Chapter 137: Pokémon and Spirits
Chapter 137: Pokémon and Spirits
However, how to use this Pokémon concept in TLF Online was not an easy problem either.
‘First, the attempt to create a Pokémon-like feeling through the Summoner in TLF2 ended somewhat clumsily.’
It had not been a complete failure. But the results were too limited. He had designed it around Pokémon’s key points of adventure, collection, and battle, but it seemed too weak.
‘Did I design it too dependently?’
There had been limits because he tried to implement it inside the TLF series. But this was not because Insu had been timid. It was unavoidable due to the nature of packaged games.
Once a packaged game was released, it was difficult to revise, so it had to be released as a polished finished product. Bold attempts were inevitably limited.
‘But online games are a little different.’
Fundamentally, MMORPGs were games based on the premise that content would continue to be added, so users were more tolerant. Moreover, because they were relatively easier to modify, if the response was too bad, they could even go as far as completely deleting the content, allowing for bolder attempts.
But that did not mean he intended to simply take Pokémon as-is and attach it to the game.
Unless he planned to write some absurd story, like Warcraft, where a dimensional portal opened and Pokémon led by Pokémon Masters invaded the TLF world, it had to be adapted to TLF Online to some extent.
Moreover, Pokémon was fairly bulky content. If it were just bringing in one or two characters like later collaborations commonly did, they could roughly get away with bringing in dinosaurs or aliens. But if they were going to attach such a large mass of content, they had to be careful.
Just as fusion cuisine failed if it went too far.
‘First of all, I think the problem with TLF2’s Summoner was that it used existing monsters.’
The idea of turning enemies into allies was appealing in its own way, but the problem was that the monsters did not look very good.
One of the important reasons Pokémon succeeded was the visuals of the Pokémon themselves. One could ask whether this was some appearance-obsessed way of thinking, but it was an unavoidable fact and reality.
Fundamentally, Pokémon being the protagonist’s friends and companions was an important part of the premise.
Of course, there were minor errors, such as beating them up, trapping them in balls, using them in fights however one pleased, mercilessly abandoning them when they were no longer needed, and not even letting them share a table but making them eat separately on the floor. Still, the game worked hard to gaslight players and Pokémon into believing they were companions, and it succeeded.
But although TLF Online’s monsters had a name similar to Pocket Monsters, because of the medieval fantasy setting, they were not “monsters” as an affectionate nickname. They were literal monsters.
There were some monsters that looked fairly cool, but fundamentally, they were designed as threatening, frightening, and repulsive beings.
And no matter how much humans pretended to value what was inside, they were beings who could not ignore outward appearance. This was even more true for people who liked games, and especially in the case of Pokémon, which was liked by younger children. The younger people were, the stronger that tendency became.
Because it was instinct.
As people aged, they became able to date someone even if that person lacked looks, provided they had a good personality, a lot of money, or strong abilities. But this was not because they stopped looking at appearance. It was because they learned that other things were more important.
‘And if I’m going to care about appearance anyway, I should make them simple, cute, and friendly like Pokémon.’
He did not want to make Digimon instead of Pokémon by compromising awkwardly.
(Translator’s Notes: Digimon — Real-world Japanese multimedia franchise centered on digital monsters, compared here with Pokémon in terms of design appeal and target audience.)
Insu did not particularly dislike Digimon. However, it was unavoidable that Digimon had weaker mainstream design appeal compared to Pokémon. Of course, Digimon was also a highly successful IP. This was only a relative evaluation compared to Pokémon.
First of all, Digimon’s target audience was too limited to teenagers.
Its designs were complex and aggressive, with a slightly dark feeling and many metallic and mechanical elements. This could receive strong responses from certain groups, but it could be difficult for very young audiences to understand, while seeming slightly childish to older audiences.
‘I need to use characters completely separate from the existing monsters.’
Fortunately, fantasy had a setting that fit these conditions.
Spirits.
And when he thought about it, Pokémon seemed to have taken part of its concept from spirits to some extent.
‘They aren’t ordinary lifeforms, they sympathize and communicate with people through the heart, and they possess natural attributes. No matter how you look at it, that’s a spirit.’
However, if he used the spirit settings from traditional fantasy, these spirits could also take grotesque and frightening forms.
That was because monsters commonly appearing in fantasy, such as goblins, kelpies that lured people into water and ate their organs, sirens, Naga, and basilisks, were also beings derived from spirits.
(Translator’s Notes: Kelpies — Water spirits from Scottish folklore, often depicted as dangerous beings that lure people into water.)
(Translator’s Notes: Sirens — Mythological beings from Greek tradition who lure sailors with enchanting voices.)
(Translator’s Notes: Naga — Serpentine beings found in South Asian and Southeast Asian mythology, later widely used in fantasy settings.
(Translator’s Notes: Basilisk — Legendary reptilian monster from European folklore, often associated with deadly gaze or poison.)
Fortunately, Insu had a decent reference.
Korean fantasy.
In the 1990s, fantasy novels using spirits as a subject began appearing, but the problem was that both writers and readers had only superficial knowledge and understanding of Western spirits, while games were extremely popular at the time, so many game-like settings were mixed in.
Because of that, the sense of disconnect became even stronger. What those works introduced to resolve this was the setting that spirits came from an entirely different world, a separate world called the Spirit Realm, which was distinct from reality but connected to it to some extent.
This gave justification for spirits depending on spirit masters and, furthermore, becoming bound to them. It also made their completely alien appearances and traits feel convincing. Additional settings included things like communicating through the heart despite not sharing a language.
‘This is also a perfect setting to put into Pokémon.’
For the designs, he planned to lean closer to Pokémon than to Korean fantasy spirits. In terms of form, there were quite a few similar cases like salamanders and Charmander, but Korean fantasy spirits often emphasized their attributes by giving them bodies made of water if they were water spirits, or bodies made of fire if they were fire spirits. Because of that, they tended to lack character appeal.
Of course, a body made of flames could be considered a striking character in its own way. But because it was single-colored, it was too simple, inconvenient because its form was difficult to distinguish, and above all, it was far from Pokémon’s distinctive cute and simple feeling.
‘And implementing that in reality would be difficult too.’
It was still far too early to discuss, but if he was going to recreate Pokémon, real-world merchandise could not be left out. The amount of money was large, and this kind of character merchandise expanded awareness among people beyond gamers while strengthening IP power.
In any case, he intended to move forward with designs similar to Pokémon.
But they probably would not be identical. It was not because he disliked copying. In truth, although Insu was interested in the Pokémon IP, he was not particularly a fan, so he did not know the details of which Pokémon existed. Even with the representative character Pikachu, he would recognize it immediately if he saw it, but all he clearly remembered was that it looked somewhat like a mouse, was yellow, and had a lightning-bolt-shaped tail.
“How is it?”
Because of that, the design team, including Eunha, had to repeatedly bring him drafts and go through trial and error.
“Oh! Right. This is the feeling.”
But TLF Online’s graphics team was highly capable. At first, they brought designs that looked like American cartoons, making him laugh helplessly, but soon they brought designs that felt fairly convincing.
They reminded him of Pokémon while also feeling different somehow.
‘I don’t think they’ll feel that out of place.’
Fortunately, although TLF Online had a medieval fantasy setting, it had used a Japanese manga-style art direction following JRPG design since the previous packaged games.
Because of that, even these cute designs did not feel excessively out of place. It was probably also because the designers of these monsters were the same people who designed TLF Online.
And he did not know about the other designers, but Eunha seemed to like this work quite a lot.
“Right. This kind of thing is pretty nice too. It does feel slightly like something boys would like, but I read quite a lot of boys’ manga too.”
Since Eunha disliked realistic dramatic art styles and had admiration for Japanese manga, her tastes in that direction were quite broad.
In any case, they decided to proceed with the designs in this direction. Next came the question of how to implement these spirits inside the game.
First, he had to think about how they would appear in the game fields.
‘Should I just release a new region and have them appear there?’
If he simply inserted them into existing maps, there was a high chance things would become messy. The types of monsters inhabiting an area were also, surprisingly, an important part of design.
If there were too few, it could feel monotonous. If there were too many, it became difficult to absorb information all at once, making things complicated and increasing variables.
Moreover, the spirits being added this time had designs that were fairly different, so if they were mixed with existing monsters, they would probably stand out too much.
‘Gamers might feel a sense of mismatch.’
Because games were fundamentally not reality, immersion was a very important element. Therefore, it was best to exclude anything that could break that immersion as much as possible.
But releasing a new map created many problems too.
‘First of all, there are too many spirits.’
To create a feeling of collection and adventure, there would need to be hundreds of them, like Pokémon. Then they could not all be gathered in one place like a zoo, so the size of the new world would inevitably grow.
That would take a lot of development cost and time, while also consuming many resources. Moreover, a huge world filled with monsters completely different from the original game would also likely feel out of place.
‘It might work if I separate it into another world by calling it the Spirit Realm.’
But making a separate world containing only spirits would weaken the game’s continuity too much. If handled poorly, it might turn into something like attaching Lineage and MapleStory together.
(Translator’s Notes: MapleStory — Korean 2D side-scrolling MMORPG released in 2003 by Wizet and published by Nexon. Known for its anime-style visuals, platforming gameplay, character progression, and large-scale social online features.)
And if he was going to make Pokémon, it was better to maximize the adventure element. To do that, using the existing wide fields was naturally more advantageous.
‘Then I need to make the spirits blend well into the existing fields.’
But as mentioned earlier, this could create a sense of mismatch, so he had to resolve that issue. The first thing that came to mind was making these spirits special and difficult to find.
Existing monsters were distributed across broad areas, but these spirits would inhabit much narrower regions in smaller numbers.
‘This is also a commonly used method.’
It was the method used when implementing event monsters or boss monsters. If their numbers were extremely small, they would not feel confusingly mixed in. Instead, attention would focus on them as points of interest, adding fascination instead of mismatch.
But even that felt somewhat insufficient.
‘There’s no sense of mystery.’
If the artificial intelligence were better, they could display special movements and habits to make them feel convincing, but TLF Online was a mid-1990s game. Monsters merely looked around according to simple entered patterns.
There was another problem as well.
Because placing only a small number of spirits meant the population would be low, spirit masters might fail to capture them properly.
Appropriate rarity and acquisition difficulty could create immersion, but if it became too severe, it led to irritation and loss of motivation. Moreover, if other adventurers hunted them down as soon as they appeared, the spirit masters might end up going there only to suck their fingers.
(Translator’s Notes: “suck their fingers” — Korean idiomatic expression meaning to stand around helplessly with nothing to gain or do.)
“Do you have any ideas?”
After worrying over it, Insu asked the team members for their opinions.
“Spirits, huh?”
The team members were quite interested in this new content. In truth, since MMORPGs were a first for them too, while things seemed to be growing for now, they were still anxious because they did not know when it might suddenly collapse.
Moreover, several months had already passed since launch, so they were worried that users might become bored and quit. That made talk of new content welcome.
“Wouldn’t it work if we just set them stronger than the surrounding monsters?”
It was Chris’s opinion.
The idea was simple. If they had combat power high enough that ordinary adventurers who came to hunt in the area could not easily touch them, they would naturally be left alone, and later, they would become the targets of spirit masters who specifically came for them.