Heartgold and Soulsilver were the perfect Pokémon games. My favourite detail about them, and I can’t understand why the developers never reused it, was that your lead Pokémon would walk behind your character. Such a minor feature sparked such joy and immersed me so well in that universe—a reminder, dear player, that through this world’s trials, you will never walk alone. I haven’t played Pokémon Heartgold in years, but the nostalgia stays, entangled with my memories of you. You’re still on my team, you know.
“On the night of a full moon, if shadows move on their own and laugh, it must be Gengar’s doing.”
We became friends in Grade 10. For a semester, we and three other boys congregated at 9:35 each morning, too early for the cafeteria to bother serving food, and we fought to survive Lord of the Flies-style in this forgotten lunch hour compelled by our overcommitted class schedules. In the mutual struggle, we dubbed our quintet the USSL or “United Socialist Second Lunchers.” That’s how I got to know you. Our unabashedly nerdy high school cultivated eccentric tastes and yours were no exception. You were an excellent student who worked hard but played hard too, in every sense: played Sporcle quizzes in the library, played tennis on the school team, played trombone for the jazz band, played Dota 2 online. Thus, I anticipated stiff competition when we started bringing our DS to school; I wouldn’t stand a chance against you without learning a lot more of the Pokémon Gen 4 meta.
“The leer that floats in darkness belongs to a Gengar delighting in casting curses on people.”
My post-secondary life has been less digital thanks to the dual analog experiences of theatre and social drinking. I was doing the latter at a trendy fusion bar in Queen West last fall when a friend mentioned that your funeral had been the previous week. We moved through the platitudes in reaction: “So young.” “It got bad fast.” “He was such a nice dude; great tennis player, too.” “But he’d just started that treatment. That sucks.” “Didn’t he trade me my Gengar? You know, the Ghost-type Pokémon—a bit on the nose…” We drank to your memory which lightened the mood some, but your shadow followed me all night.
“Deep in the night, your shadow cast by a streetlight may suddenly overtake you. It is actually a Gengar running past you, pretending to be your shadow.”
I remember Grade 10 as the year of my first love, but you were there for all of it too, weren’t you? I’m ashamed of how much I forgot until recently. How you mock-hypnotized me, then commanded me to go ask her out. How you teased from a nearby seat on the bus back from that band trip the first time she rested her head on my shoulder. How you pestered both of us for weeks for every update on the relationship status. How flattered she was by my joke that I’d have to break up with you for her. I forgot so much. I did remember the time you said that just having a girlfriend put me up a tier in our high school in terms of “having game.” Did I rank, though, when it came to being your friend near the end?
“Even your home isn’t safe. Gengar will lurk in whatever dark corner of a room it can find and wait for its chance to catch its prey.”
Nintendo’s newer systems could definitely handle processing the game-changer of five or six moves-per-mon, but the limit is still four move slots, the number set by the Gameboy’s 8-bit hardware. Tradition keeps the game interesting, though. Four forces you to be selective about what you remember and forget. So, a quarter-century after the first games in 1996, four lingers in last November’s new games—the first Pokémon generation released into a world without you.
“To steal the life of its target, it slips into the prey’s shadow and silently waits for an opportunity.”
We grew apart after the semester of the USSL—that’s life. But as I associated with new people, I think I started seeing you as too much of the unpleasant STEM-lord type, while I probably came off as the weirdo theatre kid. Maybe both perceptions are imagined, or maybe both are accurate. Still, the result was that one day after school in Grade 12, I came across you in the music locker bay—you with some of your circle and me fixing to join mine elsewhere, and unprompted, you uttered in a quiet, offended tone: “You know, you could stay here and talk to us.” I don’t remember saying anything before indignantly turning to leave. Now I worry those might be the last words we ever traded.
“You can hear tales told all over the world about how Gengar will pay a visit to children who are naughty.”
Lately, my kid nephew’s been living with my parents, and I think he’s moving my stuff around. I haven’t been able to find my DSi for months, nor my Pokémon Heartgold cartridge. It’s stupid how crushed I am by that.
“It apparently wishes for a traveling companion. Since it was once human itself, it tries to create one by taking the lives of other humans.”
Last August, you posted on Facebook for the first time in ages, but not in happy circumstances. You’d broken silence to ask everyone to retweet you to get the attention of a clinic with an experimental treatment for the exact rare neuroendocrine cancer you’d fought for the last three years. What a way to get the news—I hadn’t even known you were sick. All I could do was share your tweet to my Facebook friends saying I had fond memories of losing Pokémon battles to you, and you deserved a chance to kick cancer’s ass too. Somehow, though, you did not deserve the effort it would take me to make a Twitter account to retweet you myself—sorry. You posted some days later that you’d gotten in contact with the clinic and would start a trial soon. Surely a cause for celebration, yet the accompanying selfie dampened my hope. Your face, intubated and emaciated, was a far cry from that of the athlete and trombonist I’d known. I couldn’t look for too long.
“Should you feel yourself attacked by a sudden chill; it is evidence of an approaching Gengar. There is no escaping it. Give up.”
Am I misremembering that you traded me a Haunter? It’d make sense that you did, and that’s why I don’t trust it—my brain wants to curate a right-sounding narrative. You’d know better than anyone to not read so hard into life when we’re all just victims of the RNG (Random Number Generator). Indulge me for a second, though. I never said goodbye to you, after all.
My real favourite part of the Pokémon game design is that some monsters only evolve when traded to other players. You can finish the plot yourself, but you’ll never truly complete the game without human connection, and what you gain stays long after the people you knew are gone. I can’t find my Heartgold right now, but I imagine one day I will, and I’ll open my old save to find the team that I battled you with all those years ago. There they are: Scizor, Tyranitar, Staraptor, Espeon, Gyarados, and Gengar. The Gengar was your Haunter once, but now it follows me. Some ghosts only walk with us to remind us of the people who can’t. They’re no replacement, but I treasure those ghosts all the same.
I never finished my Pokédex, though someday I’d like to. “Gotta catch ‘em all,” as they say. But I wouldn’t have minded a few more battles with you. You deserved to win.