Imagine a world in which someone took Ken Sugimori’s original Pokémon art and brought it to life with animation. And then, in this wonderful idyll, someone took inspiration from this fanart, and developed a 3D Pokémon game based on it. And just to be sure, this developer would have already built an engine for creating Pokémon-inspired games. Obviously we can’t live in this world, because Nintendo would miserably crush it, but just imagine.
If I were imagining such a thing, the idea possibly planted in my brain by GamesRadar, I’d begin with the extraordinary fanart of pokeyugami, who would create adorable animations showing how the earliest Pokémon games would look were they 3D and based on the art of original Pokémon TCG card designer, Ken Sugimori. In my head, it would look something like this:
Or maybe like this:
What I’d then do, purely speculatively of course, is pick studio Yanako RPGs to see these clips, which would be inspired by them to develop a full game based on the concept. I’d choose Yanako RPGs, because it would be the developer behind MonMae, an open source engine that allows anyone to make their own monster-collecting game, which is also developing a game within the engine, Dokimon. I mean, that name would obviously be far too on-the-nose and get a developer sued into the sun, but it’s just what my imagination came up with in the moment. I’d definitely remember to come up with something more than one letter off a multi-billion franchise before I released such a game for God’s sake.
In my mind, it gets declared with a tweet like this:
The game would be created using the same watercolor art, but also implement ideas from the more recent Pokémon games, as well as being inspired by Pokémon Black & White 2.
Sure, it’d be lovely if any of this could actually happen, but given Nintendo’s reputation for releasing its rabid legal hounds at anyone who even looks at them funny (thus illegally reflecting their copyrighted artworks in their eyeballs), it will have to remain my fantasy.