When you have a franchise that has gone on for decades, you’ll always run into questions about whether you can “keep it fresh.” For The Pokemon Company, their “freshness” is directly tied to their pocket monsters and how you play them in the mainline and spinoff titles. For the mainline games, it’s about new regions, new twists on battles, the story you undergo, and more. Spinoff games add variety and options beyond turn-based battles. But for the pocket monsters themselves, many fans have wondered how long the dev team can keep making good ones.
As many fans will tell you, there have definitely been peaks and valleys in the “creative process” of making Pokemon. In Gen 9, we had a creature that is literally a golden Jamaican-style surfer…and many weren’t happy about that. During the TCG World Championships, The Pokemon Company COO Takato Utsunomiya noted (as revealed by Gamespot) that he feels the team behind creating the pocket monsters haven’t run out of ideas yet, and won’t for some time:
“As new generations of people come to work on the games and they’ll have new ideas for new creatures, we’re able to continue creating new Pokemon. Right now we’re over 1,000, but if you think about how many living creatures there are in our world, there’s something over hundreds of thousands. I would think we probably still have a long way we can keep going.”
That’s certainly true to an extent, but just because you can have “lots of options” doesn’t mean all of them will be winners. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
