I recently defeated the Pokémon League in Brilliant Diamond and I was thinking about how the Pokémon franchise characterizes end goals for Pokémon trainers. Most obvious is the Pokémon League championship: this is essentially the “main quest” of the mainline games. It is upon becoming champion that the credits roll. There is also the secondary task of filling the Pokédex by catching every type of Pokémon (reflected in the franchise’s slogan, “Gotta catch ’em all!”). Notably however, these are not the end goals of anime series protagonist Ash Ketchum. His goal is to become a Pokémon Master.

I really like the way Pokémon sets up becoming a Pokémon Master as the highest aspiration for trainers. According to Bulbapedia, the Pokémon fan wiki, the criteria for Pokémon Master are intentionally vague.

… the Pokémon Company does not answer questions of this nature. It is the intent of the Pokémon creators that such questions be left to the imaginations and interpretations of Pokémon fans, adding more excitement and mystery to the Pokémon universe.

By explicitly differentiating between being a Pokémon Master and defeating the Pokémon League or catching every pokémon, the creators of Pokémon open up the opportunity to engage with the world in different ways. In the games, the player can ignore the task of filling the Pokédex, or indeed even the Pokémon League challenge. With systems like the Grand Underground, Super Contest Shows, Pokémon breeding, player versus player battles, shiny hunting, etc. (to give a few examples from Brilliant Diamond), a player can spend many hours in-game without ever challenging the Elite Four. These are all paths to Pokémon Mastery.

Having a vague goal makes Pokémon different from open-ended games like Minecraft in which players establish goals for themselves. Pokémon has an extremely aspirational tone, as can be seen in the first lyrics of the original anime’s opening theme:

I want to be the very best, like no one ever was.

A note about the term “Pokémon Master” itself: it’s not a translation, the original Japanese is ポケモンマスター (pokemon masutā). Masutā is a loanword from the English “master.” It’s unclear to me whether Japanese speakers have a somewhat different understanding of this word compared to English speakers, as sometimes happens with loanwords. The term “master” in this context is a little ambiguous between “expert” and “master of pokémon” in the sense that the owner of an animal might be called its “master.” However, I think it is intended to mean the former. Otherwise, any trainer (or indeed anyone who owns a pokémon) could be called a “pokémon master.” That said, it’s still a weird phrase. Pokémon is not an activity or a skill, it’s a type of living organism. It’s not clear what it would mean to have mastery in this. That in turn is the reason for its vagueness, so this is really a strength. You’re not meant to think very hard about what it literally means, it’s more like a vehicle for whatever meaning you want to attach to it.