Pokémon X and Y Having No Legacy is Baffling (From the Perspective of Someone Playing for the First Time Years Later)
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Firstly, congrats to X and Y for its 10th anniversary. I was late to these games by about 4 years because I didn't get a 3DS until shortly before Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire were announced, so I just got those since I did not have a source of income back then. And then I waited for a Pokémon Z, except then Sun and Moon happened, so...Yeah, X and Y fell by the wayside until 2017 for me, when it was very obvious that the only way I'd see Kalos was by playing those games and not a sister version. (Also my cartridge stopped working at some point while I was halfway through the game so I had to buy a new copy and start over a few weeks ago, making me 10 years late to these games, but, eh, details)
Also I will be spoiling the story for this game, so if you, like me for some reason, have not played these games and care about this kind of thing, probably best to skip this whole thread. The vast majority of what I'm about to talk about is in regards to the games' narrative.
ANYWAY. I didn't hear much about these games, other than that they were pretty good, and apparently the story had genocide in it or something? And the games being too easy because of the EXP Share and the fact that no trainer uses more than 3 Pokémon? There were a couple other things regarding the gameplay that people talked about, but they're not really relevant to my topic here.
Part 1 - The Unassuming Majority of the Game
So, right out the gate, things are pretty typical by Pokémon standards. A bit cornier and more children's-TV-program-ish than usual when it comes to the writing and dialogue, but I didn't really think much of it. Honestly, this part of the game, which lasts from the intro all the way up until, like, 6 or 7 Gym Badges in, is...fine, I guess. It's certainly not good, but compared to what came later, it's relatively inoffensive.
That said, it's still mediocre at best. I actually kinda dig the intent. X and Y are set up as a big road trip with your friends, touring Not France, catching Pokémon, investigating this mysterious "Mega Evolution" thing (and oh boy am I gonna have more to say on that later), checking out the boutiques and cafés, and, of course, taking on the Gyms in each of the towns and cities that have one. It's a cozy, charming idea.
What is not cozy and charming is the characters who are intended to be your friends on this road trip.
So, the first problem here is the fact that the game establishes almost immediately that you, the player, have just moved to Kalos from another region extremely recently. Like, “yesterday” kinds of recently. The 4 characters of whom you are going to be traveling with have to introduce themselves to you because today is the first time they've met you. However, Pokémon isn't a stranger to sparking quick relationships between strangers and it not feeling too awkward.
This game is, though. We have 3 characters who bought their personalities from the dollar store on clearance, and then Serena/Calum who forgot their wallet at home and had to make one for themselves from a cardboard box that the store clerk dug out from their supply room for them.
Trevor is probably the only character here who has the faintest blueprints for potential, and only if you go out of your way looking for them in Lumiose City. His personality is that he's:
- Quiet
- Awkward
- More into filling the Pokédex than battling or training his Pokémon
Now, you might have read that and thought, "That doesn't sound bad." And you would be right, normally, if it wasn't for the fact that this is all his character is and every line of dialogue he has seemed to be designed to specifically remind you of the fact that at least one of those things is a bullet point of his characterization. We know, based on his sister(?) in Lumiose City, that his parents are basically never around because they're often on trips abroad, which would indicate that he's from a well-off family and is unfortunately neglected, thus resulting in his social ineptitude and lack of confidence in his own abilities. I could probably head-canon some other stuff from there, but it wouldn't matter because Trevor's actions and dialogue do not indicate that there is anything there beyond the bullet points I mentioned earlier. Half the time he talks to you, he engages you in a competition to see which of you has filled the most entries in their Pokédex, and each time, he makes sure to remind you that this is him "challenging you to my own kind of Pokémon battle." (Those exact words every time, I might add)
So, okay, Trevor's not a very interesting character, but there's a skeleton you can work with if you want to read into things. I'll give him that.
Then we have Tierno. What are Tierno's bullet points?
- He is obsessed with dancing
...That is literally it. All he cares about is dancing, making a team of Pokémon who dance, and learning about moves to use in dancing. Unlike Trevor, he doesn't even have a family you can talk to in order to gain even the tiniest bit of additional insight into his character or why he is the way that he is. (At least, not to my knowledge. I sure never found anything while I was playing) I think he's meant to be the comic relief of the group, as the other friend characters usually have lines acknowledging how one-track-minded he is, as if it's supposed to be funny.
So Tierno is uninteresting and also characterized by a gimmick of a "personality trait". How about Shauna?
Shauna is...
- Ditzy
- ...A girl, I guess?
Of these 3 characters so far, I'd say Shauna is actually the one who bothers me the least, even though she's about as shallow as Tierno. The fact that her bullet point is at least technically a personality trait rather than a gimmick helps. But, also, she's really the only friend character who feels kinda like she's...at least trying to be a character? The game has a few scenes with her and the player where it feels like they're trying to sell you some kind of heartfelt or emotional moments, but they don't really feel deserved or earned (which is a running theme in the execution of this narrative), and ultimately Shauna becomes merely flat, rather than actively bad.
And then we have Serena/Calum. Their characterization is:
- Needs to explore Mega Evolution because they think that will set them apart from other trainers
I think it would be more appropriate to say that this character feels like they need Mega Evolution because they think it will give them an actual defining trait as a character, but that joke is moot because you dash their hopes of obtaining Mega Evolution for themselves halfway through the game, and...they just kinda accept it and become your generic rival for the rest of the game. At least, Serena does. I won't speak for Calum on this specific point, as he may have different dialogue. (I made the mistake of assuming that Brendan and May had basically the same characterization in Ruby and Sapphire until I actually played as May and realized that Brendan is actually an immature jerk)
But, actually, I'd like to talk about the Mega Bangle scene for a moment. Serena (for the sake of this particular point, I'll specifically refer to Serena for the reason mentioned above) has spent the entire journey up to this point, which is about halfway through the game, prioritizing the study and exploration of Mega Evolution, pursuing it to obtain it for herself because she believes that it is the key to her success as a trainer. Mega Evolution is a vital ingredient in her path and arc in this story.
And you rip it away from her. Just like that. And she's upset by this for all of one line of dialogue. After your battle is over, she's over it. Ignoring the fact that she doesn't actually have a personality, am I the only person who felt like she got robbed of any actual development in her character from this moment on? This moment should have been a turning point for her, one to raise some sort of conflict, either within herself, or even between her and the player. This should have been a moment in which Serena is forced to face a reality that is disappointing, frustrating, even, compared to what she saw as her future. I don't mind that she gets over this, but it should not have been instantaneous.
And, actually, this connects pretty seamlessly into another point, now that we've conveniently finished talking about the friend group.
Part 2 - Mega Evolution: The Cornerstone of X and Y's Identity, Until It Wasn't
Mega Evolution. It was the big, shiny new thing at the time, right? It was a big deal. Here were new forms for a bunch of old Pokémon to beef up their stats and give them some new gimmicky abilities. At the time, I remember it being a pretty big point of conversation surrounding the games. (One of the only ones, really) Naturally, I wasn't too surprised when the game was rather...heavy-handed in reminding you of Mega Evolution's importance basically every time you met up with your road trip friends.
What did surprise me, however, was the fact that the game forgets Mega Evolution even exists the moment you gain access to it as a gameplay mechanic. The instant you complete the tutorial battle with Korrina, Mega Evolution only gets brought up...once? Twice, maybe? For the rest of the game. In fact, if we don't count the tutorial battle, there are only 3 instances of NPCs using Mega Evolution in the entire game. (Not counting the Battle Maison, because they use everything there) 4 if we count the rematch with Korrina after you become a Grand Duke/Duchess in the Battle Chateau. 1 is the final battle with Lysandre, one is the champion battle at the end of the game, and the last one is the battle with Serena/Calum in the postgame. That's it. For a game that was pushing this concept so hard in the first half, it dropped it like a smoldering rock as soon as the player could actually use it. How do none of the Gym Leaders, or at least the Elite Four, use Mega Evolution? (Again, other than Korrina after you've spent an unreasonable amount of time grinding in the Battle Chateau)
I honestly forgot Mega Evolution was even a thing by the time I saw Lysandre Mega Evolve his Gyarados. It didn't help that I only used Pokémon that were, at the time, new and exclusive to the Kalos region, which meant that I never was using Megas for myself, either. However, I was still shocked to realize that there are basically no trainers in the game who use this mechanic that was so heavily emphasized for such a large chunk of the game. I understand that Mega Evolution is, canonically, not super well-known in the Kalos region, but that particular footnote is kind of...inconsequential? It didn't need to be that way. There was really no reason for Mega Evolution to be just as new to the Pokémon world as it was to us in 2013. (Or the "discovery" of the Fairy-type, but that's a tangent waiting to happen)
And, actually, while we're talking about X and Y lacking an identity, something that bothered me very early on in this game was how heavily the game relies on older Pokémon. It's not quite as weird nowadays, since basically every game after X and Y does something similar. (Though not to the same degree, in my opinion)
Let's take a look at Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire for a moment. (I swear I'm going somewhere with this) In that game, you do not see a single Pokémon from Red/Blue or Gold/Silver until you're about to get your second Gym Badge. That means you've gone through Route 101, into Oldale Town, onto Route 103, though Route 102, Petalburg City, Route 104, an entire dungeon in the form of Petalburg Woods (even if it is a small dungeon), Rustboro City for your first Gym Badge, and Route 105 and Rusturf Tunnel before you will finally see Geodude and Zubat in Granite Cave. (Or Tentacool or Magikarp if you nabbed the Old Rod in Dewford Town) By the time you've seen these old faces, you've already had a couple of hours, or more if you're taking your time, getting to know entirely new Pokémon and getting an impression of the new (at the time) generation through them.
Diamond and Pearl do this, as well, though not quite to the same extent. And, obviously, Black and White made the bold choice of not having any older Pokémon in the game until you cleared the main story. By contrast, let's look at how long it takes X and Y to expose you to older Pokémon.
...Route 2. Which is honestly making it sound more impressive than it really is, because Route 1 has no Pokémon on it at all. Technically, you see an old Pokémon in the form of your mom's Rhyhorn outside of your house, like, 2 minutes into the game, but I'll generously not count that one for the sake of argument.
X and Y gives you older Pokémon mere minutes after giving you your starter. Now, mind you, Gold and Silver did the same thing. However, Gold and Silver were kinda weird and were designed to blend the old and the new together basically the whole way through, and with the Pokédex being much, much smaller back then, it doesn't feel nearly as strange. (Still feels a little bit strange, though)
And, actually, speaking of getting your starter, we have our Kalos starters, right? Just like in every generation, you pick your starter Pokémon, and, more likely than not, you'll have them for your entire journey. They're new, they're neat (usually), and they generally shine above all the other Pokémon in the game.
...so why does this game hand you a Kanto starter shortly after getting your first Gym Badge? Not only that, but all 3 of the Kanto starters have fancy new Mega Evolutions, which, in addition to the fact that a lot of players are drawn to the familiarity of what are often considered to be the fan favorite starters, makes them seem a whole lot more appealing than any of the actual new starters of X and Y. Obviously, you don't have to use the Kanto starter that Sycamore gives you (I didn't), but it's hard to deny the idea that the game feels like it's slanting you towards using them just as much, if not more than your Kalos starter, especially once you have access to the Mega Bangle. And while, yes, it is entirely up to the player which combination of starters they pick, and which ones they decide to use, it feels like a rather significant disservice to the Kalos starters.
Part 3 - Team Flare and This Game's Bizarre Tonal Dissonance
For the last several years, all I knew about Team Flare was people meme-ing about how they want to kill everyone because people aren't beautiful enough. All this time, I took these memes and jokes to be facetious, deliberately reading into things more than intended just to make fun of it and make it sound more ridiculous than it really was.
I had no idea.
I had no idea how un-hyperbolic these jokes were. In fact, I'd say they were actually watering down the reality of Team Flare and AZ as they are presented in the game itself.
Team Flare shows up kinda early in the game. (Between Gym Badges 1 and 2, but that particular segment of the game is much longer than you might expect) At that point, they are presented as cartoonishly arrogant and obsessed with their looks, which, at least to me, paints them as very incompetent and deliberately written to not be taken seriously. This annoyed me, but it wasn't a big deal. Evil teams in Pokémon aren't always the most well-written or entertaining characters in the game, but something about Team Flare felt especially...satirical, almost. Like Game Freak was making fun of their own mold that Pokémon antagonists took the shape of. It felt very...disingenuous, I guess? But that's not really my point.
Team Flare pops up again after getting your second Gym Badge, loitering around Route 10, home to Not Stonehenge. (Remember that, because I'll be referring back to this instance later) Not much happens during that encounter, other than it being incredibly obvious that there's something to be investigated in the gigantic pile of rocks with a door-shaped rock smack dab in the center, conveniently located just off-screen where a Flare Grunt vanished to, but we're apparently too naive and stupid to try and investigate that at this point in the game.
Later, Team Flare is siphoning electricity from the Kalos Power Plant, and later still, stealing Pokéballs from the Kalos Pokéball Factory. Obviously, you send them packing both times because they're bad at Pokémon battles, but that's not my point here, either.
My point is that, up to this point, which is about 6 Gym Badges in, Team Flare, and the story as a whole, has been played more or less for a joke. Or, at least, as something very corny and/or not worth trying to get invested in its plot or characters.
…So, when Lysandre broadcasts to everyone's Holo Casters that he's going to wipe out everyone who isn't part of Team Flare and you infiltrate his base of operations under the guise of a café (God this sounds so much more stupid when I explain it), and then get suddenly handed a lore dump about how Not Stonehenge is actually the burial ground of hundreds of Pokémon who were killed 3,000 years ago in order to power the Ultimate Weapon™ so that it could kill a very large number of people in order to end the great war...
...I kinda wasn't sure why the game was expecting me to take any of it seriously? Especially since, while all of this was happening, and it was explained that Lysandre was planning to draw life from more Pokémon in order to commit mass genocide, you still had Flare Grunts and Admins making asinine remarks about how stylish they are when you defeat them in a Pokémon battle? Even during the actual climax, when Serena/Calum (and later. Shauna) join you at Not Stonehenge to infiltrate Team Flare’s “super secret” base (the one that was incredibly obvious to anyone with a functioning pair of eyes), while you have these characters giving their speeches about friendship and the value of all life, they’re still pushing the Flare Grunt and Admin’s usual one-liners regarding their stylishness.
The whole game has this weird tug of war with itself, where it presents itself in an almost self-aware, deliberately low quality of writing, but then also tries to act like it’s being profound, emotional, or otherwise presenting a dramatic or impactful scene. Yes, a narrative can have both jokes and also heavy themes (look at virtually any Dragon Quest game, or, heck, even Black and White of this very same franchise), but X and Y do not come anywhere close to sticking the landing in this regard, and instead I felt more confused by what the narrative was going for more often than not.
But I’m getting ahead of myself now.
Part 4 - AZ is a Meaningless Addition to the Narrative
Let’s rewind a little bit, back to the Kalos Power Plant sequence. Immediately after kicking Team Flare out, the player is presented with a new character, a towering man who, at the time, has no name, but can be heard muttering something to himself before walking off-screen. By this point, you’re halfway through the game. Would you believe me if I told you that this person is actually, apparently, very important to the plot, but will not be seen again until the infiltration of the Flare Café base, right before the story’s grand (if we’re being generous here) climax?
This character is called AZ. When meeting him in a prison cell in the Flare Café base, he tells the player a story which is so obviously about himself that I don’t really understand why he even tried to act like it wasn’t. This takes the form of what is effectively a PowerPoint presentation for, like, 2 whole minutes, and I am going to try to sum it up as succinctly as possible.
3,000 years ago, there was a great war between the ancient Kalos region and…somewhere else that isn’t specified because it isn’t that important. During this war, there’s a guy (who is all but depicted exactly like AZ) who loses his beloved Floette in death to this war. AZ is heartbroken by this event and builds a colossal device (by himself) which will resurrect his Pokémon from the dead (again, by himself, because he can just do that, apparently), but does so by sucking the life force out of all of the nearby Pokémon. However, AZ, not content with reviving his dear Floette, was still angry at humanity for causing his Pokémon to die at all in the first place, and reverses his machine to instead suck the life energy of even more nearby Pokémon in order to fire a death beam into the war itself and kill more Pokémon (and people) to bring the war to an end.
His Floette gains knowledge of the fact that its life was restored at the cost of the lives of countless other Pokémon and leaves AZ, not approving of his methods and actions. This sends AZ into despair as he roams the world for 3,000 years in search of the Floette he worked so hard to bring back.
To summarize, AZ threw away countless lives in order to bring back 1 life. He didn’t try to stop the war because the war was horrible or for any noble cause. He did it because he was mad at the world for killing his Floette. AZ tries to spin the story in a way that sounds like he wanted to prevent anyone else from feeling his pain of losing his Floette in death, but doesn’t seem to realize that he himself inflicted the exact same pain on others with those same actions.
Obviously the device AZ built to restore and destroy life is the same machine as the Ultimate Weapon™Team Flare is aiming to fire in their quest to rid the world of anyone who is not on their side. Why was AZ important? Well, other than providing what honestly felt like a superfluous backstory to Team Flare’s goal, he also is carrying the…key to the Ultimate Weapon™, and Team Flare needs that in order to operate the device. I wish I could say that’s a joke, but that is literally the only reason he matters to the sequence of events. He’s, allegedly, wearing this key around his neck to prevent anyone else from using the Ultimate Weapon™, which does not make any sense, because if he actually wanted to make sure that no one would fire his weapon, he should have destroyed it, not simply hidden the key on his person.
There are a few references to AZ outside of this, like Dexio and Sina, two assistants of Professor Sycamore (also they think they’re superheroes? That plot thread is also completely meaningless to the point where I could have left it out and I’m sure no one would have noticed, but that also kind of proves my point about how this story has things caked onto it without actually serving any meaningful purpose), asking about him, though ultimately it never amounts to anything other than solidifying the already-obvious truth that AZ is the same man from the ancient tale of 3,000 years ago. (Also he was the king of Kalos back then. Did I forget to mention that? Because that also hardly matters, even though it honestly should be a huge deal)
Team Flare’s whole story arc is already very eyebrow-raising and, quite frankly, sloppily implemented and poorly presented, but everything about AZ somehow makes it all worse. He adds nothing but convolution and needless additional drama to the story, and really raises more questions than he answers. At least in Y, they never indicate how he or his Floette are still alive after 3,000 years, why he’s a giant, why he never thought to destroy his Ultimate Weapon™in all these years to prevent anyone else from using it as he claimed, or how he simply vanished from history even though he was the king of the Kalos region and has been wandering it for literal millennia.
Furthermore, at the end of the game, AZ pops up at a celebratory event to commemorate you and your friends as the heroes of the Kalos region for stopping Team Flare, challenges you to a battle, and…somehow this eliminates his disdain for humanity and spurs his Floette to descend from the heavens to return to him because it was waiting for this change of heart within him for 3,000 years? This sequence was so bizarre, as AZ himself is only in the story for a collective 10 or 15 minutes of screentime at most. His reunion with his Floette is presented as this grand, emotional moment of both tenderness and triumph, yet as the audience, I felt nothing from this resolution to his arc. AZ is such an arbitrary footnote to X and Y’s narrative, that this whole scene feels entirely undeserved and, quite frankly, empty, as a result. Had AZ been a more consistently recurring character throughout the story, and been written well enough to actually be sympathetic instead of pretty much just as wrong as Lysandre, this scene could have actually worked.
Speaking of Lysandre, can we talk about him? I’ve wrung as much as I could out of AZ because he really isn’t that relevant to anything (or at least, he didn’t need to be).
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(Had to split this into 2 posts because apparently this was too long, lol)
Part 5 - Lysandre, and How the Narrative Tries to Manipulate Your View of Him
Unlike AZ, Lysandre is not quite so simply removed from the narrative, being the game’s main antagonist.
…But he’s also presented as being a famous figure the rest of the Kalos region reveres, due to the tech his lab manufactures. Which, sure, fine, that can work. However, it’s clear from the instant you meet him that something isn’t right about him. He speaks so disdainfully of wasting things like beauty and youth while speaking to Diantha, the Kalos region’s Champion and famed movie star (whom is also not really a relevant player in any of this, but that’s not really worth getting into), that it’s painfully obvious that he’s evil. But, alright, Ghetsis was also stupidly obviously evil back in Black and White, and he similarly had everybody fooled to his true nature despite that, so I’ll give Lysandre a pass.
However, the difference here is that Ghetsis was also very clearly wrong, while Lysandre is presented as if he is not. Sympathetic or morally gray antagonists can certainly work. Not every villain has to be evil, and can create fascinating conflicts when the antagonist is motivated by a philosophy that isn’t demonstrably false. So, alright, what’s Lysandre’s goal and his motivation?
Well…it depends on where in the game you’re at. For the vast majority of the game, Lysandre makes it abundantly clear that he thinks humanity is “ugly” and selfish, and that he would “ end the world in an instant so that beauty never fades.” (His exact words)
Lysandre. Is insane.
But later, as in, the climax of the story levels of later, he reveals that there is an additional reason for his actions. He fears for the limited resources available to both humans and Pokémon in the world, and feels that people being selfish and “ugly” are not worthy of life and consumption of these resources which will eventually become scarce. Thus, he is taking it upon himself to trim the world’s population in order to…provide a temporary fix for this perceived issue, I guess, because obviously this will become a problem again in the future, but he never addresses that obvious eventuality. (I’ll add here that I only played Y, so if this is augmented in X, then I will throw my hands in the air and concede that it might make more sense there)
Lysandre’s justification for his actions is…not inherently bad, but it also does not come anywhere close to actually justifying mass genocide. Are overpopulation and scarcity of food and resources a frightening prospect and reality? Yes. Does it make killing most of the world’s population so that only people of your choosing survive based on how much of a fashionista they are okay? This may shock you, but the answer to that question is not really up for debate.
But, as I said earlier, Lysandre is insane. He is legitimately unhinged from any and all voices of reason and logic, and if the narrative accepted this reality, I would not be nearly as offended by his character. But, instead, X and Y wants you to believe the most baffling lie it ever tries to present:
Lysandre is apparently morally gray, and sympathetic, according to this narrative.
What.
Let’s start with the “sympathetic” part, since it’s the part that is only presented once. (Actually, twice if you count a line from a random NPC you can talk to, who says that they knew Lysandre before all this and how he’s a poor soul who tried so hard to believe in humanity but was constantly met with evidence to the contrary, which…nah, I don’t buy that, sorry) While the player and Serena/Calum confronts Lysandre on the first floor of Team Flare’s Geosenge base, Lysandre explains his motives as stated above, to which Serena/Calum responds by asking about all of the innocent Pokémon who will die from Lysandre’s attempt of thinning the human population for the so-called good of the world. The brief scene that followed almost made me genuinely laugh, and I know for a fact that that was not the intended reaction.
Lysandre, knowing that this person has raised an excellent point which he must have had to come to terms with, sheds a single tear of regret. For, you see, it pains him to know that countless Pokémon will be robbed of their lives, but he must proceed with his plan for the good of everyone – for the good of the world!
I spit on this scene. This scene is one of the stupidest, most poorly-written parts of this mediocre story. If Lysandre’s motives were actually capable of justifying his actions even just a tiny percentage, and if Lysandre was fleshed out to be appropriately portrayed as someone who really does care about the world and the lives of both people and Pokémon prior to this point, I could buy it. But neither of these things are true. Lysandre has taken it upon himself to eliminate the vast majority of the world’s population of both humans and Pokémon, not based on how good they are or how friendly to the environment they are, not for how well they use and manage the resources that he supposedly cares so much about, but on the basis of whether or not they are stylish enough to become a member of Team Flare. And he’s going to throw away the lives of everyone and everything else to get there.
Can I just say, Team Flare is too comically incompetent, one-dimensional, and painfully bumbling to deserve or even be capable of a plot this genuinely, sincerely evil? I would argue that Ghetsis is still more despicable on a very personal level, but Lysandre is so insane that his level of evil is on a different plane from any other villain in these games.
Why, then, is he depicted as if he isn’t wrong for what he does?
Serena/Calum later meets up with the player on Victory Road, right before the end of the game. There, they share their musings and reflections regarding the events that transpired during the Team Flare climax. In particular, I want to single out this exact line: "But since our positions forced our [yours, mine, and Lysandre's] hands, you can't really say any of us were right."
Excuse me?
You mean to try and convince me that mass genocide (I will keep emphasizing this point because I cannot make it any more abundantly clear how transparent the game is on this concept) is not necessarily wrong? That stopping someone from wiping the vast majority of the world’s population is difficult to call right? Either the writers really, severely underthought their own narrative when they felt like trying to spin it in a more profound direction, or this is indicative of their own morals. (Please let it just be the former)
Professor Sycamore also has an exchange with the player, shortly after returning from Team Flare’s super secret base, where he reveals that he knew about Lysandre’s true colors and ideals all along, and he allowed him to build up Lysandre’s Labs because he hoped that Lysandre would…grow out of that mentality, I guess? And that he is partly at fault for allowing Team Flare to exist and do what they did?
So…not only is Lysandre insane, but he was enabled for years, possibly decades, by Professor Sycamore. Why was this exchange necessary? All it did was make Sycamore look worse. It didn’t explain Lysandre’s mentality at all, only that he has apparently felt this way for a long time and anyone who picked up on it did nothing to address it. This does not make Lysandre sympathetic, nor does it make him any less wrong.
Speaking of which, there was one other line of dialogue that tried to re-enforce the idea that Lysandre, and Team Flare as a whole, was not wrong in what they did and strove for. In the postgame, during the Looker quest (we’ll come back to this in more detail later, so don’t worry), you meet up with one of the Elite Four, Malva. There, she very casually drops the tiny little tidbit of information that she’s not only a news anchor and member of the Elite Four, but also an admin for Team Flare. She then prefaces her reasons for asking for your aid with the words, “You may have disagreed with us,” which, to me, indicates that she still believes that Team Flare is right, or at least, not intrinsically wrong, even after the operation was shut down.
But, more importantly, this raised the question of how on earth this lady is allowed to continue serving as a member of the Elite Four and also a news broadcaster while being simultaneously affiliated with this group of terrorists who tried to kill everyone. The game, of course, never addresses this, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth considering. Like, the fact that Team Flare’s attempt at destroying everything was known well enough that a big ceremony was held at the end of the game. Surely, the general public must know that Team Flare is, y’know…horrible? I guess Malva kept her role as admin secret from everybody? That’s the only thing that makes any degree of sense to me.
But, anyway, back to Lysandre for a little bit longer. After defeating him for the last time, Lysandre decides to fire the Ultimate Weapon™anyway because…I guess he just can? Even though you’ve already caught Xerneas/Yveltal, which was a significant chunk of the energy that was necessary for firing the weapon? (Which I guess means all the Pokémon Team Flare stole from people died in that scene, which is, quite honestly, disgusting, considering what the result of this action is)
So, anyway, the weapon fires, and Shauna, Serena/Calum, and the player flee the base while Lysandre stands there, obliterated by the Ultimate Weapon™ he just fired. I do think that Lysandre dying in this scene was the correct call, but the way the scene is presented and followed up makes his demise feel so…vague and empty. On top of that, Lysandre’s words before firing the Ultimate Weapon™ come across as almost spiteful, like he wasn’t actually intending to destroy the device and himself with it. If that’s the case, then the fact that his death isn’t so much as acknowledged by anyone makes it feel so dissatisfying and, in a way, meaningless. On the other hand, if Lysandre did mean to annihilate himself alongside the weapon, then that feels almost like it’s trying to give him a redemption arc out of nowhere. He didn’t express any signs of accepting that he was in the wrong and thus needed to pay for his crimes with his life, and the rest of the game’s dialogue continues to hammer in the ludicrous idea that he may have, in fact, been in the right! You really can’t win with this scene as it is.
What should have happened, in my opinion, was that Lysandre’s final defeat should have been when the final string of his remaining sanity snapped, throwing him into a blind rage and spurring him to attempt to fire the weapon in a desperate struggle to salvage his operation that he’d sunk so much of his time, resources, and planning into. After all, he believes that, despite the painful sacrifices he’s [making everyone else] making, he is RIGHT. He is the HERO in this scenario. He is doing what’s BEST for the world. He cannot accept failure. Lysandre should have initiated some kind of emergency system to either, I dunno, lock himself in with the control panel, or maybe eject the player and their friends from the base, and fire the weapon with its incomplete power levels anyway.
However, rather than firing as intended, the device’s resources being so grossly insufficient for the magnitude of the blast he requires should have caused the machine to malfunction, and in his final moments trapped with the machine that was to be his salvation, he realizes that he has actually sealed his own imminent fate. Thus, Lysandre pays with his life, not out of choice, but out of his own arrogance and delusion. He realizes all too late that he has made a fatal error, but is not redeemed. He merely pays the ultimate price, the price that he wanted the rest of the world to pay in his stead.
That is how I think Lysandre should have ended. It would have been poetic. He didn’t need to be redeemed. He didn’t need to be sympathetic. He didn’t need to be morally ambiguous. When you’ve dedicated your life to building a cult-like group of people into a plan to wipe out all life aside from yourselves, and you actually go through with all of it, regardless of it being successful or not, there is no redemption. There is no sympathy. There is no question about whether or not you’re right. You are a horrible, blind, selfish, and totally unhinged individual who is beyond saving, beyond salvaging.
…But X and Y don’t see it that way. Lysandre’s fate is completely up to your interpretation, and once the device has been destroyed, Shauna asks a question which I feel speaks volumes about the developers’ and writers’ feelings about this game’s story. She asks if, now that all this Team Flare stuff is over, “can we go back to our adventure now?”
Team Flare’s whole arc was just a hurdle. Just something to trudge through and get out of the way so you can get back to the important thing. Saving all life? Nah. I’m talking about going and touring Not France and challenging more people to Pokémon battles!
The almost blase way Team Flare’s arc is…shrugged off as just kinda like, “well, that happened, I guess. So anyway, back to Pokémon…” is so…perplexing. The writing team clearly put time and work and effort into writing this narrative. Into the backstory, into the blocking of the scenes, and they clearly wanted the audience to be invested in this story and these characters.
…At least, that’s what I want to say. Because, as I said earlier when I was talking about the tone of this story, I got mixed messages constantly from this game. Did it want me to be invested? Or did it want me to hand-wave all the story developments as nothing more than a ridiculous joke? The characters are all so flat and devoid of any actual life or character, and the plot is so whack and absurd, yet you have scenes, like Lysandre shedding a tear, or AZ’s backstory slideshow, which are presented in a way that very, very obviously thinks that it’s being very heavy and emotional, except…there is no weight there. There is no baggage for the audience to be weighed down by prior to any of these scenes. If anything, the story and writing have actively discouraged investment in any of these characters or stakes by writing everyone as almost satirical archetypes.
However, X and Y do not understand this. They do not understand how much of a joke they are. They try to manipulate their audience’s feelings with these scenes with melodramatic one-liners, camera angles, music, or other such touches which, in a well-written story, would be effective tools in plucking at the audience’s heartstrings. I can almost guarantee you that if you felt any sadness or emotional connection during this game’s cutscenes, it’s not because it was written well enough to deserve it. It’s because the presentation successfully manipulated you into thinking that it was.
Final Part - Team Flare Ruins Everything They Touch (Postgame)
For my final point of discussion (and I swear this won’t be nearly as long as the Lysandre part, so bear with me), I’d like to talk about the postgame quest, involving Looker from Pokémon Platinum Version and Black/White. In this postgame story, you meet Looker, a man who claims to be a detective and enlists your help as an assistant for his jobs. It’s a quaint, if weirdly hand-holdy, string of mini-episodic quests that lead you to meeting, befriending, and joining forces with a homeless girl, Emma, and her wild Espurr friend, Mimi.
Aside from the fact that unlocking this quest is incredibly poorly messaged to the player, requiring a string of seemingly unrelated (and in one case, exceedingly optional) tasks in the postgame, I was actually kinda digging the Looker quests. They told a surprisingly wholesome and charming little tale about a homeless, yet fiery girl who’s so grateful to the player and Looker for taking her in and letting her stay in the office instead of living on the streets, to the point where she feels incredibly guilty that she isn’t helping to pay for rent or food or other facilities while Looker is struggling to pay the bills.
Emma has a talk with her trusty Espurr friend, Mimi, and decides to go and seek out a job so she can contribute financially and express her gratitude to both the player and Looker. It’s really sweet, and it was such a breath of fresh air after the disaster that was X and Y’s main campaign.
…So, of course, Team Flare has to get involved and stamp out any potential enjoyment I could have had.
To keep things brief, Dr. Xerosic, who was one of the lead scientists in Team Flare’s operations (and whom I’ve not mentioned at all because he’s so inconsequential to anything in the main campaign outside of one really stupid scene), is revealed to have been the one who hired Emma, using her to test out a mecha suit that grants the wearer superhuman abilities and knocks them into a state of unconsciousness while they wear the suit. This allows for Dr. Xerosic to control the suit, and by extension, the person wearing it, remotely. To do whatever he wants. In this case, he uses Emma in the suit to deface art in the Lumiose Museum as a “test.”
Later, he uses Emma in his experimental suit to go around and challenge people to battles in dark alleys, then steal their Pokémon after winning. The idea here being that, due to the suit’s capabilities and the fact that Dr. Xerosic is the one controlling her while she’s unconscious, she will never tire out like an ordinary human.
The player battles Emma in the suit (or Essentia, as she and Dr. Xerosic both refer to her while she’s wearing the suit) many times. Like…way too many times. But, anyway, after enough battles, Dr. Xerosic is satisfied with the results of all these tests and…apparently understands that what he’s been doing by using a young girl to commit crimes for the sake of testing out an incredibly dubious piece of technology is…kind of a bad thing to do?
Dr. Xerosic and Looker have a private conversation, and Dr. Xerosic agrees to “let” Looker turn him in to the police to answer for his crimes. And apologizes to Emma for what he did to her.
…and then there’s this tearful goodbye with Dr. Xerosic and Looker, the latter of which reveals himself to be a member of the International Police and that he has to go back abroad because the whole detective agency thing was just a ruse he used while he tried to track down Dr. Xerosic. And, actually, I did feel a little something when Emma was struggling to understand why Looker, someone whom she’d grown to care about and trust and view almost like family, had to suddenly abandon her indefinitely.
But Dr. Xerosic’s drastic 180? Nah, that was stupid. Xerosic, being a lead Team Flare scientist and engineer, was in on Team Flare’s endeavors in the main game, and therefore, he is just as guilty as Lysandre of all the same crimes that Lysandre was. Pile on top of that the willful manipulation of other people just to test out technology that he unflinchingly used to pull a string of crimes, and all he has to say is, “Sorry, that was my bad. I’ll go to prison instead of you.”? That’s it? And he gets away with this?
This guy is responsible for a significant chunk of Team Flare’s operations, including activating the Ultimate Weapon™ if the player presses a button that will prevent it from firing. And you’re telling me that I’m supposed to feel like he’s turned over a new leaf because he apologized and decided to go to prison? Nah, pal, get outta here with that garbage.
This postgame story could have been just fine without Team Flare getting involved. I should note that this bit with Dr. Xerosic and Essentia is also when you meet up with Malva, as she is the one who tells Looker where to find Dr. Xerosic, seeming to believe that the doctor has done something to shame Team Flare or something. (Because mass genocide is fine, but using somebody to commit vandalism and thievery? That’s too far, man)
…
You know, I’ve heard people express that Pokémon X and Y are the least noteworthy mainline Pokémon games in the franchise, that they’re forgettable, and that they would have been remembered if they’d had a sister game like how Ruby and Sapphire had Emerald, or Diamond and Pearl had Platinum.
I disagree.
X and Y are anything but unmemorable with an utterly nuts and appalling narrative, textbook examples of flat, uninspired characters, and the biggest struggle in maintaining its own identity of any mainline game. On a gameplay front, the games are mostly fine, with some gimmicks that were either annoying or incredibly short-lived as the game was constantly throwing new things at the player. But when it comes to the story? This game made me angry, which is not something I can say about any Pokémon game other than Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness (Which ALSO had a bafflingly stupid endgame story, but that’s neither here nor there).
A Pokémon Z would not have fixed X and Y. That’s not to say X and Y’s story is beyond salvaging – there is a skeleton that can be worked with and refined into something good here. But Pokémon sister games never make the sheer volume of changes that X and Y would have needed to be good in the story department. And, honestly, the issues with this narrative go so deep that even a lot of small changes would not have been enough.
I went into this game expecting the story to not be good. I did not expect it to be actively bad, though. It failed to meet even my already-low expectations, which is something I am still both shocked and disheartened by. Black and White, at the time, had such great storytelling and genuine thought by the standards Pokémon had set up to that point. To see such a gross regression in literary competency within just a single generation of the franchise was so disappointing and frustrating, and I’m just grateful that we’ve not stepped back into this low again since then. People may have complained about Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon’s story (which, in fairness, is more that it downgraded Sun and Moon’s above average story into one that was merely meh) and Sword and Shield’s story, but, in my opinion, nothing will ever come close to Pokémon X and Y – the lowest low that mainline Pokémon games have ever (and hopefully will ever) hit. Narratively, at least.
If you’ve made it all the way down here, then I’d like to personally thank you for sticking with me through my ramblings about a completely irrelevant game that’s been largely forgotten by the Pokémon community. I expect that X and Y will suddenly be remembered fondly by the fans in another 5 or 10 years, around the time that they expect the games will be remade. And then the remakes will come out and people might finally realize just how bad the story in these games actually was all these years. But I digress.
Happy 10th anniversary, Pokémon X and Y. I may not like your story at all, but I can’t deny the important things you’ve done to contribute towards this franchise’s growth. (Also PSS is still the best multiplayer interface Pokémon has ever had, which is wild)
…I’m gonna stop this here now. I got nothing else to say. Take care, and by all means, please share your thoughts! I love discussing these kinds of things.
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I liked the write-up. It's unfortunate more people won't see it.
Honestly thought the whole gen was pretty lousy. Boring, forgettable towns, uninspired gym leaders, and a dogshit plot. If it wasn't a Pokemon game it would've done horribly. And I feel like that way about ORAS as well. Couldn't even finish that one. I think the only thing Gen 6 brought to the table of any value was the Fairy type and any of the games could've done that.
