Farewell to old friends

Author's Note: This comic was conceived in response to Sony announcing the PlayStation 4 on the 20th of February, 2013. Time constraints mean that by the time this comic was completed, the PlayStation 4 was already available on retail for several years, while the PlayStation 3 is no longer in production. Now that Sony announced the PlayStation 5, this comic will be for commemorating Sony's PlayStation 5 announcement as well as the 25th anniversary of the original Sony PlayStation in all regions outside Japan.

For those wondering why Klonoa is the character saying his farewells to the PlayStation consoles in this comic, that's because the Klonoa series began on the PlayStation, and Klonoa was a prominent Namco character during the PlayStation 2 era. The dates in the first two panels are references to the discontinuation of the production of the PS1 in 2006 and the PS2 on the 4th of January, 2013. As for Klonoa frowning on the PS3 in the last two panels, it's not because the PS3 has no Klonoa titles, but the PS4 is not backwards compatible with its predecessors. Note that Klonoa is holding a PS3 Slim in the last two panels, and the date on the third panel is a reference to the day the PS4 was announced.

The PlayStation 5 will be backward compatible with most PS4 titles, but it will not be backward compatible with any game from the PS1, PS2 or PS3. Therefore, expect Klonoa to shun the PS5 for being backward compatible with the PS4 only, and totally leaving out the PS3, PS2 and PS1.

Ultimate Betrayal

With the Game Freak-developed Tembo being not only on non-Nintendo platforms, but will not be on any Nintendo platforms at all, Nintendo owning more than 50% of Game Freak's shares means nothing. And it does not help when Pokemon creator Satoshi Tajiri was the executive producer of Tembo. No wonder the late Takeshi Shudo and subsequent directors of the Pokemon anime after him made sure that Ash Ketchum never wins the Pokemon League, especially when Ash was called Satoshi. It's like the directors of the Pokemon anime disliked Pokemon creator Satoshi Tajiri, or any character based on him, and for good reasons.

Maybe most of us have never played Pulseman, another Game Freak-developed game which was published by Sega just like Tembo. However, most of Game Freak's non-Pokemon games never left Japan, meaning that we were unaware that Game Freak made games that were on non-Nintendo platforms during the Console Wars of the 1990s, which could jeopardize any relations between Nintendo and Game Freak should this truth ever be made known to the general public. This could also explain the absence of Pulseman in the Sega Superstars series, especially when Game Freak developed Pulseman for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.

Game Freak was also said to be the reason Pokemon had been a licensing nightmare for the Super Smash Bros production crew, and Masahiro Sakurai claimed that acquiring the license to include Pokemon characters in the Super Smash Bros games was harder than that of third-party characters, including the theoretically impossible ones.

Finally, Game Freak was the reason there was no Pokemon-themed attraction in Nintendo Land, which can also explain the lack of actual Pokemon cameos in many of Nintendo's games. It seems like acquiring a license from Game Freak is actually far harder than acquiring a license from a third-party game studio, especially for character cameos and crossovers. So much for Pokemon being published by Nintendo...