El Goonish Shive

No comic tonight. For those that don't keep up with the Shive's twitter, he's down with back pain. He hopes to have comics on Tues. and Thurs., but isn't sure how he'll feel, so no promises.

It seems he was indeed being overly optimistic. He now hopes to be back next week.

So it appears that I've been reading EGS for so long and frequently that I respond by saying "Za?".

I wonder how the shallow Pokemon parodies only covers the first generation will change when people who grew up on the second etc generations become adults and make Pokemon Parodies.

I think gen 3 or 4 are already a lot of adult's first games.

I mean gen 3 came out like 15 years ago. The target audience for that game are in their early to mid 20s now.

Edited by Elfive on Jun 27th 2018 at 11:10:12 AM

I never played any from generations 2 to 5, but it's possible I was already a bit too old: Pokemon felt very kiddy to 16-yo me by the time it came out (not to mention way ugly compared to Zelda LADX which was released in France a year earlier), so at the time it was my younger brother that played Blue, then Yellow (before seemingly losing interest in videogames altogether, at least as far as handhelds go).

Still, I was nonetheless hit by the third phase of the Popularity Polynomial and bought a Gen VI game (partly because it took place in not!France).

Edited by Medinoc on Jun 27th 2018 at 3:09:25 PM

To be fair, Pokémon is one of the most famous cases of something completely missing it's intended audience and becoming popular with a completely different one. My kid brother really dislikes Pokémon, for example. Most of it's current audience is teenagers and adults these days.

Well, keep in mind that Gen III also had the Gen I remakes, and the Gen I remakes were more popular than Ruby and Sapphire for reasons beyond nostalgia (that said, even though I was in college when Red and Blue came out and thus would be prime Genwunner material, I'm actually most fond of Gens III and IV). Not only that, but Gen II harkened back to Gen I in the form of its entire post-Elite Four content, so that caters to Gen I nostalgia as well (which means that the Gen II remakes, which also had technical superiority over the Gen IV games that they followed, also cater to that nostalgia).

Honestly, I don't think we're going to see the end of "shallow parody of Generation I of Pokémon" until the fans that came of age during Gen V come of age and start making works themselves. That was 2010, so I guess we'll see that in roughly 5-7 years, give or take.

I wouldn't bet on it, considering the incoming Switch games will be pokemon Yellow kinda remakes with focus on pick and play and pokemon go integration.

Good point. Perhaps I should say that I don't think that the shallow parody of Pokemon Gen I will stop being so pervasive until the fans that came of age as of Gen V start seriously making works. Because the only thing that will make the Gen I shallow parody stop is if people stop caring about the series.

Still going on about this guys? (Snickers)

I mean a number of my Sparks bring in Pokemon cards on the regular and talk about it, so I wouldn't write it off as being purely adults.

New comic up and, naturally, it went from being too complex and detailed to being easily-understood but lacking detail. Too bad Tedd and Arthur couldn't have tried to establish an actual channel to the Will of Magic to help get things smoothed out.

Making an edit to point out that, in Night Vision, the initial post shows up as bright-blue background with white text, and it requires an edit to turn it into a darker shade and black text.

Edited by ironballs16 on Jul 2nd 2018 at 8:01:16 AM

Geez tedd. You made it too simple

I think it would be funnier is Magic is just being a jerk on purpose.

Yeah or if it's being too literally minded.

Alternatively, the Will of Magic is just a crappy writer. It sounds like the spellbooks went from a maximalist poor writing style to a minimalist one.

NP Gam-08

Would you like to play a game?

Sister3-298

Squirrel Girl power up in 3...2...

thank u dan

That's a lotta explanation comics dan has to throw out now.

Comic Sister3-299

Ominous? I have no idea what you mean.

So between this and that uryuom war-robot thing from the warehouse, I think the clear implication is that a previous Magic system change stripped magic from the uryuoms, possibly to end a hinted-at ancient war between humans and uryuoms. Uryuoms built their super-science to compensate. And now the magic's been turned back on for them.

Some shit's about to go down, and I look forward to our heroes being nearby while it does.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jul 6th 2018 at 6:59:07 AM

NP Gam-09

Stop having fun!

Man, I don't know what Shive's on about. That comic is totally nothing like actual Pokemon games.

...

I mean, all the complex stat stuff is spot on, but Tutorial Dude never respects your right to refuse the Poke Ball lesson! He's very pushy about it.