leaving the party

pokemon lazarus (2025) + the pokemon episode – PODCAST

January 16, 2026

apple / spotify / pocket casts / overcast

Hello! It’s been a minute. How are you? What a lovely answer, I assume! It’s 🐝 yourself Friday and wouldn’t you know it, the Leaving the Party podcast is back. Did you miss us? We’re coming back with a sort of weird episode and a very lovely guest, the very beautiful Yvonne! She’s my girlfriend 🙂

lazarus spoilers i suppose? it’s a pokemon game so nothing really crazy lol

I say this episode’s sort of weird because there’s a couple things we’re doing here. Ostensibly, the thing we came here to talk about was Pokémon Lazarus, an incredible romhack of Pokémon Emerald by Nemo622 with help from many others in the romhacking community. It’s genuinely a beautiful little game, and end of last year our whole friend group was playing it, excitedly sending screenshots of our teams in group chats every time we beat one of the eight gym leaders. But we also thought: if we’re gonna record this podcast about a Pokémon game, we should do it in such a way that we never have to talk about a main series Pokémon game again. So this episode is not just the Lazarus episode, it’s also “The Pokemon Episode.” This kind of ended up divided into two parts: the first half, roughly, is about Pokémon as a whole and as a brand, one of the most successful media properties in modern history. We talk about what it is, what it means to us, and what is wrong with it (and us) such that we now live in a world where it pisses us all off so much, all the time. It’s only AFTERWARDS that we really get into Pokémon Lazarus, a fanmade Pokémon game that genuinely excites us!

Lazarus is what we call a “total conversion” romhack. Total conversion here means that it takes the engine, structure, and mechanics of Pokémon Emerald and totally reimagines it from the ground up: all new assets for almost the whole game, new music, a new region called the Ilios region, new Pokémon from later in the series and a new visual style. Lazarus takes on a sort of Gameboy Color-era art style, but updated and modernized with inspiration from the Gameboy Advance era the game is built upon. And we’re happy to say in this episode that Lazarus is a rare and incredible accomplishment, a full game built using the bones of Emerald, yet still deserving of consideration as its own entry in the series nonetheless.

What strikes me about Lazarus is its sincere interest in the world it takes place in, and that goes from simple things like an attention to detail in the design of the world to a more complex thematic content about the place of Pokémon as wildlife, and what wildlife conservation means in the world of Pokémon. You can find Nemo as an NPC in Lazarus, and when you speak with them they thank you for playing and tell you that they hope it’s got you thinking about biology and wildlife, the reason they made this game in the first place. The world is always portrayed just as the game itself is, with a certain straightforwardness characteristic to this era of Pokémon, where everybody speaks in no uncertain terms about what they know and what they believe about the cohabitation of people and Pokémon. The difference between the main series games and this one is a more academic interest in these questions that more directly draws connections to our relationships to wildlife in the real world.

thats my GOAT

An idea that recurs throughout Lazarus from the beginning to end is this biological concept of “lazarus taxa,” species of animals which are believed to have been extinct and then are rediscovered later, either as a currently living creature or as a creature out of time in the fossil record. This is the major point of study that your character follows as a university student during their adventures in Ilios, and the area of study your paleontology professor sets you upon at the start of the game. Throughout Lazarus, you will find extinct and mythical Pokémon in the wild during your adventure that would typically be impossible to catch without resurrecting a fossil. Ilios is a place is where the past is in a constant state of being exhumed, both in its ecology and in its culture. You will find monuments, temples, statues, and people all across Ilios waiting to tell you about the myths and histories of their world and, usually more locally, their cities. The Tropius statue in Port Pello will give you a short myth about how a Tropius and its trainer turned a barren land ruined by war between city-states to a blooming forest. Another student and friend, Niko, will tell you about the statues of a mighty king and a humble poet, and how the kings greed caused his statue to be overgrown and worn down. A complete fossil of Tyrantrum can be found, 72 million years old, in front of the wildlife conservation facility. And now, creatures believed to be extinct live and breathe on the routes and in the wild, perplexing the world and tantalizing those who would exploit it. It’s a region full of tributes to the past, creating an environment that feels full of history and culture without ever sacrificing the simplicity that makes these games so approachable.

I said earlier that Lazarus was built from the bones of Emerald. In this sense, Pokémon Lazarus is itself sort of a lazarus taxon too, having revived a generation of Pokémon games that many people like me once believed to be long extinct, creating an experience consistent with the way it once felt to play Emerald for the first time, with much of the same tone, formula, simplicity, and focus, never breaking the feeling of that classic Gameboy Advance era of Pokémon.

I mention in the episode that there tends to be an attitude among fans of many Nintendo games that Nintendo won’t take these games seriously, and so we have to do it for them. This is something you’ll see a lot in circles like Super Smash Bros. Melee, where an incredibly dedicated community has decided on a competitive ruleset and built a modern fighting game out of the bones of a party brawler. This attitude exists within Pokémon romhacking as well, with a plethora of difficulty hacks like Radical Red that begin to resemble competitive Pokémon exercises. I need to clarify here (like I do in the episode) that this is not necessarily a bad attitude to have! Both of these examples are moments where a community has created something truly great and transformative, alchemy-like, out of a game that was not necessarily made for what they wanted from it. But there is also some magic in the consistency of something like Lazarus, which has managed to become a beautiful and competent Pokémon game by staying true to the first principals of what made those games good in the first place. Nothing is too complicated or overwrought, everything is charming and interesting and fun, finding and catching new Pokémon is always exciting, and the world is populated by good people just like you doing much the same. It has nailed the tone of the original 3rd generation Pokémon games to a T, and stayed true to the core fantasy of the series of games: one where you become stronger through your bonds with your Pokémon in much the same way that the world itself becomes stronger through caring for the creatures who live in it, people and Pokémon alike.

okay plus look how pretty!!!

At the end of this episode, we also spend some time introducing the newest yearly Leaving the Party tradition: the Annual Leaving the Party Awards Ceremony Awards: Huge Panic at the Heart Throbbing School Trip! If you’re a keen reader, you might realize that the first half of this is an acronym for the ALPACAs. These are just some awards we’re gonna give out every year to games that we particularly liked (not even necessarily games that came out this year lol). Maybe in the future, we’ll do a whole episode about this and we’ll have physical awards to mail out; we certainly have some ideas. For now, it’s just a brief little discussion where we shout out some games that made us excited this year. I don’t want to spoil all of our choices, but because I can’t help myself I’ll just say this: Shoutout Of the Devil. that game whips cant wait for the next episode

Alright, I think that’s all for this post here. Next episode, this time for real, is going to be Chained Echoes. I know we’ve said that before but we mean it this time. I’m really excited for this one, so look forward to it hopefully by the end of next month! Love you! Happy 🐝 yourself Friday!

PS: the wildlife conservation facility you can repopulate with Pokémon that you catch — and the little habitats they appear in — is such a good idea that I think it belongs in every single Pokémon game. Just like Pokémon who follow behind you in the overworld. It’s the smartest thematic move the Pokémon series has made in a while, and the Pokémon series didn’t even make it!

thanks for listening / reading / etc
“keep driving” is sad in the way that teenagers with cars almost always are

December 5, 2025

some spoilers below, including spoilers for one of the many endings

“Dandelion” off the album “Nuet” by Dorena. please purchase this song on bandcamp, and listen while you read this

Just after I graduated high school, probably the most precious thing I owned was my car. I was a kid who never wanted to be at home, and when I got old enough I was lucky to get a car from my Dad who worked at a car dealership. I was raised in a quiet little town in New Hampshire, and going anywhere in most of the state usually meant driving. Like many other women I know, before I was a beautiful woman, I was a sad boy, and I wanted to disappear. Me and my high school friends, all feeling lost and a little directionless both in our personal lives and in the transition to adulthood, disappeared for days at a time on little road trips around New England. For the last years of our childhood, we would drive late at night to Hampton Beach to see the ocean, or to Boston or Portland just to see another city, just to get out of the house. Sometimes we would drive for no reason at all, in whatever direction. We were always driving somewhere. I have fond and difficult memories of this time, and all of the seemingly unused construction sites, fields, and parking lots where we would park my car in to spend the night, picking flowers in the grass and smoking weed on the top of my car. It’s complicated, and once I became independent and got my own place, I started to look back at this time with a nostalgic sadness.

For me, Keep Driving is this nostalgic sadness. Stressing about gas on the way to the next station, worrying about that weird noise the car is making, listening to CDs lent by friends or strangers, eating last nights pizza on the road to the next rest stop, arguing in the car, hitting pot holes, meeting questionable hitchhikers and new, equally directionless friends: this is what Keep Driving is about. The premise is this: I’ve just bought my first car. I have a little bit of cash, a tank full of gas, and a long summer alone. I have a map and a letter from a friend telling me about a music festival hundreds of miles away which I absolutely must go to. The rest is left up to something between choice and chance; which route I take, which hitchhikers I meet on the side of the road, and how (or if) me and my car can even make it to the festival. Between rest stops, gas stations, and towns, I drive, picking up strangers with different tricks to help along the way. Occasionally I’ll get stopped by random encounters like “getting lost” or “potholes” or “birds that won’t move.” These encounters are temporary annoyances, but since I’m driving, they drain me of resources; gas, the wear and tear on my car, my energy and money. The less resources I have, the more difficult choices I’m forced to make. I begin to think, am I gonna have to buy some shitty gas station pizza to keep myself from going hungry? Can I afford gas to get us to the next stop? Should I go hungry and risk running out of gas just to save money on my way to a repair shop? But what if I hit a toll!!!!!!!! Keep Driving is a management RPG that puts us in these situations the whole way, right up until the car breaks down or I run out of gas. Then I’ll have to call my parents.

On the character creation screen, one of the first things the game asks me about is my relationship with my parents. “A good relationship with your parents can help you in a pinch!” When this first prompts me, it’s unclear what they mean by this, but they give me a scale from 1 to 5 and I pick a number that will remain undisclosed. Much, much later, there’s this missing little kid that’s been in my car for a couple towns now because she got on the wrong bus and doesn’t know where her home is, and while I’m finally on the way to bring her home, my car breaks down in the middle of the highway. I’m given a couple choices on how to deal with this, but out of options and resources, my last chance is to call my parents. It turns out that just like real life, the probability that my parents pick up my phone call depends on my relationship to them. They might pick up the phone to come and bail me out of my problem here, but if they don’t, it’s game over. It’s always the last option to keep going on the road, and if there’s no answer, it makes for a sad and childish ending, humiliating in a very teenage way. And to me this is what’s beautiful about the game, it understands this teenage angst and this feeling of being lost and how humiliating and sad it can be to have to go home. When this happened to me in game, it reminded me of when I was a 17 year old in 2015, unable to vote in the big presidential election, very closeted, very scared for my future, full of frustration, powerless, and driving every day. One of those nights I did something kind of stupid: me and a friend stole a lot of campaign signs from people’s yards and then drove my car into a giant Trump sign on the side of the road somewhere (also undisclosed). It felt really good to knock it over and break its supports, I felt righteous, a very dramatic and thoughtless teenage gesture. It wasn’t until about five minutes later, feeling so smug and satisfied, that I had realized it had also cracked my windshield. Probably the most humiliated I had ever felt was when I had to call my parents after that trying to come up with a good explanation for what had happened. I imagine this conversation in Keep Driving is sort of like that, except if I were also hundreds of miles away and stranded in the middle of nowhere.

But this is what is so great about Keep Driving to me, so much of this game feels just like those nights. Making stupid mistakes behind the wheel surrounded by friends and strangers alike, technically free to go wherever we please but still somehow totally trapped by the reality of the world: money, gas, stress and illness, my relationship to my parents, so on and so on. In another run, I drive and listen to the quiet ambiance of the wind, enjoying the moment until a loud gang of bikers end up on the highway next to me, or I get stuck in traffic, or until this kid I just met in my backseat tells me to put the radio on. There is a real mundane beauty to the world, sometimes interrupted by the equally mundane frustrations, annoyances, and reminders of my real mundane problems. I daydream behind the wheel, and text appears in the clouds: “I gotta call my parents soon, and not only when I need help.” I resolve to do it tomorrow. The text reads: “Sure you will.”

here we are being harassed by a gang of bikers. this is what a random encounter looks like btw

On the road in Keep Driving, there’s always a certain emotional space between me and everybody I meet. I don’t even get the names for most characters who get in my car, they’re all named things like “the kid” and “the girl” and “the idiot.” Seems like pretty much everybody I meet on the road is unemployed. It makes sense given the circumstance: the only people I talk to are people who get into strangers cars and live there for several days, going in a pretty much random direction. Still, they’re good for idle chat. The kid might say something like, “I have to peeeee.” The songwriter might say something like, “better loved and lost than never loved at all, right?” The idiot might say something like, “did you know that the oldest discovered flower is 125 million years old?” Over the course of our road trip, I’ll finish their little side quests and get a fuller picture of their character, but it’s never really complete. There is always a distance they keep me at, and there’s always more distance to drive.

Instead of telling a big story, Keep Driving instead wants us to see the way this interplay of systems and aesthetics creates a nostalgic and melancholic tone. it wants us to find pieces of other people’s stories, to spend time with them and spend time with the world of the game. It wants us to get status effects like “sad,” “tired,” and “dirty,” and make from that what story we will. At the beginning of the game in my third run, one of the backgrounds I could choose from was “In Mourning,” which means that whenever I get the “sad” status effect I also get the “satisfied” status effect. There is a certain Vibe that they’re clearly going for here. A large part of that vibe is the music, which is crucial to the game’s function. Throughout the game I can find or purchase CDs from strangers and stores, and each one unlocks more songs for the soundtrack. The music is almost entirely diegetic, only playing when I decide to put music on in the car, and it featured by all real indie bands mostly from Sweden. It’s genuinely very good, and I especially recommend seeking out CDs for the bands Fucking Werewolf Asso, Holy Now, and The Honeydrips. This game genuinely put me onto them. With these CDs, we can put together little 6 to 8 track playlists and listen to them on the road. I wish the game had committed to making us listen to an album all the way through like you would’ve had to with a CD on a car stereo, but what’s a road trip without a playlist?

the idiot, just like my car after meeting him, has a flowery interior

One CD, for the song “Dandelion” by Dorena, is given to me by the idiot. The idiot is a little bit spaced out, and my characters first impression of him says something about how he’s not all there. When I pick the idiot up, he asks that I bring him along so he can go visit his sister, and gives me a location to drive to. This was my first quest. Along the way, he gathers flowers into bouquets, talks about the majesty of life and of nature, spaces out. His skills aren’t incredibly useful, and his OCD skill which causes him to organize threats during random encounters into different orders honestly makes things more difficult than anything. Actually getting to the place he’s been guiding me, I find that he’s brought me to visit a graveyard. He plays this song, Dandelion, on a big radio by his side, saying that him and his sister always used to listen to this together. Dandelion is an 8 minute long melodic track full of melancholic and gentle joy, with a twinkly echoing guitar that reminds me of certain midwest emo stuff and a droning and uplifting synth melody that climbs and repeats and climbs again, over and over. He gives the CD to me as thanks for bringing him here. Eventually, he’ll give me a flower to keep on my dashboard, too. Then he gets back in the car with me and we go back on the road, back to dodging potholes and getting stuck behind birds and listening to the drone of the engines in traffic. Spend enough time with him, and my impression of him changes; the text on his character sheet will eventually read:

“Some shitheads called him an idiot when we stopped for gas as he picked another bouquet from the side of the road. He said ‘beauty will save the world and the world is beautiful’. I didn’t understand, but smiled all the same.”

A couple hours into my first run of the game, I ended up at the first big city I had seen. I spent a long time here: picking up part time jobs for money to keep me going, getting too drunk as a bartender for a night and having to sleep it off, wandering in alleys looking for anything useful in the garbage. What brought me here, though, is a letter from my grandmother. It says she’s dying, and she wants to pass on her inheritance to me. I find her, and she tells me about an old cabin she used to live in, which now belongs to me. She tells me to go there, to live there, and to give the land love. So I go turn the car around and go back the way I came, to a little shack near my hometown.

In the real world, I live in the city now, and I don’t drive anymore. Eventually, my car broke down and I just never fixed it. It died on the road one day while I was waiting for a red light to turn green. I just tried to put some pressure on the gas and realized the engine had stopped completely. Before I knew it it was gone. In a sense, it was probably already dead when I started it that day, the engine sputtering awake for the last time. I got it towed off the road and brought to my apartment. It’s changed hands a couple times since then, but today, it’s still there, getting worse. Rabbits run and take shelter under the car as people walk by, and no doubt creatures have made a home in the long dead engine. I’ve been meaning to sell it for parts for ages now, but I just never got around to it. Now it sits, gathering rust and dust, much to the chagrin of my family who doesn’t understand how I could let something go for so long. I guess I’m just thinking about something else. This is the type of ending found in the real world, and the type of ending found in Keep Driving. It’s not particularly satisfying or conclusive. It’s just life and it keeps going.

The game keeps a log of all my past runs. For my first completed run, the log simply says:

“I was studying. Living with my parents. I ended up getting a bit annoyed by this girl. Helped a little girl reunite with her parents. Befriended a songwriter. But I had to cut my trip short because my grandma died.”

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