Pokémon Book Reviews

Individual Review of Pokémon: Fate's Path by Cerberous10

(SGmijumaru)

For the first time ever in my career as a GRA reviewer, I found myself met with a challenge that I regret taking. I've read fanfics and played games I've absolutely hated before, but never before have I forced myself to read through a fanfiction that I've disliked so much that I struggled to finish it. Pokémon: Fate's Path is the first ever fanfiction I've read that has made me feel that way.

The premise of the story starts about as simply as they come, really. A few trainers are given their first Pokémon and start their journey, aiming to collect gym badges and ultimately become the champion. Along the way, they fight against a villainous team that wants to abuse legendary Pokémon, or powerful Pokémon in general, and defeat them in order to bring peace to the region. It's as cookie cutter as it gets.

The unique trait here comes from the fact that outside of the Pokémon themselves and aspects of the Pokémon world, such as Pokémon centres and such, Fate's Path uses as much original content as possible. It has its own region, complete with its own routes, dungeons, gyms, elite four, gym leaders, and even its own different rules to Pokémon battles. All of this is explained early on in the story where it's necessary, complete with a hand drawn map of the world the author created, the Drucan Region, which is nothing more than a plus. It's just impressive that they managed to do that, to be honest.

So despite the fact that the story uses an overused formula, I had reasonably high hopes going into it because it was set to be a whole new Pokémon adventure for me. The description was fairly good and promised complexity, even if it was a little long. The drawing of the region gave me the solid impression that the author really put a lot of thought and passion into this story and its concept. Even the first character that we're introduced to, Jay Wolfe, seems promising in her introduction. So why was this fanfic so difficult for me to read all the way through?

Well, the problems with Fate's Path start almost immediately after getting into the story. We're introduced to several characters within a short space of time, each of those characters with their own introductions, beginning Pokémon and many more details that are difficult to remember all at once. All of these introductions are done from the perspectives of those characters, which would be a plus if it didn't carry on all throughout the book. Normally, constant changes of first person perspective are only a problem when they're rapid throughout a single chapter. Here, they're a problem because I just can't see the reason why we're even switching perspectives.

We see practically the same introduction three times in a row, only to showcase characters that don't end up having all that much importance to the story. If you're tired of trying to remember and care about those characters, then you have no hope of remembering their Pokémon teams – all of their Pokémon have nicknames, and those names are used almost immediately upon meeting the Pokémon. This is on top of being expected to remember every detail of the map of the region shown in the intro, all while characters list name after name of where they plan to go. It very quickly becomes a mess of topics that you could only hope to understand if you had some notes beside you while you read. No one should have to do that just to remember character names.