Pokemon is a beloved franchise (a very lucrative one too) . It is an impressively deep role-playing game franchise, known for the cuteness of it’s monster inhabitants and the social aspect of trading/battling monsters with friends.

Aside from a few exceptions though, Pokemon games have never had very good stories. You fight your way through eight gyms, take out the bad guys who are trying to steal Pokemon and give yourself a pat on the back. And the newest core games in the franchise: Pokemon Sun and Moon, follow this pattern in a similar way, they got rid of the gyms but it’s pretty much the same jazz.  That being said there is a post-game side quest that knocked the wind out of me, because for the first time in, maybe ever(?) Pokemon gets really dark, and really genuine.

After I had beaten the game I decided to wander about the different islands of the games’ Hawaii inspired region of Alola. Eventually I found a older gentleman who recognized that I was a Pokemon trainer, and noticed my badges, indicating that I had beaten the main game. He then starts talking about how he used to be a trainer:

This is when the task is finally given: Go out and search the region for these different trainers that he used to fight, finding out what they have been doing with their lives for the past 30 years.

I wasn’t really thinking much about the task when he gave it to me, it just seemed like any typical quest. But then I went to the first of these trainers.

Her name was Jane and he described her as being a “tyrant in battle”. I found her at what the game calls the “Community Center” of one of the islands but it looks more like a retirement home. Jane is very old and is staring at a TV, when I asked her about the man who sent me she doesn’t remember him.

And almost all of the other trainers have similar stories. One of them has been working at the same power plant for all of those 30 years.  Another one says that he just got out of the hospital after staying there for a while, and he tells me this:

 

Like I said before, this earnest talk about life and death knocked the wind out of me. Not only is this uncommon for a Pokemon game, this kind of writing isn’t very common in Nintendo games in general. But this wasn’t the heaviest one, no that was the last one of the trainers that I visited.

I was told that the last user’s name was Sakura, and where to find her. But there was no elderly woman when I got to the house, only a young girl. The girl explained to me that her grandmother was the trainer I was looking for, and that she had passed away a couple of years ago.

The grand-daughter still battles you, and afterward she says this:

It’s kind of remarkable to me that a little post-game quest had this much care put into it. Enough for it to give a genuine expression of humanity and to capture the brevity of life. Somehow some game about catching monsters does this.