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At some point during the creation of a new Pokémon title, the development team makes a journey to the region in which the game will be loosely set. Once there, they hire a knowledgeable cab driver to drive them around the local sights and act as an impromptu tour guide, reporting details that the team will later use to colour their game. With this in mind, you have to wonder whether the Parisian cabbie hired to look after team making Pokémon X & Y - the sixth 'generation' of Tokyo-based Game Freak's world-conquering series - let his imagination run away with him somewhat.Take the game's prim cafés, for example, which heave with movie stars and famous photographers as if Paris were twinned with Hollywood, or its gilded stately homes which charge tourists 1000 Euros per entry. Then there are the high-rise offices with frontages flecked with flowers and bunting, filled with lab-coated technicians dedicated to studying the local fauna - while, out in the suburbs, teenagers politely roller-skate hand-in-hand and frolic through purple meadows. If this is France, it is France through rose-tinted spectacles. And France isn't the only thing to benefit from Game Freak's tardy but striking 3D recast of the Pokémon myth.
Like most fables ancient and modern, this is a story about the awkward stumble from childhood to adulthood. But unlike most other fables, in Pokémon that story is framed by the world of fantasy cock fighting. Here, any wild animal (and there are now hundreds of species to be encountered - although Nintendo's exacting NDA prevents us from revealing just how many), if sufficiently wounded, may be captured and trained to fight. The game's power (and make no mistake, this is one of the most commercially powerful video games; as of March this year, game sales total more than 245 million) is complex but also somehow primal.
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