Why we remember Lavender Town
I was listening to a video today about Pokemon creepypasta. (This is how I spend my time at work, I'm very productive.) While he was going through a unifying theme for a lot of these older stories, he brought up a sentence that really struck me:
"Lavender Town is the closest these old games feel to being haunted"
And the reason that struck me is because it's... true. Not just for the old games, either. Lavender Town is the closest the franchise has ever felt to being haunted.
Pokemon was a very different beast back in '97. It's hard to properly explain the feel of these games in Present Day, when the franchise has become so glutted and universal. I still enjoy Pokemon, but nothing has ever quite captured the magic of first booting up the old gray brick and seeing Blastoise slide across the green-tinted screen as I booted up Blue for the first time.
Or for the twentieth time.
Back on the playground, itching to take on my friends with the team of monsters I had assembled. Back when we were trading rumors as easily as we traded Pokemon.
I still remember when I reached Lavender Town for the first time. Fourth grade, end of day. Our classroom was on the second storey of the building. It was raining-- dark outside, soft interior lights of the classroom inside, kids all with their Game Boys out continuing our own adventures, nobody particularly in a rush for the rain to stop and for us to head home. It was a perfect atmosphere to step into the Pokemon Tower and have my first encounter with a GHOST.
Pokemon has had more ghost types introduced since then, and introduced more spooky locations in its games. There's a house in the Kalos region that's spooky. That one Hex Maniac who freaks you out in the office building. The abandoned store where you fight Mimikyu. The mansion where you find Rotom.
But none of them have at all the same bone-deep staying power of Lavender Town, and that sentence really exemplified what the difference is.
"Lavender Town feels haunted"
The other times Pokemon dabbles in the spooky end of the pool feel like events. Scripted. A little funhouse moment that you're lead to see, and then it's gone, and you carry on as normal.
But Lavender Town, in all its 8-bit glory, feels haunted.
The only indication the game can provide is a change in its music, from the adventure cords of the overworld to the slightly uncomfortable melancholia of Lavender Town (an impressive feat given the Game Boy's sound limitations). There are no tricks that the game can perform graphically except to surround you, as you ascend, with tombstones-- which don't reach particularly well on that tiny screen.
But if you go there before you have the Silph Scope, you aren't encountering Pokemon. You're seeing GHOSTs. Enemies that repeat "Get out... get out..." when you try to interact with them. You can't
If you continue ascending -- as you probably would as a child, unaware that this is a gatekeeping measure you have to resolve -- you start encountering other trainers. Strange sprites on the overworld, robed women with long straight hair and closed eyes, and when they fight you--
Ke... ke... ke... ke...
Be cursed with me!
Urf-- kwaa!
Threatening shouts. Inhuman noises. In the middle of the tower, a purification circle, just a group of strange white tiles that serves as a moment to breathe.
The game doesn't tell you what's happening here, and I think that's very much to its benefit. One Channeler tells you earlier that they can't identify the spirits and need the Silph Scope, but most of the others are already possessed, and you as the player don't get a warning, or have anybody prime you for this revelation. You see it in the dialogue when they attack you.
And because the game doesn't explain itself any more than it absolutely must, you are left to figure this out for yourself. The implications drip through the mind as you piece together what you're seeing (or fail to, if you're a seven year old, this all just comes across as really unnerving). They settle. This doesn't feel like an event that you walked into, nobody comes yelling "Our people our possessed, help us!" You've walked into the middle of a collapsing ritual and nobody is going to protect you.
When you come back with the Silph Scope and can actually see the Pokemon, that honestly don't help too much. Your Normal attacks are worthless against them, and the ghosts themselves are actually kind of freaky for that era. Gastly is a cute little gas ball but as rendered in the original Red/Blue it's a spray of pixels with threatening eyes and massive fangs. Haunter hasn't looked this cool since Gen 1:
And since I mentioned melancholia, that's the button the whole tower climb-- sometimes, you'll encounter not a ghost, but a Cubone, a sweet little lizard-guy wearing a skull and wielding a bone club. And at the top of the tower, the final, true GHOST-- the furious spirit of a Marowak, who was killed by Team Rocket and whose abandoned child now waits in Mr. Fuji's house.
I emphasize; you did not enter the Tower being told about any of this. You did not enter the Tower to avenge Cubone, you weren't told to put the spirit to rest. You're just some kid wandering into events he has no business wandering into and trying to understand what you've stumbled upon.
And what you've stumbled upon is a haunting. Not a scheduled event. not a moment to prove your heroism. A haunting in progress.
Later games will emphasize these moments. The house in Kalos gives you a tiny tour. The mansion in Sinnoh has little events going on to unnerve you. The Hex Maniac stops you in your tracks to mess with you. All fine, I have no problems with these places.
But Lavender Town never explains itself to you. It never demands you see how creepy it is. It does exactly what the rest of the game has been doing with fairly minimal ornamentation, but that's why it digs into your brain the way I don't feel the later-game locations do. It is as the rest of the game, but wrong.
I am a great advocate for show don't tell in many forms of storytelling and the restrictions on the original Pokemon games (indeed, many older games) enforce a level of restraint that many modern games (indeed, works of art in general) no longer demand and therefore people no longer feel an obligation to respect. It's not minimalism, but it is careful selection of what is important to communicate and how to do so in the most effective way possible, just because they didn't have the raw memory to write more text.
What it creates in Lavender Town is a strange note on an otherwise straightforward journey. Not dissonant or discordant, just off. Wrong. Haunted.
