Game Theory - The Tragic Mystery of Pokemon's Ghost Girl (Pokemon)

Episode Date: June 18, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he solves the story of Pokemon's mysterious "Ghost Girl" Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick and Justin Kuiper Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Marc Schneider, Tyler Mascola, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

No internet, welcome to game theory, the show that's like Team Rocket, always ruining things for people who are just trying to have fun. For today's video, I have one question for you. Are you ready for a ghost story? Because for a series all about happy go lucky romps alongside your favorite sapient ice cream cone, Pokemon has some really scary themes. Themes that most of us just gloss over in our quest to be the best like no one ever was. I mean sure, by this point we're all familiar with the hauntings of Lavender Town and creepy Pokedex entries, but those are just scratching the surface of the horrific tragedies that hide inside these games. The world of Pokemon has a shocking number of ghosts, and I'm not talking about Gengars and Gaspis. I'm talking about real children dying.

Throughout the series, we see repeated instances of ghost girls. Out of nowhere moments where you're walking along hunting for your next shiny magic harp, when the next thing you know, the girl you were standing next to fades away. Or just straight up pulls a batman and disappears. And it's always a ghost girl for some reason. I don't know why. Apparently Game Freak thinks that it's really creepy for a ghost girl to come up and say, You're not the one!

Jokes on you, Game Freak. Growing up, that kind of rejection happened to me all the time. And those girls weren't even dead. While you're playing the game, these are the moments that make you stop and go, huh, that was weird. Before immediately seeing a Barry and continuing on your merry way, As a result, the stories behind these ghost girls have remained largely a mystery. Little bits of lore that are just waiting to be unearthed by the trainers who are willing to postpone their next gym badge and instead explore off the beaten path.

So today, I want to start piecing together these mysteries, starting with the OG, the original ghost, the Marvelous Bridge Girl from Pokemon Black and White. Think back to Generation 5 of Pokemon, a trip back to the Unova region. In that game, when you visit the Marvelous Bridge that connects Nipiq's Mbasa City to either black city or white forest, you'll catch sight of a girl who vanishes like a ghost if you get too close. And no, that was not just a sprite glitch. The NPC standing next to her immediately reacts saying, Huh? What? Did she just disappear? If you explore the area near where she appears and head to the bridge's eastern gate, you'll find an old lady who will tell you that a young girl used to play around the area with an Abra before the bridge was built. And that was it. At the time of this game's release, those were really all the clues

that we ever got as to who she was and why she was there. Just an odd little Easter egg of your casual run-of-the-mill bridge ghost. But the ghost girl would soon become part of a much larger mystery. While every other trainer moved on with their lives, in the years following Black and White's release, more and more clues started to leak out as to who this character might be. And to truly solve the mystery of the Marvelous Bridge Ghost, we'll actually need to visit three separate games,

Black and White, the sequels, Black 2 and White 2, and the previous generation of games, Diamond and Pearl, all to uncover what really happened to this girl and why. In Black 2 and White 2, a new area becomes accessible, the Strange House. But Strange is putting it lightly. In addition to being full of Ghost Pokemon, when you explore the house, the environment will constantly change. Furniture will be rearranged, objects will shake, and it's very clear that this place is being haunted by something, or someone. Someone turns out to be a girl who, when you speak to her, says this. An everlasting dark dream. An endless dream of darkness.

Dad, mom, Abra, where are you? Let's see, a girl in a haunted house calling out to her parents and her Pokemon Abra? Yeah, that sounds like it might be our girl. Her dialogue then continues. In the dark dream, I heard my dad's voice. Forget about the lunar wing. Stay here with me. And finally... Oh, the lunar wing. I can't take it now.

But it'll be okay. Please return the wing to the Pokemon. I was waiting on the bridge so I could return it myself. A bridge, you say. Seems to me like this is our smoking gun connecting the disappearing girl on the Marvelous Bridge in black and white to the girl haunting the strange house in black and white too. After exploring the house, the girl gives you a key item,

the Lunar Wing, and sends you back to the Marvelous Bridge, where you can now encounter and hopefully catch the legendary Pokemon Chryselia. Now all of that seems fairly straightforward. The girl vanishes and the story seems to be resolved, but it's just scratching the surface of what actually happened to her. You see, this ghost girl's entire tragic backstory was laid out for us by the developers, and we've just been overlooking it for the better part of the last decade.

You see, by this point, we all expect games like Dark Souls and FNAF to not wear their stories on their sleeves, to instead hide the lore in nooks and crannies, item descriptions, and secret Easter eggs. But to solve the case of Pokemon's Ghost Girl, we're gonna have to do a similar sort of investigation. Scattered throughout the Strange House are bookshelves, each one referencing some random fact about Pokemon or their moves. But when you actually stop and really read these entries, and think about why they were put here inside this haunted house, you start to get a sense of the real story that the developers are trying to tell us. They all have to do with Pokemon possessing sleep-related abilities. First, there's an entry about drowsy.

Quote, there are Pokemon called Drowsy. They put others to sleep and eat their dreams. Eating nightmares can upset their stomachs. Next, there's an entry about his evolution, hypno. Quote again, each one carries a pendulum that it can swing to make people drowsy. It's been said that a hypno once hypnotized a child and took it away. End quote. We then learn about the move Dream-Eater.

With this move, a Pokemon attacks while the target is asleep and eats its dream. It restores HP equal to half the damage inflicted on the target. With all this dream and nightmare talk, is it a coincidence then that the girl's first piece of dialogue inside the house is... An everlasting dark dream. An endless dream of darkness. Taking all that information into consideration, it seems like what the devs are trying to tell us is that the girl was trapped in an endless nightmare. And her parents were stuck on the outside. researching every possible way to wake her up. That's why the books are scattered around the house. The parents were researching her condition. The bulk of their search was spent looking into Pokemon with abilities that could possibly heal her. Drowsy eating dreams and hypnosis.

Unfortunately, it didn't work. Drowsy probably tried to eat the dream, but because it was such an intense nightmare, he couldn't do it. The solution to their problem wasn't that straightforward. We know this through two additional books on the shelves, that help us complete the puzzle. The first directly mentions the shadow Pokemon Dark Cry. To protect itself, it drives people and Pokemon away with terrible nightmares. And the next entry is about Cresselia. It's wings shine like the Crescent Moon and keep nightmares away. So it would seem that the girl's inescapable nightmares were caused by the legendary Pokemon Dark Cry. The girl is put into this endless dark sleep and despite the family trying to get drowsy to eat her free, the intense nature of DarkRy's bad dreams are impenetrable.

That's why we also learn about Chryselya, as Chryslea's lunar wing is the only real counter to Darkrise nightmares. Not only does the item description hint at this, we've actually seen at rescue a similar child in the past. If you rewind back to the previous generation of games, Diamond and Pearl, we meet Eldrich, a sailor who lives in Conilave City. Eventually we learned that his son is caught in a horrible nightmare.

a nightmare that also appears to have been caused by DarkRye. He doesn't say too much about the incident, except for one line. Dark, Dark is watching me. Even though he never says the full name, Darkry is the only Pokemon whose name starts with the letters D-A-R-K. And the only way to rescue him is by using, you guessed it, the Lunar Wing. There's one other book in the Strange House that we're given access to, one that specifically calls out the ability for Worn.

Quote, a Pokemon with this ability is alerted to one of the opposing Pokemon's moves. High power moves will be recognized first. It's worth noting that drowsy and hypno are two of only six Pokemon who are able to learn this move. So it's definitely tied into this story, but how? Well, this seems to be the last of the missing pieces, and it tells us the order of events. The parents bring in either a drowsy or hypno to use foreworn, or as it translates into the original Japanese, prophetic dream. And that move tells them what happened to the girl. What move a

Pokemon had performed on her to trap her in this never-ending darkness? This in turn is how the father of our ghost girl knew to look into dark-cry's nightmares and ultimately Chryselya's lunar wing as the cure. The girl's second dialogue says, In the dark dream, I heard my dad's voice. Forget about the lunar wing. Stay here with me. It might be tempting for us to assume that the second part of the sentence is the girl telling us what her dad said. After all, she starts by saying that she heard her dad's voice. But if we dig deeper, it's clear that she isn't quoting her father at all. Throughout Pokemon black and white, when a character's dialogue includes them

quoting a different character, we actually see quotation marks. For example, when the player battles Chantal of the Elite 4 for a second time, she'll talk about Volkner saying, Do you know Thunderbolt was his first greeting to me. Note the single quote marks around the words that Volkner said because she's quoting him. So when the girl says, forget about the lunar wing, stay here with me, she isn't repeating the words her father said. There are no quotation marks. This is instead the girl crying out to her father.

Her father went out in search of the lunar wing, but the girl didn't want him to go. She wanted him to stay by her side, but she couldn't let him know that because she was trapped in this dark nightmare. And viewed in this light, this story takes an even more tragic turn. Maybe she knew that it was already too late,

and she just wanted her father to be there in her final moments. Or maybe she was just scared, and her father's comforting presence was the one thing that enabled her to persevere through the everlasting dark dream. So here we have the final, and complete and tragic story of the ghost girl. We have a young girl, just like Eldridge's son before, who one day is stricken with inescapable nightmares.

The parents don't know what to do, using Drowsy's dream eater ability to try and make the nightmares go away, but when that doesn't work, they use a hip note. with foreworn to see what exactly is going on. Thanks to that move, they learned that it was the legendary dark cry that did this tour, and that the only way to counter a Pokemon that strong was with the power of another legendary, Chryselia's lunar wing. The father goes out in search of the item that'll save his daughter's life,

unable to hear her begging him to stay. By the time her father finally does return, though, it's too late. The girl's already passed on. Unable to wake from her nightmares, and her father, leaves the lunar wing in the room as a memento of the girl that he lost forever. The parents leave the house and many years later the house becomes overrun with Ghost Pokemon and the marvelous bridge was built where the Ghost Girl wanders to this day trying to return the unused Lunar Wing to the Pokemon that it belonged to.

And that is the sad and tragic story of Pokemon's first ever Ghost Girl, who just simply started off as a randomly disappearing NPC. There is admittedly one big question here that I think remains unaddressed. We know that the girl was plagued by Dark Cry's nightmares, and we know that her parents were unable to break the spell in time, but why would Dark Cry do this to her in the first place? Dark Cry's polketech entry indicates that it's not a malicious Pokemon, that it doesn't intentionally prey on the week. It uses its nightmares as a defense mechanism. So why would Dark Cry afflict this young girl who presumably posed no threat to it? I'm not a hundred percent sure. It doesn't seem like the evidence is there. Rodrich's son in Diamond and Pearl was also afflicted, so maybe Dark Cry just misses sometimes. In the movie, The Rise of Dark Cry, it turns out that a girl's grandmother had met and befriended Darkry, whose nightmares ended up helping them save the world.

It turns out that the nightmare told me just what I needed to do. The nightmares were prophecies that ultimately helped avoid an apocalypse, so maybe that's the case? I'm not entirely sure. There doesn't really seem to be enough evidence there to make a judgment call. This is all just speculation. But there you have it, theorists. Man, Pokemon is not afraid to go there. And our legacy on Game Theory making sure to cover all the games with all the dead kids continues on.

And in the meantime, remember, that is just a theory. A Game Theory! Thanks for watching!