Lumiose Is Pokemon’s Most Underrated City
Pokemon’s Paris is still waiting for its moment
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Pokemon has a lot of majestic settings, which is pretty impressive when you consider that almost every game before Let’s Go was a scrunched up pixelated mess of sprites. Since then, Sword & Shield stepped up to the plate with a fully realised 3D Pokemon game, but after fumbling the ball by not including the glorious city of Newcastle and somehow making Hulbury feel lifeless, it didn’t quite make the most of it. New Pokemon Snap picks up some of the slack, with fantastic locations like the Outaway Cave, while Goldenrod City, first introduced in Gen 2, remains the game’s most interesting city – although Sootopolis might be the best location in Pokemon full stop. Certainly, it ain’t Cianwood, as our features editor Cian Maher has already pointed out. The most majestic place of all though might be Lumiose City.
Lumiose is not as special nor as significant as Goldenrod, nor is it as interesting as Sootopolis. However, the capital of Kalos has an unmatched beauty, a strange and complex appeal that goes beyond listing what events occur there or which shops line its high street. Lumiose is based on Paris, the City of Light, and much like the iconic French metropolis, it does not need to be seen – it needs you to breathe it in.
How does that work with the washed out, blurry graphics of the Nintendo 3DS? No idea mate. I’m not a Nintendo engineer. I’ve got no idea how the devs at Pokemon manage to make their limited, lightly detailed, often blurry cities look so charming. What’s that? I’m merely projecting my childhood love of Pokemon onto something that isn’t there and combining it with my own time spent walking the streets of Paris? Preposterous!
Look, even if that is that case, I think Pokemon X & Y still deserve some credit. I’ve been to New York City too, and I don’t feel the same charm when I stroll around Unova. It’s just buildings and stuff. Lumiose goes beyond that, capturing the Parisienne je ne sais quoi of Haussmann Saint-Lazare. It’s just very pretty, right? The circular design, with all roads leading back to the central Eiffel Tower – sorry, the PrismTower – makes it feel like its own, self-contained bubble. Much like Paris in comparison to the rest of France, Lumiose City feels like a place unto itself.
Each of the boulevards have their own sense of personality, and far more than with Unova, you feel as if you are learning the city’s history, understanding its past, present, and future with every footstep you take. A remake of X & Y, if the Let’s Go idea is ever revived – yes please – and we get that far, could build on this further, adding more personality to the NPCs and more detail to the various hubs, corners, and secrets of the city. More stories. More culture. More Lumiose.
Because it’s more of a map than a city (in the way Goldenrod is a clear city in your journey through Johto), it often gets overlooked. Add that to the fact X & Y is one of the least popular entries in the mainline series and Lumiose gets left by the wayside. Still, to this day, no city in Pokemon has understood its appeal, and either we need a remake, or Gen 9 needs to take note.
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