Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Pokemon Origins
One of the most overrated Pokemon things ever. Sure, it's a direct translation of Pokemon Red and Blue, but that's all it is. There's barely any meaningful character development or depth to be seen. Even the main show, for all its many flaws, makes you care about the Pokemon far more. Compare Mewtwo Strikes Back to Origins Mewtwo, for instance. Or Ash's Charizard (immediately bringing to mind the episode where Ash sticks around to heal it when it becomes frozen and it learns to obey him again) to Red's Charizard.
I could go on, but The Cave of Dragonflies already said everything I was thinking anyway.
PS: I would appreciate it if anyone contributing to this thread would read the linked review, since it is the core of my argument. It's hard to have a discussion when we're using different argumentative frameworks.
Comments
Is it really that overrated? I thought just about everyone's opinion was that it had some cool bits but was mostly underwhelming. (I never got around to watching it.)
There is a fairly vocal segment of the fanbase that treats it as the greatest accomplishment in Pokemon adaptations, especially when bringing up the original anime. Though backlash against the latter seems like one of the primary reasons many of those fans latch onto Origins. And of course Genwunners.
And I'm a Genwunner.
Well, to be fair, I recognize that RBY is flawed to heck and back, though it's also the generation that I'm personally most familiar with, so it was a nice Nostalgia trip.
Honestly, though, it was sort of a long and inefficient though imagination-inspiring and surprisingly faithful-to-the-games advertisement for mega-evolutions, which turned out to be really cheesy when it actually showed up anyway.
The best things about Pokémon Origins are:
* the remixes of the gen 1 music, and
* the fact that it got us to think about a game-faithful anime adaptation.
Now if only they had actually gone the whole way and made a game-faithful (flaws aside) series that followed Red's canonical journey and personal growth as a trainer, that would be the best thing ever since scyther-sliced bread.
It's the greatest Pokemon adaption in the world because you can hear Charmander scream for his life.
Pokemon Origins is infinitely better than the main Pokemon anime because it has a protagonist that's actually competent.
^The linked review already debunks that by pointing out that the battles come down to random commands more than anything.
@glennmagusharvey: Honestly, I thought the faithfulness actually worked against it by showing how shallow the original plot was in the first place. I always felt the point of a good Pokemon adaptation was to adapt what the player imagines, and none I've seen so far do it for me. The mainstream anime is formulaic and panders to children (especially since recently it has given big middle fingers to the older fans with the Black & White League and the new movie Mewtwo), Pokemon Adventures is more generic shonen than Pokemon (not as bad as Digimon Frontier to the first three seasons, but something like that), and I already mentioned Pokemon Origins. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon's stories are probably the closest to what I'd like to see in an adaptation, actually.
I watched just enough to check if pokémon cry things other than their names and is thus automatically better than the anime.
Which is ultimately meaningless since, unlike Ash, Red actually succeeds in his goals. So he's infinitely more competent in that he actually does eventually achieve what he said out to achieve.
I actually liked Digimon Frontier and I consider it better than 02. But that's another argument entirely.
@RedEyeAbyss. Also, competent doesn't mean what you think it means, it's not about most optimal attacks. It's about not releasing pokemon like a goddamn idiot.
"it's not about most optimal attacks"
I'd think that if I were watching a show based on a video game where the protagonist is my avatar, I'd like to imagine myself using the tactics I used playing said game. But we're clearly not seeing eye-to-eye on that subject.
Trust me, there's a lot I don't like about Ash, albeit for reasons other than his memetic loser status. But since he's become a major distraction from the thread's main point, I'll drop it for now.
The main point is, do you actually like Red as a character on his own merits?
The attacks you used playing that game, in 1996, when you(the intended audience) were about 10 years old or even less. You understood what optimal attack meant beyond:hits harder. I can't believe that.
And I can't properly answer your question for Red isn't a character in the same sense Ash is. The merits or demerits he has or doesn't have are based around the fact that he is a player avatar.
I guess that I never actually played a Pokemon game to completion until Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, so it wasn't meant for me (and I had the benefit of seeing Pokemon Stadium 2's tutorials). At that point, Pokemon Red and Blue were simply imbalanced games with terrible AI and trivial difficulty.
And I always felt that something should be able to stand on its own merits. If the point was that Red was an author avatar, it fails for me because I don't see myself in him and feel like he's only being dragged along by the plot.
I know it's not supposed to be high art, but it annoys me is that many of the arguments for Origins boil down to Gen I nostalgia or backlash against the original anime. I haven't seen much discussion about it on its own merits. Maybe I'm missing the point, but there was a huge dissonance between what I expected and what I got in the end. In all honesty, yes, I had more emotional involvement in the main show than I did Origins, which made the latter even more disappointing.
And I'm well aware that I'm merely one of many among Pokemon's notoriously splintered fanbase.
I think this is better than the original anime by default. Origins isn't anything special, but it's relatively efficient and self-contained in what it does. It's acceptable as an adaptation of an aged children's video game on the Gameboy. The Pokemon TV series is similar to Origins at its best, and spends plenty of time just being downright terrible. It had some good ideas, particularly in Team Rocket's Jesse and James moving between incompetent villainy and reluctant heroism, but it's been functionally dead for ages. Nothing of substance really ever changes in the ongoing TV series, so much of it merges into an amorphous blur where any part might as well be interchangable with others.
And before someone points out episode X or episode Y or whatever, keep in mind that the Pokemon TV series has been running for several hundred episodes. When it comes to narrative, an event is usually considered significant if it changes a character, the plot, or both. But we're pretty much at the same point we were at a dozen episodes in. There is no point or purpose to the TV series but to be expected companion media to new game releases. It's content without its own intrinsic purpose, which is why most people -- even people that still play Pokemon like myself -- ignore the show.
So that's why Origins is better. It moves and concludes. It doesn't do this in sophisticated or clever ways, it's not a work of truly remarkable quality and I doubt anyone except for First Generation players give much of a damn. It does have closure, though, and that closure brings some semblance of meaning to the content within. Personally, I wanted more from Origins, but that doesn't mean it didn't do what it set out to.