Last weekend saw the release of the highly anticipated (especially by me) Pokémon Black & White Version 2, but if you were worried that someone out there wasn't really mad about that, rest your mind at ease. Those well-meaning lunatic killjoys over at PETA have set their sights on blowing the lid off of the world of pocket monsters in a flash game where Pikachu & Co. take on their trainers, who are apparently drunken psychos who like to beat their pets with baseball bats.

I assure you, it is charming.With the cleverly titled Pokémon: Black and Blue, Pokémon has joined PETA's previous video game targets, Mario (they were apparently upset about the Tanooki Suit from Super Mario 3 because fur is brown pixels are murder), and Cooking Mama, which involves pretending to make recipes that involve meat. Clearly, these are the pressing issues of our day.

This time, though, they really Britta'd things up, presenting shrieking caricatures of Professor Juniper and Cheren, who seems to have developed a drinking problem and also a hits-his-Pokémon-with-a-baseball-bat-for-some-reason problem. The whole thing is an exercise in drawing a connection between Pokémon's world of pets who are captured and made to battle each other and real-life abuse of animals, and even though that is quite literally the easiest comparison in the world to make, they completely drop the ball.

The fact is, this is stuff that was actually addressed better in Pokémon itself. Seriously, Team Plasma's rhetoric about freeing Pokémon rather than making them battle in Black & White 1 might've fallen apart at the end, but it's a hell of lot more convincing than this stuff, and that one episode where Ash rescues Charmander is way better at teaching kids a lesson about being mean to and neglecting pets. Seriously: When you are worse at making a point than the thing you are trying to make that point against, maybe it's time to rethink your strategy. Along those lines, FYPBlog has a comparison between PETA's game and the anime's version by Tumblr's NerdyCouture.

For those of you whose morbid curiosity is getting the better of you (or who just want to see Pikachu pull off a PETA-approved move called "Protest" in between blasting Cheren with lightning bolts), have at it:


Personally, I tapped out about halfway through the first cutscene with Nurse Joy. While the heart-shaped bear traps scattered about the land were a nice touch, the bleeding trees were a little over the top.

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