Awwww? That's so cute??

"None of the ones I've beaten had a grimdark twist! Though there's people who do permadeath challenge runs and some of them draw edgy comics about it."

"Like there's an in-game way to kill your Pokémon or they're just pretending hardcore?"

"They release their Pokémon if they faint in battle and call it killing them! If it were me, I would just put them in a box until postgame and call that purgatory, but I do not really understand the mindset that drives people to this kind of challenge." 

"Yeah, me either. Games are what I do to relax."

She shrugs. "I don't mind frustrating puzzles or combat, if it's not impossible! But permadeath Pokémon isn't either of those, really, it's just go fight a billion wild battles until your best friends can effortlessly defeat the local Gods. And that just seems boring." 

"There are gods in Pokémon? I have been missing out by spending my childhood unable to keep a save going past a couple towns."

"Some legendary Pokémon are very much Gods! Sometimes in vaguely contradictory ways. Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres control the weather (but maybe only in their region), Kyogre and Groudon created the lands and seas," and she can go on like this for a while, really. 

He'll sleep the Switch while she's explaining.

"...and then in gen five, I think they must have realized they had jumped the shark a bit with Time and Space and also The Creator Of Everything Forever because the box legendaries there are about... Truth and... Bravery, I think? I don't actually remember. But anyways those take the form of black and white dragons, of course." She pauses for breath. "That one actually has an interesting plot! With characters doing things! And your rival is a Disney princess and he makes you ride on a Ferris wheel with him while he talks to you about his feelings, it's delightful."

"He's a... Disney princess...?"

Grin. "He was raised by Pokemon and calls them his friends and he at least claims to be able to talk to yours! And most of the times you fight him, he always uses Pokémon from the adjacent areas only, so a very common headcanon is that he isn't catching them, just asking them if they want to hang out with him and do a bit of battling..." (Her voice starts to trail off near the end, as she realizes she's been. Babbling kind of a lot.)

"Oh, that's cute, there's this sort of inherent weirdness in how you're catching stuff and only making friends with it after it can't leave."

"Yeah, I feel like a lot about Pokémon kinda falls apart if you think about it too much... It would be cool to have a monster collector game that handled that aspect better." 

"Is that a whole genre, monster collection?"

Nodnodnod! "Pokémon is the one everyone knows and there's Digimon games too, there've been two different Final Fantasy ones that are both supposedly bad... Ni No Kuni looks like a Ghibli movie but unfortunately it was not very interesting as a game... I haven't played Cassette Beasts but I hear it's quite good!" 

"Casette Beasts? Like... tapes?"

"Yeah. I think you record the little guys to catch them? So the cassette tapes are like the pokeballs." 

"That doesn't just... copy them?"

"It might! I dunno, I haven't played it." 

(It does! You record monsters onto a tape and get a copy of them to fight with.)

"Because that would also be weird, if there were two of it after. You might wind up, like, making it fight itself, or something."

"I mean I think from their perspective that's a common trope from a different genre?" She does a voice.."Off-brand Pikachu, you must fight your worst foe... a corrupted copy of... yourself..." 

"I think they did literally that in the first Pokémon movie."

She laughs. "Right! They did, yeah." pause. "...Sometimes I wish more media franchises could get that kind of popularity. Where's the anime spinoff movie for, I dunno, Transistor."

"I don't know that one."