I have dined in rooms that cost more to decorate than this game cost to make, and while I have rarely wanted to return to the same meals I was served in them, I would return with relish to Kanto. This is a hard thing to admit. How could anyone prefer a handful of pixels to a properly balanced burgundy pepper sauce over a medium-rare hart-steak, with cloudlike mashed potatoes beside it?

Simple. The pleasure in the second case is fleeting. Kanto’s is not.

Pocket Monsters Red and Green went on sale in Japan on 27 February 1996. Everything you can see while playing that cartridge looks like science fiction. But what governs it in the places you cannot is magic of a very old and specific kind. The two have been laid one on top of the other so neatly that almost nobody notices, and the arrangement explains a great deal about why the place has outlasted its hardware by three decades, and why it deserves discussion in a periodical concerned primarily with fantasy.

The props say science fiction. The laws say magic. The laws win, and they always do.

Everything you can see is Science fiction

Set out what’s visible and the genre looks settled.

There is a device that converts a living animal into something portable and back again. There is a network that transmits those animals between distant towns while they are stored. There is a corporate research campus occupying a tower in the capital city, and a laboratory on an island that revives extinct species from amber. There is even one creature that is plainly a piece of software, while another that is plainly the product of a cloning programme.

That is a technological civilisation, described in technological language, and it is presented without a shred of wonder.

Yet, not one of these things is ever explained. Not the conversion, not the network, not the revival, not the cloning. No character curious enough to ask, apparently. A world that possessed genuine science would contain at least one person who wanted to know how the ball works, and in Kanto, apparently, nobody at all does.

Everything that governs it is alchemy

Now look underneath, where the actual rules are.

Kanto runs on fifteen elements arranged in fixed relations of sympathy and antipathy. Fire consumes grass. Grass drinks water. Water quenches fire.

It is the doctrine of correspondences: the belief that the world is composed of a small number of principles standing in permanent relation to one another, and that to know those relations is to know how anything whatever will behave. It held the European mind for four centuries and the Chinese mind for a good deal longer. It is the intellectual engine of alchemy, astrology, humoral medicine and most of what we now file under superstition.

The line, and where it is drawn

Which brings me to the point: whether we can call Kanto a land of magic, or science-fiction?

I would make the argument that while it appears to be both, in truth, a world belongs to the genre of its laws, not the genre of its props.

There is a reason Kanto feels enchanted, even when it appears stuffed with machinery, because a great deal of what sits on the science fiction shelf is actually fantasy wearing a spacesuit.

Give me a prophesied heir, a mystical energy, a sect of witches and a rightful throne, and you have a fantasy story. Set it on a foreign planet and you have Dune. The presence of starships changes people’s minds on the genre, but they are really nothing more than a set dressing. The laws of Dune are established and they are very much mystical and unexplainable.

Too often, I feel the argument for what constitutes sci-fi is merely the presence of technology. But good sci-fi, as any reader of that wonderful genre knows, thrives in the potential of technology, not just its presence.

So, in short, the critical question is what a world obeys.

I do not wish to labour the point and concede that I might be wrong, but if there are no explanations or if technology fails to capture them, it seems to me we have fantasy.

Pokémon, at least according to this logic, fits the bill.

The quest…that turns out to be a catalogue

The costume is deceptive, I grant. A child leaves home. There are eight trials, each presided over by a master of a single element, and each awarding a token. At the far end is a champion to be overthrown. Strip the setting away and you have the shape of every apprenticeship narrative in the literature: the young mage, the eight ordeals, the dark lord at the summit.

And admittedly, the argument lies partially with what the boy is actually asked to do.

The professor does not send him out to become champion of anything. He hands over an instrument and states his own frustrated ambition, which is to make a complete guide to all the creatures in the world. “That was my dream”, he says, and asks the children to finish it for him.

The commission is really a survey, then. The badges are gates on a road, the tournament is an event at the end of it, and the actual work is taxonomy.

Does this departute change anything? Fantasy almost always runs on danger: something is coming, and the hero must be ready. Kanto runs on incompleteness, which is a stranger and more elegant engine. One hundred and fifty-one entries, and an instrument that will tell you at any hour precisely how many you have failed to acquire.

We should also note that the world is declared larger than its own catalogue realises on the first day. The animated series makes the point in its opening half-hour, broadcast on 1 April 1997: the closing shot is a golden bird crossing a rainbow, and the boy’s brand-new encyclopedia has no entry for it whatsoever.

I can think of no better statement of what the fantastic is for. Not a world that has been explained to you. But a world that exceeds its own index on the very first afternoon, then goes on exceeding it.

The oldest bargain, and the archetype

One of the biggest tells is a the eponymous wildlife of this world. The creature that walks beside you is not an invention of 1996. It is one of the oldest arrangements we have: the witch’s familiar, the bonded dragon, the daemon at the shoulder, the horse that understands speech. A companion who is not a servant, whose loyalty cannot be commanded, and who knows things about you that you would rather it did not.

Pokémon is the purest modern form of that bargain, and it should be said that although the animated revolves around a bond of friendship formed between these monsters and their captors, the games contain little hint of that. A couple of incidental dialogues with NPCs mention the fact, but the narrative itself doesn’t declare it. Odd, that a key fact which is thrown at the non-versed, about this series being all about friendship and a bond of trust, was arrived at later in another medium. But there you have it.

Again, that doesn’t change the argument much. These Pokémon are not just companions, after all, but act as stand-ins for the standard protagonist’s magical education and ability. Creatures can summon water, fire, make the earth shake and even assault enemies psychically, and they even change form to become more powerful. The protagonist does not change, except to gain more knowledge and command of these mediums companions, which parallels the usual development of self and maturity in many fables. Here, the magic and the user are separated, which is is a unique twist on the old model.

A land with one grave in it

One important insight is that the mode here is actually pastoral, which is among the oldest fantasy modes there is and the one least often attempted seriously.

There is no war in Kanto. No army, no border, no tax, no state to speak of. No clergy, no temple, no rent, no hunger, and no illness that the free clinic in every town will not repair without charging anybody. There is, most remarkably, no death: the creatures faint and are revived, and this was a deliberate decision by the man who made them, on the grounds that a child ought not to learn to say I died when he means he has lost a game.

The roads are wide and mostly empty, while the animated series returns again and again to the late afternoon, which is the hour that makes distance legible and puts a long shadow behind anyone walking. Nothing in the composition suggests the journey needs to conclude.

I confess I did not at first understand why the walking mattered so much, having never in my life walked anywhere a carriage could reach. I understand it now, and I am told the experience is character-forming.

And then, set exactly at the centre of this sprawling expanse, death.

Lavender Town has a tower of seven floors and it is a working cemetery. A haunted ruin, not just an atmospheric flourish. This is a burial ground in an unremarkable town, which the child is required to climb. On the stairs stands a spirit he can neither identify nor fight, and no amount of force will move her.

The solution is not a weapon. It is a lens, and what the lens reveals is a mother, killed by men who came to the tower because the skulls her species carries are worth money.

You do not defeat her. You look at her, and you know what she is, and then she departs.

A land with a single death at its heart, in a building erected for the purpose, which cannot be avoided, cannot be fought, and can only be passed by identifying the dead. Any pastoral knows that it requires a tomb somewhere in the landscape. Very few children’s works have the nerve to put one in and then decline to explain it.

In Pokémon, this is one of the oddest and most brilliant narrative choices I’ve seen in game or novel. It is poignant, to the point, even if too deeply ciphered for most of the audience to understand. Yet, the reason is obvious…

The heresy

Lavender Town shows you what the other path is. And why the villains in this story matter.

Team Rocket are brutes, willing to kill Pokémon (really kill them, not just make them ‘faint’) for profit.

Kanto contains almost no violence in the ordinary sense. But this is the Rockets’ offence. Along with the fact that they treat living particulars as interchangeable, lifeless units, steal these miraculous creatures to sell, run a gambling house, and seize a corporation to obtain the device that removes the last element of chance from capture. They are in the cemetery for the commercial value of bone, and will do grievous things to get it.

In a world whose entire moral architecture rests on playful, almost joyful battle, of being a good sport and learning to manage great power, disregarding all this and treating the wonder as a sellable commodity is heresy.

Team Rocket is positioned clearly as the antagonist. As the example of what not to do, and the kind of trainer you would never want to be, and like all good stories, a child will learn quickly to dislike them. Strangely, however, even Team Rocket do not constitute the main form of antagonism in the game.

They are almost a distraction. An annoyance to be dealt with as the protagonist continues their journey to complete their peaceable survey and become a champion.

Perhaps this is a wiser outlook to instill in children than an urge to destroy.

Where it came from

A connoisseur always asks after provenance, and Pokémon has an unusually good answer.

The man who made it collected insects as a boy in Machida, on the edge of Tokyo, and was known to his schoolfellows as Dr Bug. He intended to be an entomologist. What happened instead is that the district was developed, the water was covered over, and the insects went. “Places to catch insects are rare because of urbanisation,” he said, years afterwards, when the whole world was discovering the same thing.

So the thing in question is a field, rebuilt from memory by a man whose own field had been paved, and fitted with a corridor along which children could pass its inhabitants to one another. The tall grass is the whole of it in one image: a green blank you must walk into to find anything at all, which may contain something you have never seen.

That is not nostalgia. Nostalgia is a mood and produces nothing. In fact what we are observing is preservation, which is a craft, and considerably harder to achieve.

The author’s late doubt

One last thing, because it is too good to leave out.

The writer who shaped the television series for its first five years, and who did more than anyone to install the doctrine of friendship and devotion described above, kept a journal towards the end of his life. What he had been attempting, he said, was not a slogan about friendship at all but something more austere: that you are you, and other people are other people, and that approaching them on those terms is how conflict is avoided.

And in his final year he set down an alternative ending he had considered, in which the creatures work out that they have been used as slaves, and rise.

I record it without embroidery. A man spends five years building the most successful argument for interspecies devotion ever made for children, and at the end of his life writes down, privately, what the same facts look like from the other side. That is not a scandal and it spoils nothing. It is what a serious author does. He could see the shape of his own invention clearly enough to see what it was standing on.

Personally, I am glad he never carried it through. There are enough tales like that, and Pokémon, for all its odd fascination with capture and control, retains a joyful innocence and playfulness.

The verdict

Kanto is a fantasy, and a very good one, and it is a fantasy for exactly one reason: its laws are magical and its machines are, too.

Every part of the design follows from that. A closed cosmology of fifteen principles. A quest wearing the costume of a war and running on a catalogue. The oldest companion-bargain in the tradition, with the devotion supplied afterwards by its adapters. An Arcadia with one grave in it and an adversary whose main sin is an obsession with profit.

I am aware it is customary to be embarrassed about admiring this sort of thing. I decline. When one understands the motives behind the creation, there is a tragic and hopeful story. Of a man who saw something beautiful get destroyed, and tried to recover it in the only way he knew how. In doing so, he brought joy to millions of people. That doesn’t restore what was lost. But it is in some way a consolation.

There is, I gather, no longer any way for me to go back and look at the place I grew up in either. One makes do.