Pokemon Liquid Crystal - The Farthest From Home I've Ever Been (Patreon)

“I want to be the very best,

Like no one ever was.

To catch them is my real test,

To train them is my cause!

I will travel across the land,

Searching far and wide.

Each Pokemon to understand

The power that's inside!

Pokemon!”

- Pokemon Theme Song

Pokemon Red Version and Pokemon Green Version, the original games in the Pokemon series was released in 1996, and within a few years it would be a worldwide phenomenon, with several chapters in the game series, a trading card game, an anime series released internationally and fucking annual movie releases. The success of the franchise almost completely comes down to its immediate popularity with children, and there are a few obvious reasons these games captured the imaginations of children so completely: the child-aged player character gets to travel away from home like a big grown-up; they have cool animal friends; the designs are varied and consistently thoughtful so kids get to argue constantly about which one is the best.

One possibility we’re going to ignore all others for today, though, is that Pokemon is so successful because it’s a masterpiece. Okay, that’s silly, and that’s not how success works. Media is not a meritocracy. The objective fact that Pokemon is a masterpiece and the success of the franchise is a happy coincidence.

There's a lot to be said about both the context of its creation and the context into which the franchise was published, and how it was received, so this video is going to bring together Pokemon with another masterpiece first released in 1996: me. That is to say, like a lot of people watching, for me Pokemon absolutely dominates my childhood, and it would be counterproductive to pretend otherwise.

So what is Pokemon about? Well first let's turn to the theme song again for clues.

“Oh, you're my best friend,

In a world we must defend!”

- Pokemon Theme Song

“A world we must defend”? Defend from what? Well it’s obvious really: Capitalism.

Back on my bullshit again? Mostly - but Pokemon was originally inspired by its creator’s love of bug collecting as a child, and a desire to inspire a love of nature and animals in children, and I think it’s undeniably one of the most prominent themes of the franchise. You have Pokemon like Muk and Koffing that are polluted by toxic waste, Galarian Corsola representing the destruction of the barrier reef, and the first movie is about a Pokemon uprising rebelling against humans for exploiting and enslaving them. Like, the resolution is that Ash’s Pikachu serves as a model for how humans should respect animals and treat them as equals and partners, instead of tools. They say all this explicitly, it’s a children’s film.

The climate crisis, and in particular the fact that the climate crisis is driven by human greed and exploitation is a constantly foregrounded theme of the franchise. In season 1 episode 51, Bulbasaur’s Mysterious Garden, while musing on the scientific debate over whether Venusaur is a plant or an animal, Brock says that “maybe Venusaur represents that we’re all connected to nature.”

Every scheme of every villain in Pokemon is about the exploitation of pokemon labour and the destruction of the environment, from Team Rocket’s cons and theft to Gary’s disrespect of his pokemon friends, to the guy trying to sell you Slowpoke tails to the man in the pokemon centre who wants $500 for a Magikarp!

Extinct Pokemon play a prominent role in every generation right from the beginning because conservation and ecological protection is a vital concern of the text.

I know I may well be getting ahead of myself for some people here. I asked all my friends who’d played Pokemon as children what Pokemon was about and I did not hear these themes come up at all. Instead, everyone I asked told me Pokemon is about friendship, adventure, exploring, coming-of-age, friendship and friendship. I have my own theory as to why this may be, but first let’s talk about the ubiquity of Pokemon and some of the knock-on effects of that.

Everyone who grew up with it feels an immense amount of ownership over Pokemon because at a certain level of ubiquity, art just feels like it belongs to the public. As John Berger says in Ways of Seeing,

“This is vividly illustrated by what happens when a painting is shown on a television screen. The painting enters each viewer’s house. There it is surrounded by [their] wallpaper, [their] furniture, [their] mementoes. It enters the atmosphere of [their] family. It becomes their talking point. It lends its meaning to their meaning. At the same time it enters a million other houses and, in each of them, is seen in a different context. Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator rather than the spectator to the painting. In its travels, its meaning is diversified.
One might argue that all reproductions more or less distort, and that therefore the original painting is still in a sense unique.”

Pokemon Liquid Crystal is a ROM that was in development since 2007 until.. Well, the last update was in 2016. It was being developed by a 4 person team, known online as: Linkandzelda, Zeikku, Jambo51 and Magnius. In this video I’d like to talk about my experience with it and why Pokemon Liquid Crystal is completely amazing.

First though, ROMs:

A ROM is the colloquial term for a port of a console game, usually gameboy specifically. The name ROM comes from the Read-Only Memory chip in a game cartridge that the data needs to be copied from to create a port of the game. Who is it that copies the data you may be asking, and the answer is, fans of the game. Someone who wants to play the game from their childhood but doesn’t have access to their console any more perhaps, or maybe someone who wants to mod their nostalgic fave in some way.
For example, most ROM emulators include fast-forward settings, which are honestly absurdly useful, because… do you know how slow Pokemon is? Walking from Viridian City to the Elite Four I can feel my hair growing.

Artists need to get paid, just like everyone else but when art is considered culturally essential efforts are made to make that art freely available to everyone, like you can just look at the Mona Lisa by just googling it. It’s not the fully same experience as going to the Louvre and shoving your way through an enormous crowd of tourists and then later reflecting on whether anyone will ever have an authentic experience seeing the painting the way Da Vinci intended again, but as Berger points out, everyone’s experience of a painting is different anyway.

The Mona Lisa is considered so seminal that everyone needs to know what it looks like, because how are we going to have conversations about art if we don’t know what the Mona Lisa looks like? If Mr Art Enjoyer the man who owns every painting in europe said that only the people he let see the painting could see it, wouldn’t we lose something as a society? As a species?

Clearly there is an assumption that ubiquitous art should be freely accessible to all.
Console games especially, which have a huge financial barrier to entry, have repeatedly become culturally ubiquitous points of reference, but how are my filthy broke comrades and I supposed to experience Muscular Murder Man XL only on Nintendo DS if we can’t afford the Nintendo DS?

The answer ROMs provide is that old games should be free to everyone. Old games, by the way, that are largely discontinued and don’t make any new money for the people who make them. Lots of art debuts in a setting that costs money to access, but then if the work is considered culturally essential, effort is made to make it available to everyone. Video games debut in a setting that costs money to access, but then, if they come to be considered essential, efforts are made to make them available to everyone for free. The difference with games, the absolutely magical thing is, all it takes is one person. If just one person loves a game enough, they can make a ROM of it, and it will be saved forever.

Also, a lot of ROM hacking is done to translate games and make them accessible to a wider audience, or to change them back to earlier versions to push back against censorship laws - it’s a gaming paradise of liberty and high-minded public ownership of art!

(except that most of the anti-censorship changes are to put naked women and nazi imagery back into games that had them removed so okay it isn’t exactly as pure as I made out at first)

Maybe, if they love the game enough, they’ll want to not just copy it, but update it, try to improve it, give it modern graphics and more content - and so we come back around to Pokemon Liquid Crystal.

Pokemon Liquid Crystal isn’t just a copy of a game. Instead it uses the more modern graphics of Pokemon: Fire Red in the setting of Pokemon: Crystal. Pokemon: Soul Silver and Pokemon: Heart Gold came out a couple of years after Pokemon Liquid Crystal but they’re really distinct games. For one thing, Liquid Crystal includes some elements from much later generations of Pokemon that the developers liked, and those are the elements that crash all the fucking time. It also includes small quality-of-life things like letting you skip a tutorial you’ve done literally 10,000 times.

Liquid Crystal gave Pokemon fans an updated Johto-Kanto game with full colour graphics, and it did it years before Nintendo made an official game doing that, which is really cool.

For many people, Pokemon Liquid Crystal is the perfect Pokemon experience. For fans who are feeling homesick and nostalgic, and don’t want to play any of the newer, inferior games. You start in Johto, confront the pokemon thief, heal the sick Ampharos, squirt all over Sudowoodo, all that good stuff, and then you get to go to the first gen Kanto region.
And if you beat the Kanto Region, then the Liquid Crystal devs have added more content. They started working on a new area called the Orange Islands, based off the anime, with totally new maps, characters, dialogue and plot.

Even besides any of the changes, one of the most fundamental things about Liquid Crystal was the simple fact of it being free, and accessible, and as I’ve been saying, the ubiquity. It’s not that it does something so radically different with Pokemon, but it does tap into what’s great about Pokemon.

The Lion Man Statuette is one of the oldest pieces of art we have, especially art depicting something imaginary - a human being with the head of a lion. It’s a fundamentally fascinating object. First off, and this is just for starters: it was carved from mammoth tusk how fucking cool is that?? Then there’s the gender. Look at all the gender going on here! This lion has no mane, so is it a lion man or is it a lion woman? Is it a man’s body with a lioness head? Maybe more interestingly, is it a purely human body with a purely lion head, transcending notions of sex and gender?? These are all hotly contested possibilities in archaeology.

Then there’s the meaning of the piece itself, some kind of fusion of person and animal, maybe trying to represent some way in which we, no matter who we are, or what gender, or human or animal, are all part of the same thing - or equally possible it was made 40,000 year old furries.

I think Pokemon and the Lion Man speak to something viscerally true in the human experience, and in a different time to ours, where the notion of ownership over art is much more social, maybe the art that simply captures people’s imaginations can be the thing we share the most, instead of the art that’s the most profitable. I think that’s something really wonderful about ROMs.

On the internet, everything is, in a sense, just ideas, just art. Everything online is just human expression in a realm created out of human expression. This is why early internet culture had a huge focus on high-minded libertarian ideas like don’t let them take the boobies out of my video games.

As the internet came to be seen as more potentially profitable for capitalists, the issue of regulation and law became more pressing, and this is why copyright law has become such a fucking big deal online. Have you noticed how much online behaviour is policed by copyright instead of laws more appropriate to the actual issue? I’ve seen people use copyright strikes to take down their critics and political opponents instead of harassment policy or libel laws, because the copyright system is much more reliable for a copyright-holder and infinitely more on their side.

This is because copyright is landlordism over intellectual property and landlordism is the basis of capitalism - Mr Art Enjoyer simply says “no, I own the Mona Lisa and you’re going to have to pay me if you want to enjoy it!”

So my point isn’t that the art that is most profitable is in some way inherently bad, but rather that art is only allowed ubiquity if the supposed owner can make enough money off it being shared, and that… fucking sucks turds.

Like, Wikipedia doesn’t host adverts and it’s a resource created by and used by everyone, yet wikipedia still has to at least pay server hosting fees to its digital landlord, so it has to go begging for change. Shout out to wikipedia!

When I first moved away from home to university I took my old gameboy with me and I used to play and replay Pokemon a bunch. Like so many people Pokemon is the definitive game of my childhood. The first 2 generations, and a few of the 3rd gen Pokemon hold this incredibly nostalgic power for me and it took me absolutely forever to get past that and not think newer Pokemon are just garbage. I mean some of them are, but some of them are really good. Look at Wooloo. Look at her and tell her you think she’s bad, you just can’t do it.

But, at this time when I had just moved away, this distinction of the older generations of Pokemon before pignite came along and ruined everything kind of mattered to me, and when I downloaded an emulator on my phone so I could play Pokemon again more conveniently I found the perfect game that had all of my exactly favourite bits of Pokemon, and a fast forward button.

I would play Liquid Crystal for hours upon hours, and often not for the healthiest reasons. I was very homesick, and I was usually putting off important work that I had to do. Actually, several times I had to uninstall the emulator just to radically sever myself so that I could sit down and finally spend all night reading wikipedia summaries of what famous philosophers thought instead of doing my engineering coursework shoutout to wikipedia!

Some time later, when I was in a significantly better place I reinstalled Liquid Crystal just to play for fun. For the first time in maybe a decade I was going to try out a new story set in the best era of Pokemon! So I beat Johto, and I beat Kanto, but then I got into the story of the Orange Islands a little way, and I found that the game hadn’t been finished. All this time I’d been playing a ROM that had been more or less abandoned, and I could play only as far as the half-completed maps that the developers left behind, and no further.
At first, this was a little heartbreaking. Then it felt ironic: something I’d been using to not get things done had never been finished. I kept putting off finishing it because if it was done I’d have to get on with the rest of my life, but now seeing where it ended, but didn’t finish, it felt like a cruel joke. One of the unfinished parts of the map is even a staircase you can just climb and climb and climb forever. You can keep going forever, suspended in the middle of the screen, walking but never progressing.

This game I was kind of unhealthily using to stop me progressing was not only never finished, but it was now literally stopping me progressing. I found you can play right up to the pixel where childhood ends. If I could take one more step I would be the farthest from home I’d ever been, but now I’d never be able to.

But then, it struck me that I shouldn’t be sad that it hadn’t been finished, I should be happy that linkandzelda, zeikku and the others had loved Pokemon so much in the first place that they’d made this game that I’d had so much fun playing. I shouldn’t feel like this was the farthest point from home, because as Berger points out when art enters the home it enters the viewer’s context, but also when art is ubiquitous enough it becomes its own context, and that is how we take home with us wherever we go. If art can be free and shared between everybody we can all love it and we can be richer as a society in a very meaningful sense.

I said before I had a theory as to why nobody brings up environmentalism and exploitation - the environmentalist-socialist politics of Pokemon and honestly I think it’s because those ideas became background noise to the generation raised on it. It’s too obvious to point out, because respecting animals and protecting our vast and diverse ecosystem is just so obviously important. Maybe that’s because Pokemon taps into something viscerally true about the human experience, maybe that’s because Pokemon trained us to think that way, and maybe it’s a bit of both. I just know Pokemon belongs to everyone.