As of March 2023, an estimated 53 billion Pokémon cards have been printed, translated into 14 languages and sold in 89 countries, and around 15% of the total was produced in the last two years alone. A phenomenon that has lasted for thirty years now, like everything that revolves around Pokémon and which over time has only increased its turnover. Both thanks to the ability to constantly renew itself, and for all that generation of boys and girls who grew up with the first chapters who began to collect and play with their children.
To find out more we went to the Tokyo offices of the Creature, which is one of the three companies together with Nintendo and Game Freak, on which the enormous Pokémon production machine rests. In particular, Creature deals with both the development of some games and everything related to cards.
Between old and new
Behind the beauty and simplicity of each Pokémon card hides a world made up of many parts that must combine with each other and a continuous process of analysis and control. The rules of the Pokémon card game have always been the same but gradually the expansions have added variables, exceptions, abilities that have made it extremely branched and complex, exactly as happened to Magic, and each new card introduced can mess up the so-called “goal”, i.e. the set of most effective strategies to achieve victory.
Basically there are two fundamental qualities for the success of these cards: the appearance and the mechanics. The images must be beautiful, colorful, captivating for both children and adults, all information must be clearly displayed and the rare cards, with their holographic watermarks, must give the idea of actually holding something rare.
And then everything must work perfectly, offering new competitive ideas but without overturning an already known mechanism too much. “Balancing a product played by millions of people is the most complex part – explains Atsushi Nagashima, who directs the study – Every choice, every detour must offer novelty, must keep the debate alive around the game to avoid stagnation on strategies seen and magazines, but at the same time it must not be too destructive and excessively complicated for those who may be approaching the game”. A good witness must also be able to anticipate and find the “loops”, ie those combinations of cards that allow a player to repeat an action indefinitely, breaking the game.
“Each new series of cards is obviously based on the video game – continues Nagashima – the artistic direction chooses four or five creatures around which to develop the whole narrative and slowly we compose the list of all the Pokémon and the abilities we would like to give them, how to make them evolve, what elements to introduce into the main game to give an element of novelty”.
From hand to hand
Then comes the testing phase, in which the 18 internal testers spend their days trying to use the new cards against already known decks, drawing from a huge file that contains multiple versions of all the cards produced. Every day for seven hours, with about four games in an hour. others where we’ve been there for two months. And despite everything the players still manage to amaze us and find combinations we hadn’t thought of. Ours is a scrupulous job that cannot be changed on the run like in a video game, at the most we correct the defects by releasing other cards that compensate for any imbalances”.
But has anyone ever thought of using AI to test thousands and thousands of games in a short time? “We can’t tell you anything at the moment, but there are some ideas.”
As much as balancing is fundamental, there are many people who will never use the cards to play and will enjoy collecting them, filling pages and pages of albums, as if they were stickers. “The appearance of Pokémon and cards is the gateway to this world – explains Haru Saito – director of the team dedicated to illustrations – we are well aware of this and one of the most important things for us is being able to capture the essence of creatures. It is not necessary to fill all the space with details, you have to make a few essential choices and understand how to make the most of the work by exploiting the skills of each artist”.
Fantasy and reality
Over the years, more than 200 people have worked on the illustrations of the Pokémon which are based on those of the game, but very often they are reinterpreted and adapted according to the style of who draws. “The work is very stimulating, because on the one hand you have maximum freedom of expression, but always within the confines of what is required – continues Saito – and it is also nice to return to the great classics because it is a way for those who have been accompanying for some time to see them in a different”.
It’s not always about drawings. One of the most loved artists, in addition to the historian Ken Sugimori, who worked on practically all the chapters and is the main character designer of the saga, or Mitsuhiro Arita, who designed the first Pikachu and Charizard cards, is Yuka Morii, who instead of drawing Pokémon shapes them into clay or terracotta statues and then colors and photographs them. The effect is spectacular, unique, and it’s no coincidence that there are those who only collect his cards, edition after edition.
“For us artists it is essential to visualize Pokémon as if they were subjects existing in the real world – explains Morii – for this reason we often look at the information contained in video games. Where does he live? What does it eat? how’s his personality? And then we can think about how to place it in a context where it doesn’t just look like a game, but a creature that could exist. In this it must be said that my style helps me particularly”.
Game design, artistic vision, playability, hours and hours of testing, more than a year of work, revisions, adjustments, this is the world that hides behind a very simple card that ends up in newsstands and comic books, on the tables of millions of people in the world or in their binders. A concentrate of art and calculation that can be a simple collector’s item or the decisive move to win the world championship. The next one will be held shortly in Yokohama, and Italy will also participate, with good hopes of success.