As a follow up to Gold and Silver, Crystal adds a lot of quality of life and even some story beats that weren't there initially, but it fails to deliver on the "definitive version" feel that later third-version Pokémon games would come to represent. As a continuation to the first generation games, however, I always thought the Johto games fall short, even in their later, amazing remakes, as both a story and a content expansion. Underexplored places, an awkward pacing, and few new Pokémon of note are some of my grips with generation 2, even though I still hold it dear.

Beyond the interesting day and night mechanic that syncs with real life time (which makes for an organic sense of wildlife sleep cycles), it's still a Pokemon game that now didn't have the benefit of having been an innovative and technically impressive 8 bit feat like the first generation, and not reinventing itself is still a world that's so obssessed with these creatures there will be veterinary hospitals for them but not a single one for humans and NPC dialogue is still really cheesy.

Completed together with the Kanto post-game as a sign of respect for Takeshi Shudo, who wrote a flawed but extremely interesting and kind of surreal third Pokemon movie based on this generation. He's also the guy who designed Lugia, though he intended the creature to be exclusive to the second movie and Game Freak just plunged it into this game against his demands. As such I didn't capture that Pokemon as I want it to have the mystical aspect Shudo intended for the second movie.

Am I pretentious? Go tell Game Freak to pretend to have a decent looking game instead of those Switch pieces of crap!