Playing Pokémon - 1st generation 20+ years later

I was a kid in the '90s and when Pokémon dropped, my generation was blown out. I had nine or ten years when I played my first Pokémon game, which was the Yellow version. It was in english, so I had to play it with my english-to-italian dictionary next to me (technically the game belonged to my little brother, but he was four years old and at the time he was too young to even know how to read italian). I still clearly remember the struggle to beat the Indigo League, or the time when I used the Master Ball on a Magikarp, or the day when I failed to catch Mewtwo and my brother took away the game boy from my hands and saved the game (because he was upset and didn't understand that I was simply going to retry it). Aah, good times. All peaked when I caught all the 150 Pokémon, thanks to the help of my school buds. I was surely 10 at the time, later on I just brought my dream team to Pokémon Silver and their legacy went on there.

Now I'm 31 and I started Yellow again. Thanks to the mutual excitement shared by me and a friend of mine (who still has a working Blue), we embarked on a mission to catch 'em all AGAIN. I had to change the battery of my cartridge (which took me time to gather the components), while my friend didn't. After five hours, I lost the save due to an imperfection in my battery replacement, as I do not intend to buy a solder and the proper "winged" battery. So I fixed my mistake and begin anew, with now three days of delay. But it is not strictly competitive, as our point is to complete the Pokédex (yeah we need someone with Red and maybe we found one, not sure if he's in it) and maybe duel a little bit. I even learned of the Mew glitch, which is outstanding. If only I knew it when I was a child...

This whole adventure made me consider one little thing: Pokémon is the first-ever RPG that I played. And it is stunning how much of the game I still remember: mechanics, some spawn-points, evolutions, moves and so on. The thing that I miss the most in the first gen, compared to the second and mostly the third (I never played after Sapphire, so there's that), is the improvements of the Day Care, as I used it to literally build teams after teams of finely raised living beasts of destruction. In short terms, character builds. But aside that, the pure concept that numbers could be used to represent an imaginary situation and also mean fun (and not pain, as I used to suck in math) maybe did the thing. After Pokémon I played some proper RPGs (Legend of Legaia, Final Fantasy, the Temple of Elemental Evil videogame), some Action RPGs (Sacred for example) and only nearly a decade after I began playing TTRPGs.

Now, to close this circle, I wondered: do Pokémon TTRPG exist? The answer is YES.

I found two: Pokérole and Pokémon Pen and Paper. I'm sure there's more out there, but for the purpose of this article I'm going to stop here. I'm not able to read them right now fully, but for what I can grasp Pokérole is more detailed and crunchy, while PPP is more simple and quick. Am I going to try them? I would like so.

So if you're wondering: how could it be Pokémon in D&D? My answer is no, thanks, but if you insist...

Simply and quickly put: use classes which put emphasis on summoning and restrict said summons to creature the characters have actually seen. Could work for a one shot maybe.

Be kind to each other.

Daniele