Friday, February 27, 2026

This is the one hundred and seventh installment of West Wind, your weekly drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. So close!

Hello everyone! It’s been a while, but the last time I posted it was because of a special day, and today is pretty special for a number of reasons! 🐉

That’s right, today is not only Pokémon Day, but the 30th such! On this day in 1996, the first two Pokémon games were released in Japan on the original Game Boy. It took another two years for them to come to America, likely since no one knew what to do with such a strange concept. But it was a good thing they did.

I wasn't into Pokémon at all when I was a kid, despite having a Game Boy and being the perfect target audience. Instead, I got into the world of Monster Rancher, which has a completely different vibe than the creature-taming game that everyone knows so much better.

My nephew came to live with us for a little while, and he brought his collection of Pokémon cards. He wanted to play with his cousins, who didn’t have any, but that was a pretty easy thing to fix! Rather than buy a bunch of booster packs and hope for the best, I invested in some pre-constructed decks that brought a lot of fun to all. I also began studying Pokémon more closely, learning about the thousands of creatures that had been created since I was a kid. I didn’t know yet that it would be for research into the competition.

Vivi & the All-Lands Tournament draws heavily from Pokémon lore, since it came out of my daughter’s imaginary adventures with her stuffed animals, right around the same time that we began our Trainer journey as a family. Mysterious creatures bonded to young children in some unexplained way, and those kids venturing out on their own to seek fun and adventure, form the major components of the story.

While there are only four categories of creature in the Rary-verse (Animal, Plant, Robot, and Stuffed), there are endless varieties of each, most of which are inspired or taken directly from other monsters in different media, both the pocket variety and the ranched ones. I had intended to add explanations for all the jokes and references to the World Anvil version as footnotes, but… I forgot. Maybe when V-ALT is up for its next anniversary.

Coming up with activities for creatures to engage in other than battling was a fun challenge, too. Racing is always a good non-contact sport, so that ended up in the final story twice. I came up with several other events that will have to wait for next year's tournament, like maze-running, singing, and a spelling bee. I don’t think Rary would do very good in that one...

My fascination with creature taming didn’t end there, with Pokémon providing a huge inspiration to your favorite Wild West monster-planting adventure, Frontier Flora. A lot of the early design for the world was done in contrast to Pokémon: “they won’t be compressed, they’ll follow their people around all the time”, “since they don’t have energy attacks, they can’t all battle against one another, some will have to avoid the ring altogether", “the rooting system means that people wouldn't travel around as much, they would form closer bonds to a specific place."

We don’t play a whole lot of the physical TCG anymore, since the kids are busy with school and we’ve found some other fun games to play. One that my daughter and I have kept up with pretty regularly, though, is Pokémon TCG Pocket. An attempt by the Pokémon Company to recapture the fun of card collection, it relies much less on battling, and more on sharing. Every action you do that involves another player provides the opportunity to Thank them, which grants them in-game currency. Even if you duel another player and lose, they will probably give you some Thanks, making the experience worthwhile.

If you play TCGP and want some of my extra Dachsbun cards, let me know! My Friend ID is 3603604478785656

I’ve got more I want to share, but I’m going to keep it short, partly as an incentive for me to post more often! The very rectangular month of February comes to an end soon, and this newsletter ends right now. Enjoy the weekend and remember, all is well.