Larvitar · Neo Discovery (N2) #57

7 comments

1. 

   feyblade

   (10 years ago)

   Wait..am I mistaken, or is that a Larvitar staring into its own reflection? Ignoring the fact that it totally doesn’t match up (and the fact that it doesn’t at all look introspective) that’s a pretty creative design choice, there.

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     Blob Takeshifeyblade

     (6 years ago)

     Neo sets is where they really started to get creative and stopped using so much KS artwork.

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2. 

   Blob Takeshi

   (4 years ago)

   This card is worse than Dunsparce in the same set.

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3. 

   Ambassador

   (3 months ago)

   While this set’s Pupitar and Tyranitar received retains as CES Pupitar and CES Tyranitar, this card was excluded in favor of giving those cards a retrain of N4 Larvitar to evolve from.

   So why was this card snubbed? It’s certainly nought to do with the artist. This set’s Larvitar line is one of the early examples of an artist being tasked with illustrating all stages of a set’s evolution line, and the aforementioned Pupitar and Tyranitar made it through fine. Is it just because N4 Larvitar was the better card, gameplay-wise? I’ve previously pointed out how CES Shuppet picked the “set accurate” Shuppet to retrain, rather than the one that actually saw play, so that isn’t necessarily it either.

   On this set’s Wooper, I’ve shared a personal anecdote about how Neo Discovery “kept me company” for a while, as far as collecting the TCG went. And, in turn, it ended up forming my understanding of the second generation of Pokémon for a while – as a kid, I didn’t like the anime¹, so it was solely the video games and TCG informed most of how I came to know the franchise. None of GS’s NPC Trainers have a Larvitar, and I was so wary of Zubat/Golbat/etc that I tended to Repel my way through caves, and since since the games were waning in popularity, I didn’t know anyone with a strategy guide. What I’m getting at here is that this card (alongside the scaled down Sugimori on Pupitar’s card) formed the entirety of what I knew about Larvitar for a year and change.

   It made it very mysterious for me, and the way the illustration doesn’t give you a good impression of what Larvitar looks like makes it virtually impossible to read it as any way but knowingly feeding into the mystery of it². That sense of purposefully leaving something unanswered or for the audience to uncover for themselves is so alien to the franchise today, that I wonder if this card didn’t get a retrain because it just doesn’t fit in with the modern ethos.

   ¹ Well, no. I liked the anime fine. I just didn’t like the dub, even before I was wholly understanding of the fact of what it meant to be a dub, etc. It was the dub theme song and some of the awkward insert songs that 4Kids jammed into it that rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t understand why “I wanna be the very best…” et al. have retained a positive reputation, I always felt such a “how do you do, fellow kids?” energy to it, subsequently imagining some uninterested men in a soundbooth in Van Nuys struggling to understand the show they had been tasked with working on. (I was also aware that Viz had been trimming content from episodes of Sailor Moon to make room for their faux-edutainment “Sailor Moon Says” segments at the end of each episode, and assumed the PokéRap was being accommodated by similar means. At some point 4Kids was becoming less aggressive with these sorts of interjections, and was able to start watching the anime again sometime around the midpoint of the Johto portion of the OS.

   ² Continuing on from the last footnote, it’s worth pointing out Larvitar was among the last Gen II Pokémon to debut in the anime, and reinforces my theory that it was being “held back” as part of a conscious strategy to make the question of where to get Larvitar something of a mystery. Note also that even the anime ends up being non-committal at the start of it – Larvitar debuts after hatching from an egg given to Ash, not being encountered in the wild. However, anyone paying close attention would’ve recalled that the egg was identified as coming from Mt. Silver, and anyone who hadn’t would hopefully put it together when Ash releases Larvitar into the wilds of Mt. Silver. (This card’s dex entry might also have been read as a helpful hint along those lines, though it wasn’t one I picked up on myself.)

   It’s one that the franchise doesn’t implement anymore – and while you’d be correct in saying that in an age of internet and datamines, *can’t* implement anyways, it’s one the modern audience would probably reject. I’ve seen many newer fans of the series try to criticize Pokémon Gold and Silver by suggesting some of the Pokémon were *too* hidden away, often using Skarmory as a poster child; e.g. “a lot of people back in the day assumed Skarmory was a Gen 3 Pokémon because they never even saw one in Gen 2!” This is complete nonsense, as Skarmory had received two cards (including a holo!), appeared in the anime, and so forth, and so it doesn’t hold water. The argument is a poor one, where their subjective lack of awareness of these Pokémon is seen as objective obfuscation, and obfuscation is bad design ..in fact, the argument should be that the franchise had very quickly grasped and taken advantage of its success on several different fronts, and set up a framework where these games kept giving to you, with things tucked away in all corners, and the anime and/or TCG encouraging you to go back and look for those hidden rewards. When you cleared a Super Mario, that was typically the end of it, but when you cleared Pokémon Gold and Silver, you’d end up coming back to it not just for daily rematches and events (thank you, clock battery technology!), but the TCG, anime, merchandise, revealing to you something new that you might’ve missed in your first ring around the games’ sprawling, two-region map.

   Like, there is just so much folded into this apparently trivial card that it’s actually kind of nuts.

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     TwylisAmbassador

     (3 months ago)

     Skarmory was always such a weird example for that. The plight of Slugma is far worse; confined to Kanto after already having beaten the Elite Four, with an abnormally high evolution level and an evolution whose base stats are comparable to an early-game bug with none of the utility. Plus Skarmory was like the second most iconic Steel-type after Steelix :v

     But yes, I absolutely agree. Milotic was always that pokemon for me; it had such a beautiful design, but aside from “seen” status in Sapphire’s pokedex (which I would frequently open to admire), it may as well not have existed. I didn’t even know it evolved from Feebas, and even if I had known that, there’s no way I would’ve 1) managed to find Feebas, and 2) figured out how to evolve it. BW and later ORAS made significant changes to its availability, emphasizing the change in values, and I do think there’s merit to that — trying to obfuscate stuff like this just seems pointless in an age where information is so thoroughly documented online. But there’s a an undeniable beauty in that sense of the unknown that will just never be recaptured. The Regis are another superb example of this, and I don’t think it’s coincidence that Gen 4 moving away from it coincided with increased internet availability (a core aspect of Gen 4, with online battles and trading).

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       TwylisTwylis

       (3 months ago)

       Thinking, though, it definitely doesn’t *have* to be that that mystique is gone — they would just need to get creative in how to recreate it. Having components of the game randomly generated upon starting the file would be a workaround; spawn points could vary, puzzles could be totally different across files, etc. But obviously that’s not the direction Game Freak or the franchise at large has gone, so it’s unlikely. Still, perhaps some game developer someday will finally take note of what made early pokemon games actually good and fill that void, even if it lacks the unique cross-media component of Pokemon. On that note, while I think the current direction of AI is broadly terrible for artists, musicians, and other creators in many ways, this is an area where it has tremendous merit; it greatly expands the ability for games to generate player-specific experiences that wouldn’t be easily documentable.

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         AmbassadorTwylis

         (3 months ago)

         I think at this point trying to reintroduce mystique would be trying to outsmart the audience, in a way. This comment will date myself a bit but I’m reminded of an old TV show that aired on US TV called LOST. It was a mystery-driven drama, full of plottwists, cliffhangers, etc. and a ton of easter eggs and foreshadowing to make them feel like adequate payoff rather than out-of-left-field nonsense. The show’s format lent itself really well to being tracked, discussed, and documented by fans online – and more than a couple of times fan theories correctly anticipated season finales ahead of time.

         The showrunners and head writers of the show initially appreciated the fans and their dedication because this online fanbase was successfully making the show a lot more popular than it would’ve been otherwise – but you started to see they were getting frustrated with fans anticipating events several episodes (occasionally an entire season) before events they were building the show towards (re: were foreshadowing) aired, and started to become preoccupied with ‘outsmarting’ the fans. Rather than events occurring that were in coordination with what the plot had been telegraphing was going to occur, it began to get bogged down with unpredictable, and nonsensical twists, and so on. Instead of making the best of the format/circumstances of their time, the writers tried to fight against it, and the show suffered for it.

         I don’t want to use this as the *definitive* example because I haven’t played SWSH or SV (and don’t plan on it), and don’t know how well these land, but my understanding is that some of the evolution methods of these games have become a bit ridiculous. According to Bulbapedia, Runergius “evolves from Galarian Yamask when the player travels under the large rock arch in Dusty Bowl after Yamask takes at least 49 HP in damage (even if healed) without fainting” and I’ve seen people comment that this is completely unknowable and only becomes apparent when datamined. Taking those comments as legit, it sounds like someone on the dev team is trying to outsmart the audience, and maybe that’s not working so well here.

         I think the best thing is to just roll with the punches and in some sense they may or may not be doing that – we might assume that the new Pokémon in SWSH and SV’s DLC were deliberately held back to stretch out the lifespan of the generation. Since they’re only added to the games after the fact, there’s less of an “oh wow, he was there all along” you might experience today – since they *weren’t* there all along. Actually, I think maybe they tried to emulate this with SV’s [hideously bizarre] Suicune dinosaur being added as DLC content when it was originally just a sketch in an in-game book, as, in a way, he too was there all along.

         Another way of looking at all this is to consider the hypothetical where the GS had internet capabilities, internationally. Perhaps Larvitar, Slugma, et al. would’ve been added to the game as an over-the-air update in this scenario. (That’s not too far off from what happened with Celebi and JP Crystal, anyways.) The most successful approach is to embrace the format you find yourself in – older games have a je ne sais quoi even the most successful new games can’t replicate very well because most creatives work best when they’re working with restrictions, and the GBC was a restrictive canvas that brought out Game Freak’s best work.

         [Incidentally, I think you’re bang-on to bring up AI here. It’s going to upend a lot of things in terrible ways for a while yet, but so far the artists who have figured out how to work *with* it, rather than against it, are doing some fantastic stuff.]

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