Pokemon Adventures; The World's Biggest Franchise's Most Slept on Story



Pokemon Adventures is the world that Satoshi Tajiri envisioned when he first began his work on Pokemon Red all those years ago. Over the years Tajiri has talked about how his image of this world had a darker edge, it was a place that had been hurt and was rebuilding. Despite having had nigh on hundreds of different adaptations Pokemon Adventures remains one of the very few series to capture the darker tone that Tajiri envisioned.

To start with Pokemon Adventures is an anthology series with each major arc of the manga following the story of one of the games, what this means in practice is that we get to see what the stories of the games look like when they’re the focus and just who our protagonists really are. For example, the first arc of the manga follows the plot of Pokemon Red, the very first Pokemon game. Right from the start the manga begins to build out the world because now not only do we have our rivals from Pallet Town Red and Blue but we also have the thief Green make her own way across Kanto. The ability to build on an existing story allows the games to flesh out characters who had very little to them in the original games, take Blue. In the games, he’s your cocky rival who shows up to try and show you up at every turn. In the manga Blue is a dedicated and no-nonsense trainer who will do whatever it takes to win gym battles, he has a big reputation to live up to and it pushes him to work hard towards his goal. And that’s a fairly major character from the games with the expanded time all the side characters get far-expanded backstories that allow them to grow in real people/

Pokemon Adventures is far and away one of the best-written pieces of media to come out of the Pokemon franchise and frankly, it deserves better.