The Pokémon games and I have always had something of a love-hate relationship: Love, because I can’t seem to put them down; hate, because I’m always left with the feeling that they could be so much more. At the end of last school year, I decided to start up a new game of what was then the latest installment in the Pokémon series: Pokémon Y. As I played through the game, I revisited my feelings for the series’ untapped potential.

Pokémon games market themselves as grand adventures, in which you can explore distant lands and befriend magical creatures. But when it actually comes down to it, the distant lands all end up looking pretty much the same, and the befriending of creatures generally amounts to walking back and forth and throwing tiny orbs at whatever comes your way. Your principal means of interacting with your Pokémon, through battling, is hardly indicative of a healthy, nurturing friendship, and your conversations with other trainers usually are restricted to two-line phrases. Pokémon provides for an interesting case study because, although stories of friendship are promoted strongly in the television series and in the game’s narrative, the game doesn’t actually provide a mechanism for carrying this out.

In a way, Pokémon reminds me of another Nintendo title, Animal Crossing. In Animal Crossing, players find themselves the sole human settlers in a village full of cute animals, saddled with a large home loan and forced to pay it off. Like Pokémon battles, the tasks that a player undertakes in order to raise money are monotonous affairs: picking fruit, delivering items, hitting rocks with shovels. But somehow, it all seems worth it in the end, as you decorate your house, gain the friendship of your cute animal neighbors with their cookie-cutter preprogrammed responses and find yourself deeper in debt.

Unlike in Animal Crossing, where friends will give you a portrait once your relationship with them becomes strong enough, Pokémon doesn’t provide a significant mechanism to record a player’s in-game relationships. In this way, it relies on personal narrative: I know that my Lapras, Simone, doesn’t like fighting and prefers to sing, but only because that is the story I have created around her character, not because of anything represented within the game. I might purchase a galette at the bakery for my Fletchinder, Flé, but when she eats it nothing noticeable happens to her description, and her stats don’t change. The significance of these actions don’t exist within the game’s mechanics, they’re all in my head.

For a long time, I wished there were more of an in-game recognition of friendship and character. Lately, however, I’ve come to appreciate this absence. If Pokémon games started recognizing little gestures such as these, they would lose a lot of their meaning: care and appreciation would become just extra stats to maximize. With that approach, the actions that the game recognized as improving your relationship with your Pokémon suddenly wouldn’t seem as genuine, and those that it didn’t recognize would seem less valuable. By not assigning meaning to acts of friendship, Pokémon games allow players to create it for themselves, weaving a narrative that may not be represented fully in the game, but which is tailored uniquely for each user.

In order to play a Pokémon game, you have to care about your Pokémon. This isn’t because the game penalizes you for doing so–so moves, like Frustration. It’s actually more effective if you and your Pokémon are antagonistic towards each other. But without some level of personal investment, playing through battle after battle, and wild encounter after wild encounter quickly becomes a chore. In playing through Pokémon Y, I have found myself thankful for the first time that the game doesn’t use more to hardcore friendship as a game mechanic. Instead, leaving things up to me as a player, creates a richer and more personal narrative of my experience.