In The Pokemon Fandom, Every Once In A While You Stumble Upon A ‘Pokeballs Are $200′ Joke. In Reference

In the Pokemon fandom, every once in a while you stumble upon a ‘Pokeballs are $200′ joke. In reference to how Pokeballs cost 200 of the in-game currency:

What a lot of fans, especially more casual ones, don’t seem to realize is that the currency in the Pokemon games it based on the Japanese yen. The symbol for the currency in the games even resembles the yen symbol:

In fact, according to Bulbapedia, the ‘Poke dollar’ symbol was specifically created for the English translations of the games, and the original Japanese versions use the yen symbol.

Now, for perspective, although the exact exchange rate naturally varies, a US dollar is equivalent to about 120 Japanese yen. So, 200 yen is about $1.67.

A Pokeball in the Pokemon games actually cost less then two bucks.

There’s a REASON we see so many young kids training Pokemon, especially early in the games. The cost of investing into a Pokeball to try catching their own Pokemon easily falls into the range of a typical kid’s allowance. A Potion for healing after battles is 300 (or about $2.50), but since Pokemon Centers offer their healing services for free, that’s a moot point.

Youngsters in the early game only give within a range from 50-150 of the currency, which is about equivalent to $0.40-$1.25. The first Gym Leader in Hoenn Region, Roxanne, give 1,680 in Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire, equivalent to about $14. Which is about right for the equivalent of a middle or high school honors student. A later Gym Leader, Winona, gives 4,200, or about $35. The Champion, Steven, gives 11600, or $96.67.

The winnings from enemy Trainers varies, but Ace Trainers seem to give out about 1500 or $14 on average, give or take. Swimmers (especially common later in ORAS), award a range from 400-800, or $3.33-$6.67.

Vitamins (such as Calcium, Iron, and HP UP), cost 9,800 or $81.67 each. An Ultra Ball cost 1,200, or $10. A Paralyze Heal costs the same as a Pokeball, while an Awakening is half that. A Revive is 1,500, or $12.50.

What’s the point of doing this? Well, for one, to get a better sense of the in-game economics, which can be hard to grasp if one doesn’t realize the in-game ‘Poke dollars’ are based on the Japanese yen. And a look at said economics reveals some interesting details.

First, it shows basic Pokemon training and raising is well within the affordability of a ten-year old, or older. Which makes sense as Pokemon is aimed at younger kids, and the develops would want them to have the sense that going on a Pokemon journey is something they could do if they somehow ended up in the Pokemon world.

On the other hand, it also shows there’s really not that much money to be made in Pokemon raising and training, unless you battle frequently and regularly against higher-level opponents regularly and and win. Which is…very much in line with how professional sports work in real-life. Pokemon battling gets compared to a sporting event a lot for a reason. The initial 3-D games were even called Pokemon *Stadium.* Parallels are frequently drawn between the Pokemon League tournaments and the Olympics in the anime. The low money output is probably also why we often see Gym Leaders and the like working other jobs.

Just something interesting I decided to look into. I’m a Pokemon fan first, before any other fandom, and always will be. It’s shocking that I haven’t written any meta on it yet.

Hope you enjoyed!

ok its hyperrogue infodump time because boy do i have a story to tell

so, hyperrogue as a game is incredibly open-ended. there really isn’t a set goal for ANYTHING – it’s really an open-world, choose-your-own-adventure game with over 60 different biomes each with their own mechanics and quirks. however, it does have a few major quests that are kept track of by the game.

one of these quests is the Yendor quest, which involves collecting an Orb of Yendor, which needs to be unlocked with its Key before it can be collected. you do need to do some work to make these things even spawn in the first place, but that’s beside the point. once you touch an Orb of Yendor, a beacon will activate telling you which direction the key is and how far away from your current location it is. it looks something like this:

Ok Its Hyperrogue Infodump Time Because Boy Do I Have A Story To Tell

your goal during the Yendor quest is to go get the key and fetch it back to its orb, at which point it will be consumed, you will gain the Orb of Yendor (and a hearty helping of various orb powers, along with the orb itself worth 50 points), and formally win the game (with your turncount and real time recorded on leaderboards and the like). and the key is a mere 100 tiles away! how hard could it be?

the answer is: incredibly fucking hard.

hyperrogue’s whole thing is that the world is based on hyperbolic geometry, and in hyperbolic geometry, big things grow exponentially. the number of cells at distance 100 from you would have been around 600 in a flat, euclidean hexagonal grid, but here it’s to the tune of 700 sextillion (the same order of magnitude as avogadro’s constant)! if you don’t know EXACTLY what you’re doing and retrace your EXACT steps (such as by dropping a breadcrumb trail on the way there), the slightest deviation from your path will almost certainly lead you hopelessly astray – you have no hope whatsoever of getting back to where you came.

or do you?

see, the thing about hyperrogue is that its many lands tell the story of its geometry in many different ways. and this could not be more true for gravity lands like Ivory Tower.

the mechanic introduced by this land is artificial, magical gravity, which makes objects and non-flying monsters (and also you) unable to move upward (which, in Ivory Tower’s case, means away from the Great Wall). tiles within the land are colored in a way that reflects this - the alternating color “bands” in the screenshot above are horizontal from the viewpoint of the gravity mechanic.

and because this is hyperbolic geometry, things grow exponentially as you go higher and higher up. the numbers work out so that, for every two tiles in elevation, the number of tiles approximately triples. this means that, once you’re a few dozen tiles up the Ivory Tower, the horizontal movements you make barely have any effect on your movement left or right relative to your entry point back at the bottom. and usually, you’ll come back exactly the way you came.

another gravity land is Yendorian Forest, whose gravity works the same way as in Ivory Tower, except on the tree trunks where movement is unrestricted (except birds can’t fly through them):

just like elsewhere in the world, under the right conditions, Orbs of Yendor can spawn here. and the key will be generated further into the Yendorian Forest. and you may think, hey, since descending in a gravity land takes you back where you came, doesn’t that mean getting your Yendor here is basically trivial? and you’d be right to think that… if The DevTeam didn’t Think Of Everything.

when you travel to the key in YF, you will at first see the beacon take you up the tree trunk, perhaps taking different turns at the branching points sometimes, but still a very easy path to follow back.

and then at some point you’ll see the beacon point directly upward, out of the canopy. which, if you are unprepared, it will be very hard to continue your journey to the key from here.

and about 20 more tiles up, high in the Yendorian Forest sky…

there will be the key, sitting atop a single-block platform placed there with the sole purpose of ensuring the key won’t just fall to the canopy.

this sort of thing happens in Ivory Tower too, in which the key is placed on a platform unreachable by normal climbing, but it’s easier to pass that off as natural terrain generation there. here, however, it is a special exception made specifically to ensure the quest never becomes trivial. and i think that’s both beautiful and kind of funny. one of the many things that gives hyperrogue this je ne sais quoi that makes it so addictive.

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thegigabrain

1 year ago

fromsoft calling us filthy dogs over and over again in all the released ac6 footage:

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thegigabrain

1 year ago

One of the things I liked about Armored Core VI is how it really shined a light on how corporations exploit their workers, particularly by the “we aren’t a company, we’re a family” mentality.

You can really see this with both Arquebus and Balam, particularly in the Vespers and Redguns.

On the Vesper side, you clearly have a lot of dynamics going on. O’keefe cares about the people under him, as evidenced by the way Pater speaks about him in the true ending. Plus Hawkins and Pater’s relationship. There’s also Maeterlinck, who respects Snail as her superior and looks up to him. And Snail, as the firm company man who see himself as the embodiment of Arquebus, exploits ALL of this. He knowingly sends Maeterlinck to die by your hand, exploiting her loyalty. He constantly throws those under his command out on useless missions just because he can (as evidenced by the dialogue between Hawkins and Pater). He doesn’t care about anyone or anything but himself and sees himself as the true future for Arquebus.

On Balam’s side you have the Redguns. A fucked up military family lead by Michigan. Michigan knows the names of those under his command, even the grunts in MTs. He cares about everyone under his command and Balam exploits the shit out of that. The Redguns are sent on suicide missions constantly. They clearly seem to be underfunded compared to the Vespers and Balam tried to rush out ahead of Arquebus to their downfall to make up for their financial shortcomings.

The corpos don’t care though. They see the family dynamic in their Ace AC squads as another tool in their belt. ACVI is good.

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thegigabrain

1 year ago