The original Pokemon Red and Blue released when I was in 8th grade (for those of you in Europe, when I was roughly twelve years old). It was a time in my life where I found school work tedious, people were horrible, my parents were tyrannical or smothering and any hope for the future was so far off into adulthood it may as well have been fantasy.

Which is exactly where I retreated. My obsession with things like anime at this age wasn’t simply because it was new or that it presented a serialized storyline with character growth in an age where all other television was speaking to me like an idiot. It was also easy to want to just fall into that world and live it. To want to be with those characters or have their abilities (I never actually wanted to be the characters themselves, though).

Pokemon introduced a world that felt designed specifically for someone like me. You play someone that’s roughly twelve years old, leaving home and their tedious life behind to go and become something special. Perhaps this is why I fell in love with the show as well, even though I knew deep down it wasn’t very well written. The cheese factor was flowing like the Kraft factory exploded, yet it conceptualized this desire to be a young man leaving home and becoming an adult.

This is, perhaps, one of the greater reasons that Pokemon was so successful. On the surface everyone can see how the collection aspect can be addictive, and business men certainly noted how genius it was to sell two versions with exclusive content. Even The Legend of Zelda began to release multiple versions of similar games on the GameBoy. Why make money off of a single cartridge when you can sell twice as many and make double the profits? One might even imagine allowing only a single save file in your Pokemon game was a clever trick to convince penny pinching parents to drop change on both versions of the game for their children. After all, why would Father and Mother care that you can’t catch all 150 with just a single version of the game?

Yet you don’t see as many of these imitations these days. You’ll see plenty of attempts to combine toys and anime or video games, and perhaps the most successful aside from Pokemon was Yu-Gi-Oh!, but nothing has continued to have the longevity of the monster catching franchise.

I’ve come to believe that the metaphorical journey into adulthood may be the reason. Pokemon released at just the right time that a lot of their younger fans that had grown up with Mario were in that awkward stage between childhood and adulthood. Anyone from ten to even fourteen years old could feel right at home with a character being given an important duty, treated as a capable adult and told to go forth and grow. It was a fantasy.

However, it is also easy to see how a fan can just stop caring as much as they get older. A lot of times it can be the mechanics just got old, it could be that the new Pokemon didn’t feel as exciting and fresh (which makes sense, as the franchise was no longer exciting and fresh), or a simple change of taste. Yet it makes sense that a fully grown adult that has come to terms with their lot in life and no longer has these impossible fantasies just has no interest in a world that caters to the mind of a twelve year old.

Pokemon White, however, has managed to take the franchise a little bit further past its simple 8-bit roots. It is still firmly planted in the realm of a young child’s fantasy, but it no longer focuses on simply becoming the best trainer there is. The other characters aren’t your “rivals”, but your friends. Each of you is different, and as the game progresses you can see how each character begins to take shape.

Bianca in particular is a truly heartfelt character. Her parents were overprotective, insisting she wasn’t ready for the harsh realities of the world yet. In many ways her bubbly personality was not, and it becomes apparent rather quickly that she is not cut out to be a trainer like Cheren or the player. Her journey is one of discovering who she really is and what her place in this world can be, and while her character isn’t very deep her trials through the game can be fascinating. Cheren seems much more suited to be the player’s traditional “rival”, but he’s much more interested in working with the player. It’s a very different dynamic from the first game, where the rival actively disliked you and wanted to be nothing more than the very best, no matter the cost.

Then there’s the new villain, Team Plasma. In the past Team Rocket and other such groups were all about stealing Pokemon and treating them as weapons. Team Plasma is the exact opposite, instead focusing on characters that do not believe in capturing Pokemon or forcing them to fight.

Of course, this is handled rather shoddily, as you must be able to fight the villain in these games and the only method is to do so with Pokemon. Yet I noticed that the group leader tends to use the Pokemon found in the environment, implying that he doesn’t capture the Pokemon but instead “speaks” with them and gains their assistance.

The intention is interesting to see, though. In a lot of ways it is making the reality of leaving your family behind and stepping into the real world a central part of the Pokemon story. The question of whether all the things you were told to be true are true, or if you’ve been living a lie the whole time. What it is like to encounter someone that believes fundamentally different things than you. Questions of what is truly right and wrong.

You know Team Plasma is evil, of course. The game makes it very clear that they are, in particular because they still go around stealing everyone’s Pokemon. The game is still made for young audiences as well, and thus isn’t going to be setting the narrative desires of adults on fire. It is still a step in an interesting direction, though, and has me curious and excited as to the possibilities of Pokemon in the future.

I do not expect them to leave their central premise behind, though. A world that a twelve year old can explore, a metaphor for the journey towards adulthood, even if life is mundane, tedious, or even cruel.