Ranking the top 101 Nintendo games: No. 5, Pokémon (series)

You could individually rank Pokémon games, sure, but why would you when the Pokémon experience is at its best when each game is part of something much larger?

I’m ranking the top 101 Nintendo developed/published games of all-time, and you can read about the thought process behind game eligibility and list construction here. You can keep up with the rankings so far through this link.

You’ve seen a few Pokémon games in the rankings so far, but none of them were Pokémon games. Pokémon Snap (number 74) is a spinoff on-rails “shooter,” and Pokémon Conquest (number 66) is a crossover tactics RPG with the Nobunaga’s Ambition series. Puzzle League (number 59) isn’t explicitly Pokémon, but my favorite of that bunch of games is, so let’s mention that, too. As for actual, mainline Pokémon games, though? I’ve been silent on them so far, and that’s because to me, for the purposes of this list, they’re just one giant game.

This isn’t like with the Super Smash Bros. series ranking, where it just made practical sense to lump them all together because, outside of expanded casts and some additional game modes and tweaks, they were generally the same game but with some balancing tweaks, which would make them all terrifically boring to write about in a hurry were they all given separate entries. No, Pokémon games of the gotta catch ‘em all variety are put together in one ranking because the Pokémon series is at its best when each game is part of one large collective effort, rather than viewed as individual games. Every Pokémon games builds on the last, to create a larger, more expansive world: you care more about the Pokémon games of the present because the Pokémon games of the past helped create the situation you find yourself sucked into, still to this day. It’s not because of nostalgia: it’s because the world of Pokémon thrives on this connectivity of past and present, of memories made and memories to be made.

I’m actually a latecomer to the world of Pokémon, all things (like my age, and having a Game Boy when the first titles in the series released) considered. My first main series Pokémon game was on the Nintendo DS, Pokemon Diamond, and then I followed that up with Platinum. I had fun, but neither grabbed me in a way where I was hooked or in need of seeking out other Pokémon games or more of the little creatures themselves. Looking back, now having played every other entry in the series, I can tell you that it’s partially because that generation just wasn’t very exciting and was a bit plodding, comparatively, but it’s also because I was experiencing Pokémon in a vacuum, or like I showed up to a party where everyone there knew everyone else and I didn’t know anyone, which is no way to experience Pokémon or parties at all.

There was no way, at that point, to fully catch up on the series’ past without buying all of the old games, and the games I had just played weren’t so strong that I was in any rush to do that. I didn’t push too hard to catch every Pokémon within these Generation IV games, because it’s not like I was ever going to be able to catch them all. Pokémon’s gameplay sans that part of the experience, as said, was still fun, but it doesn’t hold up anywhere near as well. The battles aren’t quite as tough as they could be, at least not until you get to the parts of the game you only access if you’re fully invested, and without any strong connection to Pokémon in general, I had no reason to go into the post-game or end-game of Diamond or Platinum. This wasn’t just on me, though, but also on Pokémon itself and it not being particularly welcoming to newcomers at what we can see now was a strange time in the series’ history where it was adjusting to a new platform and its own advancing age as a phenomenon.

When Black and White came out, though, things changed for me, and began to change for the series itself, too. This was designed to be, well, not a reset or a reboot, but kind of like a Red and Blue v2.0. The only Pokémon you could catch in these Generation V games, until you had become Champion, were new ones, and there were 156 of those, more than in any other generation, including the original’s 151. This created something of a closed loop to work within, like the original games had, and motivated me much more to catch everything I could find. This was the game that convinced me that I was a big fan of Pokémon, and that eventually, I’d put in the work to start catching them all. When I ended up losing a lucrative freelance gig with the shuttering of Sports on Earth, well, what better time to mine the Pokémon games I already owned, in order to work toward catching them all? After all, they were already paid for.

Additional ideas unrelated to my employment status would be put forth by developer Game Freak to better tie the series’ past to its present, making the thought of catching them all much more viable than it was at the time I was introduced to the series during the Diamond days. Game Freak started releasing remakes of older games on newer hardware, making accessing the plots and pocket monsters of the past easier than ever before for players who weren’t around at the start.

The first of the 3DS games, Pokémon X and Y, had an absurd number of Pokémon available, and made a point of making the original starters collectable, too. Trading expanded well beyond just swapping things with your friends locally or online, and into a massive global operation that not only let you seek out specific Pokémon from strangers, but also allowed you to do random trades, where you’d offer up a Pokémon you didn’t mind giving up in exchange for a mystery Pokémon. If that Pokémon was new to you, great! Your Pokédex was now a little more filled out. If that Pokémon, too, was one you already had, you could always offer that one up instead, in the hopes you’d get a better return this time around. You could also breed that rarer Pokémon for yourself, and send the original back out into the world, to help someone else out like you were just helped. I found a number of rare or just difficult to acquire, for one reason or another, Pokémon this way, and it helped motivate me toward catching them all, since it shrunk the distance between this being an impossible task and it being a possible one.

These kinds of additions, that narrowed the gap between generations and brought the past into the present, helped make Pokémon even more of a continuum of games than it previously was. It helped create an outcome where fewer people would pick up a new Pokémon game and feel out of place, like I had when I finally dove in back in the DS days. There were more ways to catch ‘em all than just having existed as a Pokémon fan in the past, with old Game Boy cartridges and connect cables and the like letting you move your Pokédex through time. With everything digitized and connected through the internet, Pokémon was easier to share, and the Pokémon themselves easier to collect, than ever.

The gameplay of Pokémon is pretty easy to explain. It’s a turn-based RPG, where you pit your own party of Pokémon against either wild Pokémon or another trainer. There are Pokémon types that are weak or strong to other types — grass bests water, water bests fire, bug bests psychic. and so on. Think about that last one for a minute, and it’ll make as much sense as water being the answer to fire. Some Pokémon have multiple types, which means it’s not always as simple as water vs. fire, since a fire type could also be a second type that isn’t weak to water, helping to nullify some of what was supposed to be an advantage. Figuring out how to counter these nullifications and advantages rests on you developing a well-rounded party and plenty of substitutes for when you might need them, as you go around a game’s given region defeating its Gym Leaders to earn the right to challenge the Elite Four and Champion, proving you are the very best, like no one ever was. Likely due to the power that’s inside.

There are different game modes and ways of training up your Pokémon in the various releases, and also some kind of big bad to be taken care of adjacent to your quest to become Champion, but the very core gameplay has remained the same since the series’ inception. There are new types, and far, far more Pokémon, but if you understood the game back in 1998, you can understand it now in 2021, without having had to keep up all this time in between. There’s just more to learn than there used to be, but if you managed once, you can manage again. That ability to return to the series at any point, too, is also a real strength of its continuity.

If you made me choose, I’d say X and Y are my favorite Pokémon games, but how do you pick a single game out and rank it against the other Pokémon games? There are differences between games and generations, sure, but Pokémon is as enduring as it is because of the foundation each game is built upon. Pokémon itself is bigger than any individual game, or even the sum of its parts — if I had individually ranked these, I imagine the highest-ranking Pokémon would have ranked a couple of dozen spaces back on the list from this collective ranking. I didn’t come up with Pokémon at the five slot just because there are a lot of games in the series. It’s here because a new Pokémon title works in part because the previous Pokémon worked, and the one before that, and so on all the way back to the beginning of the franchise. There is no separating them, and what makes them work is that, at their best, they are one unified experience. So it’s more than there just being a lot of them: it’s that, together, they are something special, significant beyond their individual positive traits.

Pokémon is astounding in its scope — we’ve gone from the first North American release in 1998 and its 151 pocket monsters to eight generations of games and 898 distinct species of Pokémon, plus regional variants. I can’t account for the time I spent with Pokémon before my systems were tracking this information, but since the release of the 3DS in 2011, I’ve put 1,013 hours towards main series Pokémon games. That’s basically 75-100 hours with one of each pair of games in a Generation, plus 20-25 hours for the second, since I could push through that one a lot more quickly already having most of the new Pokémon in question. And don’t forget replays of DS-era Pokémon on the 3DS, or that the Switch now has a few of its own, or… I’d have to check to confirm, but my first instinct is to say that the only series I’ve spent more time with than Pokémon in the last decade is Civilization.

The series’ ability to reel you in with the very concept of Pokémon, even if you've played a game a lot like whatever the new one is time and time again already, is noteworthy. Even if you’re not wowed by a specific plot, or the game you’re playing doesn’t have the same amount of memorable setpieces or characters as another in the series, you’ve still got the Pokémon themselves, and the act of finding and catching them all. And that continues to be a driving force today, as much as it ever was. You would think that I’d eventually get tired of being able to say I have caught them all, only to have new ones come out and for me to have to regain that status, but you’d be wrong. Finding all of the new ones, using them to play, that’s where the fun of it all is.

I tend to get both games from the new generation of Pokémon, in order to get all of the exclusives without having to go about trading, especially since it’s not like the legendaries are just being handed out by folks online. This means that I’ll only play with brand new Pokémon the first time through, which makes all of those new Pokémon more than just additions to an expanded Pokédex for me: adding more and more to the Pokédex isn’t just busy work or something I’m compelled to do without knowing why. I’m still drawn to the differences in how the new Pokémon work compared to the ones I’m familiar with, the new types as well on the rare occasions they’re introduced, the new combinations of types and how they change the way you play the game and construct a party. I’m always on the lookout for the next Pokémon that’ll become part of my collection’s inner circle, the kind I’m ready to bust out when it’s time to take on the real version of the Elite Four and a region’s Champion, when they’re not holding back and are much higher leveled than the first time you face them.

That’s part of why Sword and Shield, despite a lackluster plot and some seemingly tossed together elements, still worked so much for me. The parts that worked, they worked, and the new Pokémon were excellent and fun to use. As long as Pokémon keeps up on those ends, and continues with this new expansion pack model rather than go back to releasing sequels within Generations — an exhausting and expensive proposition that had me sleepwalking through Pokémon’s version of Hawaii yet again in order to avoid missing out on some legendaries — then it’s going to be just fine, no matter how many clumsy and rushed metaphors for climate change it throws into the narrative.

Would Sword and Shield have worked as well as it did without the history and weight of Pokémon behind it? Absolutely not, but it doesn’t have to: the universe it exists within does contain those things, and so, it succeeded, it was enjoyable, it represented the Pokémon name well.

I have certainly played some monster collecting games with superior mechanics to individual Pokémon titles — the Dragon Quest Monster games are truly wonderful handheld titles, for instance — but what series like DQ Monsters lack is the continuity that makes Pokémon intoxicating, that keeps you coming back again and again. You aren’t bringing out a creature you’ve been training and fighting alongside for 20 years in DQ Monsters, like you are in Pokémon, and you aren’t relying on the knowledge you’ve accumulated of how that game world works, knowledge as old as the relationship between you and some of your Pokémon themselves, in order to win those fights. Scientists have discovered a “Pokémon region” of the brain in adults who played as kids, that responds better to images of Pokémon than it does other images. How the hell is Yo-Kai Watch supposed to compete with that shit?

It might be difficult to comprehend what makes Pokémon work if you still haven’t played them. I had a hard time understanding back when I was still in school, thinking that it was kind of like a kiddie RPG series I didn’t need to dive into because I had been playing more difficult and more complex RPGs for ages by then. How wrong I was, though, to think that this was like the video game equivalent of Harry Potter vs. Final Fantasy VI’s Lord of the Rings. Pokémon has its own brilliance, its own universe of rules and complexity, and it just made so much more sense once I actually let it grab me like it was capable of.

Now I wonder how it is I ever avoided Pokémon for as long as I did, but I don’t regret the delay, not really. Otherwise I would have had a more difficult time finding stuff to do when I lost that job there.

The good news for those of you who still don’t get it or haven’t tried to, though, is that it’s now easier than ever to do so: far easier than when I decided to step into this particular ring. The series is more connected than it ever was, catching up doesn’t hav to be done exclusively through catching them all. Hell, even the legendaries are more available than they used to be, thanks to a giveaway of them all to celebrate a Pokémon anniversary last decade, and the existence of the storage-focused Pokémon Home — formerly Bank — means it’s also easier than ever to store your Pokémon and restart your game to catch additional instances of legendaries you can then trade for the ones missing from your Pokédex.

You’ll want to catch plenty of them yourself, though, if only for the dopamine released every time it’s confirmed that your Pokéball has successfully caught its prey. I’ve got my daughter watching me play Pokémon Let’s Go — she hasn’t quite figured out how to use an analog stick yet, so she enjoys watching me play for her — and she’s even doing the same count I’d do as you wait to see if you’ve got a successful catch or not. It’s all an addicting experience, but with no negative connotations attached to that word: there is just a power there, to pull you in on every little thing, to keep you connected, to a world that has so much to show you and to experience. My kids will end up with a far more developed Pokémon region of their brain than me, considering their early start. I should probably start saving more money for plushies.

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