Pokemon’s New Low: How ‘Pokemon Go’ stripped love from a series that raised a generation

Pokemon Go is the Tinder of video games, and I mean that in the worst sense possible.

For all the talk of how much Pokemon Go has brought people together, the game leaves me feeling empty. I like standing in a circle with people on some dark sidewalk, rabidly swiping up on my phone for 20 minutes, as much as the next guy. But while that does manage to barely cross the line of counting as real interaction, it dilutes the relationship that has always been the true heart of the series: you and your Pokemon.

Pokemon has never been about simply collecting a bunch of living creatures for the sake of saying you have, franchise slogan aside. You’re supposed to grow with your Pokemon — some won’t even evolve unless you have a high level of “friendship” with them. When you put Pokemon in situations that leave them steamrolled by opponents, they like you less. And early in the game, if you catch a high-level Pokemon, they don’t listen to your commands because they don’t respect you yet. You have to earn that.

This isn’t my own weird delusion, it’s a core game mechanic. Which brings me to my beef with Pokemon Go: I couldn’t possibly care less about the 15 Rattatas I’ve caught. Why would I?

Step one of my encounter with them is swiping upward on my phone, repeating until I capture them. I strip them of candies to feed whichever one is the strongest, and then I ship the rest off to an unknown fate with some shady professor I barely know. The one I keep will appear as a little, lifeless image in my inventory until I fight a gym, at which point I just start tapping furiously until I win.

I’m not training these Pokemon as much as I am drugging them with colorful pills until they can bash their heads against each other really well. Honestly, it feels somewhat dirty. Pokemon Go puts the focus entirely on building yourself up in comparison to your friends while generally ignoring the creatures you’re using in the process. Strategy doesn’t matter, and neither do the Pokemon.

Let’s remember, training Pokemon was Ash Ketchum’s cause — not just winning.

I’ve never approached Pokemon games like a competition. Plenty of people do, and that’s why there are tournaments that bring together thousands from around the world. I would wager, though, that most of those people began their time with the game the same way I did: as a little kid who thought Charizard was my badass, orange, fire-spitting friend.

The only appeal of Pokemon Go for me is that it’s a Pokemon game. But really, it qualifies in name only — if it was marketed differently, I probably would have never played it. Mechanically, there’s very little similarity, and graphically, there’s next to none. The most “Pokemon” thing about it is the pokeball on the app icon.

Of course, it would be absurd for a free mobile game to have the same depth, for lack of a better term, as a full $40 product. At the same time, I feel misled. Pokemon was an important part of my childhood. It taught me to grind for the things I wanted, even if that goal was just to teach a big, sleepy monster Hyper Beam.

In Pokemon Go, all that matters is where I am and who was there before me. What’s the point of caring?

So while you’re all walking around in packs, disrupting traffic and potentially getting robbed, I’ll be home listening to the Pokerap and bonding with my Magikarp the old-fashioned way.

Nobody said the trainer life was easy, but building relationships never is.