However, Pokemon GO’s Fashion Week highlights a major flaw in the game. Although the Fashion Week event added some new clothing items for player avatars, it doesn’t go far enough to fix the significant pitfalls of Pokemon GO’s character customization. The event puts an emphasis on self-expression and the player’s sense of style, yet avatars in Pokemon GO can barely be edited beyond the clothes on their backs. Fashion Week would feel like a more appropriate celebration of each player’s identity if players had more tools to make their avatars look like themselves.
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Pokemon’s Relationship With Customization
The Pokemon franchise doesn’t historically allow for much customization. For a long time, players simply chose between a boy protagonist or a girl protagonist, then named that character. Everything changed with Pokemon X and Y. Not only could players suddenly shop for clothes for their character, but they could decide details like skin color, hairstyle, and so on. It marked a major leap forward in player self-expression in Pokemon. Since then, Pokemon has been expanding these services, much to the delight of fans.
Even as the main Pokemon franchise keeps building on customization, Pokemon GO remains stagnant. Niantic adds new clothing to the game, but the physical avatar customization tools are almost identical to their design at launch. Players are still largely limited to changing the color of their eyes, hair, and skin. Even though there’s a great range of colors available in all of these categories, since Pokemon GO fans can’t change their physical features, every avatar ends up looking uncannily similar and doll-like. They can be jarring, especially compared to newer Pokemon GO NPCs like the Team GO Rocket leaders who have detailed designs and unique appearances. For some reason, players can’t be so distinct from each other.
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Potential Pokemon GO Avatar Upgrades
At the very least, there should be some more basic options added to Pokemon GO’s avatar customization. Hair styles don’t seem like they’d be hard to integrate into Pokemon GO, and a few options for face shapes would go a long way. Ideally, though, Niantic should introduce more detailed customization to Pokemon GO. It’d be great to see Niantic add a few sliders that players can use to adjust their body type, tweaking their avatar’s height, muscularity, body fat, and so on. Any or all of these changes could make Pokemon GO’s avatars better at representing players.
Pokemon GO’s huge wardrobe is great. There’s a ton of clothing options that let players define their own sense of style, show their love for a favorite Pokemon, and so on. Clothes only go so far, though. It’s crucial that the avatar that wears the clothes physically looks the way that the player wants to, or else it’s impossible to truly achieve the appearance a player wants. Hopefully Pokemon GO realizes this sooner rather than later and introduces some upgrades to the avatar system. Style-focused Pokemon GO events in the vein of Fashion Week will feel much richer when they’re filled with Pokemon trainers of all shapes and sizes.
Pokemon GO is available now on Android and iOS devices.
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