Vol. 2, Issue 45 - Interview with PocketMonsters.net
Vol. 2, Issue 45 - Interview with PocketMonsters.net
An interview with Sunain, one of the founders of PocketMonsters.net, a database driven Pokémon fansite, founded in 2005. Plus, a recap of the latest Pokémon news, and more from our mailbag
Welcome to Vol. 2, issue 45 of the Johto Times newsletter! We hope our readers had a fun Halloween and didn’t get too sick from all that candy! While the spooky season may have left us, we have some treats for you in this issue! This week, we are sharing an interview with PocketMonsters.net, a community founded in 2005 and a great resource for Pokémon news and information. Sunain, one of the original founders of the community, tells us all about the history of the site. Plus, we have a recap of the latest Pokémon news, and more from the Johto Times mailbag!
News
A new expansion for the Pokémon Trading Card Game, Scarlet & Violet—Prismatic Evolutions, will be released on January 17th, 2025. This set will feature Eevee and all eight of its Eeveelutions appearing as Stellar Tera Pokémon ex cards. The set will feature 32 special illustration rare Pokémon ex and Supporter cards, 12 ultra rare Supporter cards, 10 Pokémon ex, 15 Tera Pokémon ex cards, 6 ACE SPEC Trainer cards, and 5 hyper rare gold-etched Pokémon ex cards. As usual, there is a range of other TCG products for the set, such as an Elite Trainer Box, Binder Collection, and Booster Bundle. There will also be a special Accessory Pouch Collection featuring Eevee!
Source: Pokémon
Nintendo have updated their Top Selling Title Sales Units information to reflect software sales as of September 30th, 2024. Pokémon Scarlet & Violet have now sold 25.69 million copies on Nintendo Switch, up from 25.29 million in August. Additionally, Pokémon Sword & Shield have now sold a total of 26.44 million units, up slightly from 26.35 million in August.
Source: Nintendo
Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket's first ever event is currently underway. "Wonder Pick Event 1" introduces two promo cards into the game, featuring Chansey and Meowth. The event will take place on November 1st-15th, 2024, giving players a chance to obtain the promo cards through the special "Chansey Pick" in the Wonder Pick section of the app. You can also obtain Event Shop Tickets, which can be exchanged for time-sensitive items like backdrops and a cover. In addition to this, a Lapras ex Drop Event is currently underway, giving players an opportunity to obtain promo cards by doing solo battles. Five promo cards are currently available: Butterfree, Pikachu, Mankey, Clefairy, and Lapras ex.
It was also announced via Pokémon TCGP’s official social media account that the game has already received over 10 million downloads in its first few days since release.
Source: Pokémon TCGP (In-game news), Pokémon GO Hub
Pokémon Masters EX has announced that the app will cease service in Vietnam from November 27th, 2024. No reason has been officially given for the service ending. Last month, we shared the news that Pokémon UNITE would end its service in Belgium and the Netherlands, with in-game items no longer being purchasable as of October 31st, 2024.
Source: Pokémon Masters EX (in-game news), Bulbagarden
Feature: Interview with PocketMonsters.net
PocketMonsters.net is a database driven Pokémon fansite which provides a range of useful information, resources, and news. It was founded in 2005 as a chatroom on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and has grown to become a highly useful resource for fans to learn more about the franchise. I had the pleasure of interviewing Sunain, one of the founders of PocketMonsters.net, to tell us more about the history of the website and its community.
Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Sunain! Please introduce yourself and your website!
Sunain:
Hello, I'm Sunain, one of the founders of PocketMonsters.net. PocketMonsters.net is a fansite dedicated to all things Pokémon and Pocket Monsters. We are the premier site for news and information about all aspects of the franchise from around the world. We cover news, the Anime, the Trading Card Game, the Games, Pokémon live action variety shows and much more.
The site was officially founded on May 14th, 2005 and has evolved over that time. Initially we never expected the site to get as large as it currently is with tens of thousands of pages in a massive database that grows daily. As the many different aspects of the Pokémon franchise continue to expand, PocketMonsters.net also continues to expand.
As a fansite, PocketMonsters.net has always tried to be a free site as we believe that the spirit of a 'fansite' is hampered when a hobby or an interest comes in conflict with business initiatives and generating revenue by exploiting a copyrighted intellectual property. Though our site may not be as well known as other Pokémon fansites on the Internet, we have a core group of users that visit the site on a regular basis and we strive to keep our viewers informed with the latest information about Pokémon.
PocketMonsters.net originally began in 2005 and served as a front page to an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel, sharing fan translations of episodes from the Pokémon anime. You also set up a separate fansub group specifically for this. What gave you the idea to start such a project?
Sunain:
We were the largest IRC Pokémon channel for a long time and chat is the core of #PocketMonsters. Unfortunately, like many other older net technologies, IRC didn't evolve to incorporate new features like Discord did. We migrated from IRC to Discord to take advantage of its features. There are many disadvantages though to Discord such as it being a business and increasingly they are trying to monetize more core features. Privacy is also a big concern with Discord and other social media companies versus IRC, so while we are currently using Discord for #PocketMonsters, we certainly aren't loyal to the system. It's just the most popular and easiest chat currently available.
Our site was really put together initially as a replacement for PokeAni, a Japanese site that would list the titles of upcoming episodes of the series. When they announced they were closing, there was really no list of upcoming episode titles with accurate translations. So we made a table listing the date, Japanese title and English title translation to showcase on the front page of PocketMonsters.net, similar in style to how PokeAni used to do it. To this day, fansites use our title translations and summary translations for their sites.
The Pocket Monsters anime has always aired months ahead in Japan, so as we're in the Internet era, many fans want to know what's going on with the show as soon as possible. Unlike most anime series from Japan, Pocket Monsters does not have an officially released sub. The Pokémon Company obviously does not see subbing the series as a profitable venture, as there is a very small number of people worldwide that want to watch the series in Japanese with English subs. Almost all viewers of the show watch an official dub version of the series in their native language now.
Subbing the series made it easier for us to do comparisons from the Japanese original and the English dub to showcase the differences and they are listed as part of our translation notes on the website.
I want to be extremely clear that the releases we did were all free fansubs. They were not sold, we didn't collect ad revenue, and we always highlighted that viewers should support the Pokémon franchise by purchasing official merchandise. Unfortunately, one of the reasons we stopped subbing was because too many for profit streaming sites were using the sub releases. We wanted them for the core Pokémon fans to watch and to also help us get information for our site for archival reference.
For those who may not be aware, and to help people get a better understanding, please explain the process you go through to prepare a translation for each episode!
Sunain:
Sub Process: Unlike most anime released in Japan these days, PocketMonsters.net does not have officially released subs on a service like Crunchyroll. Most current anime releases from fan groups rip subs from services like Crunchyroll and re-edit these, allowing them to easily re-release a few hours after they air. Since this isn't the case with Pocket Monsters, we have to do all the work from scratch, which significantly increases the workload and therefore takes longer than working off official subs.
Pocket Monsters airs Over-the-Air on TV Tokyo with Japanese Closed Captions. We pretime the closed captions to our work raw making it easier for the translators to fill in the dialogue while having easy access to both caption and audio for any given line at any time. This is a slightly different process than the one most other fansubs groups use, but it makes the process significantly easier for the translator.
Once the initial translation has been completed, the episode gets encoded, and the editor, translation checker and quality checkers review and edit the script, while also looking for things like line timing errors, line style errors, typesetting errors, karaoke errors, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, encoding glitches, audio in-sync, consistency errors, and any other errors that would reduce the overall quality of the release.
The PocketMonsters.net website has been a great resource for Pokémon news, and in my experience, it has been quick to get accurate information available onto the website. How are you able to stay on top of the news so effectively?
Sunain:
We try to cover as many topics of the franchise as possible, going into more detail than most. Other more mainstream and corporately supported Pokémon sites are usually faster than we are but we have always run the site as a fansite and hobby, not a business. We have many people in our chat that see news and information to help keep us informed. Plus, The Pokémon Company have a lot of press releases. Twitter/X feeds and RSS makes it easier for fans to get notifications faster than ever too.
Since 2010, the website has been making efforts to archive information and content relating to Pokémon. What encouraged you to document the franchise so extensively?
Sunain:
Serebii.net does an amazing job documenting the games but that is his primary focus as that's where most of the fans of the franchise are. We've always focused on general news and the anime for PocketMonsters.net. There are quite a few Pokémon-related wikis out there but, unfortunately, if anyone has actually tried to use a wiki for documenting information, it's not a very ideal system. When we started PocketMonsters.net, we decided to make it a moderated database driven site.
In your opinion, what benefits does a moderated database like PocketMonsters.net have over a wiki?
Sunain:
Wikis are good for lots of information that may not be structured data, but Pokémon inherently has lots of structured data, game data, TCG data, episode data and indexing[, and] that information is much better suited for an actual [structured] database as the backend. Further, once that data is in a database, it allows for quicker results to custom data searches. Almost every fandom and even communities have their own wikis now, but while there are automation tools for wikis to help present data in the wiki entries, they really aren't very good for the type of data the Pokémon franchise uses. Databases allow for quick answers such as what are the different episode counts for all the different seasons of the anime, depending on the region or release.
When we helped with Bulbapedia in the very early days with server and technical help, it was clear to us that while wikis were a quick way to organize and collect data while getting a lot of people contributing, it isn't very customizable for the massive amount of data that Pokémon fans have been collecting.
With the wiki content management system being developed externally, it reduces website development time significantly, so that's one of wikis’ biggest advantages and why CMSes in general are so popular. For PocketMonsters.net, we have a very small team, so we have to develop the site first before we do any data entry. The technical knowledge for a custom fansite is also a lot higher, which also reduces the number of people that can help contribute initially. We also believe that if you are a beginner that wants to help out, you're better off learning HTML and CSS first rather than learning the lightweight markup language that wikis use.
Unfortunately, wikis, other than Wikipedia itself, have become plagued by corporate control, malware and ads. This is not a good end user experience. Obviously, these wikis have become massive in scale and they need ways to pay for the server costs. A good example is the Fandom wikis which have been in the news a lot for these problems.
A few years ago, the folks at LegendaryPKMN tried to get together a bunch of the big Pokémon fansites to work together to develop a database framework for the entire Pokémon fansite community to use. Unfortunately, it was right around the time that Pokémon fansites in general were starting to die off. That is still a great idea, but with very few Pokémon fansites remaining, I doubt that will ever become a reality.
Considering the significant amount of products, services, and information Pokémon and its partners release, the scope of your project and efforts must be tremendous. How do you ensure the information on your website and archive is accurate to the best of your ability?
Sunain:
We are constantly updating and fixing errors that are reported by site viewers. We have a pretty small team of people that work on the site these days, so we tend to stick to a few main areas of the franchise but we are slowly expanding to other areas of the franchise.
It’s clear to me that our two communities share the same passion for documenting and preserving the history of Pokémon. In your opinion, why is it so important for us to archive this information?
Sunain:
In the digital age, information ironically is not being properly archived by corporations, even though it's easier than ever to do so. For instance, we'll take what used to be the Pokémon movie website; it would update yearly for each movie, replacing the previous year’s movie site and all the information in the process.
Pokemon.com has also undergone a few complete redesigns over the years. Thankfully some of that information is still available on Archive.org but a lot of it is lost to time or in The Pokémon Company's archives.
The current official Pokémon websites are also not very uniform. They have so many subsites and game speciality sites rather than having the information available all in one place.
Not including your own, what are some of the Pokémon fansites that you have enjoyed visiting over the years, and why?
Sunain:
Serebii has worked tirelessly for a couple decades now trying to keep Pokémon gamers updated with the lastest news and has a great resource for game information. We've been one of Serebii's only affiliates for many years as we share the same fansite goals and love of Pokémon!
ProjectPokémon is a great resource for the technical aspects of the games as well as keeping track of event Pokémon all around the world.
PokeJungle has really upped his social media presence in recent years rather than the actual fansite but he keeps people informed with a lot of the merchandise that is released around the world.
The PocketMonsters.net forum covers a wide range of discussion topics, such as news, current events, games, anime, and merchandise. How would you describe your community?
Sunain:
Many of the visitors and users of the site are older fans of the series. We try to cater to those fans that may have started being a fan from the late 1990s when the franchise first started and have continued following it since then. The series doesn't just appeal to younger fans but all age groups.
We also try to cover areas of the franchise that the official sites or [other] fansites don't cover at all. At the end of the day, we are fans of the franchise!
When you began the website, we had just three generations of Pokémon. At the time of this interview, we have nine, with over 1000 creatures and forms to play with, across a variety of different games and live services. What are your feelings on the franchise after all these years?
Sunain:
I honestly don't think it's evolved enough, ironically. Legends Arceus is my favorite game of the series so far as it added open world aspects and a great battle and catching system. When Scarlet and Violet came out and went back to the standard basic system we've had for over 25 years, I just couldn't get into it.
I've always advocated that the future of Pokémon needs to be a MMORPG that ties in all the aspects of the franchise into one. Years ago I made an article of what that might include.
Your commitment to documenting and preserving Pokémon information for almost twenty years is highly commendable. Looking ahead, what do you think is the future of your community?
Sunain:
We are one of the last major Pokémon fansites still going after all these years and it's unfortunate as there used to be so many Pokémon fansites, and they are now gone. We used to have a long list of affiliate fansites but now we're basically down to just Serebii.net! I'm not sure how much longer we will go but we will certainly make it to our 20th anniversary next year. Many of our staff are a lot older now, have full time jobs and families and have also moved on from the franchise, so we'll see how long we go!
If you asked us 20 years ago if we thought we'd still be running PocketMonsters.net [in twenty years], I'm sure all of us would have had a big laugh, but here we are!
It's nice to see that you are documenting all the older fansites, as I think that's something that the current web has really lost. Unfortunately, the majority of the web now is company driven websites and they lose the charm that fans have when making fansites.
Sunain, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me about PocketMonsters.net! Do you have any final comments you would like to make to our readers, and the PocketMonsters.net community?
Sunain:
Thanks for the great interview questions. We share a passion for documenting and preserving the history of Pokémon.
We are always looking for knowledgeable and mature people to help out with PocketMonsters.net. Feel free to contact any of the staff or visit our Discord channel and talk to one of the staff if you wish to help out.
A huge thanks to Sunain for answering our questions about PocketMonsters.net, allowing us to learn more about the hard work the team puts into the website. We wish them the very best of luck for the future!
Mailbag
It’s always great to receive more items in our mailbag and it’s always a pleasure to feature all kinds of submissions, including your questions, stories, and artwork. For this issue, mailbag regular Corylus has sent over another awesome piece of Pokémon artwork I am sure you’re going to love!
Bulbasaur is directly based on the Sugimori artwork from Aka & Midori [Red & Green]. It was a bit sturdier back then and slimmed down over the years, but [the change is] not as drastic as Pikachu though. My reference of course was a toad, as they are one of the inspirations for our lovely grass starter. [Out of] just the starters alone, without any evolutions, I think Bulbasaur is the best one from Kanto. What do you think?
Corylus, Germany
Greetings once again, Corylus! Thank you for sharing this amazing artwork of Bulbasaur with us! While I have always been a huge fan of Charmander, I accept that Bulbasaur deserves much more love. As I have said previously, you capture Ken Sugimori’s watercolour art style beautifully. I am happy to see that you have kept working hard on your art, and I hope you’ll consider sending more of it across in the future!
That’s all for this week’s issue! If you enjoy what Johto Times provides, be sure to share our newsletter with your friends and loved ones to help us reach even more Pokémon fans. For Discord users, you’re welcome to join our server for the latest notifications from our project. We are still open to sharing your mailbag entries, so if you have anything you would like to share with us, drop us a line by visiting this link to contact us directly!