Would having to say goodbye to your Pokémon stable have you ready to say goodbye to your boyfriend or girlfriend too?
The Pokémon video games started off squarely aimed at kids, and elementary school-age gamers still make up a key part of their fanbase. However, the franchise has hung onto a lot of fans in the 21 years it’s been in existence, and in the current era, there are plenty of would-be Pokémon Masters who’re adults.
They’re old enough to have active love lives, and thus also old enough to have lovers’ quarrels, which got Japanese Twitter user @mizutarou00312 thinking about a hypothetical problem for grown-up gamers. “A question for Pokémon fans,” @mizutarou00312 tweeted. “Imagine you got in an argument with your romantic partner (boyfriend, girlfriend), and then he or she erased your Pokémon save data. After that, your partner showed remorse. Would you be able to forgive him or her?”
In just two days, @mizutarou00312’s poll drew 32,988 responses, and in the end, nearly two thirds said the destruction of their Pokémon data would be an unforgivable offense.
65 percent of respondents chose “Couldn’t forgive (would break up),” with the remainder saying they’d forgive their partner and mend the emotional rift.
At first glance, this might seem like a case of hard-core gamers valuing their imaginary Pocket Minsters over their real life boyfriends and girlfriends, which certainly sounds like a chide-worthy set of principles. “You’d just have to raise your Pokémon again,” said one member of the forgive-and-forget camp.
But looking through voters’ comments, there aren’t many people bemoaning the potential loss of a Gyarados’ fighting prowess per se. Instead, those who don’t think they could mend the relationship asserted that someone deliberately erasing the save date of someone they’re upset at points to a lack of understanding of or respect for your partner’s interests. Others, meanwhile, said it was indicative of an even more deeply unattractive part of that person’s psyche.
“It’s not a matter of forgiving them or not. If they’re the kind of person who’d break something that belonged to someone else because of a fight, I think you’re better off without them.”
“If the reason we had the fight in the first place stemmed from Pokémon, I might be able to forgive them. You could chalk it up to an ill-conceived attempt to fix the problem. But if it was just a case of destroying something that was important to someone else as an act of revenge, then I think you should break up. It shows that they aren’t a mature empathetic person, and they’re probably going to do the same sort of thing again in the future.”
Adding an extra amount of significance to the transgression is the fact that, like most modern games, Pokémon is designed so that you can’t erase your data with a single button press, in order to prevent accidental, unintentional deletions. As such, one commenter felt it couldn’t be shrugged off as something done purely in the heat of the moment.
“You can’t erase a Pokémon save with one button press, so that shows that even after thinking it over they still decided to delete it. That’s something you can’t forgive.”
So remember, no matter how heightened your emotions may get during a disagreement, it’s important to always keep in mind that you can’t take things back once you’ve said them, nor can you undo a Pokémon save deletion.
Source: Jin
Top image ©SoraNews24
Follow Casey on Twitter, where the lost save data that hurt him the most was the one in his copy of Crystalis for the NES (which he ended up never finishing as a result).