Vol. 1, Issue 20 - Interview with Blue Moon Falls
We have an interview with Blue Moon Falls, a Pokémon fansite focused on the original first and second generations of Pokémon games! Plus the latest Pokémon news and more from the mailbag
Welcome to issue 20 of the Johto Times! This week, we are very happy to share another interview, this time with Ayano from Blue Moon Falls, a Pokémon fansite that focuses on the original two generations of the series, which looks and feels like a classic Pokémon website from the early 2000s! We also have the latest Pokémon news, and more from our mailbag.
The latest Nintendo Direct presentation aired yesterday, revealing a trailer for Detective Pikachu Returns, a sequel to the February 2016 game on Nintendo 3DS. The game was first announced back in May 2019 shortly after the film adaptation was released, and now finally, four and a half years after it was first announced, it will release on October 6th 2023 for Nintendo Switch. A description for the game is available on Nintendo’s official website, where the game can now be pre-ordered:
Solve mysteries with the personality-packed Detective Pikachu!
Unravel a series of mysteries across Ryme City with a tough-talking, coffee-loving Pikachu who calls himself a great detective. This Pikachu may have a self-assured attitude and talk like a middle-aged man, but he somehow manages to keep his lovable charm. Together with his partner Tim Goodman, this great detective duo cracks several cases with the help of the many Pokémon and people who live in Ryme City.
Investigate Ryme City, where Pokémon and people live side by side
Search for clues in Ryme City, where Pokémon and humans coexist in harmony. With the help of many other Pokémon, Tim and his talkative Pikachu partner work together to solve a series of mysterious incidents in this cinematic adventure game.
Source: Nintendo
Nintendo also shared new information on Pokémon Scarlet and Violet's Hidden Treasures of Area Zero DLC, showing footage from areas of the game, and brand-new Pokémon. Check out the trailer below to see them for yourself! Part 1: The Teal Mask is planned to release in Fall 2023, while Part 2: The Indigo Disk is planned to release in Winter 2023.
Source: Nintendo
The Pokémon Company confirmed this week that Pokémon Scarlet & Violet: 151 will release on September 22nd 2023. The set was recently released in Japan, containing 210 cards. Various products will release during this set, including an Elite Trainer Box featuring Snorlax (that also has a Pokémon Center-exclusive version), a Booster Bundle of six Booster Packs, a Binder Pack containing twenty nine-pocket pages and four Booster Packs, and a Poster Collection bundle which includes three promo cards with the Kanto starters, a poster, three Booster Packs and a code card for Pokémon TCG Live. This is a set I personally have my eyes on, but what about our readers? Will you be picking it up? Let us know in the comments below!
Source: Pokémon
Feature: Interview with Blue Moon Falls
We are super thrilled to be interviewing Ayano from Blue Moon Falls, a Pokémon fansite with a focus on the first two generations of Pokémon games. The website’s aesthetics and content would lead you to believe it’s a traditional Pokémon fansite from the early 2000’s, when in fact it was actually created in late 2021!
Firstly, please introduce yourself and tell us about your website: Blue Moon Falls!
Ayano:
Hi! My name is Ayano, or well, that's the name I go by on the internet, anyways. I'm an autistic woman from somewhere in the USA, a lifelong Pokémon fan, and I'm the webmaster of the Pokémon fansite, Blue Moon Falls. Blue Moon Falls (or BMF for short) is a site dedicated to anything related to the first two generations of Pokémon from back in the 90s, though mostly the video games in particular. Red/Blue/Yellow, Gold/Silver/Crystal, and their associated spin-off titles such as Pokémon Stadium are all included. I launched the site back in December 2021 and have been maintaining it and making content for it ever since.
At the moment, I mainly write in-depth informational guides for aspects of RBY and GSC's gameplay that are not commonly explored elsewhere with the intent of making such information more accessible to modern players who either haven't touched the older games past the surface level, or are new to Pokémon in general... Though older fans will probably still learn something new! On top of that, I also make simple interactive tools that can be used in-browser which are helpful for more in-depth play, and a handful of other resources I think are useful despite not quite fitting the definition of a guide. Blue Moon Falls is my passion project that I make as a labor of love in my free time. I am incredibly flattered to be interviewed for my hobbyist efforts.
It's not every day a Pokémon fan website pops up! Why did you come to the decision to make one?
Ayano:
Being completely honest, it was less that I came to the decision to make one, and more like I was slapped in the face with the sudden drive to create one out of nowhere. However, first some context; before starting up my own website, I had been tentatively looking around Neocities, the service BMF is hosted on, for quite a long time. Neocities is a static web host harking back to the days of Geocities in the 90s and 2000s, where anyone could start up a personal website with a little bit of HTML knowledge. Despite what you may believe after glancing at BMF's retro aesthetic, I am not a 90s kid (being born on December 12th, 1999 really doesn't count), so my memories of the earlier internet are shrouded in the ethereal fog that most childhood memories tend to be. Even so, I really missed the creativity and freedom that the 90s and 2000s web used to provide, unlike the corporate social media that dominates the internet today, and I found myself often browsing the various websites hosted on the service to try and bring back the spark of those old experiences, Pokémon fansites included. I wanted to make one myself, especially since I didn't get to [make one] as a young kid, but trying to decide what to create a website about was difficult... Plus I had extremely minimal knowledge of web development, so it was intimidating to approach.
Fast forward to December 13th, 2021, I had been grinding stat experience on some Pokémon in my Crystal version to use them in Pokémon Stadium 2's Prime Cup tournament, and was getting frustrated because I remembered previously having seen a resource on the most efficient way to do so, but couldn't find it again for quite a few Google searches. Eventually, I did manage to find it again, floating within an old Smogon (a major competitive Pokémon website for the uninformed) forum thread. I began texting a group chat with my friends, complaining about how scattered the more niche information on Crystal tended to be, and how said resources often weren't easily accessible or straightforward. That's when it dawned on me with the force of a train - I could make those resources more accessible if I wanted! A guide for a game mechanic didn't exist? Why not make it myself, then? I hadn't spent the past year diving headfirst into GSC and RBY for nothing!
After almost zero deliberation and never having touched website creation in my life, I created Blue Moon Falls the next day on December 14th and whipped up a homepage with a lot, and I mean a lot, of Googling. Considering how suddenly I was shocked with the desire to make a Pokémon site and how little prior experience I had with the skills necessary to make one, I almost expected the spark to die within a couple weeks at most... But it didn't. I kept going. And now we're here. Yay! It ended up unlocking my general interest in programming and has let me introduce why I love these games to so many more people, so that spur of the moment decision was super worth it!
Your mention of forum threads reminded me of just how much great content could be found on those old Pokémon forums from the early 2000's, many of which no longer exist and have not been archived anywhere. It's heartbreaking to consider the amount of information from that era that has been lost to time. What are your feelings on this topic?
Ayano:
It's heartbreaking for me as well...! There are times that I try to dig up websites and forums from my earliest internet experiences, only to follow a dead link to a site that doesn't exist anymore, and it's always saddening and disappointing.
It's really unfortunate that we all grew up with the notion that once something is put on the internet, it's there forever, because that really isn't the case. It is important more than ever to archive and document as much of the internet as we can, lest historians a couple centuries from now try to write about this era of life and can't because of the lack of physical records. Entire subcultures and parts of human history are being lost every single day as websites go down, forums go defunct, and posts get removed from social media sites.
Of course, the history of the early Pokémon fandom isn't the most important thing in the world, but I think it's a tragedy on its own when pieces of fandom, which are entire subcultures, get lost to time. Yeah, it's not exactly history classroom textbook-worthy, but Pokémon in particular doubles as a social experience that brings people together, and who knows how many memories have been made that will never be accessible again. Of course, it also sucks to miss out on old Pokémon documentation too... we are very lucky to still have the likes of the Azure Heights forums around, and some old Geocities Pokémon sites backed up on archive.org with old guides and informational pages (I even have to reference these sometimes while working on BMF!), but some things will always truly be lost forever. The best we can do is save what remains and be mindful as time continues to pass! It's good to archive the things that are important to you on the web.
I love that the website has the feel of a classic Pokémon website from the early 2000's, yet is made for the modern era by supporting mobile devices. How did you settle on the design?
Ayano:
While looking to design BMF's homepage, I pulled up most of the classic looking Pokémon fansites I could find, plus fansites for things unrelated to Pokémon. Three column layouts used to be really popular, with two sidebars on the sides and the main content being in the middle. In fact, Pokémon sites like Serebii and The Cave of Dragonflies, two major inspirations of mine, still hold onto three column layouts, albeit most of the important links on one side and extra information on the other. I appreciated the simplicity and straight-to-the-point nature of these layouts, as all the important links were visible without being hidden under multiple clicks of a button, and were dense with information, so that's what I decided to try and go for. Most of my time with early BMF was spent learning the HTML and CSS necessary to position things the way I wanted and I wasn't thinking about the actual visual design of the site until I got there. I was a complete newbie to code and was just sort of winging it as I went along... Aside from using the pixelated font for headers and basing the base theme's color scheme on GSC, which were more purposeful, many design decisions were arbitrary and based on what I thought looked good in the moment. Even the logo and horizontally repeating banner were a product of me winging it in my art program, Krita, for a while. At some point I became satisfied with the appearance and just rolled with it! It's pretty easy to tell that I like the appearance of older websites, considering what the "things I thought looked good in the moment" ended up being, haha.
As for the site being mobile friendly, while I am mostly a PC user myself and rarely browse the internet on my phone unless I have to, I knew that the site would need to be mobile friendly if I wanted it to be accessible to the most people possible. It would really suck if someone who wanted to read one of my guides clicked on it, only to back out because it was annoying to navigate, which was likely considering how many people prefer phones over computers nowadays. I have friends who don't even own a computer and wouldn't be able to enjoy my site at all if it weren't mobile friendly. BMF looks nostalgic, but I didn't want it to be tied so hard to old designs that it wasn't actually functional in the modern day! Thankfully, even with my complete newbie skill set, it wasn't too difficult to implement the layout changing for phones. Really all that happens with phone screens is the sidebars being replaced by the mobile menu and some content in articles stacking on top of each other instead of being put side to side.
Blue Moon Falls has some cool guides, such as the Gold, Silver and Crystal Save Converter, and the Generation 1 Shiny Hunting guide, the latter of which I had never heard of before until I visited your website! How did you discover this information originally?
Ayano:
Most of the niche topics covered on BMF were things I took interest in organically over the course of my own playtime. My main Pokémon hobby other than BMF is shiny hunting, specifically full odds shiny hunting, which is looking for shiny Pokémon with the base 1/8192 odds (or 1/4096 in modern Pokémon games) instead of using various methods to make the odds better. This may not be surprising considering how many shiny hunting resources there are on the site, haha. Being a full odds shiny hunter tends to introduce you to other people very knowledgeable about Pokémon, because who else is going to be passionate enough to repeat the same encounters thousands upon thousands of times just for a virtual monster with a rare and different color palette? As a result, I learned about the ability to shiny hunt in generation 1 from fellow shiny hunters who had already gotten RBY shinies themselves. Other niche game mechanics and hyper-specific information on the inner workings of Pokémon games just sort of... naturally come up in conversation with shiny hunters, and I've gotten a lot of direction for what to make next on BMF from them. I will hear a small whisper of something interesting, and then dive into it as much as possible to get a full understanding so that I can relay that information to other people in a comprehensive and digestible format.
That being said, I also probe the games with my own natural curiosity, regardless of outside influence. The page on generation 2 Mystery Gift is one of my favorites on the website, and I dove into that topic just because I was struggling to get all the decorations I wanted and wished I knew more about the mechanic. I made the GSC Save Converter because I wanted to convert my cartridge save of Crystal to Virtual Console on 3DS so I could look at some of my beloved shiny Pokémon in full 3D in generation 7, which led me to want to make that easier for other people to do, too. I use a lot of my own resources and tools because they were all made in response to my own gaming experiences!
You mentioned the 3DS Virtual Console releases of first and second generation titles. At the time of conducting this interview, the 3DS and Wii U eShop has recently shut down, making those games inaccessible to new players. I would like to hear your thoughts on this and how you might handle your content moving forward if the games pop up on a service like Nintendo Switch Online.
Ayano:
It saddens me just how difficult it is to share RBY and GSC with new players, and the lack of the 3DS eShop now certainly doesn't help. Aside from just the rising prices of retro games, which is a major issue, the batteries inside of RBY and especially GSC that are necessary for saving to work and practically function like a ticking time bomb adds an extra layer of complication and headache that isn't present when buying pretty much any other Pokémon game... So when RBY and GSC were available on the eShop, it was a bit of a godsend. A lot of people played them for the first time on 3DS and not having that as an option to recommend them to people anymore is really unfortunate. I wish Nintendo was better about re-releasing their legacy content.
That being said, most of my articles do include Virtual Console-specific information when appropriate because I'm aware that the amount of people playing RBY and GSC on original hardware instead of VC is pretty small, all things considered. I take a pretty strong anti-piracy stance on BMF for the sake of my own safety, but... I know a lot of people are playing RBY and GSC for the first time through such means as well, as it's very easy to do. It would be foolish to not include the most popular method of playing RBY and GSC these days in my writing.
As for Nintendo Switch Online, I've actually already had to handle this to some extent due to Stadium recently releasing on it, with Stadium 2 soon to follow at the time of this interview. In response, I made an article about playing Stadium 1 & 2 in the modern day since the release of Stadium on Switch is... incomplete, to say the least, without Transfer Pak compatibility. If RBY or GSC were ever to release on Switch, I would keep that in mind moving forward just like how I try to keep 3DS VC in mind while writing. I would also probably have to update that Stadium guide, haha. As much as I don't expect it to happen, it really would be nice to have another way to get more people playing! Especially because of how popular the Switch has been.
What are your long term goals for Blue Moon Falls?
Ayano:
I would love it if one day, BMF could be a one-stop-shop for everything to do with the generation 1 and 2 Pokémon games. I'm a bit slower than other webmasters on account of my disabilities and health struggles, so at the moment, I really have to pick what I want to work on and I tend to go for things that are very poorly documented, or that I think having a more formally written guide could be useful for. Eventually, though, I want to get to the point where I have documented RBY and GSC so thoroughly that I start running out of topics that are difficult to research and have to start going for things that are more surface-level, or have to start diving into spin-off games, because that means I've succeeded in bringing the underappreciated depth of these games that I love into the light! It may take some time, but I do think my goals are achievable, it's just a matter of taking it one step, or page, at a time.
On the other hand, my work on BMF has inspired me to become a web developer or software developer (still feeling out which one I would like the most as a career) and whatever I do in that regard will likely be reflected in my quality of work on BMF. I want BMF to really become a monolith of my efforts and something that I can be majorly proud of, even when I'm off with a programming career.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with us about Blue Moon Falls! Do you have any closing comments you would like to make?
Ayano:
No problem, this was really fun for me! To close out, I will say what I always say whenever I get the chance to talk about BMF - if you have ever wanted to make a website, fansite or not, Pokémon related or not, you should go for it! I started Blue Moon Falls on a whim with little to no programming knowledge. It may seem intimidating, but there are so many resources out there now to assist with newbie webmasters, I promise you can figure it out. It is completely worth it even if you are just making a personal site to collect pictures you like or list your interests or whatever. It is freeing to get away from the rigid formats social media forces us to express ourselves in, and truly do anything with your internet space, and you really don't need to be a professional to do it. Oh, and also, of course, please try out the Game Boy Pokémon games if you haven't already. I love them and they are worth your time. And thank you for the support on Blue Moon Falls! I am deeply appreciative of anyone interested in my passionate ramblings on the site. I hope they are useful for you!
We want to say a big thank you to Ayano for taking the time to speak with us about Blue Moon Falls. We were blown away by her determination to create a website with no prior knowledge of writing code, and to make content more accessible to fans. Furthermore, we want to wish her and the site the very best for the future, and you can find the website by visiting https://bluemoonfalls.com
Mailbag
Want to be a part of our newsletter? You’re welcome to submit content including (but not limited to) questions, fanart, short stories, memories, photographs of your collection, or even Pokémon tattoos! We will happily publish them in our mailbag and share them in future issues of our newsletter. This week’s mailbag question comes from Torvus from Norway.
What are your thoughts about the sandwich mechanic in Scarlet/Violet? I think it's fun to make sandwiches, and it's so neat to see your Pokémon enjoy them too, I even think it heals them!!
Torvus, Norway
Thank you very much for your question, Torvus! I was never a huge fan of these kinds of gimmicks in Pokémon, but when I was playing my initial play through of Scarlet, and making sandwiches online with friends, I made hilariously bad ones. Fillings would roll off, the bread on the top of the sandwich would slip and fall onto the table, and result in a pretty embarrassing looking sandwich. But we loved it, and it became a bit of a joke in the subsequent times we played together.
I also managed to catch a shiny Gastly thanks to the increased odds a sandwich gave me, which I caught in the final few seconds before the ability wore off. The Gastly was given to one of our mutual friends who loves Gengar, which I hope he appreciated!