Hi! I'm Jackie, a 23-year-old celebrating the 20th birthday of something important to many people my age. For those who don't know, Pokemon made its debut to its native audience in Japan on February 27th of 1996. That's a long time ago, huh? Back in my day (imagine me with old lady glasses and a cute little gray bun if you like), there were only 151 different species of Pokemon and only fifteen types for those little fellas. Now, there's six hundred and forty nine of them-- just counting the ones you can use now, as a seventh generation has been confirmed-- and even then there's different possible forms for some. An impressive run for something all about what people first viewed as glorified animal fighting. Perhaps that's because there's more to it.

Spoiler alert: There is. Keep reading if you want the long and short of it, but I can promise you as a dedicated fan, it takes a lot more than brute strength to raise a Pokemon according to both the shows and the games; and that's a point that's been becoming more and more evident with every iteration.

In the first generation-- often called the Kanto generation for the region in which it took place-- it obviously had a lot of establish. What in the world was a Pokemon? Why were they so adored by the people living with them? What could they do? Why is being a Pokemon Trainer such a common career? That's not explained all too well at the beginning, but it becomes more clear as you start to play for yourself.

You begin your journey as a ten year old boy (a female avatar was introduced in the second generation's "special edition" game) and end up saving the equivalent to your whole country! From whom? Simple. The bad guys, the famous Team Rocket, those weirdos who only use Pokemon to strengthen their crime syndicate. Like I said, it's the first game; give it some credit for the simplicity. Along your way, you also take on the Pokemon League challenge to beat the 8 Gym leaders around your little jaunt in Kanto and then eventually the Elite Four and Champion-- earning yourself a pretty penny along the way, as each fight has prize money hinging on it.

Oh, and you're on a mission from the famous Professor who lives in your town too, but that's not all that big of a deal, riiiiight? Nope, it's actually a huge deal! This mission happens to be entering in as much data as possible on the Pokemon encyclopedia (or Pokedex as it's called; yeah, everything has a Poke in front of it. Wonder where Apple got their iDea?). The prize money comes in here, as you have to buy items to heal or train or even catch the Pokemon for the information. And there's the matter of the fighting itself, since most of these adorable or monstrous little critters turn into different forms-- evolution for those not in the know-- with training while they level/grow up. But I digress. This is just the first generation we're talking about. Onto the next, Johto, where the series answered the questions that naturally came with the idea of battling animals for sport.

With the release of those games came a new mechanic to raising Pokemon: baby Pokemon. You could bring a Pokemon of either gender together-- or any Pokemon with a gender and a special blob of goo called a Ditto-- and then wha-bam, your trainer learns about the Braviary and the Beedrill in a process that gives you a mysterious egg! After walking around with them for a while, they hatch into cute little Pokemon starting at level 5 (in that generation, anyway; by the 4th generation, they hatch at level 1). A handful of them can be specifically categorized as "babies" since they evolve into pre-existing Pokemon, like Pichu into Pikachu, but their method was newly introduced. A hidden statistic of training is happiness, one harnessed for this way of making the cuties grow up. It's fairly easy to exploit, too. All it takes is using items on it, walking around with it, and keeping it from fainting. Keep it pleased enough, and it will feel comfortable enough to evolve. From one useless electric rat to a slightly less useless one, hooray! It was also used in a few other evolutions that hadn't existed before, but the main gimmick was the baby Pokemon, likely due to padding the numbers for the Pokedex mentioned before. Oh yeah, that's right, in every generation you're going for the League and Pokedex completion along with taking on your "Team" for the game-- in this case, it's once again Team Rocket, but we'll get to that later. It's not exactly a happy topic all the time.

Back on the previous subject, the happiness statistic was also used for two special moves. Depending on how much your Pokemon liked you, you could go to a certain city in the games and get one of two attacks on Sunday. Your pet dragon seems fond of you? Great, have the machine that lets it learn Return! More accurately translated as "Return Favor" from its Japanese name but limited for text space, this move gets more powerful depending on the happiness level of the Pokemon. On the flipside if you let that dragon faint a lot in battle or have had it shoved in the computer program that keeps it safe but not with you, you get Frustration (translated from "Angry Outburst"). This move packs a wallop too, though its connotation is just disheartening for most Trainers. Still, it's the perfect other side of the coin to Return. And speaking of other sides of the coin...

Moving on at a breakneck pace, we reach Hoenn. This one people in this world may have heard about a little more, since it just got a reboot. But what does this have to do with opposites, you may ask? The villains in this series are the teams Aqua and Magma, who fight for more water and land mass respectively. They're in direct competition with each other, and depending on whether you pick Ruby or Sapphire, you're helping one of them. By the end, they figure out how wrong it is to try and change the world-- by using super ancient monsters that they needed to wake up using sacred relics on top of a graveyard mountain. It helps a ton that the Pokemon on the box in this game goes on a rampage because the leader of your choice picks the wrong item to control it, but come on, how dumb do you have to be to expect complete command of a creature twenty times older than you? Bite off more than you can chew, and there will be consequences.

In the special edition of this game, Emerald, you oppose both of them at the same time. It was a fairly revolutionary idea to face two big teams head-on at once, but it was handled surprisingly well. After a while into the game, one of the bad guys first realizes how wrong his idea is and tries talking the other out of going through with their plans. You can imagine that it doesn't go well. In fact, this one causes Aqua and Magma's mascots to start a fight that literally changes the climate of the entire world. Torrents and droughts (actually the abilities of the Pokemon in question) plague Hoenn in rapid-fire fluxes, only to be solved by this box's mascot, who you yourself placate due to your bond with your own partners. Once the tree quit their fighting and return to their caves to slumber, you don't hear from either of the bad guys past an optional blurb where they realize how insignificant they were in the grand scheme of these creatures. Yeah, you just woke them up, guys. Don't expect to control them just because they're there.

Glossing past generation four's Sinnoh region to generation five's Unova, we meet a reboot of the series. The makers wanted to take a new look onto the franchise they had made, and certainly did a job of it. Not only did players originally only have the Pokemon introduced this time (So…many…monkeys. Help.), but they came up with a surprisingly realistic villain group: Team Plasma. Their leader Ghetsis-- no, I wish I'd sneezed while typing this-- is seen in the first big town you reach trying to tell people to release their Pokemon since we've all been so cruel to them keeping them cooped up in balls. The NPCs in the town all have murmurs of doubt after that, but you continue on your way and meet a boy named N minutes past the speech. He claims to hear Pokemon talking, and wants to know what yours are like. Through a battle, he does just that, and is surprised to find out they like you. Most of the plot of this game comes from those two forces, N and Team Plasma. The idiots in cloaks all try to steal Pokemon from the weak while you battle their grunts, while N eventually reveals he is the hero of the game. A huge plot twist for this series as well, since you're supposed to be the one saving the world.

Oh, but you do. N is not just the hero, but he is also the king of Team Plasma. He harnesses the power of the legendary dragon of the game, though he's unaware that Ghetsis had been puppeteering him the whole time to make a perfect image of a human living with Pokemon in peace…just so this guy could get by making an empire and keeping all the powerful beasties for himself. You have to go through the