The Sentimentality of Pokémon X/Y

The other day I was scrolling through my Pokémon Home account looking at all my old Elite Four teams. I’ve played every generation of Pokémon (though Red was a bit of an oddball run), and almost every member of my final teams survived the various transitions into modern day. My original goal, in my nostalgic boredom, was to choose the most sentimental “companion” mon of each team, the one I bonded most with and remember the quickest and most fondly. And indeed, I was able to identify one pretty much every time.

Until I got to Pokémon Y,  a game that hadn’t left much of an impact on my memory. I remember enjoying it, like I did the rest, but nothing in particular had cemented in my present-day mind about that generation, until I looked at the team and realized all six of them had been on my mental shortlist. I hadn’t even remembered what gen they were from, but they were anticipated to join the list before I realized they were all competing for a slot that, for once, I couldn’t hand out. And as I delved into their movesets, medals, and other statistics that slowly brought recollections back about that game, I realized there was actually a lot of things that gen did to create sentimentality between the player and its game world, things I feel have been forgotten by the community at large. In this article I want to talk about several different mechanics in X/Y that I think deserve more credit for either establishing or codifying. I’ll be using the six members of my team as demonstrations for the six mechanics on this list, mostly because they surprisingly slot quite well into them.

0. Player Customization

Before we get into the Pokémon, I have to mention the single biggest change I appreciated, getting to fully customize my appearance and outfit! I loved my trainer’s black and yellow jacket, as it was very similar to the one I always wore in real life at the time. Future generations expanded heavily on this aspect (or removed it, always to widespread protest), and it was the first time we could really make the player character feel like us instead of a pre-established character like May or Red.

1. Pokémon Amie

Pokémon Amie was a mechanic introduced in X/Y where you could withdraw a Pokémon from their Pokéball and play with them to raise their affection. You could pet them, dangle toys in their face, and feed them treats, and it was the biggest leap forward in noncombat interactions we’d had up to that point. I spent ages playing around with my mons, but especially Mark the Maractus because his dancing-cactus animations were so adorable. Even in battle, his signature move Petal Blizzard had equally-unsteady animations, he always looked on the verge of tumbling over and really drove home the characterization potential in the new fully-rigged animation system.

2. The Trainer PR Video

In Lumiose City, the player could visit a film studio which lets them record a 13-second clip showcasing themselves or one of their Pokémon. This could be accessed at any time and seen by other players you mixed records with, and had enough customization options to craft something that really demonstrated the personality of the subject. I recorded a silly little vignette for Mercy the Goomy, already my favorite new Pokémon this gen with her derpy face and featureless blob design, but once she evolved into Goodra she was also a powerhouse mon and my special attacker of choice. (But I did appreciate the PR Vid immortalizing her unevolved form, Goomy is just the cutest darn thing)

3. Tons of Post Game

You had so much additional content to bond with your mons in Gen 6! Most Pokémon games there’s only a little bit left to do after beating the Elite Four, but in X/Y I remember playing for months later and still unlocking additional storylines, especially an extended chain of side quests revolving around Looker, a private investigator from a foreign region and a fan favorite character. There’s a reason Gen 6 is the only one I leveled my entire team to 100, and that wasn’t intentional, I just never ran out of things to do.

Since my Pokémon team, naturally, was well-established before the postgame, this bullet point’s flagship mon will instead flashback to the very beginning. Das Bird was my first Pokémon ever caught in the game (on my birthday no less, December 8th), and well beyond average as far as early-game mons go in Pokémon. Even 12 years and 3 gens later, Talonflame is still the franchise’s preeminent Tailwind setter, and outside combat the Flame Body ability is great for quickly hatching eggs from the daycare.

4. Wonder Trades

I don’t think people remember that Wonder Trades came out this gen! Now you could go online, trade anything you like, and get a completely random mon back in return. It was no-risk high-reward, you never knew what weird things you’d get. And since so many people were grinding IVs and had nothing better to do with the rejects, you’d get all sort of cool lvl1 pokémon you’d have no way to obtain in-game yet. This is how I acquired Gillette the Aegislash, whose nickname is not canonized in-game because it came from another player’s cartridge, but that’s okay because it was my favorite pinch-hitter, using its dual forms to swap effortlessly between bulk and DPS depending on what the team needed for the current fight. (I’m honestly confused why they released the perfect sword/shield Pokémon before Sword and Shield.) Wonder Trade was a quirky and whimsical mechanic that never got old, and I used to spend hours rolling the dice to see what I’d get for my dozens of Flame Wheel Rattatas.

5. Friend Safaris

Friend Safaris were the primary method by which Pokémon X/Y tried to encourage players to connect with each other, and IMO one of the best implemented. Each player you connected with would unlock a unique safari zone dedicated to a different type and containing specific pokemon from older gens, encouraging you to mix records with lots of people and unlock safaris with all the different types of mons. I was in college during this time, and certain people quickly became minor celebrities for having rare types like Ghost or Dragon, or for having specific high-value mons in their safari that would cause other students to seek them out to mix records. (Sadly nobody wanted my boring-ass Grass safari. C’est la vie!)

Once again this was a post-game thing, so none of my core team came from a Friend Safari, but Timmy the Carracosta does exemplify the concept of coming from an earlier gen. He was obtained as part of a side quest in my previous game, Pokémon Black, as a fossil which I could revive at a museum after beating the Elite Four. He was so cool that I felt bad I couldn’t use him in my proper run, so I traded him forward to the next generation to experience a game with him properly. Timmy was my team’s tankiest mon thanks to his Water/Rock typing and Solid Rock ability, while also specializing in AoE damage thanks to Surf and Earthquake.

6. Mega Evolution

I’ve already mentioned Mega Evolution, but it deserves its own bullet point because it was the first big poké-gimmick, and IMO the most widely accepted. The new forms were cool in both design and function, the Mega Stones were collected in many different ways and added a lot of post-game content to explore, and the system elevated many Pokémon who were otherwise unusable by giving them a newer more-powerful form that could shine once again. For me, it was a no-brainer to make the giveaway event Torchic my mega-evolver of choice, as Speed Boost was a godly ability that let Ken blaze through most opponents with a flurry of blows that only grew faster as the battle went on.

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Pokémon X/Y doesn’t have the greatest reputation among the generations, mostly remembered as decent but formulaic compared to what came before and after. The previous gen, Black/White, was where the franchise boldly redesigned away from the classic pixel sprites to fully-animated 3D environments and animated Pokémon sprites. And the subsequent gen, Sun/Moon, started the franchise trend of steering away from the core formula to attempt more unique gameplay loops. This left X/Y in an unusual position of being the “middle child” between both eras of Pokémon (much like the real-world Gen X). This situation isn’t helped by its core identifying gimmick, Mega-Evolutions, being popular enough to graduate beyond the generation and showcase itself multiple times in the games ahead.

But who knows? The upcoming game Pokemon Legends Z-A, widely suspected to borrow/rework heavy elements from the long-shuttered Pokemon Z that was supposed to come out and complete Generation 6, might do wonders for revitalizing interest and appreciation in this most-ignored of series eras. We’ll just have to see!