Gaming

A Massive New Pokemon Game Has Been Announced, And It’s Immediately Become A Wonderful Meme

The whole internet loves Grookey, the green chimp who said gay rights.

by Joseph Earp  28 February 2019
Pokemon Sword And Shield

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Pokemon! It’s a beloved franchise about trainers pitting sentient creatures against one another in complicated games of glorified dog-fighting, and it’s basically more popular than God.

Now, the series is back. Nintendo has announced an expansive new RPG set in the game’s universe, populated by faces old and new, and designed specifically for the high-powered and super portable Switch console.

As is the tradition with the series, the game will be released in two similar packages — Sword and Shield — with each package boasting its own unique Pokemon.

Speaking of Pokemon themselves, the series has introduced three new starter creatures: Grookey, an extraordinarily cute chimp-looking little thing; Scorbunny, a creepy-ass rabbit; and Sobble, which is being described as a lizard-like creature, but resembles no lizard I have ever laid my eyes on.

Of them all, Grookey is the only good one — personally, I will take the green chimp, and the other two can proceed directly to Hell.

Sword and Shield are both set in Galar, which is a new locale specifically designed for this fresh generation of games. Given Nintendo’s habit of basing the franchise’s locales on real life locations (as Polygon reports, Unova is basically a straight rip of New York City) and Galar’s bucolic, distinctly green look, fans have already guessed that the world is based on the United Kingdom.

That in turn has prompted a whole wave of brand new memes, imagining what a Pokemon game might look like if it was populated solely by grumpy cockneys and written by someone who’s spent the last six months directly mainlining Scottish Twitter.

One Twitter thread in particular has attracted attention, kicked off by user @Puritikuma borrowing a Scottish Twitter staple and updating it for Sword and Shield.

From there, the thread has been variously adapted for voice and for animation.

Pokemon Sword and Shield don’t drop till Spring of this year, so get ready for a whole lot more of this beautiful nonsense as we draw closer to release date.