Game Theory - These 25 Pokemon are DEAD Because of YOU!

Episode Date: July 2, 2023

Join Game Theory Host Matpat as he breaks down the impact that WE, as real people, have on Pokemon! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick, Mike Keenan (The Pokémon Biologist), and Tom Robinson Editors: Jerika (NekoOnigiri), Shannon (Bomb0i) and Koen Verhagen Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Congratulations! You are killing Pokemon! In the established canon of the Pokemon series, we, our player character at least, are the reason that at least 25 Pokemon species have gone extinct. That's not even really a theory. It is established within the canon. To be fair, it's buried way down in there and requires you to connect a few dots, but I have 100% confidence that Game Freak has expressly put this in here for observant, dedicated players. And perhaps strangest of all, this steamrolling of the wildlife, thus bumping innocent animals permanently off the mortal coil, it's all because of a message from God.

The Pokemon God, Archaeus. He gives us this divine mission to exterminate the Mon. If you thought Pokemon lore was weird before. Sweet until you hear this one. Oh, internet, welcome to game theory. The only show that's nerdy enough to remind you that Ho-O isn't just a Pokemon, it's also the chemical formula for hydrogen peroxide. Drop that knowledge bond the next time you're in Mrs. Nagy's third period chemistry class.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are three things that are certain in the world, death, taxes, and new Pokemon games. In short, Pokemonia is in the air. So I figured it was time we took another look at the series. And what better game to talk about than the smash hit of 2022, Pokemon Legends Archaeus. While recent remakes have literally just been recycling the Pokemon formula that's been reused since the mid-90s, Legends Archaeus threw that formula out into the trubbish. It's the first game in the core series to give players an open world to explore. But while it certainly was a new look, it wasn't a new world. In this game, you're actually running through an ancient version of Sino, the region from Gen 4's diamond, pearl, and platinum.

How far back in the past are we talking? Unfortunately, the game doesn't explicitly tell us, but based on the somewhat modern amenities of Jubalife Village, like binded books, brimmed hats, and steam-powered poca balls, as well as the architectural inspiration for the Galaxy Hall, the game seems to take place in the Meiji era of Japanese history, which took place from around 1868 to 1912. And given the houses and clothing in Jubalite Village seemed to resemble that of the Edo era, the era prior to Meiji, more likely to be closer to that 140 years ago mark. So really, this thing was one part Pokemon game and one part history lesson for that fictional region.

And while it's certainly fun picking up on all the similarities from two games set in the same region from two different time periods, like map locations, logo, artwork, and ancestral connections between NPCs, what really tickled my theorist senses were the differences between the two regions that seemed to have happened in that 140-year gap. There are some obvious ones, like the region's name being changed from his soon, to Sino and isolated camps evolving into urbanized cities, but clearly I'm not here to talk about my love of geography or urban planning. I'm here to talk about the biggest difference of them all, the Pokemon. There are a good number of Pokemon that we find in the Hesui region that are completely new. Ones that don't make an appearance in the Gen 4 games, their remakes, or any other core installment in the series. Doing a quick comparison of the Hesui and Sino Dexes shows us that there's a whopping 25 Pokemon that are found somewhere in the Hesui region that are completely absent from other titles. Pokemon like the adorable Hesuian growleth and the hauntingly new evolution of Basculene, Basculegian.

But why? Where'd they go? We've been in this region before. We've seen everything there is to see here. And yet, in the 140-year history between this game and Gen 4, 25 Pokemon apparently got wiped out. Unsurprisingly, the game never explicitly says what happened to all these Pokemon. Based on my findings, for a good reason. You see, they're shielding us from the truth. We killed them.

We are responsible. We're the reason those 25. Pokemon variants are gone now. We made them go extinct. So come with me, loyal theorists, as we go big lore hunting to figure out what exactly happened to all these new, old Pokemon. Let's start by looking at one of the first new Pokemon that we get to see in the game, Wordier, the long-awated evolution for the Pokemon Stantler. Now in Legends, Archaeus, stantlers are plentiful. You practically trip over these guys. But in Sino, not so much. They can only be obtained on one specific route using the Pocor radar. And as for Werdier, they don't exist. Like, not at all. For a

To be a wordier, it needs to use the move Syshield Bash a total of 20 times. But Syshield Bash isn't a move that Stantlers can learn in games set in the future. So not only has the overall number of Stantler shrunk, but it's also lost the ability to use a move that's critical for its evolution into Wordier. That's weird, right? So inevitably, I have to ask the question, why? Clearly the game designers consciously made this decision, so what are they trying to tell us? What reason would Stantlers have to forget an entire move? Well, Wordier's Pokedex entry actually gives us hint.

The black orbs shine. Ha, I guess I can't use my normal Pokedex since this game doesn't have an electronic Pokedex. Gotta go with the old-fashioned method! The black orbs shine with an uncanny light when the Pokemon is erecting invisible barriers. The fur shed from its beard retains heat well and is highly useful material for winter clothing.

Useful in cold weather, huh? Sure sounds like something that the citizens of the cold Hissui region would find pretty valuable. Once people read that Pokedex entry, it's likely they're going to be tempted to try and get their hands on wordier to obtain that precious fur. especially as they continue expanding into areas like the icy north. So, it would seem like were deer were hunted to extinction for their fur,

while the remaining stantlers did their best to avoid evolving, choosing to flee rather than fight, much like real-life deer are known to do. For the stantlers, evolving just wasn't worth the added stat increase if it made it harder to survive. After generations and generations of stantlers avoiding fights with humans, and especially avoiding the use of scy shield bash out of a fear of evolving, they would eventually forget how to use the move entirely in order to help their chances of survival. No Sy shield bash means no evolving means no wordier.

And they aren't the only species that was basically bullied into extinction either. Take the Hissuian quillfish, a regional variant that's been totally wiped out from Sino by the time Gen 4 rolls around. Looking at its Pocodex entry though, immediately you start to see why this guy might have been on the chopping block. It tells us that... Fishers detested this troublesome Pokemon because it sprays poison from its spines getting it everywhere. A different form of quillfish lives in other regions. If you look at the Cobalt Coastline, one of the one of the small coastline, one of the of the main locations for Hesui and Quillfish, we see that in the intervening 140 years,

this actually becomes Gen 4's Route 223, a prime fishing location thanks to the Sunny Shore Market and a swimming location on the way to Victory Road. What this tells us is that fishermen, fed up with the poisonous quillfish, hunted them to extinction so the coastline could be better used for commercial and recreational purposes. They eliminated what they saw as a problematic fish, which directly leads to what we see in Sino years later. And it's not like it would be hard for them to do either, considering the Diamond and Pearl Pocodex entries called Quillfish a poor swimmer. There's also a second reason that fishermen might have wanted to get their hands on the quillfish, but this one isn't as directly called out.

Food. Quillfish are likely to be a delicacy in this universe. There's a type of real-world pufferfish called Fugu. It contains a super deadly neurotoxin, just like our good old poisoned type Hissuian quillfish. And it too is a delicacy in many parts of Japan, only being served by specially trained chefs who know how to prepare the meat without killing their customers. Hissui and Quillfish would probably work in the same way. Regardless though, whether it was to clear a nuisance or fill the restaurants, humans were the ones that wiped these guys out from the coastlines of Hesui.

Speaking of being hunted, let's look at two more examples of hunted Pokemon. Hesuian Voltorbs and Electrodes. Look at them, it's immediately clear that these two have had some of the most dramatic changes in their design. The Conto versions of these Pokemon are made of some sort of metal-like compound. While the Hissuian Electroods' Pocode says that the body is made of a, quote, material curiously similar to Apricorn wood. Now, this is an important detail. because historically, apricorns were used to make

pokeballs. In Legends Archaeus, apricorns are everywhere. But in Sino, there's no more of these trees to be found. So what happened? Well, by the end of Legends Archaeus, because of the work that we did throughout the game, people are now looking to catch Pokemon for themselves. As a result, it's likely that they began to harvest apricorns at an alarming rate to craft their own polka balls. But in the rush, no one thought to do it sustainably.

And suddenly, there are no more apricorn trees left in the region. So, without the wood to build polka balls, What do you do then? You start to hunt the animal that has a body made of a very similar wood. Hissuian Voltorbs and Electrods. Over time, to avoid going extinct, Hissuian Voltorb and Electrood may have evolved into their metal form that would prevent them from getting poached by the would-be curts of the world. And this directly mirrors the animal behavior that we see in real life.

Many elephants are slaughtered specifically for their tusks. Right? Well, this has historically been happening so much that elephants in heavily hunted areas are now starting to evolve to have smaller tusks. or even no tusks at all. Since poachers are hunting them for those tusks, elephants with no tusks have an evolutionary advantage, thereby passing that trait along, just like a metal Voltorb and Electrode would have a survival advantage over their wood variance. But it wasn't just overhunting that was a problem in that 140 year period. It was also an overuse of the region's resources.

Ursa Luna and Cleaver are two new evolutions of Ursuling and Cyther that we see in Legends Archaeus that require the use of a specific item to evolve. Ursa Ring needs the peat block and Cyther needs the black augurite. And while Ursuling and Cyther are certainly easy to obtain in the Gen 4 games Their evolutions aren't present because neither of these items exist anymore Which we can explain by looking at the differences between Hesui and Sino. The peat block item is based on the real-life material material known as well peat Basically it's like a precursor to coal takes thousands of years to form and it can be burned for fuel Based on the cities that we see in Gen 4 it's clear that there was an increase in industrialization in the Sino region Industrialization means machines and machines need fuel.

And hey look, here's a readily available material that's just laying here with no other discernible purpose. Might as well use it until it's gone. Black augurite actually suffers a similar fate. The name originally led me to believe that Black Algarite is based off the mineral augite. However, looking at the in-game sprites and description, the two don't seem to line up. Its black, glassy texture actually makes it more likely to be obsidian. Obsidian's a material that's made from the rapid cooling of lava, and it's been used for centuries as a sharp material for tools.

The only active volcano that we see in the Hissui region is this one off the Cobalt Coastland, which, based on its shape, is what they call a cinder cone volcano. Cinder cone volcanoes don't tend to make obsidian. The only other place it could have come from is Mount Coronet, which the box art does seem to imply is a volcano, but it appears to have been dormant for years. Therefore, it's safe to say that black augurite is going to be in limited supply. It, along with peat, are non-renewable resources.

So when humanity expanded its presence in the region and wound up using up all these items, Ursaring and Cyther no longer had the ability to evolve. You know who else disappeared from the region because the natural environment changed? Arcanine, Avalug, and De Situai, who all have Pokedex entries that specifically mentioned being adapted to the colder climate and snow of the Hesui region. Hesui is an island, and islands are small. When habitats are smaller, that means that the organisms that live there need to become more specialized. For example, take the famous finches studied by Charles Darwin on the Galapagos Islands. What he saw was that each finch evolved a completely unique beak shape based on the island that it was

that it lived on. This comes with the benefit of making you really well suited to your environment, but the downside is that if anything changes, then your specialized traits won't do you any good. And that's exactly what happened with these Hissui Pokemon. As humans expanded their reach into the area as they industrialized, the climate of Hesui became warmer. This uptick in human development,

the deforestation that came with it, all of it led to a shift in biodiversity of the region, meaning some of these Pokemon were no longer able to make the cuts. Now, these are only a few examples of what happened to these region-specific Pokemon, but you can see the pattern, right? All these Pokemon are gone thanks to one specific factor. Humans. Humans plundering resources, humans overhunting, humans over expanding. In the 140 years between legends Archaeus and Gen 4, humans have completely morphed the landscape of

the Sino region and the game designers have clearly fought through that history. They didn't just insert designs and evolutions into this world arbitrarily. The whole thing was thoughtful, intentional. It was told to us through hints in the Pokedex. In the end, we get ourselves a game that has a really strong environmental message if we just bothered to piece together the bread crumbs that they left behind for us. Except there's still one piece that I haven't connected. During the game we learned that the people of Hissui are afraid of of Pokemon. Some even worship them. The little village that you start off in isn't able to expand more because they're afraid to face the monsters that lurk out in the wilderness. But someone changes that and in so doing signs Hissui's death warrant. That person is you.

At the start of the game, your character is called back in time by the god Pokemon Archaeus. When you land, you're immediately with catching Pokemon, something that other people are afraid to do. But you, you know better, you come from the future, so you persist. You teach people that Pokemon can be your friends, that they can be used to help with chores. You can even collect them and use them for competitive sport. Without this fear of Pokemon, the human race is now able to expand throughout Hissui. Thanks to you, they're no longer afraid to hunt wordier for their fur, to exterminate pests like the quillfish, or to use up the land's natural resources.

If you had decided to not be a hero, to not save the day, the region would have remained too inhospitable for civilization to truly grow, and humans would have chosen to avoid it entirely. Kind of makes you wonder if that god Pokemon who sent us back in time was so benevolent after all. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.