“people like talking about pokemon”
– Nameless Rumia

Pocket Monsters (ポケットモンスター), or Pokémon (ポケモン), is the long-running Japanese video game franchise that sparked a worldwide phenomenon. It was created by Satoshi Tajiri and the first few games of their core series were released in 1996 for handheld consoles.

Since 1998, the high-grossing franchise is managed by a three-way joint venture called The Pokémon Company. In recent years, they've had their fair brush of criticism over the years as the cash cow's quality has declined because of the tight release cadence.¹⁾

In the Pokémon universe, humans co-exist with creatures known as Pokémon. The general goal of the core games is to collect, raise, establish, and lead Pokémon teams, aiming to be one of the very best trainers. While it sounds simple, the games were really innovative for its time that it would spawn a long-running anime, generations of core and side games, trading cards, several manga series, and so forth.

“RG≈RS → GS≈DPPt → BW → B2W2≈XY”
– Toshinobu Matsumiya²⁾

Until recent years, the core Pokémon games had a vague chronological timeline, backed by the 2014 tweet from scenario writer Toshinobu Matsumiya.³⁾ However, the company has shied away from it,⁴⁾ and it all gets complicated when you factor in the confirmed multiverse. Despite these developments, there are efforts to keep this vague chronological timeline going, as shown on this page.

This section contains brief summaries of the Hoenn Battle Frontier facilities and the intended experience, mostly to serve as a rough guideline for a ROM hack idea that will probably never happen.

• Battle Factory - Choose from a random selection of Pokémon and see how far your team goes.
• Battle Arena - You have three turns to beat your foe, then your performance is judged.
• Battle Dome - Bring three, only use two. This becomes a tense guessing game as you progress.
• Battle Pike - Select from three doors and hope for the best. It's all about taking risks.
• Battle Palace - This facility mainly depends on your Pokémon's nature and how lucky you get.
• Battle Pyramid - Calculate every move. Brave conditions, conserve power, find items, etc.
• Battle Tower - Every single trainer usually has a useful held item. Sounds simple enough, yeah?

Below is a handmade list of “Walk Through Walls” (WTW) cheat codes for the core Pokémon games, mostly the first three generations since I love looking at map layouts and newer generation hacks typically do not modify their maps. These shouldn't require any so-called “master codes” and presumably don't work with any cracktro versions. Help with the Japanese codes would be appreciated.⁵⁾

• Pokémon Red/Green/Blue/Yellow (All):
  • 010138CD

The last digit of your trainer ID in Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald determines a few optional events that could be exchanged whenever you mix records with other players. It should be noted that record mixing across multiple languages is Emerald only. As record mixing was discontinued, the Old Guy and Secret Base trainer representative in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire rely on completely different factors instead.

^{Note: This chart obviously doesn't include the Lilycove Pokemon Center Lady, since modulo is different than “ID ending in X”.}

Due to its international reach, the Pokémon franchise gets localized into many different languages, meaning that attack names, character names, monster names, events, and labels could potentially have all sorts of various names which can make things confusing, making it a prime subject for translation analysis. However, I can't realistically cover everything, so I'll probably write about something less taxing.

At the time of this writing, there are 18 types in the Pokémon franchise. Due to the sheer length of the chart, I've been forced to split the whole chart into two charts because it really eats a lot of space on desktop.

In the Johto story, there is a set of non-playable characters that will show up on certain days of the week. The following chart is a compilation of their names, next to the respective day of the week in the language.

While Pokémon was introduced to China in 1998, the PRC would enact a ban on video game consoles from 2000 to 2014 that killed localization efforts since Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Singapore weren't large markets enough to justify the amount of resources needed to localize these games.¹⁰⁾ Instead, Pokémon was experienced through the anime, manga, and bootleg/imported copies.

As a result, the Pokémon franchise would assume several different names amongst Mandarin-speaking and Cantonese-speaking audiences for many years. The Pokemon Company eventually decided to settle on “Bǎokěmèng” (宝可梦) as the official Chinese name going forward, as they wanted to keep the pronunciation consistent according to a Chinese-exclusive Nintendo Direct in 2016,¹¹⁾ finalizing this in 2019.¹²⁾

The four Ruinous Pokémon in Scarlet and Violet use Chinese names, but the official localization team made an odd decision to use the archaic Wade–Giles system over the Hanyu Pinyin system. This was fixed in the French and German version, though they base it on the Japanese name. Meanwhile, the Chinese translation adds “gǔ” (古, lit. “old”) and changed the first two names for some reason.¹⁵⁾

^{Note: “Old” = Kyūjitai (Japanese) and Traditional Chinese. “New” = Shinjitai (Japanese) and Simplified Chinese.}

• It's often mentioned that Dragon Quest and MOTHER were major inspirations for Pokémon.
  • The latter is rather obvious, given that Tsunekazu Ishihara had previously worked at Ape Inc. before establishing Creatures Inc. which hired former staff members of said company.
  • In the 2019 GameCenter CX interview, Shigesato Itoi confirms that the team who “stepped up” to develop EarthBound (MOTHER 2) is the same team developing the Pokémon franchise.¹⁶⁾
• During the development process for Pokémon Red and Green, there are a couple of curiosities:
  • In a design document, there is a curious “C” area, between 6, 7, and 8, which indicates a location that would've been the same size as 7.¹⁷⁾ The leaked prototype data implies that “C” would have been “Town 12”, a small map that curiously has the S.S. Anne truck, but it's believed that the map was overwritten at this point¹⁸⁾ before it was eventually gutted.¹⁹⁾
  • The route between Vermilion City to Celadon City was initially more direct. Instead of the roundabout way of going through Rock Tunnel, there used to be an underground path²⁰⁾ which linked Route 5,²¹⁾ or the Underground Path of Route 5–6,²²⁾ to Route 7.²³⁾
  • At one point, Blaine once had a military-like design,²⁴⁾ but the idea was abandoned, and they decided to go with the scrapped Silph Chief's design at the last second.
    • Given his Japanese M98 uniform, he could've had a rivalry with Lt. Surge, the Lightning American, but we'd have to assume that it was either cut for being too complex for kids to understand, two military-themed gym leaders would've felt redundant or had implications, or the developers simply saw the potential value in limiting the Japanese influence.²⁵⁾
  • Lastly, the league headquarters was initially a nine-floor dungeon gauntlet with floors resembling Viridian Forest, Mt. Moon, S.S. Anne, Rock Tunnel, Pokémon Tower, the Rocket Hideout, Safari Zone, and the Pokémon Mansion before we find familiar territory.²⁶⁾
• Now, here's a handful of notes on the Japanese versions of the first generation Pokémon games:
  • The Japanese RGB boxart has this screenshot of a Lv. 5 Charmander named Sepultura,²⁷⁾ fighting against a Lv. 18 Pidgeotto that likely belongs to the rival in Cerulean City.
    • It was later referenced in XY by an NPC on Route 21, specifically the Japanese, English, and Korean versions, though it was edited out for Spanish, German, French, and Italian.²⁸⁾
  • For some reason, an Indian elephant (インドぞう, Indo zou) is oddly mentioned in the Pokédex entries for Raichu and Gastly in the Japanese version of Red and Green. These were later recycled for both Pokémon in the international versions of FireRed, then it carried over to Raichu in Sun while Gastly had a brand new entry written for them.
    • While GSC did introduce elephant Pokémon like Phanpy and Donphan, SwSh introduced Cufant and Copperajah to serve as a more blatant reference.
  • During the Silph Co. takeover, there is a Team Rocket scientist²⁹⁾ on the sixth floor who talks about being sent to their “Ponaya Tsungusuka” (ポナヤツングスカ) branch in Russia, which is believed to be short for Podkamennaya Tunguska³⁰⁾ as a reference to the Tunguska event.
    • In the international versions, this became Tiksi in northern Siberia. However in LGPE, the Japanese version omits Russia, while most international translations leave it vague.
  • “Lavender Town Syndrome” (シオンタウン症候群, Shion Taun Shōkōgun) isn't real, kid.³¹⁾
• The Japanese name for the Eeveelutions is technically “Ībuizu” (イーブイズ) or “EVs”, but everyone typically calls them the “Buizu” (ブイズ), “Vees”, or “Vs” instead.³²⁾
  • Unlike the international names, the Japanese names does not utilize a common suffix or pattern: Showers, Thunders, Booster, Eifie, Blacky, Leafia, Glacia, and Nymphia.
• According to illustrator Ken Sugimori, the male protagonist of RSE (and ORAS) is wearing a knit cap,³³⁾ alternatively known as a beanie, a toboggan, a toque, a watch cap, a winter hat, etc.
• I personally believe that Green is the boy, Blue is the girl, and Blue and Leaf are the same person.
• Some of the protagonists' original Japanese names were previously used as generic trainer names:
  • Kouki (コウキ) was a male Cooltrainer's name (Edgar) in Emerald's Victory Road.
  • Hikari (ヒカリ) was a female Psychic's name (Maura) in RSE's Mossdeep Gym.
  • Kotone (コトネ) was a Channeler's name (Patricia) in FRLG and LGPE's Pokémon Tower.
  • Touya (トウヤ) was a male Psychic's name (Greg) in HGSS's Route 37.³⁴⁾
  • Touko (トウコ) was a female Swimmer's name (Marcy) in RSE's Battle Tower^RS/Frontier^E, as well as a female Picnicker's name (Marcy) in FRLG's Pattern Bush.³⁵⁾
• In BW, “The Riches” in Undella Town are called “Bourgeoir” (ブルジョワール) in Japanese, directly referencing the bourgeoisie. This is retained in the Chinese, Korean, and Italian versions.
• The game color palettes were directly borrowed from Bulbapedia, specifically the lighter palettes.³⁶⁾
• Please stop recommending me infamously bad ROM hacks of Pokémon.

• Bootleg Pokémon Games - A list of unlicensed Pokémon games, excludes sprite hacks.
• Kaizō Pokémon (改造ポケモン) / Pokémon ROM Hacks:
  • List of Pokémon ROM Hacks that use Existing Regions - Tentative name.
  • Moekko Monsters - It's one of the oldest Japanese hacks, featuring humanoid moe creatures.
  • Touhou Ningyougeki (Touhou Puppet Play) - The obligatory Touhou Project crossover.
  • VIP Monsters - An old Japanese VIP-themed ROM hack, featuring AA characters from that era.
• Twitch Plays Pokémon