "doesn't want to stand up" in the mouth of the player.
But even with Pokémon, the consumption of IP will eventually have a focus. GF itself seems to be groping for some new directions, and in pokémon legend: Arzeus, which was released at the same time as Pokémon Jane & Diamond, the game finally made a bold innovation, abandoning fixed perspectives and process experiences, and moving towards an "open world" with more free gameplay. And its recently announced next-generation "orthodox sequel", Pokémon Zhu & Purple, will also continue to use the "open world" gameplay.
GF can swing badly, but only a little.
The birth of the world's first game IP
The protagonist of the first generation of Pokémon, and a name known to all players: Satoshi, is the in-game avatar of its game producer, Tomoru Tajiri.
The predecessor of game producer Tomoru Tajiri is the player Tomoru Tajiri. In 1978, the arcade game "Space Invaders" caught fire, and the 13-year-old Tomomochi Tajiri quickly fell in love with the game and became a master.
The love of the game allowed Tajiri, who was slightly autistic and did not look smart, to find his own field, and after falling in love with "Space Invaders", Tajiri also taught himself the basic programming language of the game at that time, basic programming language basics, and ported "Space Invaders" to the computer version, which caused a lot of repercussions at the time.
With the encouragement of his classmates, Tajiri founded Game Freak Game Magazine in 1983 and put all he knew and learned on the page. The first edition of the magazine was only 18 pages of content, but it received widespread praise. Through the game magazine, Tajiri indirectly recognized the president of Bandai Namco and many people in the game industry, and even participated in the writing and editing of the authoritative game magazine Famitsu.
But Tajiri, who has a fanatical pursuit of games, is not satisfied with long-term in the downstream of the game industry. In 1989, Tajiri founded a game development agency named after Game Freak to develop works for Bandai Namco, the first game successfully sold 250,000 copies, and received a 50 million yen prize from Bandai Namco, which boosted Tajiri's morale, and the company decided to continue to continue to study in depth in the field of game development.
That same year, Nintendo's Game Boy was introduced, which later sold 118 million copies worldwide. This also means that the games released on this console will have hundreds of millions of potential players. Tomoyuki Tajiri and GameFreak rightfully aimed at this emerging platform with the intention of developing new games for it.
A childhood entomologist who spent his childhood catching insects in the forest, Tomomoru Tajiri immediately combined his new game plan with his childhood dream, and a game defined as capturing "Pokémon" and exchanging battles was born.
Nintendo officials themselves were not optimistic about the project, but Gameboy's founder, Junpei Yokoi, and Shigeru Miyamoto, the founder of the Mario series, both supported Tomomo Tajiri in developing the game. But the project itself is huge, and Game Freak is extremely small and lacks financial support. In order to be able to successfully complete the game, Game Freak worked for Nintendo while working on the development work, maintaining and operating its games.
Six years later, in 1996, the original pokémon red & green & blue finally came out, this unprecedented work with its excellent gameplay quickly swept the world, for a time, everyone knew the protagonist of the game - Xiao Zhi, and his yellow rat - Pikachu. Pokémon, it's done.
In October of the same year, Pokémon launched a trading card game based on Pokémon combat gameplay, attacking niche players in the board game field. Just a year later, the Pokémon animation was born, and more non-players followed Xiao Zhi's travels in the TV animation, and also learned about the existence of Pokémon through this animation.
Since then, Pokémon has taken ip linkage gameplay to the extreme, and after 98 years, Nintendo even cooperated with Game Freak to establish a Pokémon company, specializing in the sale of Pokémon peripherals. Under the multiple combinations of cards, animations, and games, the influence of Pokémon IP is expanding and unbreakable, and it has begun to continue to shine on daily necessities such as toys and clothing. And this point, even Nintendo's housekeeping IP "Mario" series can not reach.
However, after the launch of Pokémon Gold & Silver and Pokémon Red Sapphire, Pokémon founder Tomoyuki Tajiri withdrew from the development of the game behind the scenes, and the future of GF entered the post-founder era.
From sticking to tradition to starting to mess up
Pokémon, which debuted at its peak, also added great obstacles to the latecomers to some extent.
With the IP operation that began very early, Pokémon has been fighting a rich battle from the beginning. Fast forward to the 21st century, and almost every pokémon can easily sell tens of millions of copies. In several works at the beginning of the 21st century, Pokémon also did its best to make a lot of breakthroughs in gameplay. In recent years, there have been a variety of gameplay such as super evolution, z moves, and extreme giantization.
Polarization
But in essence, the breakthrough in this gameplay did not really affect the core mechanics that Pokémon had set since the era of Tajiri: capture and battle.
Unlike the Mario series of platform jumping gameplay, you can design endless obstacles and breakthrough methods for the level, and even Zelda's puzzle gameplay, you can use endless puzzles to design mechanisms. Pokémon's game design, from the beginning, limited its gameplay to fixed mechanics, making it difficult to innovate and change the core.
On the basis of the improvement of this game, Pokémon has become the only player in this niche game, although there have been many challengers such as monster watches since then, but the game experience can not be compared with Pokémon, not to mention, the new IP, but there is no "Pikachu" that players have in mind. There were game mechanics in China that almost copied Pokémon's "Sail", but also because of its audience and payment mechanism problems eventually cooled down.
But because of this, Pokémon can't make major changes to its original core experience. Once there is a change in the core mechanism, it becomes less "Pokémon". Although GF has also launched other gameplay games such as Pokémon Battle and Pokémon Assemblage since then, it is more like an IP derivative attempt to break away from the main transmission, and has nothing to do with the audience of the main transmission.
Pokémon Assemblage
As a relatively more independent company, GameFreak has also tried to independently produce new IP and new games from Nintendo, launched "Monster Town" in 20 years, and released it on all platforms, but the results are not good, the number of online people is even dismal, and even ridiculed, "Away from Nintendo is a third-rate game company." ”
These problems are not prominent when Nintendo's host and picture quality have been iterating.
Just like when foreign AAA games move from high-definition to 4K, few people complain about its assembly line process, after all, the higher picture quality of each new work is enough to attract attention. However, when PS4 moves towards the PS5 era, although the picture quality has also improved, but the range of human perception by the naked eye is not large, many players have begun to complain about its immutable gameplay.
Pokémon is also like this, under the strong binding relationship with Nintendo, pokémon's picture quality is slightly upgraded and enhanced with the performance of Nintendo's console, from black and white to color, from 2D to 3D, while each game adds some innocuous new mechanics and new Pokémon to attract players. This toothpaste-squeezed innovation has maintained Pokémon's product line and met the expectations of players to a certain extent.
But when the Switch has not been updated for 5 years, Pokémon has no graphics innovation, the gameplay is almost the same, even the perspective is still fixed, and the extremely large design is not attractive enough, it is not surprising that "Pokémon Sword & Shield" has attracted bad reviews.
After all, the IP that was born at the same time as Pokémon, Mario and Zelda, can still bring players a new surprise based on the next-generation console, and pokémon's old-fashioned looks so dazzling and backward.
Towards an open world
The small company GF also understands that the consumption of IP cannot last long. On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, Pokémon unveiled its latest game, Pokémon Legend: Arzeus, and announced its move to a fully open world. However, when the game trailer was released, it was ridiculed along with the replica "Pokémon Pearl & Diamond", and the reasons for ridicule included the emptiness of the world, the monotony of the gameplay and so on.
But Pokémon's IP still played a role. After the release of "Arzeus" this year, it sold 6.5 million in its first week alone, setting a new record for the fastest and highest sales of the "Pokémon" series on the NS platform. The average score at Fami Pass is 38 (10/9/9/10) and the average score at Station M is 85.
In fact, once inside the game, it's easy to see that Pokémon Legends: Al Zeus isn't really an open world. The game is divided into the base camp area and the wilderness area of Zhuqing Village, and the movement from region to region also needs to be teleported, rather than seamless as open-world games like Zelda Legend: Breath of the Wilderness.
At the same time, the game also has a considerable degree of aliasing and graphics defects, which seems out of place in the current full HD game world, even compared with the same cartoon style, and released in 2017", "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild", there is also a big gap, careful observation of the ground, you can still see a lot of extremely rough and blurry textures. Purely in terms of picture quality, compared with the mobile game "Original God" despised by host players, it is also greatly inferior.
But Arzeus is not useless, and has learned a lot of experience in playing open worlds. Pokémon, which were only used for most of the previous game, can be used to interact with the elements of the large map using their own attributes and skills in Arzeus, and can be used to obtain resources, complete atlases, and so on.
Although its basic turn-based battle has not changed, GF has also optimized its gameplay, players can choose a variety of different modes to adjust the Pokémon's offensive rhythm, and at the same time, they can also make some moves during the battle, see the time to throw the poké ball and so on.
While this innovation is still not a complete change, Arzeus already offers a more novel game experience than the immutable Sword & Shield, and the sales data proves that players still buy it.
On February 27 this year, the 26th anniversary of Pokémon, GF also released its canonical sequel, Pokémon Zhu & Purple, indicating that it will continue to use the open world design, providing players with both a pure Pokémon combat experience and open world gameplay. It seems that GF has tasted the sweetness of the success of Arzeus.
In 2019, there was a "list of the world's most profitable IP", which included a variety of IP from movies to games to anime, and finally Pokémon won the first place with a value of $100 billion, which far exceeded Disney's Marvel series and even the spirit of Americans to "Star Wars".
Of the $100 billion in value share, Pokémon's game provides only more than $20 billion in revenue, and more than 70 billion in revenue comes from derivatives licensed by IP and so on.
As a small company with just 167 employees, GF has become the world's most profitable cash cow. It is no wonder that GF can enjoy the success of IP for four or five consecutive generations, and does not seek much understanding in game development.
However, even strongER IP can not afford to be consumed repeatedly. The sequel to the Star Wars series has been spat upon, and there is also a need to use "The Mandalorian" to save word of mouth. As strong as Pokémon, of course, it can't be put on all the time.