PokéNumbers

Part of my business today involved numbers and their processing. In going about them, I realized that a fair bit of my life is devoted to numbers, whether they are used as indicators of identification or value. And that led me to think that the same goes for Pokémon, which peruses numbers quite a bit in the games as well, in the same ways. Numbers seem to apply very much for the world of Pokémon in their variety of uses.

Identification is a big part of numbers in the Pokémon world. One of the simplest identifiers is the generation number, which is very much accepted and widely recognizable. If a person talks about the "first generation" or "third generation", what is meant is immediately recognizable: it means the Pokémon and things added with the respective iteration of the main series games. A little less widely recognizable is the indexing of local Pokémon in the Pokédex of the regions, which change from place to place; fortunately, the National Pokédex sidesteps this issue somewhat by ordering Pokémon generation-wise and as they appeared in the local indices. For the latter, it can almost be assured that when I'm talking about #25, for example, I'm talking about none other than Pikachu. Identifiers like these, especially in the form of numbers, are quite helpful in pointing things out.

As well, numbers provide value, and value is important for so many elements in the Pokémon games that mentioning them all would take too much time and space. Included are levels, vital stats, move strength and accuracy, and so on. Understanding all of these is important to know how a given Pokémon performs in battle and how to tweak this to become better. Even in a non-main series game like Shuffle, these kinds of numbers are present to some extent and serve much of the same function, to give an indication of performance in combat. Again, it's the understanding that makes the value fully known.

There seems to be no escape from numbers in life, and the same is true of Pokémon. Numbers in this world have the capacity to identify and show value much as they do in real life. I'm going to have to continue to deal and work with numbers for as long as I live, and with a life that involves Pokémon, it means even more numbers to contend with and process.