Pokemon's in-game currency is heavily based on the Japanese Yen, which is why a single bottle of water costs 200 Pokedollars and a bicycle is famously priced at a completely absurd 1 million Pokedollars.

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Pokemon's in-game currency is heavily based on the Japanese Yen, which is why a single bottle of water costs 200 Pokedollars and a bicycle is famously priced at a completely absurd 1 million Pokedollars. Western children playing the early Game Boy titles were deeply traumatized by the hyper-inflated economy of the Kanto region, unaware that they were just experiencing standard exchange rates without the context of a decimal point. It paints a deeply dystopian picture of this colorful monster-catching universe, where a ten-year-old child is forced to wander the wilderness engaging in illegal dogfighting just to afford a basic mode of transportation. The protagonist's mother casually sends her child out into a world filled with fire-breathing dragons and literal ghosts with nothing but a smile and a few bucks, completely abandoning her parental duties to the cold hands of a brutal free-market economy. Catching them all is entirely secondary to simply surviving this capitalist nightmare