I need to set this up because it's so deeply embarrassing presented without this context.
It is 2006. I have spent the last summer obsessed with Pokemon. Countless hours were spend grinding my Leaf Green team. Saturdays had me sneaking episodes of the Pokemon anime, even though my little sisters thought it was lame. Too many Holon Phantoms booster packs were cracked. Now I can't put Blue Rescue Team now.
My cousin showed me that you can use the internet for looking up things about Pokemon. He showed me this incredible website, called Psypokes, that had all the images of the shiny Pokemon online. At some point that leaks into Serebii. That's where I hear about the new games coming out for the Nintendo DS: Pokemon Diamond and Pearl.
IGN has details on the new Pokemon games. It's already out in Japan, with an unreal wait time of six months between now in October and April of the next year. That's when I load up the trailer on IGN's site, which for whatever reason was reuploaded to YouTube in like the mid 2010s, and catch my first glimpse of this game:
I'm stunned.
It's like nothing I've seen from Pokemon before. The preview stills never did it justice. It's something about that moment 20 seconds in where the music swells from the quiet, when you hear the new instruments, when it shows off that logo right before dropping their new 3D chops. It's chilling. It knows its grandeur. And I ate it up. I immediately dragged my very disinterested sister into the computer room to watch it. It's seared into my brain. I still remember that cold autumn Saturday night loading up that video to this very day, almost 20 years later.
It's mind blowing that Pokemon can look like this. I know then how good it is, and how many countless hours I'm going to spend in that game right then and there.
I don't know the magnitude of just how right I'll be.
Pokemon Pearl would end up becoming the most important video game I've played in my life. After conquering most of the lavish in game experience, I headed online. On June 9th 2007, I'd registered my first email address and joined my first internet forum. My internet home changes from Homestarrunner.com to Smogon, to trade and battle with anyone and everyone I can in Pokemon Pearl.
I was a sheltered child with zero knowledge of online etiquette on top of also being an 8th grader. It did not go well, at first. I spammed the Stark Mountain forum and the Wi-Fi section with over 3000 posts of my nearly 7000 in my first six months posting on the internet. The in game file time hit 999:59 just a bit before the new year. However, with time, I grew up. I found a wider world online that helped my skills grow as a person. Legitimately, my bad grades turned around. I cut my teeth trying to
write guides for newbies for the experiences I've lived gaining a big collection of Pokemon in Pearl. It all helped build up who I was and how I wanted to give back to the world.
This game is part of the foundation to why I am the person I am now. If it hadn't come around, if it hadn't thrusted me into this massive multiplayer world and tossed me into a big boy portion of the internet, I come out of my teenage years an entirely different man. I come out more sheltered, less studied, and worse. But that didn't happen, and my fate was sealed the moment I watched that video and heard that music and started the long, agonizing wait for Pokemon Pearl.
As time goes on, the fever pitch of Pokémon's relevance in my life comes to a crawl. A major factor turns to something I do with old college buddies IRL once every two weeks; not even that when the pandemic hits. It's still a deep part of my life, but more passive, hiding itself like an impact crater turned into a lake. Smogon isn't my internet home anymore. Logging in as TheMantyke is less the never-ending adventure it once was and more like coming back to a save file after you teleported up all your favorite Pokemon to the newest generation. It's a nostalgic revist, usually driven by a new game coming out to get cozy, just for a little bit like before.
The quiet peace of my life in late 2021 continues. There's little reason not to peep what's going on with the upcoming remakes. After all this time, somehow I won the lottery for my childhood interest and Smogon's still around. I can nestle back in at any time and it's almost like I never left. So I do, and I look at the leaks to see what's in store for BDSP.
And then I hear it.
The embrace of the game that ran into my soul and decided I was meant to kiss a wider world returns. That autumn night as a child comes roaring back. I feel the gulf of the passage of time and know its importance leading to now, leading to who I am today, and my happy life.
And I cry.
Writing this post, I cried a little again.
Something about this intro always makes me shiver, or worse. It feels like the fork in the road to who I am. I can't ever listen to it without it drifting me back.
...And the worst parts is like, BDSP is far, FAR and away the most embarrassing game in the mainline series history. How can I ever succinctly convey to anyone that this rushed slobjob of a Pokemon game, even if it's just this one little bit of the soundtrack, made me cry!?
I had my fun with it, but much of that is the core Pokemon experience being very crunchy and hard to fuck up on a baseline. At least this game is so unreasonably hilarious on version 1.1.1 where you get the most incredible glitches in a modern Pokemon game. It was a fine enough time. It was not as earth shattering to my life as Pokemon Pearl was, nor did I ever expect it to be. It did, however, make me relive a very important moment.
As embarassing as it is to say Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl made me cry, damn, I can't help it. That little bit at 20 seconds in strikes at a nerve. Whenever I hear it, I'll always feel a sliver of that wide birth of time that defined who I am. What a song.
