2026/07/31 by Vee Kennedy · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Themes in Literature Analysis #Digital Games and Media #Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.34382/0002002371
openalex created_date 2026/04/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/17
Pokmon: Legends of Arceus takes place in what Pokmon calls the Sinnoh or Hisui region, which maps on to the real-world Japanese province of Hokkaido and coincides with the actual historical colonization of this region.Arceus, however, presents a downplayed version of this history, one without indigenous people or colonization, where instead peaceful settlers from other regions arrive on an island inhabited only by Pokmon and pleasantly build villages while the player conducts research toward the creation of the region's first Pokedex.I call upon Bogost's rhetoric of video games, Trammell's Decolonizing Play, and indigenous game studies, in addition to the concept of modern Japan's soft power as presented through video games to question the rhetorical work of Arceus and the implications for colonized play evident in including revisionist history and indigenous erasure in the embodied processes of this franchise as manifested by player reviews of the game.A sample of reviews from Metacritic were compared against a sample of threads scraped from Reddit using a Python-based scraping tool.The scope of this analysis is then read in conjunction with Amano et al's 2021 framework of the ethics and social responsibility of the Japanese gaming industry particularly as it pertains to the representation of race and marginalized groups.Ultimately, the dataset expresses a gap between published reviews and player reviews and discussion about indigenous representation within Arceus, with the majority of concern about indigenous representation in the game coming from a small subset of individual players with self-described personal connections to Japanese colonialism shared in informal online settings as opposed to in major publications or aggregate game review websites.