Natalie Rambles About Pokémon X and Y

Because I apparently had 50 hours to burn on another side project…

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Part 0: Why I Replayed Pokémon X and Y

So, I should probably explain why I decided— now of all times— to go back and play Pokémon Y and what it means to be. To be fully honest, part of me wants to replay every Pokémon game in order to better gauge and assess it, as Pokémon games have so many factors going into them. The titles rely on surprises, remix familiar elements with each new entry, and offer so much experience customization that every playthrough has the capacity to be different. A different party alone can drastically change the ebb and flow of the game, for better or for worse.

This is especially true for a games Pokémon X and Y, my most played titles in the series. I put over 300 hours into Pokémon X between 2013 and 2014, loved the games immensely at the time, and was determined to scrape the games thoroughly. I amassed as complete of a Pokédex I could before Pokémon Bank rolled out to allow for easy transfer from the Generation V games to achieve a living dex. I played the games thoroughly, saw everything, collected everything, and developed a very close connected with these games. However, much of my time with them was admittedly spent engaging with its peripheral systems, doing a lot of grinding and farming, and hatching so many eggs that you’d think I was a shiny hunter. (Though, I did find a few shinies in my travels.)

I loved Pokémon X. (Almost as much as Pokémon-X, though that’s a topic for another day.) Yet, even at the time, I thought they had various weaknesses. Now, in a retrospect, there is much to criticize, analyze, and explain why certain things just do not work, because when things do not work, they just don’t work.

As for why I decided to replay this singular yet plural game now, a friend of mine who I’ll choose to refer to by Missy Scrumptious— if you know, you know— recently completed her latest playthrough of Pokémon X. She coyly mentioned that it only took her 16 hours to breeze on through it and, with some gentle nudging, I decided that was a sufficiently brief length to warrant a playthrough. …Except it took me 40 hours, basically my entire Labor Day weekend, just to clear the campaign, for reasons I will get to. But first, before I begin analyzing X and Y as a game, I need to analyze them as part of something a bit broader.

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Part 1: The Background of X and Y

Whenever I look back at the development of the Pokémon series throughout the 2000s, I am always flabbergasted at how few people and few resources were actually being put onto the games. I am sure that this was a personal decision by the developers, who wanted to carefully maintain the collective vision that launched the biggest multimedia empire of all time. This smaller approach led to various development delays and snafus/ as it takes time to design new mechanics, systems, and a hundred plus creatures to shake up the game and spur merchandising.

This is why it took an unprecedented three and a half years for them to make Gold and Silver (1999) for the blasted Game Boy. Why it took another three years to remake the underlying systems for Game Boy Advance with Ruby and Sapphire (2002). And why it took four years to make both Diamond and Pearl (2006) and Black and White (2010). The series was maturing, heading into a reasonable four year cycle, and spreading across human generations as the people who were six when Red and Green came out had matured into college students. They had a system that worked and, despite any allegations of Pokémon falling off, even their less successful titles still did damn well relative to their contemporaries. However, the highs of the GBA and DS development eras would need to shift as the series made the transition to Nintendo’s next handheld, the then upcoming 3DS.

Adapting a largely or spiritually 2D series into 3D is always a challenge for developers. It requires learning new disciplines, new tools, and even in the best of times, it’s a fraught process. With Pokémon, it was significantly harder due to the number of unique assets and animations would need to be created. This task was largely assigned to Creatures Inc, who had been planning for this transition for years, teasing players with the PokéPark series and Pokédex 3D applications, curbing some of the challenge via collaboration. Though, even when you have the assets, that does not necessarily make it easier to design a whole world.

As I said, this would be a challenge regardless of the context, but Game Freak was put into an unenviable position, with pressure coming from two places.

If hearsay, supposed leaks, and general community sentiment are anything to go by, the communal reception to Black and White was frostier than Game Freak and The Pokémon Company had intended. English forum dwellers were vocally displeased with the aesthetic, structure, and designs of Gen V. Rather than recognizing a niche as a niche, TPC allegedly used this as a point to pivot their production on the next game in the series, rushing into a new generation meant to appeal to a broader audience, because they did not yet know that the games would sell 11.5 million units worldwide. And if that is not enough units for any game to sell, I don’t know what to tell you.

This was an external pressure… but they also had clear internal pressure from Nintendo. The Nintendo Wii had failed to maintain its momentum after the Xbox 360 Kinect and PlayStation Move aped off of the casual motion controls appeal of the Wii, and developers were moving on from the system. The Wii U was still getting its kinks worked out before it would be released to much… infamy. And while Nintendo had the utmost confidence in the Nintendo 3DS, announced in summer 2010 and released in March 2011, the system failed to maintain its sales momentum due to a lack of games, in general. The 3DS was only saved from the three-hit combo of an $80 haircut, a new 3D Mario, and new Mario Kart. However, if they wanted the 3DS to be a true success, it would need a marquee Pokémon game, plain and simple.

I do not know this for a fact. But when viewing these two facts, it’s easy to extrapolate that Game Freak was only given three years to complete X and Y, and I need to stress the magnitude of the assignment presented before them. From autumn 2010 to October 2013, Game Freak had to achieve the following:

• Design a new Pokémon game meant to earn back old fans, appeal to existing ones, and appease diehard fans.
• Create a new engine, system, and development structure to develop a fully 3D game, rather than the semi-3D to 3D environments featured in prior entries.
• Incorporate the previously created models and animations produced by Creatures into a game. Expanding every Pokémon’s animations with expressions, emotional reactions, while of course implementing 700 bespoke attacks.
• Determine a visual style meant to optimize the power of the Nintendo 3DS, the 3D capabilities, and represent human character designs that were never modeled in 3D.
• Adopt a production pipeline to facilitate a simultaneous worldwide launch in seven languages, something never even thought possible back in the 2000s, where the Anglosphere had to wait six months for each new release.
• Incorporate brand new online features far in a way beyond anything attempted in prior games, while facilitating systems to allow for easy and seamless trade between players all around the world.

I could go on, but that is the gist. Knowing what I do about work, about making things, this sounds like a truly imposing request and I cannot imagine many studios saying yes to this, or be able to fulfill the totality of their vision with these restrictions. However, they were not really in a good position to argue or resist. So, they did it.

X and Y were announced in January 2013 as Nintendo’s way of re-building investor confidence, and it was a very successful reveal. It built up hype in spikes throughout 2013, bolstered by spoilers of postgame content and the new mega evolution feature. The connectivity of the international audience allowed hype to boil worldwide, and knowing everybody would get the game on the same day made this the most exciting Pokémon launch yet.

On October 12, 2013, Pokémon X and Y were released and were an immediate success. They moved over 4 million units during the launch weekend alone, eventually amassed 16.78 million sales, and were met with potent critical acclaim at the time. However, as time went on and people digested these games, criticisms began to percolate, as they always do. (We really need a better term for this Sonic/Zelda/Pokemon hype/disappointment/reappraisal cycle.)

In a certain sense, the games seemed unfinished. Many story beats were underdeveloped. Areas were not fleshed out as much as they should have been. There was a suspicious gap in the south of the regional map, similar to the southwest section of the original Unova map that was only developed in Black 2 and White 2. And… the games were in 3D and called X and Y. Clearly there had to be a Pokémon Z in the works, and… there was.

While previous reporting ultimately concluded that Pokémon Z might have been planned but never entered development, that was before the great Teraleak of October 2024. During this act of phishing and theft, a great number of files stored on Game Freak’s servers were scattered across the internet. Game prototypes, beta builds, production materials, and many, many details on various Pokémon games. Enthusiasts will likely be pouring over these details for years, and one of the more recent findings was that Pokémon Z was indeed in development. …For a little over a month. Development began before X and Y were released, but was quickly put aside after the decision was made to remake Ruby and Sapphire as 2014’s Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire.

Even with this delay, Game Freak could have resumed development Pokémon Z some time later. After all, Emerald was released a couple months after FireRed and LeafGreen. However, Game Freak ultimately chose not to pursue this idea, likely for logistical reasons. The Gear Project was an attempt for Game Freak to make more unique games, and while every title was small in scale, they were eating up dev time and resources. Yo-Kai Watch was dominating in Japan, where it overtook Pokémon in some time by some metrics. The coveted 20th anniversary was looming around the corner. And Nintendo needed something to prop up the 3DS while they switched over to the, uh, Switch. So Game Freak TPC, and Nintendo wanted to get out a new generational title that could compete with Yo-Kai Watch.

This would take the form of 2016’s Sun and Moon. A title that, among other things, served as a ‘dumping ground’ for various ideas clearly planned for Pokémon Z. The Ash-Greninja distribution. The 100 Zygarde cells to collect across the map. Hell, I’m convinced that even the Z-Moves had to have been planned for Pokémon Z at some point, because they’re called freaking Z-Moves. And wouldn’t that have been just a wonderful way to balance out Megas within their debut generation?

Regardless, the lack of a Pokémon Z has earned X and Y the reputation as the ‘least finished’ mainline game in the series. Titles that were in need of polish, revisions, and alterations to realize the true vision of the developers, or clean up their rough edges. And having gone through Pokémon Y… I can say that some of those edges are not just rough, but sharp.

That is not to say the games are bad. In certain respects, I think they are excellent. Many things they did proved to be revolutionary for the series. And I think both aspects ought to be acknowledged. …Starting with what is probably the weakest aspect of X and Y, the story.

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Part 2: The Story of X and Y

The core mission of X and Y is to simplify, streamline, and ease the Pokémon journey as much as possible. To remove the friction that lurked in prior games and deliver something that can be effortlessly enjoyed from people ages 5 to 35. And to get people out and about on a journey that feels both new and old depending on one’s age group and experience with the series.

To accomplish this narratively, X and Y attempt to make this more of a group oriented story. The protagonist is the new kid in a small town and is immediately recruited by a quirky gaggle of tweens/teens, all with their own goals and dreams, who rope them along on a cross-country journey throughout the beautiful Kalos. They hand them their starter within five minutes, immediately thrust them into battle, before telling them to get up and get out there, as there’s adventuring to do!

Broadly speaking, I think this is an excellent idea. Pokémon’s foundational and fundamental principle is the power of connections, the power of bonds. I believe one of the best ways to represent this is to make the game about a bunch of friends going on an adventure together, fulfilling aligned yet different goals, while reuniting and clashing periodically. This has been a persistent idea across most of the series, and was taken to a new level with the release of Black and White, routinely featuring run-ins with Cheren, Bianca, and N. So, it makes sense for Game Freak to double down on this concept, taking it to a further extreme.

The problem with this approach is that the friend characters are bad. They are one note, not interesting, not well-defined as characters, and are generally not fun to be around. They appear sporadically yet consistently, and contribute little more than trite tasks and mundane comments. Aside from the standard rival, Xavier or Yvonne Calem or Serena, they barely battle you or battle alongside you. And when they do engage the player in the primary mechanic of battle, they have paltry teams— virtually indistinguishable from any random trainer. For as much as people may harp on the rival battles from Black and White, it cleanly interwove themes, mechanics, and characters in a straightforward manner while delivering speed bumps of challenge.

The context around these characters is also different. In X and Y, the protagonist has recently moved to Kalos and is immediately recruited on a nation-spanning adventure. Pokémon protagonists typically fall into one of these two camps. The new kid or the homebody venturing out with a childhood friend, and if you want to make a story about character bonds, you want to pursue the latter. The X and Y ‘friends’ are also notably pushy around the protagonist, insisting that they provide them with a nickname right after meeting them— which is not how nicknames work— and urge the protagonist to follow along before running ahead of them. It feels less like the player is given the opportunity to develop bonds with these characters and more like these characters are imposed upon the player. Characters who drag the protagonist along to play in their travel game, their way, without really caring too much about their agency, while also fawning over them whenever they do… anything.

This lack of chemistry, of involvement, of depth, all could have been addressed through rewrites, more scripting opportunities, and by having characters be more than what they ultimately are. Basic things like having a photo op with all the characters, rather than have them function as solo-only ventures. Have more regularly distributed battles with all of them. Give every character a team composition that they build towards using this massive regional Pokédex. Make them more aware and invested in the world, feeling less like hangers on and emphasize their own triumphs. Have them offer more useful advice or goodies relevant to their character so the player likes them.

If Tierno is really into Pokémon moves, have him give the player TMs like Acrobatics or Swords Dance, rather than assigning them to shops or random NPCs. Have Trevor offer tips on rare Pokémon in a given route and how to catch them. Have him give the player False Swipe, emphasize using moves like Thunder Wave to paralyze them, tell them about the repel trick, or abilities like magnet pull to manipulate encounter rates. Shauna… can encourage players to explore more, make memories that way, and use the online feature to spice up her experience, as I think Wonder Trade is meant to be canon. Heck, make her the person to give the player O-Powers instead of some weird dude in a pink suit who could easily be missed if you are beelining the game. So many things could have been done here, but they just weren’t.

This does not necessarily make for a bad story, but the beyond these happy-go-lucky hangers-on, the story… well, I don’t think it respects itself.

This is a more pointed criticism that may require some unpacking. But if you were to make a parody storyline for a Pokémon game, you would basically make Pokémon X and Y. Annoying side characters who get in your way like flying pests. Gym leaders who basically just exist as bosses rather than characters, barring one— and only one. And a cartoonishly evil team with a nonsense plan that involves destroying the world under the guise of some attempt at philosophy.

Team Flare is, so far, Game Freak’s last attempt at creating a ‘traditional evil team.’ Team Skull, Team Yell, Team Star are just a bunch of hooligans. The Aether Foundation and Macro Cosmos are just puppet organizations ran by selfish billionaires. While Team Flare is a group of flashy members of a death cult who believe that the world is ugly, corrupt, and must be cleansed by any means necessary. They assign themselves as the Chosen People, the only ones who should be allowed to survive the apocalypse they intend on ushering in… using an ancient genocide laser.

Their leader, Lysandre, is a transparently evil man who believes himself to be the only one with the right to determine the future of the world. But rather than pull a Cryus and want to create a new world for himself, Lysandre just wants to destroy everything. Why? …Because it’s no longer beautiful, or its beauty is fading, and that’s just so terrible that nothing should live. No humans (except for the ones who gave him money), and no Pokémon either. His character is not unworkable. A man utterly disillusioned and embittered by humanity who believes in nihilism, that nothing should exist, that existence itself is wrong. Heck, I wrote a character like that with Nari in Psycho Bullet Festival 2222. But in execution? In the game that I played? No. This does not work.

My idea for how to make Lysandre work is actually pretty simple. Have him be someone who believes in the legend the story is built around— an ancient weapon that kills oodles in exchange for immortality— and have him want to achieve both of those things. He is obsessed with beauty, with youth, with preserving the things he selfishly values, and believes the world is not worth saving. So, have him want to destroy the world, kill almost everybody… while granting immortality, eternal beauty, to himself and his allies. It’s so obvious that I feel like I am missing something in saying this, but I read every word of his dialogue and while this might sound like his plan, it is not his plan.

Right there, you have a more compelling thematic core. The game would become something against selfishness, hoarding resources, and misanthropically rejecting the world for being wrong. You could have a story espousing the virtues of reaching out of one’s orbit, making bonds, experiencing the world, and interacting with others. Something that is greatly emphasized through the game’s broader mechanics. It is a pertinent idea to give to children at… any point in history, and something that a lot of adults choose to forget.

Those are my two big criticisms with the story— and the two pillars of this game’s plot beyond some flaky lore— yet it’s not just what the story is, but how it’s told. X and Y dole out their story in forgettable fragments that pop up, introduce plot points, and then hide away for what may be several hours. Characters just show up and appear, offering some brief exposition or insights. There is a holographic cell phone that the player cannot use to call people, but sporadically spews out exposition whenever the player meets a certain threshold.

The game developers gave themselves a lot of options to tell their story, yet they did not put in the time or effort to take advantage of these tools, make it something that feels purposeful or meaningful. Such as when the game tells the player things, has them run into their supposed friends it feels either random or like some allusion to a prior game.

The run-in with Team Flare in a cave where the player finds fossils they can revive is a clear analog to Mr. Moon in Kanto. The 3D remake of Viridian Forest to serve as the first place where the player is expected to catch oodles of Pokémon. The truly arbitrary news broadcast that happens immediately after clearing the seventh gym to head to Team Flare’s secret lair. There is a mirror to the legendary encounters in the Hoenn and Sinnoh games, but with none of the tension or forewarning. You fought those gym leaders to get the skills needed to pursue the bad guys. There was tension and a need to keep the pressure up.

The story does not feel cohesive, complete, and comes across more as a loose rough draft, half-edited, and then shipped off to be translated and implemented. Not because something went wrong, but because, with the schedule they had been given, there was probably no time for another draft.

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Part 3: The Pacing of X and Y

Another goal of Pokémon X and Y, as a new next gen Pokémon experience, was to offer players the largest selection of Pokémon available in any game leading up to this. They wanted to turn every route into a scattering of opportunities to build one’s team, swap members out, and level them up using he game’s new passive party-wide EXP Share. A quality of life feature that made the act of leveling up trivially easy compared to the old times. The goal was to create a breezy, freeform experience, and this would go on to influence the structure of every other marquee game in the series.

Personally, I think this was a marvelous idea. So many prior regions suffered from an abundance of specific Pokémon, but with a Pokédex exceeding 450 critters, that is not a problem. The developers eagerly bombard the player with new opportunities, new pursuits, and new companions to be. I love the variety… but this system is not always the best at emphasizing this variety.

Due to the way the friend characters act, show up, and prompt the player, there is a persistent push for the player to go straight, and not really engage with the variety of Pokémon present in a given route. This, by extension, makes it incredibly easy for the player to just miss entire lines of Pokémon, as it is not uncommon for them to only be featured in a single route. And when they are, they likely are only available at a paltry rate like 10%. This creates an awkward push-pull for the player where they may want to get certain Pokémon but not want to dredge through every area to see what it has to offer, look up the location on the PokéDex, or just explore in general, because they are going to get other, higher level, Pokémon if they keep on going.

Bad distribution has been a persistent problem with the series— a flaw based in the random encounter system within a creature collector genre framework. But with up to three times as many available Pokémon as prior games, it really feels like dumb luck if the player will even find major new Pokémon released as part of this game. Just going by my latest playthrough, where I tried to minimize exploration yet collect every immediately accessible item in every route, there are a bunch of wild Pokémon I just never saw. Espurr, Honedge, Swirlix, Binacle, Skrelp, Hawlucha, Dedenne, Phantump, or Noibat. Which represents a decent chunk of the new Pokémon added to the roster. Hell, I don’t even want to count the number of non-Kalos Pokémon I simply didn’t encounter. I would complain, but between DexNav in ORAS and the eventual introduction of roaming Pokémon in subsequent titles, this is a largely solved problem.

Trying to get everything in X and Y is a frustrating experience, as it often is in Pokémon games, for some reason. But I would say it manages to consistently give players new toys to play with, and new places to explore. Which is, of course, in addition to opportunities to battle trainers who, with few exceptions, never have more than three Pokémon per team, keeping battles fast and breezy. Breezy really is the operative word when describing much of X and Y‘s design. It was clearly one of its central design goals. And given how many people can, and have, beaten this game in a trim sub-20 hours, I would say the game succeeds in that regard. Though the path it takes in providing this breezy experience is often less… sensible.

Now, there is no truly standard structure in how to make a typical/traditional Pokémon game. …Especially since the series left linearity behind to become an open world affair in response to fan demands. However, just the way the game is structured makes for an uneven play experience where stuff just kind of happens and you take what you can get.

The lead up to the first gym is designed to be about as expedient as possible. The player is rushed to grab their starter and is sent down two linear routes, and a recreation of Viridian Forest, where they can snag a couple new Pokémon, get some levels, fight some trainers, and get to grips with the new presentation, or mechanics at large. The variety of wild Pokémon is good, not overwhelming, and with ready access to Poké Balls and healing in the Viridian Forest recreation, the player can make mistakes, make a few indulgences, and even venture off into a side area to the route of the first real town to grab more wild encounters and fight more trainers. It works, could realistically be cleared in an hour of focused play, yet could take a dedicated player twice as long. My only criticism I have is that… you can’t leave the gym once you enter it, which is a bit strange for a game so focused on catering to the player.

Following this, the trek to the second gym is a lot. There are six routes, three dungeon/cave areas with their gimmicks, and three intermediary towns. The gym leaders’ Pokémon jump from a high of level 12 to level 25, going from the weakest first gym (not counting GSE‘s Falkner) to the strongest second gym. I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say the player can encounter upwards of 40 Pokémon families during this voyage. And immediately after the second gym, the player is given the reworked EXP Share, enabling the player’s party to receive an additional 250% experience from every battle.

It’s dense gap in the gym-based structure of most games in the series. The new encounters and trainers the player battles provide a glutton of EXP. If the player is going through things as intended, as incentivized, they will probably accumulate well beyond 13 levels for their party. But that’s somehow not the oddest part of the game’s design during this stretch. It’s the fact it just spoils the player with powerful gift Pokémon.

Now, I know why it does this. To keep players invested, give them powerful toys to play with, familiar faces to see in stunning three dimensions, but the potency of indulgences needs to be emphasized.

• The regional professor gives the player a Kanto starter along with a mega stone— effectively a Pokémon good and powerful enough to trounce through much of the game.
• A short while later, the player is forced to encounter a level 15 Snorlax, a Pokémon with a staggering 540 BST, easily the strongest Pokémon up until that point. The hardest part is catching it, but the game already handed you a False Swipe TM and an ultra ball, so odds are in your favor.
• With the introduction of rock smash and a cave full of rocks to be smashed, the player has a good chance of getting old amber that can be used to obtain a level 20 Aerodactyl. A viable Pokémon with 515 BST, mostly distributed to its speed and attack, and if the player talks to another scientist in the same building, they can get Aerodactyl’s mega stone.
• Then, right before the second gym, the player can trade a Luvdisc, a 100% encounter with their recently received old rod, for a Steelix. A slow reliable wall with one of the highest defense stats of any Pokémon, ever, and a steel/ground typing that is ideal for the upcoming rock-type gym. (Admittedly, its only super-effective move is Gyro Ball, and the player probably didn’t have the cash to buy the Bulldoze TM at Lumiose City, but even with rock smash, this thing would be a wall.)

The break between gyms two and three is brisk by comparison— two routes, a small set piece town, and another cave, arguably the first real cave. All of which are lousy with psychic and flying Pokémon that are appropriate, and appreciated, for the upcoming fighting type gym. The bump in level is a bit steep, going from level 25 to a level 32 ace Hawlucha with a 100 base power signature STAB move, buffing support moves, and a frightening 92 attack and 118 speed stats. …But I think the idea is to just eat a hit and deal a Psybeam or Arial Ace or two to win.

Afterward, the player is given another gushing wave of goodies to keep them engaged.

• A level 32 Lucario with a mega stone.
• The mega ring to enable mega evolution on the small collection of applicable Pokémon before postgame.
• The HM for Surf that, unlike the previously distributed TM for Return and Strength, is a consistently useful move that players would want in their roster. A
• A level 30 Lapras— a 535 BST wall of a Pokémon, with a quality STAB move, body slam for good measure, and it will learn ice beam in two levels.

This is the last big gift of power in the game, but when taking all these factors together, the game just kind of hands the player a viable endgame team. Charizard or Venusaur, Aerodactyl, Snorlax, Steelix, Lucario, and Lapras is not an ideal team, and a bit slow, but it has enough coverage and raw power that you’re pretty much good on all fronts.

Leading into the fourth gym, the game only has a single route and… Azure Bay. It’s effectively a water route, and pretty much the only dedicated water route in the game— Kalos does not have enough water, 7.8/10. It’s a fine section where the player can snag the coveted leftovers, find the TM for X-Scissor, before sheclepping off to the grass gym, where the leader’s ace is only at level 34. It’s not a challenge, but I would like to note that there are no readily available wild Pokémon to help the player aside from a Chatot or a rare Heracross/Pinsir. And while the game does give the player a great boon with the TM for Acrobatics, a 55 or 110 base power flying move, that is only available via an NPC that hands out one of four randomized TMs each day. …For some reason.

Gym four is followed by a desert route full of ground type Pokémon like Dugtrio, Trapinch, and Gible. This is prior to a brief poison and dark oriented gauntlet against Team Flare, based in the highly underdeveloped Kalos Power Plant. After defeating these eyeless mooks, the player then returns to the main hub that is Lumiose City before fighting an electric gym leader with a team that caps at level 37. It’s a firmly balanced experience, though that may be due, in part, to how it’s largely just another straight line from points A to B.

Speaking of straight lines, there is one single route separating gyms 5 and 6, along with boost to a level 42 gym leader. Why a five level boost instead of two or three? I dunno! I don’t understand the rules here! This sixth gym is notable for being the first fairy gym in the series, where it distinguishes itself by being a glorified redux of a psychic gym from the Kanto games, and doing a fairly poor job of introducing its debut type. Fairy is a good type, arguably too good, and this is a new player’s first major interaction with it, requiring them to combat it. Fairy is weak to poison and steel, which is simple enough to recognize, and the game has a bevy of poison types, including three in the route leading up to this game and Tentacools… everywhere else.

However, X and Y are comparatively sparse with steel type Pokémon, choosing to make them the rarest type in the entire game. Members of this type are not readily available at this point beyond the easy to miss Honedge, Mawile, and Ferroseed encounters, all of which happened before the third gym. And steel moves are similarly reserved, as the only TM available at this point would be the situational Gyro Ball. Yes, yes, players would have a Steelix and Lucario if they are playing the game as designed, but that’s a bizarre workaround. …Or maybe they could have placed this gym after the next area, where players can find wild Klefkei, Pawniard, and Magnetons.

The trek to the seventh gym is a longer one, spread across three routes, three dungeons, and two drastic changes in scenery. It starts with the player venturing through rustic fields locked in an autumnal bliss, has then detour into icy tundra, and ends in a temperate seaside town. Presumably because the developers realized they haven’t given players enough ice types. This all culminates in a battle against a psychic type gym leader whose team caps out at… level 47. Yep, another five level boost.

Though, I will give the game kudos for trying to provide the player with useful encounters in the preceding areas. You have aforementioned Pawniard, Phantump, Pumpkaboo, Drapion, Murkrow, Mightyena/Liepard, and an unevolvable Sneasel. Not a great selection if you abide by level caps or don’t have anybody to trade with. And the fact that they didn’t throw in any bug Pokémon before this is just strange. They could have added Scyther, Durant, or had a repeat of Pinsir/Heracross. But this is the endgame and a diligent player should have already snagged TMs for X-Scissor, Dark Pulse, and Shadow Claw. So I guess this is fine.

After the seventh gym, the game proceeds to give the player the workaround leading up to the eighth gym. The final conflict with Team Flare plays out— spread across two disconnected secret bases, because one would not be enough. And then the player is sent through a glorified victory lap that eats up three routes, a purely optional dungeon, an intermediary town, and a big field of stuff. After which, they fend off against an ice-type gym leader who can be easily trounced with basically anything from the first of the three routes. His Pokémon cap out at level 59, a full twelve levels above the seventh gym leader, but the game has enough EXP and optional battles to help the player over that wild jump.

Following all of this, the game finally lets the player rush off through one last route before going through the semi-elaborate Victory Road dungeon, leading into the requisite Pokémon League. Something that is a notable boost in difficulty for a game that has refrained from giving the overwhelming majority of trainers more than three Pokémon, and sees the champion’s signature Pokémon jump ahead nine levels to level 68. Which… is a higher level than Cynthia, but at least it’s not a 17 level jump. So… progress!

There are parts of this game’s structure that work just fine, that make sense, but writing it all out, it just does not add up from a game design perspective. It often sticks to a rigid and established formula that has had over a decade and a half of iteration, frequently does exactly what it should be doing. But then it elongates a section, contracts others, or just forgets the golden rule about Pokémon distribution and gym encounters. And to keep everything from breaking, to keep the player from encountering too much friction, it placates players with a deluge of early gifts so they can chew through the rest of the game.

I can only speculate, but this is probably the result of a truncated development, fast rewrites, and the developers trying to stitch ideas together and use whatever assets were available, balance and geography be damned. The structure, progression, and pacing all feel arbitrary as a result of this scrambled approach to development, and while it’s functional, that’s not saying much.

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Part 4: The Online Features of X and Y

Pokémon has always been a social game series. Dating back to the prolonged development of the first games, the developers wanted people to battle, trade, and talk about Pokémon together, to share secrets, and to use it to foster relationships. Whether they be as two strangers on parallel journeys enjoying a momentary connection, or people using a mutual love to spur a lifelong friendship. This is something the series has tried to represent across all entries, tried to facilitate with its mechanics, and it worked, at least for the most part. However, at the risk of delivering a controversial opinion, I do not think the series can or will ever achieve this as well as they did with Pokémon X and Y.

Building off of the C-Gear in the Gen V games, X and Y introduced the Player Search System, a means of easily connecting and interacting with other players. Whether they be online acquaintances, passersby, or friends they accumulate on a system level, all filling up the bottom screen whenever the player is outside of story events and battles. While it sounds fairly simple, this feature did a wonderful job of making the player feel like they are not alone. That they are sharing a journey with dozens, hundreds, millions of people across the entire world.

I have vivid memories of delighting as the bottom screen filled with faces both new and old. I loved sending out O-Powers to people every few minutes, just because it felt good to give people stat buffs, extra prize money, or an EXP multiplier. And Wonder Trade was a rousingly fun experience of offloading surplus Pokémon just to see what you would get instead. Sometimes it would be some boring early game bug, sometimes a Lairon with a subpar nature, other times you could get extra lucky and snag a totally legit shiny mythical Pokemon.

The ability to seamlessly trade Pokémon anywhere, rather than using a designated GTS station or location in a Pokémon Center made online a persistent and critical part of the game’s experience. And everybody on your friends list, everybody you pass by, would be right there, where you could ask them to trade, battle, or just give them a little shout-out for good fun.

There was no animosity, no drama, no grieving, as everybody was trying to have fun in this bold new 3D world. Between off-platform trade details, Friend Safari code trading, and shared stories across language barriers, it truly felt like the Pokémon community at large was relishing in this new ability to be ‘social.’ While I never made any proper friends through these means myself, I still loved being part of something this big, and something that just worked. It was distracting, like everything else, and made the criticisms I had about the story and structure kind of tertiary. I’d imagine that most people were taking their sweet-ass time with this game at launch and just happy to have this surplus of things to do, stuff to uncover.

And not to bleed into ORAS, but the sharing of secret bases online made for one of the best ways to communicate with players and add user generated content in pretty much any game I have ever seen. To all of those people who filled their bases with trainers using level 100 Blisseys who held toxic orbs and only knew healing wish, you are some of the greatest people in the history of online gaming. I genuinely believe that PSS represented a high that Pokémon has never, and could never, achieve nowadays. Between the Wonder Plaza, the Wild Area, or whatever Scarlet and Violet were attempting, PSS stands out as something simple, seamless, and built upon kindness above all.

Which is why it is so unfortunate that PSS has already faded into the realm of collective memory as not everybody played these games during their peak, and these features only half function nowadays. But even if they did, it would not be the same. This system was designed under the idea of there always being at least 10,000 consecutive players, and that is simply impossible to achieve in 2025. I love that it’s still possible, that two people with 3DSes can still do most of the things they could in 2013, but there’s something to be said about platforms baking in features that they know will be killed and how, when revisiting games like this, the experience truly cannot be the same as it was back in the day.

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Part 5: The Grind of X and Y

While PSS was the primary bottom screen feature outside of combat in Pokémon X and Y, it was paired with two other new sub-modes.

The first was Super Training, a method of Effort Value training that took the abstract manipulation of a limited number of passive stat buffing values and turned it into a basic shooting minigame. One about shooting footballs at giant Pokémon balloons, where power depends on a Pokémon’s total amount of invested EVs, and the rewards are training bags. Items containing EVs that are used by mashing the touch screen until a Pokémon can destroy a training bag. It is a passable side mode, not particularly developed or fun, but a form of loose action gameplay that is arguably more stimulating than farming for EVs by fighting specific Pokémon. I mean, you could get 12 or 24 EVs in a minute or two, which is positively speedy compared to certain games.

While EV manipulation was made easier with the introduction of the “power items” in Diamond and Pearl, those were postgame unlockables that were very easy to ignore. …And up through ORAS, these tools only increased 4 EVs with each defeated Pokémon, rather than the 8 EVs gained in modern titles. Super Training is available pretty much as soon as you get Poké Balls, and is simply more efficient than finding a Pokémon, battling them, and raising EVs that way. But I would say it occupies an uncomfortable middle ground in terms of ‘player efficiency.’

An example of low efficiency would be the old and hard Gen III method of EV farming— fighting 50 of the same Pokémon just to raise one stat— was some freak stuff for psychos and obsessives. It took too long, was really boring, and could easily be dismissed even if it was optimal, as the fun factor was so low compared to the mechanical benefit received.

An example of high efficiency would be the Hyper Training in Scarlet and Violet— a process of maxxing out the Individual Values for any given Pokemon. Players just pay a random generic NPC to make their Pokémon stats better. Not fun per se, but it has all the friction of tapping a credit card onto a card reader, and whatever money-making activities the player could do would be more stimulating than fighting the same wild Pokémon ad nauseam.

Super Training lands in the middle of these two extremes, as the minigames you play are always the same, give a reliable amount of EVs with each clear, and the benefit of 24 EVs is not insubstantial. Those boosts do equate to higher stats. Even tapping the bottom screen 50 times to get 12 EVs is less mentally taxxing than farming wild encounters. But Super Training also kind of sucks. The gameplay has nothing to do with the rest of the game. It is repetitive as all hell.

The act of accumulating points is bogged down by repeated fanfare you cannot disable. And while you get a reward for it, the inherent pointlessness of the work makes you wonder why it even exists at all. Why doesn’t the game just let me manipulate a slider to add or subtract stat points? …But, circa 2013, it was by far the most efficient way to grind EVs, so can it really be that bad?

Stuff like this drives me nuts, draws me in, and tricks me into spending time doing blasé crap work rather than focus on the journey at hand. It tricks me into thinking that this is an efficient means of play, when… no, it just isn’t. It’s just better to just pursue levels and not care about perfecting a Pokemon. But it doesn’t feel like it!

Moving past Super Training, the bottom screen is also dedicated to Pokémon-Amie, a new innovation that did wonders to sell these 3D models. You could interact with them, pet them, give them cupcakes, and toy around with them, all in dazzling 3D. Doing so raises a new stat known as affection, which confers numerous benefits to the player’s party. At level 2, they get 20% more experience, for better or for worse. At level 3, they gain the ability to occassionally survive attacks that would normally cause them to faint. At level 4, they gain the ability to shake off status conditions 20% of the time. At level 4.5, they can just dodge attacks 10% of the time. And at level 5, their critical hit rate goes up from 6.25% to 12.5%.

These are BONKERS buffs that were eventually folded into the friendship stat, but in X and Y, you get these buffs by continuing to pet and feed Pokémon over and over again. But you do not have an infinite number of cupcakes or pets you can freely give, and in order to get cupcakes and petting tolerance, you need to play one of three minigames for kindergarteners. A berry matching game, a puzzle game, and a timing game. These are all subpar, though the puzzle is the most tolerable and works decently well via emulation.

Much like Super Training, Pokémon-Amie has very real and tangible benefits, but requires a lot of unrelated faffing about that is just palatable enough that it’s ‘worth it.’ I spent several hours of my playthrough solving puzzles and feeding critters cupcakes so they would get better EXP yield from battles. It was not fun, nor was it fun when I did this for hundreds of Pokémon in 2013 as I tried to assemble a living dex, but there was enough of a mechanical benefit that I do not regret any of this. …Mostly because I stopped after getting them to affection level 2.

There is novelty to Pokémon-Amie— it is an adorable feature and one of the reasons why people were so enraptured by the 3D models and animations at launch, as they were wicked impressive. However, by taking this world-building and emotional bonding aspect of the game and grafting battle mechanics onto it, they turned the act of expressing love towards a companion into a transaction. It connects the mechanics, yes, but sometimes, you don’t want to do that.

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Part 6: The Beauty of X and Y

I distinctly recall thinking that Pokémon X and Y were not particularly attractive games in their day. The chibi character models lacked the same charisma or consistency of the sprites from prior games, and were a drastic step down from the 3D models seen in certain battles. The Game Boy looking ass world design was a clear regression compared to Black and White. The 3DS screen was… bad, low res, and made pretty much every game designed for it look worse than it could have— should have.

However, having played this game in [REDACTED] and upscaling the game to 4X the ordinary resolution, playing it on an HD monitor with better colors, I think it looks beautiful. The 3D environments have enough intent and direction to come across as spectacles, filled with something unique that gives them their own identity. From tiny bobbles to a vivid color palate, or a unique arrangement of bespoke assets. For a series that was so driven by tile sets in its earlier entries, this is pretty much the developers showing off, flexing what they can do with their production pipeline, and setting the standard that a new era.

While many textures are low resolution, I think they shine when rendered without any post-processing filtering. It lets the viewer see how they were made pixel by pixel, and gives the games a potent low poly retro aesthetic. I like the outline applied to the character models, giving them a slight cel shaded look, and when rendered in screenshots, it almost looks as if the outline was drawn around them in a digital pencil. Pretty much every 2D asset upscales pretty cleanly, barring a few oddities like the surprisingly low resolution Poké Ball opening animation. Without the resolution crunch, you can just see more than ever before, and it can often be beautiful. Hell, if I wanted to be extra salty, I would say that the game looks better than Scarlet and Violet in some regards, if only because X and Y understands the value of color.

Though, I do have issues with how X and Y are presented as times. The choice to build the game around a grid-based title set really undermines the 3D-ness of the game as, well, how many non-tactics 3D games feature grid based movement? And how many did that as late as 2013? Yes, they added the much neglected innovation of diagonal movement, but they should have added that in 2002. (They were gonna, but they cowered out.)

The camera is sometimes just awful at directing the player and showing them the world. Sometimes scooching far away, sometimes forming a cinematic camera angle, and other times it is a close semi-overhead perspective that just makes navigation a pain. Let me SEE the puzzle you want me to solve. And I will offer no defense to Lumiose City, which I did not like going through. It is a small nightmare to navigate, the camera disregards nearly 20 years of game development wisdom in how it awkwardly turns with the player. Everything looks the same. There is no compass to tell your north from your down. I just did not like being in there, at all, period. …But at least the windows are modeled in the Holo Caster cutscenes.

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Part 7: The Playing of X and Y

While Pokémon is a JRPG by any and all definition, it is also one of the most unique RPG series of all time. Not necessarily because of the monster catching mechanic, but because of how deep or shallow the experience can be depending on the player’s chosen level of investment. Anyone can play through a Pokémon game, likely clear it within 15 to 30 hours depending on the title, their experience, and the overall speed of the given game. The games have so many variables to play around with and manipulate they are ideal for challenge runs, alternate playthroughs, or general breezy low effort replays.

However, Pokémon games are also far more than that. They are games that players can and have invested hundreds of hours into across a single playthrough. They are games that can last well over a week or month and expand into experiences that people continue playing for years. Between hunting every Pokémon in the dex, finding every item, participating in the postgame battle towers, raising up a team of statistically superior Pokémon, there are oodles of things to do in most games in the series, and people do aim to achieve everything. And that’s before talking about competitive play!

This makes it really hard to judge Pokémon games in general, because there is so much variance in the quality of experience one can have and how well they mesh with that experience. For example, I tried to play through Pokémon Y doing a nuzlocke, only grabbing the first Pokémon found on each route and discarding them whenever they fainted, while trying to adhere to a level cap, despite these games dousing the players in EXP. And it was a bad time. Not because I suffered heavy losses, but because I kept getting sidetracked, paranoid, and had to confront areas where the game’s design just did not complement itself.

Friendship evolution is absurdly stringent with its requirements, making early captures like Azuril and Budew completely useless long before they would naturally evolve. Evolutionary stones are either handed out for a pittance, or they are locked behind obscure minigames that no player would organically pursue in order to find them. Certain evolutionary items are locked to the postgame when… you need to catch the box art legendary in this game and are expected to have a team in the 60s when fighting the Pokémon League. Literally what are you protecting players from abusing?

Move pools are so bizarrely balanced that I almost could not believe they were actually designed by a human or algorithm. Such as how Fennekin, the fire starter, does not learn a special fire type move better than ember until evolving into Delphox at level 36 and learning Mystical Fire, a base 65 move. Azumarill learns Aqua Tail, a base 90 move, at level 21. While Pidgey, who became my go-to flying Pokémon, has an impressively thoughtless moveset, with return being their best move and them not learning a physical flying type move until level 38… and it’s Wing Attack.

TM distribution is similarly random, giving players great TMs or HMs early on while hiding staples until bizarrely late into the game, or through obscure means that seem contradictory to even the concept of balance. Such as introducing the TM for Charge Beam about an hour before the player is handed Thunderbolt. Handing out the staple flamethrower as a blink and you’ll miss it gift from a random NPC in the town with the 7th gym. …While making the 60 base power, two target, fire special move, incinerate, a postgame exclusive.

With all of this in mind, with so many things weird or wrong about the pacing of this game, it’s easy for me to conclude that the game was just not meant to be played in a steady, deliberate manner. I believe that the developers planned, if not intended, players to breeze through the campaign, not worry about it, and not look back on it as. And if the game is slanted or busted, and gives you all of these tools to undermine the design or overlevel and overpower your way to success… maybe that just is the right way to play it.

So I gave up on whatever fake ‘level cap’ rules I had abided by, turned on the EXP Share, and rejoiced in the boost of power, trouncing over everything, grabbing trinkets to my heart’s content. I cleared the remainder of the game without a single fainted ally or needing to use an item in battle. And… it just felt so much better to go through the game this way. To see locations I had scarcely thought of in over a decade, solve basic environmental puzzles, and dispatch trainers.

With my RNG-determined team of Garchomp, Delphox, Azumarill, Roserade, Sylveon, and Scrafty, I felt like I had an answer to every challenge presented to me. And with my remaining self-imposed limit of one capture per route, I was able to focus on the story and pacing in a manner I just did not do back in 2013. I don’t have records of that first playthrough, but it probably took me 80 hours to reach the postgame.

I don’t want to end this by saying that ‘Pokémon Y might be balanced like a wet bag of clams, but it’s still a fully playable, functional, and generally fun Pokémon experience.’ Because I feel I say that with every Pokémon thing I do. …But that is ultimately my takeaway here. A lot about this game drives me nuts. I really wish that the developers did any number of things differently. These games fill me with just enough bitterness and misplaced conviction that I think I could design something better. And I was struck by a sense of robbery as I contemplated the many things that could have benefitted from a Pokémon Z revision. The game is modern enough that I choose not to be as kind to it as I was with Platinum six years ago. It is full of tiny obnoxious micro problems, but I still enjoyed revisiting Pokémon Y despite it all.