Don't sweat the small stuff I guess.

Normally my posts are attempts to sort the mental baggage within my head. Thus, they take on a very serious nature, and when I reread some stuff I wrote I want to tell me to calm down! Sheesh, why you got to be so serious all the time. Life is as hard as you make it Rante!

So I'm glad to be writing about the Pokemon Gold remake I downloaded last weekend. The DS remake, Heart Gold, would normally be an instantly addicting game in itself, what with all of the crap you can do in it and whatnot. I don't want to go into detail, but the sheer scope of the game combines the simple and the complex in such a way that an RPG head like me finds oddly captivating. But to say that this is simply another game I'm playing would be a false observation.

Pokemon Gold was my childhood. When I received it nearly 10 years ago for my birthday I was ecstatic. I crammed that thing into my Gameboy Pocket and you'd assume that it was stuck in there, because that was the only game I played for a very long time. I beat the game with all three starters, I collected them all twice, I even went so far as to raise several teams based on types to imagine myself as a gym leader. All in all, I probably invested three to four times the amount of time that I had spent on Red. That number is so enormous, I'm embarrassed to say it out loud. I'll give you a hint. I remember raising a Charizard to level 99 and using it to beat the entire Elite Four on my first playthrough of Red, which took 60 hours. On my second playthrough, I decided to go back and do it right, and raise a balanced team of six pokemon. I remember being extremely excited when I hit 100 hours on that game when my family and I were eating at a Dennys. I played Red like, 5 times.

So take that number, and multiply it by three to four.

Yeah, I've always been a huge nerd.

Pokemon was my entry into the insidiously lonely world of RPGs. Before Pokemon, I had Mario and Wario on my Gameboy Pocket, and a bootleg copy of King of Fighters. I didn't know what gaming was, merely enjoying these little electronic distractions that my dad got me from K-mart. I didn't play compulsively, I didn't obsess over evolutions and stats and movesets, I didn't manage the strengths and weaknesses of a team with the preciseness of an architect. I heard about Pokemon from a friend in fourth grade, and before I knew it the game had exposed a side to me that I didn't know existed: an obsessive-compulsive addicted to micromanagement.

Pokemon got me addicted to the notion of story-telling in a video game, along with the notion of choosing how a game was to be played. I transitioned from that to Final Fantasies on Friday nights because I heard in sixth grade how the summons were like Pokemon on crack. I went from Final Fantasy to Dragon Quests, Squaresoft games, Front Missions and Fire Emblems and tactical RPGs, all the while the numbers and choices and attacks and defenses growing steadily across the expanse of my childhood, prepubescent, and teenage mind. Meanwhile, on the storytelling front, I pored over the details of elaborately designed universes, with its own histories and social systems, to the point where I invested myself in fiction because it reminded me of role-playing.

In short, I was a very lonely child who played RPGs all day because he didn't really know how to interact with people.

But Pokemon was great in its own way because it was one of a few RPGs that I could talk to other people about. Everyone played it, and if you ever ran out of things to say your little fourth-grade self could ask about Pokemon and talk his head off for hours and hours. There was a social side to it as well, but there was also a treacherous side to it. Battling was competitive. No, like serious business. And the trading cards... I learned about the dangers of capitalism from unfair trades and strong-arm tactics.

I look back very fondly at my little 10-year old self and his Pokemon addiction, so when I played the recent release my mind was blown. I'm continuing this post on the 24th of March and I've logged in about 30 hours overall during the two weeks I've had the game. An entire day and then some just playing Pokemon. It's a wonder where the time goes. I cannot stop playing this game compulsively and am entertaining the idea of giving it to my roommate to hide it for me.

It's fun though. It makes me calm down and not think about the future, and I just sit there enjoying myself like some little kid. I appreciate it not for the fact that I'm winning a game, but experiencing a feeling of nostalgia-tinged therapy.

Oh little Rante, if only you could see yourself now, playing in three dimensions.