Feature: Interview with Ecruteak Forest

Ecruteak Forest is a Pokémon fansite which opened in November 2023. Originally, it focused on Pokémon bootlegs and sharing information about different types of fan-made ROM hacks. As time went on, it expanded its content, focusing on the series as a whole. In this interview, I speak to its webmaster Takoto about his website and his passion for Pokémon.

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A graphic from Ecruteak Forest's website, a button featuring Scizor

It’s great to meet you, Takoto! Please introduce yourself, and tell us about your website, Ecruteak Forest!

Takoto:

It’s great to meet you too! I’ve been into Pokémon since around 1999. I’m mostly an artist, but I’ve been poking around in the fandom for a long time in various ways. Ecruteak Forest is my fansite; it’s Pokémon-focused with a handful of articles at the moment and has a sub-section for interesting bootleg cartridges I’ve come into possession of. It’s also themed a little bit around Scizor, who is one of my favourite Pokémon.

Ecruteak Forest opened in November 2023 and was first made on Neocities before moving to its own domain. What encouraged you to create the website in the first place?

Takoto:

Growing up I spent a lot of time on Pokémon fansites, both really big well-known sites [and] smaller ones like people’s fanpages to specific Pokémon, documenting their playthroughs, or glitch hunting. I thought having your own website was the coolest thing even if it was a really simple one, and I really enjoyed sites that focused on lesser-known topics at the time (like Japanese-exclusive music or the mechanics behind glitches), so the idea of having a fansite to put neat information I’d found or was investigating always appealed to me.

I’d wanted to put together a website that had a reference of different types of bootleg Pokémon cartridges for a few years. In 2023, I was experimenting with HTML and CSS for fun during downtime at my job, and [I] realized that social media isn’t the best place for long investigations or documenting information, so it felt like the right time to try to put something together even if it didn’t go anywhere.

Ecruteak Forest (Splash page, April 2026)

A lot of fansites focus on official video games, products and services, but Ecruteak Forest started out with a focus on bootleg games and fan-made ROM hacks. How did you come to take an interest in these?

Takoto:

Reading about bootlegs for any game has always been an interest of mine, particularly ones which differ from the official games in some way (most commonly, that’s awkward translations). When I was younger, there was this mysterious air to them, even though in reality it was usually just someone’s fan-translation or ROM hack put onto a cartridge by a third party. I thought editing an already existing game would be extremely difficult and found stuff like multi-carts really fascinating. Admittedly, I don’t have any background in programming so they still kinda mystify me.

On that note, being a kid and discovering how many romhacks there were amazed me. Making a video game seemed like this gigantic undertaking, so even the act of editing something that already existed was a big deal in my mind. I spent a lot of time looking at PokéCommunity just seeing how creative people got with them, or reading through their thought process on how they improved upon the base game. One of the first websites I made was a silly shrine-[esque] website to the ROM hack Frigo Returns, sort of as practice but also because it was one of those earlier Gen 3 ROM hacks I remembered really clearly (partially because of the interesting name and box art some bootleggers gave it when it got sold on cartridges).

One feature I enjoyed reading was your Finding the origin of Pokémon "Vietnamese" Crystal, known for its poor yet humorous translation to English. It’s an article in progress, which you plan to update over time. What inspired you to write it?

Takoto:

I played through “Vietnamese” Crystal many years back, as well as watching some other folks’ playthroughs of it, and there were a lot of lines that became permanent jokes between my friends and [me], so it’s been the poster-child of Pokémon bootlegs for a long time in my mind. A couple of years ago, a friend and I were talking about how a translation could be so incorrect but almost coherent in places, and we thought it might be that it had been machine translated one line at a time, rather than as a whole block of text like a typical translator might do.

I wanted to dig around to see if I could find a solid answer and ended up going down a bunch of rabbit holes. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to find a conclusion, so I wanted there to be an article online with my theories/what I’d found, in case anyone else was looking and could use what I’d already found as [a] reference or jumping-off point. (I do intend on returning to it this year, hopefully…!)

Ecruteak Forest layout (April 2026)

While my experience with bootlegs is limited, I do recall seeing Pokémon Diamond & Jade versions when I was in school. At the time I thought they were official games, but they turned out to be bootlegged versions of Keitai Denjuu Telefang! How familiar are you with those titles?

Takoto:

I’m pretty sure “Pokémon Diamond & Jade” were partially responsible for me being super interested in bootlegs. I didn’t see them in person as a kid, but I did read a lot about them online with conflicting information about what they were and where they came from. When I learned more of the legitimate information, it opened me up to a lot of other similar games too like Network Adventure Bugsite (a personal favourite).

I’ve played Keitai Denjuu Telefang and really enjoyed it! Both the bootleg version and the English translation by Telefang.net. I think it’s a real shame that not many monster collecting games of the time really took off like Pokémon did, especially over here in the west, [as] there’s a lot of really cool designs in there.

Also present on your website is a bootleg log, a site that catalogues bootleg cartridges and multicarts which you own. What can you tell us about this?

Takoto:

During my search for more information on the origins of Vietnamese Crystal, I ended up in possession of a bunch of bootleg Pokémon game cartridges, plus some other miscellaneous multi-carts I grabbed at conventions. There’s only a handful of places online which catalogue that sort of thing, like the BootlegGames wiki and the associated forum (the people there are super cool, very knowledgeable and friendly), so I thought it’d be a good idea to formally document mine. I think bootlegs and early fan-translations get overlooked when it comes to preserving information about video game history, which is a shame.

It’s also a useful way of keeping track of what I’ve found. Unless something is my hyperfocus at the time, I can have a bit of difficulty remembering what I have and haven’t got or written about, so I worry about buying the same bootleg cartridge twice. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted the section to be simple and fast-loading, so if I find an interesting cartridge in person at a convention with really spotty internet, I can check quickly, ahah.

A page from Ecruteak Forest discussing Pokémon "Vietnamese" Crystal (April 2026)

You later expanded your content to include features and artwork. What was the reason behind this change?

Takoto:

For the other features, there’s one covering the differences in shiny colouration in the GameCube Pokémon games, which was really fun to do. It was sort of just me going down a rabbit hole of comparing different shiny palettes across the games after I’d noticed it on a couple of Pokémon. I also have a section now with links to a bunch of archived episodes of Inuyama Inuko’s Pokémon Hour, a pretty obscure Japanese radio show from the late 90s. I’ve got some old promo TCG magazines I need to scan at some point, too. I love preserving stuff like that.

For the artwork, I’ve been making Pokémon fanart for as long as I can remember, and whenever I’m looking at other people’s websites, if they have an art section I pretty much always check it out so it felt right to have a section to put some of my fanart up too. Illustration is one of my biggest hobbies; it kind of straddles the line of being a hobby vs. being a profession for me, as I’ve done it on commission before, but at the moment I have a very different day job. I’ve also made a few Pokémon emotes over the years for my friend’s Discord servers. I’ve come across people using them on Twitch, on forums, as reaction images, etc., and it’s always a great feeling to see people use them.

Despite being a rather modern website, Ecruteak Forest’s design was inspired by old fansites. Why did this design choice appeal to you?

Takoto:

It’s probably nostalgia but I love the look and feel of older websites. Even really busy, complicated older websites felt a lot more inviting than a lot of modern web design, and you can kind of get an idea of the personality and the other interests of the creator just by their design choices even if they’re using or building off of a pre-made website template.

I wanted something that was pretty straightforward to navigate, and would also work well with screen readers (especially for the articles). Originally I was going to use the same design as the main/front page for the article pages, but [I] ended up going with something a lot more open [that] had minimal visual clutter; I have dyslexia so I was pretty much just going for a design where the information would be laid out in a way that was super easy for me to read and wouldn’t look awkward if someone zoomed in or used high contrast colours on [it].

This wonderful artwork of Sprigatito was created by Takoto, and is one of many pieces of artwork on his website

Art is clearly a huge passion of yours, which became clear when browsing the fanart and emotes sections of Ecruteak Forest. How much impact has Pokémon had upon your artistic development?

Takoto:

A lot of the concepts in Pokémon and the style of creature design have definitely had an influence on how I draw. For my final project at University, I created a bestiary-style book of cryptids, creatures from folklore, and yokai-like entities that was very much inspired by the concept of the Pokédex (I’d love to revisit the idea in future again, too). With designing creatures, I don’t post them online at the moment as I have a project I want to put them in later down the line, but the whole process of creating a creature and thinking really in depth about how it interacts with the environment, other creatures, what it specialises in, etc. – I think I can tie that back to thinking about Pokémon in that sort of way as a kid and reading the Pokédex in-game a lot.

I would love to hear your Pokémon origin story and what it means to you! What are your earliest memories of the series?

Takoto:

I’d just come home from something, put the TV on and managed to catch around the second half of an anime episode. I'm pretty sure it was either “Clefairy and the Moon Stone” or “Electric Shock Showdown”. At the time I’d never seen anime before, so I was like “woah this style is so cool” and wanted to watch more. I didn’t really watch TV much so I hadn’t seen any adverts for it or the games, but I became pretty intent on watching it whenever it was on. My parents were both big into video games, so they already knew a bit about it, and a few months later they and my grandparents bought me a Game Boy Color and Pokémon Red and Blue for my birthday.

I’d played a lot of Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot on the PS1, but Pokémon was the first game I’d played that had a lot of text. I was pretty late when it came to reading up until that point, but something about Pokémon just hooked me and I began catching up in terms of reading proficiency and speed.

Something I remember weirdly vividly was my first time seeing the evolution animation in Red, probably the day after my birthday. My Dad was driving us to somewhere in Dorset to go to a car event he wanted to go to, which was about a three hour drive from where we lived at the time (which felt like the longest journey in the world, as a kid) and while we were parked at a service station, my Charmander evolved. I was so excited I managed to knock over an almost full bottle of cola onto the backseat.

Character artwork of the blue snake-like creature featured on "Pokémon Diamond Version", a bootleg version of Keitai Denjuu Telefang 1, by Takoto

When you’re not working on Ecruteak Forest, you’re a member of the Pokéthon Charity event. What can you tell us about that?

Takoto:

Oh yeah, Pokéthon! It unfortunately hasn’t run for a few years, but I’m still part of the Art & Design team if we do any future events. We raised money for DirectRelief, with the help of a lot of really cool Pokémon streamers and YouTubers.

I was primarily involved in doing sprite art for the trainer customization we had. During the event, people could dress up an avatar and it’d appear on-screen when they donated. I’d done some sprite art, mostly making little background tilesets or Gen 2 styled Pokémon sprites, but nothing quite on that scale. It was super fun! A lot of the clothing options I designed, but some were designed or suggested by other members of the Art & Design team too. I helped out with a bit of art outside of the sprite work, too, but most of it was done by the other Art & Design team members. I’m still mega happy I got to contribute to a charity event in such a big way.

I like to ask guests to share any special items or merchandise that mean something to them. What are yours?

Takoto:

I’ve got two I’d like to share! First is a promotional postcard my granddad sent me as a kid. Like with the Game Boy, my parents and grandparents clubbed together to get me a Nintendo 64 and Pokémon Stadium for my birthday one year, and he sent me this postcard as a kind of hint. My family have always been super supportive of my interests, and I have a lot of fond memories with my granddad of learning to play the TCG together.

Second is this bootleg Cyndaquil Pokémon card a friend gifted me years ago from their childhood collection. It's actually a sticker but I’ve never peeled it. I love the old sticker versions of Pokémon cards that used to be available (it’s a shame they don’t make them anymore), and given my fondness for bootlegs, it was a funny and thoughtful gift. It ended up as a bit of a good luck charm during my exams at college and university; I kept it in my wallet for many years.

A promotional postcard given to Takoto by his grandad when he was a child

A bootleg card of Cyndaquil and Typhlosion, given to Takoto by his friend

Takoto, it has been great speaking with you! To wrap this up, do you have any closing comments you would like to make to our readers or visitors of Ecruteak Forest?

Takoto:

Firstly, thank you so much! It was a surprise to be reached out to, but not an unwelcome one at all (I’ve been reading articles on Johto Times for a while now).

Secondly, to readers, I can’t recommend enough to make a website. Even if it’s something small, or you only update it once or twice. It can be a great place to leave notes for yourself while playing games that can potentially help others in future, or to list out your favourite Pokémon and why you like them, or to put all your writing and fanart in one place. I’m planning on adding a list onto Ecruteak Forest’s Misc section soon with links to a bunch of websites that have templates and web materials, which’ll probably be updated whenever I find cool stuff.

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We would like to thank Takoto for taking the time to answer our questions, and for helping us learn more about Ecruteak Forest! We wish him the very best of luck with his website and his work through the Pokéthon charity event!

Interview conducted on: March 8th, 2026
Interview published on: April 30th, 2026