I am Generation 1’s strongest soldier.

- Small limited inventory makes you actually consider every item you pick up and I think that’s neat. Putting this one at the start to filter anyone who can’t stand the idea of someone defending gen 1 inventory management. But if you actually go through and check what items you need and what ones you don’t every so often you won’t often cap out on bag space and you’ll probably make a good bit of money from all the vitamins and TMs and other random stuff you don’t really need. It’s just another aspect of preparation, and it makes sense for prep to be important when setting out on an adventure.

- The region layout is fun, there’s just enough freedom to let you poke around in places where you don’t really belong. It’s probably a bit awkward to navigate for someone getting into it for the first time, but on the other hand the lack of explicit guidance or scripted events benefit the sense of freedom - both in the literal exploration of the region (though it is a little more railroaded than I remember early on), and thematically in allowing it to feel like your own journey (something I find important in a Pokemon game, where the core mechanic of catching and teambuilding leans heavily into individuality).

- The region thematically is probably the most compelling. It’s incredibly ‘raw’ - putting its warts fully on display and having 10 year old kids freely wander around in it all. Future games have your protagonist take on moustache-twirling supervillains whose plans are varying degrees of nonsense, whereas Team Rocket acts and operates very much how Yakuza organisations might do (limited knowledge of this admittedly), with parallels to real life such as the Game Corner acting as both a front for their operations as well as mirroring the legal loopholes real-life pachinko parlours use to evade gambling laws (social commentary, in *my* Pokemon game??). There’s so many cute, weird and uncomfortable little details there to pick up on that sell the workings of the region, no matter how weird, with a joyful yet disarming honesty. (One of the less serious, more entertaining things I picked up on was that the Fighting Dojo lost its gym status because they got the shit kicked out of them by the Psychic gym which, like, yeah of course they did! It’s funny, but it’s also an interesting look into how the world actually functions.)

- The game has the purest and most unfiltered vision of a 'complete' Pokemon experience. Filling the dex is heavily encouraged/mandatory (you wouldn’t use a map for Rock Tunnel, would you…….), though admittedly not handled with the most elegance, and in-game trades are much more frequent than later games, as well as being more desirable - there’s a good few Pokemon that are otherwise unobtainable, and in Yellow in particular you can just get a Machamp from an in-game trade! Though exploration and battling are clearly at the forefront, it puts much more emphasis on these other elements of Pokemon that would end up being eroded away over time. (Admittedly features like the GTS and Wonder Trade help keep trading alive, though those two definitely have their own issues)

- Barren movesets and HMs come together in a really strange way. Moveslots have the least value out of any Pokemon game in most cases because most of your options just aren’t that good, so you’ll be sticking to your few good ones. This makes HMs easier than ever to slot onto your team! You can have a slot taken by Flash or Cut or even Dig or Teleport for the whole game and you probably won’t feel it all that much! Not to mention that half the mandatory HMs - Surf and Strength - are actually just really good moves (more than half if you’re not using Flash, but you WOULDN’T use a map for Rock Tunnel, WOULD you???).

- When Pikachu faints it makes the most horrifying blood-curdling scream that a GB could ever produce and I think that’s awesome

Sure there are more than enough valid criticisms of these games and I still can’t blame anyone for not liking them. Someone in the 8th gym used tackle on me. Tackle! Like I don’t mind the limited movesets that much but I think that’s a bit excessive. But I think they tend to get weirdly overhated nowadays and for reasons that don’t really make much sense? Either complaining about very specific quirks and glitches (‘The AI is so bad!!’, I yell, as I intentionally send out a poison type to make Lorelei’s Dewgong spam Rest), or comparing them to later entries when they are not those later entries (limited movesets being a big one, I won’t fight tooth and nail to defend them but they really don’t feel as bad as you’d expect coming from, like, Gen 4 onwards). And I think there’s a lot of value in these silly little games that’s easy to overlook.

Memory Lane time!

When I was a much younger Goddess, I ended up getting in serious trouble, they took my TV, SNES and N64 away and my Gameboy for doing a bad in school. A couple months later, it was Halloween. I was dressed as a Power Ranger, walking to house to house to get that good ol' candy (back when Halloween was a huge event and get candy by the pound, lol).
I got to a certain house and the couple came out and said that I was the 100th trick or treater, and they gave me a box in my bag. What was it that they gave me? It was the Special Pikachu Edition Gameboy with Pokemon Yellow. That system was awesome, being blue and yellow and having a Pikachu graphic on the corners of the screen. It's one of the more fond memories I have of my childhood.
With that being said, reviewing Yellow ends up with me being a little nostalgic for it. It's basically Pokemon Blue but with some elements of the Anime. Your starter being Pikachu was, for me, awesome. He followed you around and you can even check how he feels, and he talks in this! And Team Rocket's Jessie and James were also in this game, and i loved that as well. Other than that it's that classic Pokemon game that you know and love.
Gameplay is still solid but very basic in the modern times. The difficulty could range here and there but as long as yo fight every trainer you come across it shouldn't be too hard. The music will always be the major highlight here, some of the best video game songs in general stem from the 1st generation. Even the graphics are pretty good for the time, and since it's on Gameboy, the colors of the towns change as you walk through them, it was pretty novel at the time for me.
It's a basic Pokemon game that has Pikachu up front and center for everyone to see, and that's okay. Nostalgia does hold this up for me and you can probably see why. I DID play this somewhat recently on the 3DS, thinking i wasn't gonna enjoy it as much but honestly, it's still a good time.
Definitely a must play for me, do it for the Pika!

This was actually the first Pokemon game I ever played, but I never finished it! Borrowing from a neighbour aged 5 or so, I only properly raised a Pidgeot up to level 65ish, which couldn't do the League alone. So yeah, it's nice to finally beat this one with a proper team, Pidgeot included.

Going back to Gen 1, it's interesting how much more of an old-school RPG this is. All the stuff we're glad to see the back of in Pokemon games with more sophisticated battle mechanics, such as limited bag space, HMs, and huge dungeons, are actually what keep this game compelling. It's not so much about the moment-to-moment battling as the bigger picture of travelling and dungeoneering, planning item space and such.

These RPG elements work in tandem with more player agency in figuring out where to go and a generally more open game design. The journey feels so much more personal to the player that way, even if we're all ultimately doing the same things. After a certain point in the game, a lot opens up to you, it's cool! There are some cities with a couple different routes to get to them, so I outright just skipped some parts of this game and it felt good.

Of course, poor programming undeniably brings the game down. Focus Energy halving crit-chance instead of doubling it is but a single example. However, the overall structure of the game is so appealing to me, I'm willing to forgive a lot of bad.

Sempre gostei muito do anime de Pokemon, mas os jogos não me chamavam atenção.
Quase nenhum jogo da Nintendo me chama atenção, tanto que quem baixou este jogo foi um amigo meu.

Mesmo não tendo espectativas nenhuma, eu adorei esse jogo.
Capturar e colecionar Pokémons enquanto é acompanhado de uma trilha-sonora marcante é uma tarefa divertida, e jamais repetitiva. Apesar do excesso de combates com Pokémons selvagens e treinadores ser um problema grave, a exploração deste mundo ainda sim adiciona bastante a jogabilidade, com várias regiões espalhadas pelo mapa, cada uma tem um ginásio que recompensa novas mecânicas de exploração, para abrir passagens ou navegar os mares, tanto faz. Com isso, uma área sempre tem um conteúdo que será desbloqueado após você adquirir estes novos itens e mecânicas, criando um fator replay orgânico e interessante.
O fator principal do jogo, o combate de Pokemons não tem muito o que comentar, é bem parecido com qualquer outro J-RPG; funciona no que propõe e tem recompensas justas.

Pokemon Yellow é um ótimo jogo para quem está começando na franquia assim como eu, afinal, é um dos primeiros. Apesar da quantidade exagerada de combates, tem em um mundo muito interessante de explorar, combate divertido, história legal e uma grande variedade de criaturas.
8/10

Time final: Zapdos, Articuno, Moltres, Fearow, Onyx e Hypno (solei o quarteto fantástico facinho hehe)

please... dont complete the entire pokedex, even with the 151 patch
its miserable and you'll hate yourself


fun game tho 7/10

Gen 1 is a mess of glitches and terrible type balancing, bad move pools, annoying HMs, and a pretty steep spike to the level curve going from the final gym to the Elite Four. However, I still just love the entire experience so much, especially how open Kanto feels to the player, all of the strangely dark things that never really appeared in the franchise again that are just sprinkled throughout this otherwise really simplistic and childis story, and trying out new weird teams every playthrough (Pikachu, Nidoqueen, Farfetch'd, Hypno, Dewgong, and Ninetales this playthrough, by the way.)

Honestly prefer the weird sprite work from Red and Blue over Yellow's more refined ones, but otherwise a game I really can't find too many things I don't like about it.

36:18 horas de jogo nesse clássico aqui, num emulador chinês portátil. A experiência foi boa, mas o fato de eu ter demorado quase 5 meses pra terminar não é o melhor indicativo do mundo.

Pokémon Yellow num (quase) gameboy color é uma experiência divertida e é ótimo pra jogar no carro quando você está voltando do trabalho ou esperando algo. De 20 em 20 minutos você vai avançando e se distraindo.

Infelizmente, como ele tem pouco texto, acho que só dá pra de fato aproveitar uma história se você estiver assistindo o desenho junto, mas quem liga pra história num game velho de Pokémon?

No quesito jogabilidade, esse aqui tem menos golpes que o Emerald que eu joguei logo antes, mas ainda há variedade.

O endgame te pune até um pouco por não grindar bastante e a Elite dos Quatro é até desafiadora, se não fosse meu estoque de item de cura provavelmente não teria feito na first try.

Me desafiei usando um time só com Pokemon que combinassem com a miniatura da tela de visualização do time, então foi Pikachu, Clefable, Nidoking, Victrebell, Dewgong e Pidgeot. O comecinho até foi mais complexo, mas do terceiro ginásio pra frente tirei de letra.

Gostosinho pra quem gosta de Pokemon, as cores são bonitas e os sprites charmosos. Entretanto, meio lento se você não for acostumado com a franquia ou com jogo velho.

Não há motivo para visitar esse aqui a não ser nostalgia, pois Fire Red, Leaf Green e Let's go Eevee & Pikachu são versões mais completas, mas acho que NADA barra esses jogos da primeira geração se você quiser se sentir uma criança de novo, especialmente se assim como eu você jogava nos gameboys emprestados por que era um moleque pobre.

PS: ter que trocar a BOX quando ela enche de pokemon é MUITO frustrante, no meu aftergame eu fui atrás do Mewtwo e não consegui pegar por que A BOX ESTAVA CHEIA, fiquei muito bolado. É um detalhe que atrapalha muito. Não é como o storage de itens que é pequeno e você fica jogando coisa fora pra caber, por que isso aumenta até a dificuldade e exige uma preparação, a BOX de pokémon é só um estorvo mesmo.

Knowledge of game design is a curse, akin to having the flavor of steak forever ruined by the awareness of The Matrix programming you to like it, and you can probably count in one hand the games that predate that red pill moment when gaming language forever became familiar and predictable to you. Pokemon Yellow was fortunately one of those games for me, a joyous moment of my childhood where my whole life existed inside a small square screen that could fit inside my pocket and whose 2D 8-bit walls felt as far away from my grasp as my imagination and curiosity were willing to go.

Picking it up nowadays, more than 20 years since that precious moment of my life where I gladly devoted myself to it, the feeling is a bittersweet one. With its secrets, surprises and discoveries now obsolete, the rudimentary gameplay fails to engage, and its combat is one of mindless grind and broken mechanics that are only challenged by the occasional difficulty spike, once a compelling puzzle to be solved as kid, now serving only to expose the game’s more blatant weaknesses.

Its magic wasn’t totally lost on me just yet, however. The sudden color pallet changes when arriving at a new area, the simplest of chiptunes that were instantly recognizable on note one, the kinesthetic pleasure of speeding through its routes with a newly acquired bike and its cheerful theme, and the occasional excitement at the sight of a personal favorite, managed to sustain my interest throughout its primitive JRPG nature, as it quickly took a backseat to the core allure and fun that made this the biggest franchise of all time, one that never fails to leave you in a state of impending suspense as you watch your pokeball twitch its way into a new catch or fill you with excitement as you witness your personalized team finally evolve after your hard effort, regardless if you already know what it will turn into or not.

Reviewing Pokemon Yellow in a vacuum is nonetheless a fruitless endeavor, considering so much of its purpose and qualities are tied to the social aspect that was so crucial to the Pokemon mania of the 90s, leaving the game itself in an incomplete state whose true experience is forever inaccessible to the ones who are unfortunate to not have lived through those magical years. Think of it as trying to relive the early days of your favorite MMO, it’s just not possible, is it? Nostalgia is a double-edged sword, and it’s no truer than in Pokemon Yellow’s case. Still, climbing the ranks through every Gym and surviving the Elite Four gauntlet so you can slap the grin off the face of Blue with your ever trustworthy Pikachu remains a satisfying throwback to a time when I would gladly listen to fake rumors on how to catch Mew from dumb kids at school.

One of the hardest Pokemon games no doubt.
(If you don't intentionally search for how to cheese the hell out of this game)

So many training arcs with different Pokemon, but still all late game gyms were out leveling me. Kind of poetic how you can't evolve your Pikachu and Gary ends up evolving his Eevee, the main character (you) values the bonds vs Gary that values strength and nothing else. It was a fun twist to have the following Pikachu without getting to choose, truly an unique Pokemon game experience. I also noticed there was possible to store items inside the PC after 20 hours into the game, I tossed so many items because of that - ahhhhhhhhh ...

It's hard to say if this is an improvement on Red and Blue.

Pros:
- You can get a Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Squirtle easily in one run without trading
- Jesse and James are featured in the game instead of just nameless Rocket grunts
- When played on GBC or newer hardware, color palettes shift from city to city
- Better sprite designs
- Charizard can actually learn Fly now

Cons:
- You don't have any choice of what Pokemon you start with
- You HAVE to use a Pikachu that can't evolve
- The Surfing Pikachu minigame is gated behind beating Pokemon Stadium or attending an event 20+ years ago
- The Old Man in Viridian City who shows you how to catch a Pokemon can't be skipped now
- No more Missingno. Cinnabar Island item duplication glitch

There are some neat new perks, but the game almost feels worse purely by not letting you choose your starter, and sticking you with one that's nerfed because it can't evolve.

This may be Pikachu's game, but that Pikachu belongs in the PC.

Pretty fun as a nice challenge, as some who knows FireRed like the back of their hand, to go back to this one and try and beat it with all the first generation’s weird quirks, oddities, and limitations. Was worried I was going to need a lot of grinding, but my champion rival was a pretty easy feat, with limited healing items, to boot! Also just serves as a fun challenge because you have to account for Pikachu, a little guy with low HP and defense whose only real perks are its amazing speed and that it learns Thunderbolt naturally. I kept him leveled ahead of all the other teammates more and more as enemies became stronger and the little rodent held its own the whole way. ‘Red, Blue, and Yellow Versions’ are miracles in so many ways, and I feel like people like to dog on them, now, because it’s easy to look back at ‘Red Version’, in particular and go “wow, that game is ugly as shit and barely runs,” but isn’t that just the magic of game programming? Honestly felt like the 3DS version kinda had some porting bumps that made the game act odd (probably a result of tweaking some flashing lights and sprites when they ported this). I mean, at the end of the day I’m pretty proud of myself for actually going ahead and beating a Generation 1 game for the first time. Liked my team a lot, too, I don’t know how I keep finding ways to make the Kanto Pokédex interesting. Shout out to Fearow, the underdog MVP of my league run.

I wanted to give this game another go for old times’ sake, and man… while there’s a specific Feel Gen 1 has, I always find myself sorely missing the quality of life features from later games. This game is so limiting in terms of team composition, and I’m so glad that we as a society have moved past HMs requiring a move slot on not very many Pokémon. It’s still pretty flexible, but I had a very specific team in mind (it was Yellow’s team from the Pokemon Special manga) and it became a real pain when I realized none of those critters learned Cut.

I do like the kind of edge of your seat level advantage the E4 ended up having over me, and dang, Pikachu is a cute little critter. It’s still a lot easier to replay later games in the series.

Although I am glad the Virtual Console release included the Surfing Pikachu minigame! I didn’t get any of the eligible Pikachu back in the day so it was nice to finally experience it, even if it wasn’t that impressive.

Pokémon was counterculture.

It's hard to believe that now, given what Pokémon has become, but the original Pokémon games were made by an indie team of nerds who wanted to make a different Dragon Quest in their own image. So much of that heritage and identity is baked into the first Generation's design. We take it for granted now, since subsequent generations tend to ape Gen 1's template and are almost unto their own as a genre, but if you know what to look for, you can see all the hallmarks of it. Little things like the near-future setting instead of high fantasy, legendary Pokémon as your jRPG superbosses, Voltorb/Electrode being cyberpunk Mimics, the Game Corner as an evolution of Dragon Quest's casinos, deliberate monster design consideration for how boss encounters are paced out (Onix is a scary early boss that becomes a standard encounter in mid-game and essentially a trash mob by the end), etc. I tend not to think of later Pokémon in this way, but that's the main image I have for Gen 1.

Pokémon Yellow, specifically, feels like the first core game for the series made as a mainstream phenomenon rather than a product of counterculture. You could make arguments for the Japanese Blue Version or the International Red/Blue Versions, but the way I see it - Japanese Blue was a surprised thanks from Game Freak for Red/Green's success, and Red/Blue were experiments to see if the success could be replicated outside of Japan. Yellow was made because the series was successful enough to warrant a TV show, and that TV show became a separate phenomenon. Yellow exists in an interesting place, then - it's a trendy response to the success and is thus the first mainline Pokémon game designed to be a Pokémon game rather than an RPG. At the same time, it couldn't change that much of its Gen 1 template, so it still retains those counterculture artifacts. Gen 2 as a whole would experience this as well, given the timing of its dev cycle, but it's perhaps at its most pronounced with Yellow, where the sleek new sprites and expansive Pikachu friendship mechanics exist side-by-side with the grungy counterculture design that made Gen 1 what it was.

I've always had sort of an odd relationship with Gen 1 Pokémon. I was into the anime from day 1 and collected the cards, but I didn't own any (non-PC) video games until the start of Gen 3. I got Crystal first, then Sapphire and Yellow in pretty rapid succession, so a lot of my experiences with the first three generations' core games were formed around the same time. Of those, Yellow held my attention the least, but more because it wasn't the new hotness than anything. A lot of my appreciation for the first generation's games have come after the fact, as people growing up with the titles have gotten old enough to articulate what made them so interesting and so different. I always liked Yellow, I just didn't get it until later on.

Later than this particular playthrough, even; I mostly have modern PokéTubers to thank for my current respect for Gen 1. But I will say this playthrough was a turning point for me. I revisited Yellow for the first time in years for an early Designing For video. I'd long before abandoned my Yellow playthrough and had contented myself with clearing Blue as my first-gen playthrough. But my friends needed B-roll footage, and I was happy to oblige. I had until that point been someone who loaded up on power moves and brute forced my way through every encounter (in Sapphire, I taught my Kyogre Sheer Cold and kept it as a regular part of its moveset), but I decided to give status moves a go this time. Largely because movesets are so limited, and you're starved for options otherwise. Sure enough, I found myself leaning into 'em. I remember being proud of myself for beating the Champion's Jolteon in a close fight because I tried using Thunder Wave rather than just trying to overpower it! Maybe a silly thing in retrospect, but it felt like a grew a bit then.

There's a stereotype for the kind of person who holds onto Gen 1 as the only valid generation. I get annoyed by that - even ignoring that my favorite Pokémon generation was yet to come, I detest such thought-terminating viewpoints - but it's also a pet peeve to see folks who act like any sort of Gen 1 favoritism is someone being/catering to "Gen Wunners". Like I said at the beginning, early Pokémon was counterculture in ways that the phenomenon has never been able to replicate. I can completely understand someone preferring to hold onto that.

Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow started a series that would end up becoming a monolith of game history, but it’s not easy to tell what game design landed them in the hall of fame at first glance. Monster collection RPGs had already been an established sub-genre in Japan, after all. Though when I look back to what first transfixed me about Pokémon, I see one obvious lead. Pokémon really felt like it was my own journey, and then its social aspects let me compare my journey to others. Your Pokémon adventure wasn’t going to be exactly like anyone else’s, and every team member would have a history and grow up by the end of the game—And then you fight! Pokémon had delicately sprinkled Tamagotchi game design over a fine foundation of D&D era team building concepts. Alongside this, the games focused on a modern day setting in which you’re a kid growing up in an urban fantasy world, where everyone is in on the same thing as you. Pokémon had this fantastical sports fantasy-esque pitch to it; it didn’t even need a compelling villain for the setting to immediately bring something vivid to the eyes of many.

You explore this setting through a grid-based constant overworld, with towns connected to each other through straightforward routes. Certainly a casualization compared to other RPGs of the time, but it’s a choice that has aged very well. Even some Final Fantasy games are built like this now! Pokémon Red and Blue have solid pacing as well, Gyms lay out an easy-to-track goalpost of progress. More uniquely in comparison to games to come, Red and Blue follow a very strict formula of having dungeons between every single Gym (although the game doesn’t make you do them exactly in that order). There’s some clear game designerly intent behind the early dungeons: Viridian Forest teaches you to manage your health against status effects in larger areas, Mt. Moon forces you to deal with encounters before you obtain repels, and Rock Tunnel teaches you the importance of Hidden moves. Unlike future games, there’s also a ton of variety in what order to play through the game. Everything from Celadon to Fuchsia can be played in whatever order – you can go to every area in the game (except the League) with only 4 Gym Badges. The best part of this isn’t just the non-linearity, it’s that there’s always going to be trainers you can fight if you’re under-leveled.

Fighting in the singleplayer campaign of this game is split between unique battles and taking your time to get some catches. Especially returning to this game immediately after playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus, it’s easy to see that catching in this game is a bit messy. On one hand, catching is a pure numbers game, with catching being available at any percentage of health, but damage and status effects making Pokémon easier to catch. This is good, since catching would be a very monotonous process otherwise. On the other hand, the game’s math encourages brute forcing a bit too much, especially when weakening a Pokémon you want is so scary with the damage potential of random critical hits. Beyond the faults in the experience of catching itself, Pokémon catching feels inherently rewarding. Knowing that any Pokémon you capture could become essential to your experience makes completing the Pokédex feel worthwhile.
Though for all of the aspects of personalization to feel rewarding, the battles need to work well, and they’re decent. More than later games, the combat is slow paced and often broken down by things like Wrap and sleep status effects. You don’t get strong elemental attacks until much further into the game; there’s a big chunk of time where a lot of Pokémon fight with strong normal type attacks instead. This makes the game feel a bit more methodical at times, and makes the game feel much duller at other times. Pokémon is an easy game, unless you don’t want it to be easy. I didn’t grind at all in my latest playthrough, and I beat the final boss with all of my team being 20 levels below their opponents, and that was pretty satisfying.
What really sets apart Pokémon from other RPGs is that you could take your Pokémon into battles against your friends. It’s hard to rate Pokémon PVP, because there’s so many factors to what makes battling friends interesting that exist outside of the PVP itself; the balancing is literally what you and your friends decide it to be. Having that option really just heightens the whole experience, the feeling that every choice matters because you could eventually take these Pokémon into a fight for real. It’s really the type of game design you see in a lot of games now, having something you can really apply your game knowledge to in a meaningful way beyond just the campaign of a game itself.
This game also has some glitches, it’s kind of infamous for it at this point. Most of the glitches you see in a run are miscellaneous rushed programming resulting in faulty mechanics. The most interesting bugs you can find are things you have to do very intentionally – usually defined by memory manipulation. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to seriously critique this game as buggy when most of the faults of the game are oversights that you might not even notice in the runtime of a single playthrough. Personally, I love a lot of the weirder, harder to activate glitches. Something about manipulating the game into getting weird things to happen was so intriguing to me after playing it normally for so long. But I certainly wouldn’t want stuff like Focus Energy not working to persist into future games, it is a flaw.

The game’s presentation has aged dubiously. The overworld looks totally fine for a Game Boy game, but some of those Pokémon sprites were really weird. Even the Yellow version keeps the old back sprites, which often display the design incoherently, even having factual errors about them. The music sounds pretty good though; not exactly good in quality as Link’s Awakening for example, but it’s a deservingly iconic Game Boy soundtrack.
Finally regarding Pokémon Yellow version itself, this isn’t a luxury definitive edition or anything. It reminds me of a holiday themed reskin of a game; it has that amount of substance to it. It would’ve been worth critiquing back in the day as a shallow re-release, but these days it’s fair to regard it as the best version to replay the games through by default. Those new battle sprites are just that good.

The real thing that makes Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow so interesting to go back to is that everything that I’ve ever loved Pokémon was in this game already. The feeling of going on a personal adventure with a team that I had nicknamed and given personalities to. The social aspects of the game that allow me to heighten my experience through friends. Everything was already here, from the very beginning. If anything, that’s probably why these games become so easy to compare and downplay compared to sequels; Pokémon is still about these exact same things, it’s just better at them now. But just as Pokémon already had everything it’s ever been good at, it already was a game you didn’t have love everything about. You didn’t have to play Pokémon for the collecting, you didn’t have to play it with friends, you didn’t even have to feel invested in your team, you could just play it, and it’d be a good role playing game. You could play it again, and have a completely different experience, and you’d know it was one of the best experiences on the Game Boy. You could even play it now, despite all that lost polish, and you could appreciate that this game knew exactly what it wanted to be.

gamefreak were playin the long con here. u start Blue vers. right? water or fire or grass. do the whole game w them haha nice.
anime drops. little mouse freak u overlooked is the star. what the hell? new game drops with him as the starter. hell yeah right? wrong!
the first gym just crreeeeeams ya. now u gotta go hodgepodge a crack team of lil nothings together in order to progress

so yeah u could say this one left an impression on me. somethings gotta be done about these cartoon mice

This was the first Pokémon game I ever played. At the ripe old age of six, I had no idea what I was doing, but I had watched the anime enough to know that Pikachu ain't got shit on Brock's Onix, at least not without straight up cheating.

With not an ounce of understanding of the game mechanics in my empty little head, I'd catch me some cute Pokeymans in Viridian Forest (completely oblivious to the Mankeys you could find to the west), and then I'd take my electric rat and my cute birds and bugs and unsuccessfully throw them against Brock until I ran out of money. No more Potions for mid-fight heals, no more Pokéballs to catch stronger Caterpies. I effectively softlocked myself from progressing out of Pewter City. Then I would restart my save file and try it all again: same strategy, no changes. I was having fun just walking around with my Pikachu, and that's all I needed.

It's impossible to convey just how many times I restarted this damn game in an endless loop of defeat at the hands of the first gym leader. But I can tell you that each time I did, I paid a little less attention to the intro sequence, and I put a little less care into the name of the player character and his rival. By this time, I had all but given up on the idea of victory over that Pewter City bastard and was content just vibin' around in the forest like my idol, Ash Ketchum. Who cares what my name is if I'm just gonna reset the save again in another hour? All I cared about was raising another Butterfree, maybe a stronger one this time!

Then it happened. By some cosmic miracle, my little Nidoran♀ managed to take down an Onix. Blood, sweat, and tears fell from my teal Game Boy Color that day, and an entire route of new content opened up before my little eyes. I was awestruck. Even then, I recognized the incredible amount of luck that the universe just bestowed upon me, and I was not gonna tempt fate by restarting that save file now. I was committed.

And that, my friends, is how the legend of ASHpkmn♂♀ was born.