Monday, September 28, 2020

The Future of LINE Pokémon Stickers

Recently, I had obtained the rest of all available Pokémon stickers on LINE. The stickers have come somewhat far since the beginning, but so have LINE stickers as a whole for other properties and creators. In fact, aside from animated and/or sound stickers (which some Pokémon sticker packs have), LINE stickers have developed in different ways into different kinds as well, and Pokémon stickers have yet to have any of these different kinds. That being the case, it seems plausible to discuss how those different kinds can apply to Pokémon stickers for possible future packs.

Some stickers on LINE can now look different in addition to being just images within chat sequences. There are now "big" stickers which are double the size of ordinary stickers. There are also "popup" stickers which display a screen-filling image when tapped, as well as the related "effect" stickers which display a background image and animation instead. Pokémon would be a natural for any of these, as it is very vivid; I can imagine "big" stickers that have lots of Pokémon in each sticker, "popup" stickers with different Pokémon showing all that they can do, and "effect" stickers that contain visualizations of Pokémon moves. Those are but a sample of the rich visuals of Pokémon, and much, much more can stand to be realized in any of these forms.

More recently, some stickers also allow text to be inserted in them, allowing them to be made truly unique. Text is not new to LINE stickers, as many packs contain stickers with text (and some are even purely text), but what is new is the ability to put in text on already-made stickers: "custom" stickers allow on the order of a few characters, while "message" stickers allow considerably many more characters. It may be possible to conceive a message sticker pack with various human characters of Pokémon with a variety of expressions and speech balloons that could contain text to say different things. For a "custom" sticker pack, perhaps this is where Unown and their letter-like forms could play into somehow, for a more mysterious flair than most other Pokémon stickers. The ideas may have to be well thought out, but the execution should have interesting results. 

There is one last kind of stickers, but this one may be kind of dicey. Stickers with sounds are commonplace today, but there's a neat form of this kind that is less commonplace: music stickers. They are called as such because the sounds that are heard from these stickers are well-known songs or pieces of music. While it would be neat if Pokémon could get a pack of this kind of stickers, there could be language issues as Pokémon songs exist in different languages (though primarily Japanese and English) as well as rights issues for the songs, and therefore it would be hard (if not impossible) to realize this for Pokémon. But if "the stars align", anything may just happen, including these stickers. 

LINE has diversified its profile of stickers with different kinds of enhancements after they were introduced in the beginning. So far, though, Pokémon stickers have only used the most basic of these enhancements, being animations and sounds. What lies in their future on this social media service is the usage of the other kinds of enhancements in order to have even more stickers with appealing qualities, and this is not entirely impossible, especially given the multitude of visual possibilities of Pokémon. Combine that with these new enhanced sticker possibilities, and they should result in more vividly Pokémon chats as well.

Two years ago: A New Age of EX Raids
Three years ago: To Teach and To Delight

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