Orange Archipelago/Sevii Islands | Bulbagarden

I loved the whole Orange Islands arc as a kid. The map in Official Handbook 2 was top-tier world-building for me, before I even knew what that was; I thought I was so clever when I found the elemental islands from M2.

Now that I'm grown, I'm less wowed than I used to be, but I still see some value in it. I understand that the whole thing in the anime was filler until G2 got finalized, and that the later generations introduced tons of ways to build your relationship with/between your mons, and hone/practice their skills unrelated to combat. However, the Orange League remains the only thing in the Pokémon universe (to my knowledge) that makes this an essential, integrated part of a trainer's journey. There's no way around it. That's what made it have such an impact to my young self; it expanded the whole realm of what being a Pokémon Trainer was.

(Also, Pinkanized Pokémon would be sick, although they'd likely cause several incidents of civil unrest.)

Now, I wish I had a different song to sing than everyone else ITT, but mostly it's gonna be the same Never-Gonna-Happen-Blues – for the simple fact that would require a lot of work for relatively little reward, and possibly even some backlash. Competing in a genuine, faithful representation of the Orange League is something that seems totally incompatible with the tried-and-true, compartmentalized, turn-based formula of the games. It would require building a competent system of directly controlled real-time 3D action (an even more involved task than, say, Pokken Tournament). Then with this in place, falling back on turn-based battles for stuff like wild encounters and trainer battles might seems cheap by comparison, and then they'd have to contend with the task of incorporating this system into an open world of comparable size to the latest mainline games, if not bigger.

At this point, in this standardized corporatized world, the necessary level of care and ambition and boldness has been all but scrubbed out of all the big leagues. It only exists in relatively powerless places like this. But I guess everything starts small.

ncG1vNJzZmiapaGvorPAq5uepl6jsrV706GpnpmUqHywvsCnnp5lkaewqbXPnqOan59iwKbCyKJkoquclrulv41rbnJxY258