Remember when every creature-collecting game was going to be a ‘Pokemon killer’? Maybe you’re too young. When Pokemon first became a global phenomenon, when it aggressively invaded playgrounds of kids the world over, everyone was waiting for the bubble to burst.
When I say everyone, I mean media commentators and the like. I was happy as Larry playing Pokemon Silver under my bed covers, torch between my teeth to light up the screen. No, we didn’t have backlights back then, and if you think my parents (who were already strict on screentime) would buy me the official light-up add-on for my Game Boy, you’d be dead wrong.
The phenomenon did not let up. Pokemon went from conquering playgrounds to the world, and, these days, even your nan could pick Pikachu out of a lineup. There are toys in stores, branded clothes in the big Tesco, the lot. But if Pokemon ascended to capitalist godhood, where did all of its supposed ‘killers’ end up?
Digimon
Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh! were the original Pokemon killers. However, I’m focusing on the video games here, so I’ll disregard Yu-Gi-Oh! as it struggled to compete in that arena compared to the TCG and anime.
Digimon was successful. It has aired 519 episodes of anime, produced 20 movies, and over 50 video games since its launch in 1999. What I, a wise six-year-old, dismissed as a jarg version of Pokemon, is held fondly in the hearts of millions. There are RPGs, virtual card games, fighting games, and even a kart racer – it’s got one up over Pokemon there, at least.
Digimon may not have killed Pokemon, but it has certainly had a successful career in monster catching alongside the originator of the genre. That’s more than can be said for many of the other games on this list. Plus, I’m cautiously optimistic about Digimon Story: Time Stranger, releasing later this year.
Shin Megami Tensei and Dragon Quest would both have reasonable claims to the title of being the originator of creature capture games, but Pokemon certainly took it mainstream.
Spectrobes
Do you remember Spectrobes? I certainly don’t. I wasn’t aware of this Nintendo DS game at the time it was released, when I was in my creature-catching prime, which probably explains why it was doomed to fail. One of Disney’s few attempts at creating an original IP for a video game, Spectrobes was as close to a Pokemon rip-off as you could get without infringing on copyrighted material.
It amazes me to tell you that there were three Spectrobes games, released between 2007 and 2009. Coming from Jupiter Studios, the team behind Kingdom Hearts:
Chain of Memories, it seems like there was a lot going for it. Maybe if they’d substituted one of the Krawl for Stitch or the Toy Story aliens, it would have attracted a bigger fanbase. I’m not sure that would fix the 63 rating on Metacritic, though.
TemTem
Zooming into this decade, TemTem had all the makings of a true Pokemon Killer, although the phrase had fallen out of common parlance by 2020. It had cool designs. It had intense double battles with far more strategy than contemporary Pokemon titles. It had Pokemon sorry, Tems, following behind you. So what went wrong?
TemTem threw a number of ideas at the wall to see what stuck. I struggled to gel with the MMO mechanics, for instance, despite it being cool to flex your endgame monster to strangers in the starting town. Overall, TemTem was largely successful. It had a peak of nearly 40,000 players on Steam and has spawned a spin-off, TemTem Swarm. While I’d prefer the devs to try something truly original rather than chasing trends again, the studio is enjoying a reasonable level of success on the coattails of its Pokemon inspiration. Did it kill Pokemon? Definitely not. But it didn’t kill itself trying, either.
Palworld
Palworld. Palworld, Palworld, Palworld. What more can we say about the Pokemon copycat that took the world by storm in January 2024? It blatantly copied Pokemon designs, gave them guns, and put them to work at the furnace.
While its mechanics were closer to a cheap imitation of Valheim than Pokemon, Palworld is the first game this decade that has really stood a chance of killing Nintendo’s golden Yungoos. With discontent rising for modern Pokemon games, which are often riddled with bugs, Palworld launched to 2 million Steam players and many more across consoles.
The biggest indie hit since Hades, Palworld was a brief behemoth, but has now settled to a very healthy 40,000 players per week. Let’s just hope the Nintendo lawsuit doesn’t turn this Pokemon killer into a killed-by-Pokemoner. Gottem.
Ten Thousand Indie Hopefuls
There have always been independent developers trying their hands at the Pokemon formula. None of these small teams would ever dream of being labelled a Pokemon killer, but Pokemonlikes have proliferated in recent years.
Cassette Beasts was one of my favourites of recent years, but there are a bunch releasing every year. Monster Sanctuary. Coromon. Monsterpatch. These are never going to reach the heights of Pokemon or Palworld, but each innovates and iterates in its own way.
At this point, Pokemon is never going to be killed. If it can release a game with such serious technical issues as Scarlet & Violet and sell better than ever before, it has become Arceus and achieved immortality. But if the formula has grown stale for you, it has spawned countless false prophets that each offer something new. Even if Pokemon cannot be killed, it can still faint, and there are plenty of other games to keep you occupied while you wait for it to revive at the Pokemon Center.
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