Young at heart
If the original PokémonRed,
Blue and Green resonated with so many partly because they were so deeply rooted in childhood experience, Masuda ensured that Ruby and Sapphire would repeat the trick by basing the region on summers spent with grandparents and other relatives in Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island. “When I was young, I often spent my summer holidays there, catching bugs, fishing, swimming in the sea and so on,” he recalls. “My uncle and my older brother often took me out night fishing or collecting seashells, or even looking for snakes! That was how, as a child, I learnt about the kindness of others and the ties between people. My experiences in Kyushu are actually how I came up with the name for the Hoenn region. My idea was ‘a place abundant in greenery’, so I took two Japanese characters meaning ‘abundant’ and ‘greenery’ and put them together. The resulting word is pronounced ‘houen’, which in other languages became Hoenn.”