Bright, colorful Pokémon imagery frequently contrasts with unsettling, horror-style promotional material and trailers. The franchise's lore contains disturbing elements, including Pokédex entries describing frightening behaviors and types like Ghost and Poison. The premise of capturing wild creatures and forcing them to fight adds inherent creepiness. The Pokémon Company often leverages this background strangeness in commercials that evoke horror tropes. Many eerie campaigns appeared in 2022 before Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, and there were found-footage style promotions for Pokémon GO. The recent Pokémon Legends: Z-A trailer mimics Japanese horror games and embeds creepy easter eggs referencing ghostly Pokémon legends.
A bright yellow Pikachu and a cuddly blue-and-white Snorlax, merrily playing on green grass under a clear blue sky. Even a fire-breathing Charizard is a cheerful orange and would probably give you a hug. So it's a wonderful peculiarity of the franchise that various games and spin-offs have received some of the creepiest, spookiest horror movie-like trailers and ads we've ever seen.
You don't really have to scratch very deep into Pokémon lore to find the weirdness. In fact, given it's a game series about capturing wild animals and forcing them to fight, so you don't even have to scratch at all. But take a look at any Pokédex and you'll quickly find descriptions that'd have any child concerned about going to sleep at night, and hell, plenty of the Pokémon themselves are self-contained nightmares.
A lot of these commercials appeared in 2022, ahead of the launch of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, but there were super-strange "found footage" creations for Pokémon GO as well. And clearly TPCi is still fond of the idea, given the reprisal of the horror-like approach for its latest commercial for Pokémon Legends: Z-A, which both apes Japanese horror games like Resident Evil and also hides creepy easter eggs for ghostly legends from Pokémon's past.
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