Pokemon but it's Journey to the West

I'm sure this has been done somewhere, but a roleplay featuring the cast of Pokémon paired with the story and setting of JttW. Humans would still exist, but Pokémon would be gods, demons and Yaoguai/Yokai. The primary objective would most likely still be to deliver the Sacred Texts back home.

Illustration by zerochan923600 (deviantArt):

Retellings of the story for those who would like to skim through:
Overly Sarcastic Productions - Legends Summarized (multipart series): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61nuXrvqNgI
Wookong - The Real Story of Journey to the West (multipart series): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-Qdtm5TcRw
Off The Great Wall - How The Monkey King Came To Be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN3_6efimoQ

Actually I'm constructing a Pokémon role play journey very similar to this that I'll post soon o:

But I'm also curious to what ideas you have for it!

I'll be looking forward to it! I'm not much of a GM- I still lack a lot of experience, but I'd love to participate. I could come out with basic outlines as suggestions (world-building, rules, setting, scripted events etc.).
Depends on if you want a light-hearted, action-packed comedic RP or a more epic one with mythology at it's center focus. Though nothing stops it from being a bit of both!
The themes on which you want to focus on in your story help too. Redemption, friendship, adversity, danger, trust, fun, etc.

This sounds awesome - I loved Overly Sarcastic Productions' summary of it. Also, I love how Infernape is heavily inspired by Sun Wukong. That said, I feel like, as a roleplay, it would probably work best if it wasn't tied too closely to the actual Journey to the West, as I feel like you would need to right set of roleplayers to capture the likeness of the characters from the tale.

Imagistre said:

Depends on if you want a light-hearted, action-packed comedic RP or a more epic one with mythology at it's center focus. Though nothing stops it from being a bit of both!

Click to expand...

Why not both? Hahah

Yus! Red & Blue from OSP channel make the best mythology & history crash courses in my book. *u* Mh, I can agree on the fact that following the characters too closely would be restricting.

Sun Wukong is your typical shonen hero with a bit of moral ambiguity and mischievousness. Despite all of this he grew to care for his friends despite their initial lack of trust;
Xuan Zang is the good boii™: a proper, youthful yet naive monk who learns to see with a more critical eye;
Pigsy is your typical hedonistic yet ressourceful coward who learns do to some good;
Sha Wujing was the most loyal and logical member of the crew, ofter acting as the humbled peacemaker.

Roleplaying is supposed to be natural and fun, so imposing character templates is no good. It'll gives us a good reason to think of unique character dynamics if we create brand new characters. We could leave the default appearance/role and fill in everything else. The "Monkey", the "Monk ", the "Demon" and the "General", OR the "Warrior, the "Leader", the "Trouble-maker" and the 'Peacemaker" . That's one way to go about it.

I really like Journey to the West, and have even played a game based on it before. The trick was, the players were told to use JttW as inspiration for our characters, and when the time came to play, the story started very similarly, the archetypes were explained, and then "...these are not those heroes. These guys are the best we got." We knew we weren't the characters from the story, we just filled similar roles, and our game ended up going on a different path than Tripitaka and Friends.