Pokémon Y Playthrough Pt. 6 - This game is darker than I remember...

We got a long post ahead with some good old-fashioned analysis. Enjoy!

Thoughts:

Only Team Flare is intended to survive. Lysandre finally reveals himself as the leader of Team Flare. There really isn’t much fanfare around it though. There’s no “haha we got you!” twist villain nonsense kind of thing. It’s pretty straightforward that he’s in charge. It’s almost as if the game expects you to know immediately. To be fair, he was extremely villainous from the start, so you know right off the bat unless you’re completely immune to the idea of twist villains existing.

Team Flare in general is also pretty incompetent. They drop really stupid hints all over the place about who they are and what they’re doing. For example, in Lysandre Café, they reveal their secret password AND that there’s a secret door. I’m not sure if this is to make Team Flare look stupid, or if it’s to direct players to the objective because they don’t expect the player to be smart enough to do so on their own. I’m leaning towards the former, but the latter wouldn’t surprise me either.

Team Flare is just never really set up to be scary. They’re incompetent to a degree that even when told their most heinous of plans, to destroy everyone but themselves, you just want to laugh at them. Most NPCs comment on how garish and bad their outfits are. Heck, Lysandre sent out a message to all trainers about how he’s going to destroy the entire world, and you and Calem seem to be the only ones that bother to show up. Not even the gym leaders seem to give a crap.

Lysandre’s motivations for taking over the world and destroying it seem to hinge on the idea that he’s smarter than everyone else, so he should be the one making decisions. It’s not his only motivation, though. He states at one point that he had worked all his life to develop technology to help the suffering world. But, he grew more and more frustrated over time because he couldn’t save everyone. No matter how hard he worked, there would still be suffering in the world. This was another motivation for destroying everything. He’s essentially talking about a mercy kill. His plan is to use the ultimate weapon, whatever that is. So, is this Pokémon’s version of the nuclear bomb?

It’s almost like the story writers knew they’d never get away with the plot if it was played as seriously as possible, so they made the enemy team as silly as they could to avoid getting told “hey, this game is supposed to appeal to CHILDREN, not just adults, alright?” during the writing process. I just don’t see how they legitimately thought making the team that plans on destroying the world a bunch of fashion obsessed fools would mesh well with the plot. The writers were either incompetent in trying to pull this story off, or they were being very careful with how they presented the story in order to get the game on store shelves. Optimistically, I’d like to believe in the latter, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the former.

I mean, think about it. There’s frequent mention of a king that loved to go to war. NPCs outwardly state that people AND Pokémon died in this war. It’s stated that the legendary Pokémon, Yveltal, steals the life force of those around it, killing everything it takes from. The enemy team plans to kill EVERYONE except themselves because their leader wants everything to be “beautiful” in his eyes, the ultimate mindset of “I know better, so I should be in control.” He plans to harness the ultimate weapon, whose name brings about imagery of the real life nuclear bomb (in my opinion, anyway). I truly believe if the presentation of the enemy team hadn’t been as goofy as it was, they never would’ve gotten away with this plot.

Things get more intense after you make your way through Lysandre’s café base thing. This is where we meet AZ proper. Somehow, he’s the king from all those years ago when war wracked the Kalos region. He tells the story of how his Pokémon went to war, died, and came back to him in a coffin. Desperate to revive his Pokémon, he created the Ultimate Weapon to take the lifeforce of Pokémon all around to give it to it. Then, once he resurrected it, he became enraged at the war that took the life of his Pokémon, so he used the ultimate weapon to end said war. This killed a lot of people and Pokémon alike. His Pokémon, horrified by what he had done and how he had resurrected it, left him, leaving him all alone. Now he somehow walks the Earth thousands of years later.

A lot of story is dumped on us at once here, but it’s an intense and interesting story. I find the concept of a man roaming the Earth, undying, living forever in shame of what he had done to be a dreadful but fascinating concept. Once again, very intense for a Pokemon game. How had I not remembered this bit? How come no one really talks about it? Was Team Flare’s goofiness really that off-putting that it made people forget the plot to an entire game?

Oh yeah, we also find out Team Flare and Lysandre had been using the technology they created to perform surveillance on everyone. So now we have that thrown into the mix. This has only become more and more relevant as time has gone on, what with our electronics becoming more interested in taking our data and using it instead of respecting privacy. Maybe this didn’t hit as hard when the game first came out, but in 2022? It’s particularly poignant.

So, Lysandre launches the ultimate weapon. We’re told by AZ to go and stop him, which we obviously will do. I fly off to Geosenge Town and find some... horrifying dialogue. There’s 4 Team Flare members blocking the way down the road. When you talk to them, you get the following dialogue:

“So the ultimate weapon can only be powered with the life energy of Pokémon...”

“Nope! I can’t hear them! I won’t listen to the Pokémon’s cries!”

“The mysterious stone is absorbing energy...”

“I can’t let you go beyond this point! A kid like you shouldn’t be exposed to such sights.”

Um... holy crap. Pokémon are actively having their life force sapped, they’re crying out in pain, and the sights are so terrible that Team Flare won’t let you see them. Yes, on a technical level, this is just a way to block you from wandering off, but the way they did so is truly horrifying. Just... oh dear. This is not good! I don’t really know how to put into words the dark turn this game has suddenly veered off into. We have a fascist organization hell-bent on killing everyone but themselves, and they’re actively murdering Pokémon to steal their life force to power a weapon that will kill everyone but them.

Lysandre completes the cycle. AZ created the weapon to end the war out of bitterness and rage as to what the world had done to him. Lysandre now endeavors to do the exact same thing out of bitterness that, no matter how hard he tries, the world doesn’t magically become perfect and beautiful as he desires it to. Bookends, really. Both come from a place of bitterness, but one soured due to war, and the other soured due to his efforts leading to nothing. Depressing.

We also find out that, in order to join Team Flare, it’s likely you have to spend a large amount of money. One Team Flare member states, “I bought a new life for 5,000,000!” when spoken to. So not only is Team Flare slated to be the only survivors, it’s likely only WEALTHY or at least middle class people will even have the chance to survive. Now that’s what I call a class divide (and don’t worry, I’ll be talking about the class divide in Kalos in a later entry).

We get another interesting comment from a scientist in the Team Flare base. She states: “Everyone in the whole world must be happy before any one person can be happy. But the world is too big, and there are too many people and Pokémon, so there isn’t enough happiness to go around...”

To me, this is introducing another belief many hold, that the world is becoming overpopulated. This idea is usually the precursor to the belief that only certain, useful people should survive, while others should be killed in order to prevent overpopulation. As a concept, it’s usually rooted in fascism. The story doesn’t really use dialogue to go this far, but the fact Team Flare wants to kill everyone they don’t consider to be assets sort of implies this idea.

I’m not saying that everyone worried about overpopulation is a fascist, I’m just saying that, if you aren’t careful about examining why certain people push this belief, you might find yourself in a movement with less than benign intentions.

Team Flare as an organization is taking many different flavors of fascism and throwing them together all in one pot. It’s a little disorganized, and I think they could’ve built up to it a little better, but the point is pretty clear. As always, it’s rooted in the idea that Lysandre knows better than everyone else, those that aren’t useful for a perfect society should die, and only those he decides are good enough (beautiful, in a metaphorical sense in this case) should survive. Now that’s what I call fascism!

Lysandre ups the ante by stating he plans to destroy all Pokémon. This kind of comes out of left field for me. I suppose though it kind of fits. Lysandre wants control, and I doubt Pokémon could ever be fully controlled. There are a lot of them in the world as well, probably way more than humans. If we’re to follow his views on overpopulation, beauty, and perfection, the erasure of all Pokémon from existence is a band-aid solution to the problem of deciding which species stays, which die, how many Pokémon live, etc.

This plot is... dark. I have no idea how Game Freak got away with it. Humans and Pokémon are dying. Lysandre’s beliefs are rooted in fascism, a topic few games accessible to children dare to tackle. The theme of war constantly follows you in the story. I suppose all it took to get the game onto the sales floor was to make the enemy team look like a bunch of idiots.

Have I just been living under a rock? I never really heard anyone delve into how dark this game got.

Shauna and Calem have also appeared to assist. I was kind of sad to see that Tierno and Trevor failed to join us as well (though we learn what they were up to shortly). I am glad Shauna made an appearance though.

Now, there was one scene in the game that caused memories to come flooding back. It reminded me that these were the first games that put Pokémon into the 3D world. When you reach the cocoon Yveltal resides in, the game stops and transfers into a cutscene. You see your character, no longer in a chibi form, instead in a better 3D model form, watch as Yveltal breaks out of the cocoon. I remember seeing this for the first time, and being in awe at what Pokémon had done. It had transcended into a medium that could pull off amazing cutscenes like that. Sure, I miss the sprite era, but even I have to admit that this cutscene truly showed off what the 3DS was capable of. It gave me chills back then and it gave me chills again.

Of course, I caught Yveltal. I laid waste to Lysandre’s team. It was over. I was the victor, standing beside my friends. We get the following dialogue between us and Lysandre:

Shauna: “Um... Know what I think? Even if there’s only a little bit of something, it’s still best to share it. Even you managed to use Mega Evolution... That’s because Gyarados shared its power with you, didn’t it? And not just Gyarados, but your other Pokémon, too...”

Lysandre: “...”

Calem: “The Legendary Pokémon is gone, so you can’t use the ultimate weapon anymore, right? You don’t have to worry about the future all alone... Shouldn’t everybody work together to make a beautiful world?”

Despite all Lysandre has done, Shauna and Calem are still, in a way, extending the olive branch to him. At his core, Lysandre is a pathetic, jaded pessimist that can’t see the beauty in the world right in front of him. He truly believes that all except those he deems worthy are evil and have no capacity for goodness. Calem and Shauna try to show him that goodness, since it’s right there in front of his face. The line, “You don’t have to worry about the future all alone...” really took me off guard, because it’s a very gentle thing to say to a vile person that’s essentially a fascist leader. That’s the heart of the game, I suppose. It’s proving that friendship, courage, and gentleness are everywhere around us all the time, and that darkness and evil neither outweigh it nor overtake it forever.

It’s wasted on Lysandre, though. He’s bought in to his own pessimism that the human race is full of evil people, just like himself, and that humanity is incapable of being anything different.

Lysandre: “If that were possible, all wars would have ended long ago! I can only see one future! One where selfish, foolish humans think about nothing other than themselves and steal more and more from one another... It’s a tragic future! The original purpose of this device was to bring a Pokémon back to life. But the ancient king transformed it into this ultimate weapon... Hmm. When the Legendary Pokémon awakened it took back much of its energy—its power—that had been sent to the ultimate weapon. There’s not much power left... But there IS enough to use it once... Sycamore’s pupils... The ultimate weapon is a flower that bloomed to no avail... Just like me... But this ends here! I will show you what its remaining power can do!”

Calem: “Shauna! Let’s get out of here!”

And thus, you, Calem, and Shauna flee the area, leaving Lysandre alone. He could’ve aimed the weapon at anything he wanted to. He could’ve aimed it at another region, or some other target, but he has no way out. This is the end of the road for him. So he hits another region, then what? Now he’s sitting in a secret base beneath a weapon that doesn’t work anymore. Once everyone gets to him, he’ll surely go to prison or SOMETHING. The future he sees anyway is depressing and a waste of his time. He failed to do what he set out to do. There’s only one logical solution now.

He fires the weapon at himself. It fires off a blast of energy into space. It comes back down and careens into the ultimate weapon, destroying it completely, and everyone still inside. Well, we just watched the villain commit suicide. Not only that, he did it to try and take everyone else with him, his team and the children that just defeated him. He cultivated a team that was fiercely loyal to him by creating a bunch of false things for them to fear, and then when he was defeated, he did his best to kill his enemies with no regard to the people following him. Just another day in the Pokémon world.

Tierno and Trevor show up. The mood is somewhat lightened by the fact that they went and saved the Pokémon the ultimate weapon was taking its energy from. The device used to spy on everyone’s holo-casters was found and destroyed as well. It’s stated that Team Flare is now out of the picture. However, as I finish the game, that’s to be seen. Their leader is gone, though, and he looks like a serious jerk for trying to kill his team alongside him once he realized he lost. That’s a pretty fast way to disband a team.

AZ makes another appearance as everyone else runs off. He longs for the Pokémon he brought back to life. He brought it back with the ultimate weapon using the lifeforce of other Pokémon in order to be together, but it left him. Now, due to the power of the weapon, they’re both forced to wander the Earth for all eternity—or, at least, for a long time. It’s to be seen whether or not AZ will redeem himself and find the Pokémon he endeavored to resurrect.

Whew! That was a lot to go through all at once! I just... wow. That was some dark stuff. I suppose it had been leading up to this, but my fatal mistake was 1) having a bad memory, and 2) not taking Team Flare seriously. Perhaps that’s a lesson to be gleaned from the game. You take threats like that seriously.

I’ve written enough for one blog post. More will be on the way. Thank you for your patience and thank you if you read this far!

I also made an edit to some errors in my previous entry. The Pokémon list now states the proper species of Pokémon.

Amount of in-game time: 35 hours 30 minutes

Gym Badges: 7

Pokémon:

• Montu - Simisear - Level 45 - Hardy Nature - Gluttony Ability - Met in Santalune Forest on November 13th, 2022 - Moveset: Yawn, Bite, Incinerate, Lick - Somewhat of a clown
  
• Frogger - Greninja - Level 44 - Modest Nature - Torrent Ability - Met in Aquacorde Town on November 13th, 2022 - Moveset: Water Pledge, Strength, Substitute, Surf - Hates to lose
  
• Poppy - Florges - Level 49 - Calm Nature - Flower Veil Ability - Met on Route 4 on November 15th, 2022 - Moveset: Wish, Magical Leaf, Dazzling Gleam, Petal Blizzard - Likes to thrash about
  
• Bulbapedia - Venusaur - Level 45 - Modest Nature - Overgrow Ability - Met in Lumiose City on November 15th, 2022 - Moveset: Petal Dance, Toxic, Leech Seed, Venoshock - Likes to relax
  
• Slushie - Aurorus - Level 46 - Adamant Nature - Refrigerate Ability - Met in Ambrette Town on November 16th, 2022 - Moveset: Icy Wind, Nature Power, Ancient Power, Aurora Beam - Good endurance
  
• Lucha - Hawlucha - Level 45 - Careful Nature - Unburden Ability - Met on Route 10 on November 17th, 2022 - Moveset: High Jump Kick, Flying Press, Fly, Aerial Ace - Takes plenty of siestas