Em E. Lee

Well then. This was a review I never thought I’d be writing anytime soon.

This mirrors how GO the game only ever lets the player throw Pokéballs at the wild ones, without ever needing to weaken them first;I adored the Sun & Moon seasons of the Pokémon anime; dare I say it, it's my favorite arc of its whole 1,000+ episode run. Considering what I had already experienced with the series before Sun & Moon, it's not hard to see why. I first became a Pokémon fan around 2009, starting my lifelong obsession by playing hours of Platinum version and watching the second half of the Diamond & Pearl anime. The show captured that younger me with how much resemblance the stories bore to the games; it was something I'd never felt before, feeling like I could relate to the characters' struggles that I knew not from my personal life but from a simulated world I'd become fixated on.

My hype for this game began when it appeared during Nintendo's Mini-Direct back in March; it seemed like a cute new IP, revolving around Ninja-powered bubble gum and taking place in an appealing world that blends two of my favorite aesthetics together, Japanese culture and architecture with modern-day Western society. The free-to-play battle royale-style gameplay only strengthened my resolve to try it out once it dropped later in the summer, since I haven't had much experience with the genre before, and with the state of the pandemic right now, I felt like I needed something new to keep my spirits up while in quarantine.

If the 200+ hours I've spent on this game doesn't tip off how addicting it is, then I don't know what would.

Roses are red while silence is gold

It's something I came up with while looking for work, moving game pieces or drowning in thoughts that begged me questions of love and humans and minds that made me ponder the reality of science. It began with words about the past and futures and whether archived similes could stand to be repeated, if the rhythm required that 'trepidation' replaced 'fear' or if the sun-kissed-daisy rhyme stood to be deleted. It was written with the present in mind, those front page exclamations that burden the working days and it's layered like a cake with anecdotes and inspirations from the hallucination I call life.