The Pokemon fandom is abuzz with excitement thanks to the new announcement of Pokemon Legends: Arceus. Suddenly, a trip to Sinnoh’s past has opened up a whole new world that gives players insight into the future of mainline Pokemon games. Building upon Sword and Shield’s Wild Areas while adopting an active catching mechanic, Legends clearly has a lot of new ideas that it wants to try out. The game is so different that it has even been described as an action-RPG, a concept new to the entire Pokemon franchise. However, none of them may be quite as revolutionary as its set of starter Pokemon.
In every Game Freak Pokemon title, players start as a young person who, through some sort of circumstance, is given the chance to select their first Pokemon and become a Pokemon trainer. Pokemon Legends: Arceus is not changing anything about that — but instead of picking from Sinnoh’s usual starters of Turtwig, Chimchar, and Piplup, players choose from Cyndaquil, Rowlet, or Oshawott. This is pulling from Pokemon Gold and Silver, Sun and Moon, and Black and White respectively, none of them matching up with the region they’re in. While this is explained in-game by a continent-hopping Pokemon professor, this may signal that starters could work very differently in future games.
Where marketing is concerned, starter Pokemon are the faces of their respective generations. Each player can only get one of them per save file, and they are typically strong enough to remain relevant throughout a game’s single-player portion. They are treated as very important, but what would happen if there were starter Pokemon from other regions available instead? Regions and Pokemon generations do not exist in a vacuum; most games since the third generation have offered past starters as a post-game bonus. It’s quite reasonable that they could show up in other regions.
The fact of the matter is that old starters could be used in place of new starters in future spin-off games. Any Pokemon title that is not focused on premiering a new region filled with all-new Pokemon can implement a random trio of starters from past games. This way, different fan favorites can cycle in and out of side games, enticing players to follow them (while hopefully obscuring the trend of Fire/Fighting starter evolutions). It also gives an excuse for there to be a generational mixture of Pokemon present in the wild, as well.
Speaking of which, while Pokemon Legends may not be offering Piplup as a starter option, it is letting players pick one up in the wild. In a surprise move, the game’s reveal trailer showed off two Piplups walking near a lake. This is technically not the first time starter Pokemon could be caught in the wild, as Pikachu was a starter back in Pokemon Yellow, every starter was present somewhere in Pokemon Let’s Go, and various starters could be found in Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon via Island Scan. This is still the first time that normal starter Pokemon can be caught in the wild normally in a normal Pokemon game, and that’s as big of a change as region-agnostic starters.
Starter Pokemon have always been set apart from normal Pokemon. Even in Pokemon X and Y where the player is given a Kanto starter after battling that game’s Pokemon professor, there is no other way to get the starters that have not been chosen besides trading and breeding. Starter Pokemon are almost always either Pokemon received at the start of the game, from trading, from special event codes, or from fulfilling an achievement in the postgame. Having random starters at the beginning and other starters casually wandering the field later on is a radical break in tradition, and Game Freak has everything to gain by leaning into this decision.
Future spinoffs could take this even further by using any multi-evolution Pokemon as starters. For a long time, older fans have been asking for a shake-up in the types they are presented with at the beginning of each Pokemon game. The prospect of having a Psychic, Ghost, or Dark-type Pokemon right from the get-go is immensely appealing to fans, so much so that those are the types presented at the beginning of the fan-game Pokemon Insurgence.
Future games could also expand beyond three starters. The Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series took this route, with the smallest starter roster being five Pokemon, and the largest as a whopping 19. These ideas may be too radical to ever be present in a mainline game, but even those may eventually introduce three new starters that don’t fully conform to the typical Fire-Water-Grass pattern.
There is also an option for future spin-offs to introduce regional forms for starters. These starters could be another grab bag of three different region’s starters, or they could be from the same region, but now seen in a completely different context. As has been seen with Alolan Raichu and some starter Mega Evolutions, Game Freak is quite willing to add new typings onto “important” Pokemon (even if Raichu has always played second fiddle to Pikachu and Pichu). The results may not hew very far from their usual types — a dual typing that adds an atypical type on top of the usual three is probably the way to go — but it would go a long way towards providing players different opportunities while they run through that game’s various challenges.
There are a lot of ways the idea of altered starter Pokemon could be explored in the future. Whether they be a set of starters plucked from several different regions, Pokemon that are not normally considered starters, or new variants of a group of starters that change them into different types, there are plenty of interesting paths spin-off games could choose. In addition, with a region’s “proper” starter Pokemon de-emphasized, they could be encountered and caught in the wild. This tiny change feels like a huge breath of fresh air in the 25-year old Pokemon franchise, and there is hope that its beginning in Pokemon Legends: Arceus can lead to plenty of great innovations in the future.
Pokemon Legends: Arceus is due out in early 2022 on the Nintendo Switch.
![\"IT電腦補習](\"http://itteacheritfreelance.hk/test/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/logo2-2.png\"){kind=logo}
www.itsec.hk
www.itsec.vip
www.itseceu.uk
Leave a Reply