As I said earlier, almost all media directed at children aims to create a brand loyalty and will try to convince them to buy more. In this case I'm talking abou

As I said earlier, almost all media directed at children aims to create a brand loyalty and will try to convince them to buy more. In this case I'm talking about the actual card game - it's good and features cute pretend animals, thus it makes children want related merchandise. Moreover, Pokemon was never immune to that. The very first game already introduced the mechanic where you couldn't actually get all the creatures, which was one of the goals. In order to do that, you had to trade with friends that happened to buy a different color version. That's great, because it created engagement and communities around the game, but it's also clearly a marketing ploy. If you fail to see this in that case, what about The Lego Movie? It's was made to make Lego relevant with the next generation of kids. It's also a good movie. And Lego sets are not bad toys to have. It's simply not black and white and there's a big difference between Studio Ghibli selling Totoro merch and placing unhealthy snacks at a 5 year old eye level in a checkout aisle.