We were young, and we were still learning. Coming into our own, yet still not quite there.

The second generation was much like some of us who had experienced the series from the beginning as bright eyed and optimistic children. Maturing, finding our footing in life, and trying to figure things out for what we really wanted out of our future. Do we continue onward with our current path and continue developing our skill? Are we seeking to make a career of said skill? Those drawings bearing a similar crudeness to generation one sprites that we etched on the back of our tests, those little characters that you made from your own two hands and the ocean of your imagination. They would need to be refined, perhaps to the point you would be sick of seeing them again through the months and months of practice. We struck gold on something we were good at, but were we ready to make this our life? How do we get ready for life? Would we even make it to that path we dreamed of?

For us, this was the sequel. A sequel to childhood, and the path to maturity.

If we were to get ready for life, we would need to learn how to maintain a schedule and utilize a form of communication to keep in touch with our contacts. Through our little battery-powered clock in our cartridges, we kept track of the time of day in order to search for different friends on different paths. We would remember what day it was, so we could participate in a bug catching contest and try to find that Scyther. If we couldn't get up in the morning early enough to catch a Ledyba, what good were we in participating in life? It was at this point we were starting to get into the thick of things, we weren't children anymore, but teenagers who aspired to be more like adults. We were excited of all that upcoming opportunity that would only be granted to us with age, and with that age in due time came responsibility and expectations to provide. Life would soon not be all about fun anymore.

It was soon time to grow up, and perhaps move away from home to master our craft elsewhere...

It's hard however to leave behind everything that you grew up with. We traveled to Johto to learn how to better ourselves, perhaps like the bike shop owner who got unlucky on their new shop placement in Goldenrod, but for us it wasn't truly home. We would long for our old pals, our old hangout spots, and our favorite order from our childhood fast food place. We desired a return trip home to Kanto, so we can say hello to everybody one last time before we begin our life's career. Home however, wasn't quite the same as we had remembered. Forests were chopped down, caves were cleared out, and Lavender Town's place of remembrance had been converted into a radio tower. Kanto has changed, or has it matured like us? Resources have been plundered for practical use over the thoughts of those who had lived there, and spirituality has been pushed to the side in the name of technological advancement. Have we lost our way, or is this what is to be expected of us in the future?

When I finally climb this mountain and end this visit home, what will await me at it's peak?

The last lingering strand of childhood I had left made manifest, the past me armed with the very first friends I had made on this adventure. If I must let go of the past, I must defeat the longing memories of what once was. Even if I were victorious, will the memories finally rest or will they continue pursuing me? With the destruction of the past, we make way for the future. This is the way. This is the way we grow up. We no longer have room for trifling matters such as our childhood friends, memories, or the places we once held dear. It's time to make way for adulthood and to only go forward without ever looking back. Home is no longer home, it's no longer even a memory for us, it was thrown back into the toybox where it belonged. With this we continue our adventure elsewhere, and we leave everything behind. It was a fad, and it's time to bury those McDonalds toys and trading cards in a box or sell them off in a yard sale.

It was never to be the same again, for we have both grown up. Us now simple mature adults, and them a fully-realized juggernaut of a franchise with no end in sight. We've defeated our childhood, there was no reason to keep going with this series obviously geared towards what we had grown out of. We could take a peek once in a while to check on them when they make the television, but we would do so with a look over our shoulder to try and maintain our mask of adulthood and maturity. It was time to only watch mature programming, and play mature games while doing other such mature things, like swearing while our parents weren't around. This is what is expected of us now, it's time to leave it behind to the next generation who will grow with the next set of games, whom may also leave once they have grown past it....with another generation to follow.....and the cycle repeats....

My time was over, much like Kanto and the Game Boy, but despite what life and middle school demanded of me, I would never be too far away.

I am home, I always have been.

Man, remember when Pokémon actually tried? These games used to feel like an actual adventure with dungeon-esque sections and optional content that was cool to discover.

Game Freak will never top the moment in the gen 2 games where you surf to the right of New Bark Town and are told you stepped into Kanto. Then you realize you have 8 more badges to collect. You get to go through Kanto and see what has changed over the years. You also have stuff like the roaming legendary beasts, fighting Red, introduction of Pokémon breeding and shiny collecting, etc. It's kind of crazy how much new stuff this gen had.

Gen 2 was almost too ambitious because it just made gen 3 look lame in comparison. The taking out of features was almost an omen of things to come.

This is the only game that I have nostalgia goggles for that are so big they eclipse my whole god damn head. Replaying it now after not touching it for a few years there are so many weird little quirks that only make sense as an adult who understands the troubled development it went through. I think the fact it's so rough around the edges in so many ways while still feeling polished and pushing Pokemon so far forward as a franchise just hits on something magical to me that I don't really know how to explain.

(english): my favorite Pokemon game without a shadow of a doubt, I played it for the first time this year, it was the Pokemon game that had the most fun for me, the mechanics and typings added to the game created a wider range, where I felt like a child playing Pokemon for the first time.
It's an absurd 5 stars.

Português: meu jogo de Pokemon favorito sem sombra de duvidas, joguei pela primeira vez esse ano, foi o jogo de Pokemon que mais me divertiu, as mecânicas e tipagens adicionados no jogo criaram um leque maior, onde me senti uma criança jogando Pokemon pela primeira vez.
é um 5 estrelas absurdo

Potencialmente hablando, Scizor sale muy temprano. Puedes conseguir a Scyther en el Concurso de captura de bichos, cerca de Ciudad Trigal (¡tercer gimnasio!). Esa es la parte fácil: la parte difícil es conseguir el Revestimiento metálico, el cual solo sale con 2% de probabilidades de Magnemites salvajes, los cuales salen en la ruta al oeste de Ciudad Iris.

En consecuencia, tengo que situar este juego en S tier.

Ese botón de "Abandoned" está muy tentador pero me niego a que Johto me derrote.

I've always felt like I haven't heard a rearrangement of this game's soundtrack that quite matches what it sounds like in my head. For as luxurious as HGSS's are, I'd say that Gold and Silver's soundtrack remind me most of 80s sophistipop and city pop-isms - the careful decoration of its backing jingles so pleasantly bouncing off the optimistic lead melodies. I swear I can just hear exactly where the strings and gentle acoustic guitar would go in some of these tracks. Love how evocatively the Surf Theme captures multiple instruments playfully riffing off each other.
In general, it's just a very beautiful Gameboy game. Been thinkin about Viridian Forest being "cut down" in your revisit of GSC; despite being due to a memory shortage, it feels so in line with what it wants you to feel by returning to Kanto. For every landmark that has expanded, there's also just a little something lost, sometimes to an even spiteful extent; the graveyard in Lavender being replaced by a radio station is fucking cynical lol.
It's pretty well-known that Pokemon as a series was inspired by Tajiri's reaction to the places he hunted for bugs as a child being paved over by buildings - and I think there's a lot of beauty to how in that sense, Red & Blue's existence as an immortal pop culture icon has in a sense immortalized those dead forests. But by immortalizing the moment of returning to something, and seeing exactly what's lost, GSC has immortalized something more true to our adult lives, I think. Set to a soundtrack built from the melodic bones of 80s pop's collective melancholic yearning to return to the 60s, its feelings reached me with ease.
That being said...as a whole, GSC is indifferent to becoming wholly nihilistic about what's lost to the past - Neo-Team Rocket are essentially an insurgence group unable to get over their own disbandment.

Pokemon under Satoshi Tajiri's rule has a very 'roll with the bads and the goods' mindset to modernity; despite everything I've said, the game is still adorably in love with the aesthetics of mundane modern urban life as well. The trend of every Pokemon game having a mechanically integrated cell phone - one that looks exactly like whatever the average person walked around with in the streets at the time - started here. This was only enforced further looking at cutting-room-floor content, and seeing they were originally gonna reskin the bike to a skateboard in this one...
And as someone who grew up at the tail-end of this part of the series, it's neat to see how things that felt regular to me at a time now feel like Time Capsules. In particular, the male protagonist's backwards cap, wristwatch, and yellow on black pants strike me as sooooo transitional between 90s and 2000s. And honestly, ever since I saw this Sugimori illustration of Kris, I've been feeling like this game needs to be in the conversation surrounding games w/ cool Y2K aesthetics.

Anyways this post was secretly an underground recruitment page and i want you to DESTROY YOUTUBERS. i recently had a "used to play video games but now they only play league of legends" friend say that they liked this game but thought it was "objectively bad" and i feel comfortable moving forward to call the whole level curve discussion a form of widely accepted propaganda.
At the very least, diversify the wording! "level curve" is referring to like three contrastingly diff things at once that nobody even completely agrees on, other than it being a problem. I've seen people say the level curve makes it too easy, and the level curve makes it too hard. Replaying it, there's a lot of genuinely neat boss fights in here. The mid-game is weak, but the wild Pokemon are weaker - encouraging you to see how far you can push your new guys; I love how rough Jasmine's Steelix can get if you picked the Water-type starter, but don't wanna rely on them. In a way, I sympathize with people who assume that old beloved JRPGs are just broken - levels make it hard to tell whether it's your fault, or the game's - but it's a little frustrating to read false "you need to grind" allegations against a game, especially due to how ppl seem to validate each other on this subject. Like, yes, this game does jump from level 26 boss fights to level 50 ones in like three hours, but also that's just a balancing choice centered around how good the tools mid lvl-30 pokemon are given in this one. I beat half the Fighting-type elite four member with a level 29 Ursaring! Something tells me this belief descends from the level curve's relationship with how people plan Nuzlockes, and level caps. I'm just not interested in discarding the whole game due to it bringing out the flaws in one particular playstyle, like some negative steam review with 1000 hours. You can't catch Sneasel until post-game, ❌ NOT RECOMMENDED.

Pokemon's obsession with connecting real human beings to each other is something that has brought so much joy to me. Though...playing a game like this, where all of its pros and cons are rooted in that design, I can understand why it just doesn't hit for some people. For every feature such as the real-time clock: the sun setting keeping you in touch with the outside world, no matter how many layers of blanket you are cozily under - there is a Pokemon whose encounter requirement is so specific, you'd need to know a dealer who passes around Prima guides in the school bathroom. And I can't help but think that Pokemon games are kind of a deeply lonely experience the moment the newest game stops being the one everyone around you is playing - or worse, you could've gotten into this series so young, you didn't even have friends yet. I'm pretty sure that being an only child that loves Pokemon just automatically routes you into depression from birth. Interfacing with Bulbapedia to remember how you evolve Growlithe feels like a supplement to an actual experience that is as dead as Satoshi Tajiri's childhood forests itself. But..sorry to grandma post on god's chosen list-making blogsite again, but I'm thinking this is close to being my favourite Pokemon game these days. And this is basically all to say this can be your favourite Pokemon game too, as long as you find the right group of friends who are just strange enough to play it alongside. So much quaintly childish excitement; so excited for the bug catching contest tomorrow yalls!!! don't forget about mt moon monday girlies :D

Where is Mareep?
My Team For This Game:
Cyan (Typhlosion)
Toge (Togetic)
The-boy (Quagsire)
Nippy (Umbreon)
Cid (Noctowl)
Pie (Butterfree)

Normally I try to have a somewhat recent (within the past 10 years) playthrough to tie these reviews to, but I'm trying to pace out my Crystal replay, and I don't want to let Review #251 pass me up without celebrating Gen 2 Pokémon, so here we go.

In my life so far, I've had two epoch-making games: games whose initial playthroughs were so important and influential to my development of who I am and how I understand the world around me that I can cleanly demarcate my life before and after I played them. The second of these was Persona 4, the game that, to this day, inspires me to love myself and try to find meaning in the people with whom I share a world.

But the first of these was Pokémon: Crystal Version. Bear with me for a bit before the review proper - I have to explain my background a bit before I get there.

I have a LOT of history with early Pokémon, going all the way back to watching the debut broadcast of the first episode of the anime a couple weeks before my fifth birthday. I was actually reluctant at first - I remember my sister hearing about it from a classmate, and I remember thinking her description sounded like the stupidest thing in the world (somehow I thought robots were involved?) - but I gave it a go, and found the whole thing surprisingly captivating. I really could talk at length about my time with Pokémon, but the gist of it was that I was in the thick of Pokémania in just about every way...

...except the video games. My father did not believe in letting his family own video game consoles. I was aware of the video games, between Blockbuster kiosks for Snap and Stadium, TV spots, and visiting my father's friends who let their kids have Game Boys, but for a good 5 years, I could only wonder from afar, occasionally asking my folks for a Game Boy and constantly being shot down. I watched the entirety of Generations 1 and 2 pass me by, and with prerelease and Japanese teasers for Gen 3 cropping up, I upped my game and kept trying to wear my folks down.

I think what finally did it was my changing schools. 2003 marked the year I switched from public elementary school to private middle school - a switch made because public school wasn't challenging me (I don't know if this ever occurred, but I like to imagine a conversation between my parents boiling down to, "Well, clearly, if he's doing THIS well in school, video games couldn't possibly slow him down...")

But they couldn't just give me a Game Boy, so my father cut a deal with me that summer. He told me that he'd buy me a Game Boy Advance, and he'd let me get Pokémon Sapphire for my 10th birthday - but ONLY if I finally learned to ride my bike. I'd held off for almost 10 years, and a kid my age should really know how to do so.

For almost 10 years, I had no real inclination to learn to ride my bike. But with a Game Boy and Pokémon in the balance? That was a complete game changer. I spent hours out there, learning to coordinate my body and balance without training wheels. It took about a week of falling off and getting back on, but by the end of the week, I was riding circles around my neighborhood.

(Let the record show that I haven't much ridden my bike since I learned. But I do indeed still possess the muscle memory, so if ever the need crops up...)

I'm not confident on the exact date, but I think it was Sunday, August 10th, 2003 that my father and I ordered my Game Boy online - a special, limited edition Torchic Orange Game Boy Advance SP, only available at physical Pokémon Center locations or - for a single month - online at Pokemon.com. Calvin and Hobbes had prepared me to expect it to take weeks to arrive, so I was delighted when the Game Boy came in the mail on Wednesday, August 13th. I knew I wasn't getting Sapphire until my birthday at the end of September, but I didn't care - just watching the animation for the GBA boot-up logo could be enough for me. I'd decided that would hold me over for a month.

It didn't need to. My father and I went out to a hobby shop that afternoon. When we came home, there was a copy of Pokémon: Crystal Version sitting on the kitchen table, waiting for me. A surprise from my mother.

A surprise indeed, because somehow - despite being aware of Gold and Silver for years, and frequenting websites like Pojo.com and Serebii.net and Poke-Amph.com and Marrilland.com - I had inexplicably never heard of Pokémon Crystal Version. I could tell from the boxart that it was part of the Gold/Silver series (as I knew it at the time), and I sorta recognized Suicune from my books and the anime, but I was mostly surprised that I had no idea what it was, nor what to expect. Added a whole new level of mystery and excitement to the adventure.

Now, I have no illusions that my fondness for Pokémon Crystal isn't rooted in this specific nostalgia. It's impossible for me to disentangle my feelings on Crystal when it represented, in many respects, the end of one chapter in my life and the start of the next. To be honest, I have no interest in trying to do so, since Crystal is so fundamental to how I understand myself, and so many of my tastes are informed by my experiencing things first through Crystal. But let me instead talk about the things I've noticed and thought about over the years with respect to Crystal, and how that enriched my love for the game.

First, regarding Generation II at large. I mentioned in my Yellow review how that game felt like the first core game developed as a mainstream phenomenon, and how that made for a compelling dichotomy with Pokémon's counterculture roots. By contrast, Gold/Silver (and Crystal by extension) feel like the last possible time Pokémon can be thought of as counterculture. The reason isn't complicated: there was always going to be a Pokémon Gold and Silver. Even before Game Freak knew they'd forever changed the world with Pokémon, they had plans and designs for a sequel duology. These plans changed considerably after Pokémon Red/Green proved to be megaton hits, and they continued to change as the series became an international and multimedia phenomenon, but the heart of these ideas stayed the same. The Gold/Silver series would be a post-script to the ideas advanced in the original series. Characters and concepts from the first game would receive their epilogues, new ideas would exist largely in service of complementing or commenting on original concepts... heck, it even comes down to the broad theming of each generation's regional theming: a contrast between Kanto and Kansai familiar to a lot of Japanese media.

And even with the version of the Gold/Silver series we got, we have the game ending on a fight against the protagonist from the original games, at a disproportionately elevated level. It's easy to look at this largely as a celebration of a success, but I dunno - so much of the understated rhetoric around Red carries so much more than a celebration of the past. Red has isolated himself from society in single-minded pursuit of the original games' selling points, so much so that his own mother has not heard from him in years. At the same time, Red has an Espeon, a Pokémon that (within the lore of the game and the language of the mechanics) cannot exist in the past and could only exist with love and devotion. There's a narrative here that does not serve as an advertisement of the past, but an acknowledgement that there is more than the past. If Pokémon had ended with this fight, and Red wordlessly walking away to find new purpose, the series would have told a complete story - something unimaginable for an eternal franchise, but within the vocabulary of a team looking to underline and conclude their 6-year passion project.

I think it's in this light that I choose to view Gen II: a melodic remix. This informs my response to a lot of the criticisms that exist for Gen II. Why is the level curve so low? Because the player is experienced with the composition of Gen I, and Game Freak decided to encourage further experimentation with rosters by making it easy to train a new Pokémon to the required level. Why is Team Rocket so lame here? Because they were defeated before, and the lack of strong leadership is its own commentary: a counterpoint that's never able to arrive at its own melody. Why is Kanto so abrupt? Kanto is a Coda to the adventure, not a second verse. Why are so many new Pokémon gated behind Kanto? Because the Coda is not a repeat, but a progression of the composition. I'm not claiming to love all of these things, or that the game might not have been more compelling otherwise. But I think there's a lot of artistic purpose to the choices here that are still fun and engaging.

As for Crystal itself, compared to Gold and Silver? Ampharos is my favorite Pokémon, so I definitely miss its presence, plus not having access to Aeroblast/Sacred Fire on Lugia/Ho-Oh is a little jank - but I think every other choice made here is a straight improvement. Because Generation II is such a deliberately casual experience, the world itself and its myriad NPCs feel like they take center stage; things like the Weekday Siblings, the PokéGear contacts, the Monday night Clefairy Dance, and the Friday Lapras sighting make for a lot of the flavor of what Johto is. Changes made in Crystal are largely in service of this: PokéGear contacts are more dynamic; there are secret early chances to catch Phanpy, Teddiursa, and Poliwag; Buena's Password ties the Radio feature to a specific character that encourages frequent interactivity; the Odd Egg makes each playthrough a little more unique and serves as an additional highlight of the Shiny/Baby mechanics; Suicune's subplot exists entirely as a sidequest to the game's light narrative; etc etc etc. And Kris hardly needs an explanation for why she's the best.

And it's weird - there are later Pokémon games that have expansive worlds with details that a person could get endlessly lost in. But I tend not to think as highly of those titles. Is it because I wasn't as impressionable for those as I was for Crystal? Yeah, at least in part. Like I said, I don't claim to be disentangling my own bias from my review. But I do think there's something to how understated and humble everything is in Crystal, in how everything just exists in its own quiet little rustic world, that I don't feel from any other mainstream interpretation of the series.

I'm long past the point of Pokémon being the single most important thing to my life, the way it was when I was a kid. I'm long past expecting to play every new release, or keep up with every new development, or anything like that. Crystal isn't my favorite game anymore, nor even my second- or third-favorite. Even so, Pokémon Crystal will always be in my heart and in my thoughts. It is a game for which I am incapable of holding any feeling but love, and it's a game that I will always speak of fondly.

I used to think that these older Pokemon games were cool novelties that did not stand the test of time at all. Hell, for years gen 2 was my least favorite out of any of them. I shiny hunted Celebi on the VC version of this game and stopped playing immediately after. I never really "got" Crystal or the hype around it. After SV pushed me away from the series, I came back with a real Gameboy Color (custom of course) and an official Crystal cartridge. Now that I've beaten Red, I can easily say that I was so wrong.

I forgot what it was like for these games to actually feel like an RPG with an end goal to reach for. I forgot how much smaller details got put into the world to make it feel more alive. Legendaries actually feeling like legends that you can find and catch for yourself, rather than the game just handing them to you. So many other components that make these games so special are highlighted in Crystal, and it made me love this series again.

This game definitely isn't perfect, and it's not going to suddenly be my favorite Pokemon game. But after the Switch's output of mostly okay-at-best pokemon games this was such a nice refresher, and a reminder as to why I still love this series after 15 years.

Most of my experience with generation 2 was with Silver, so it's nice to play this somewhat more complete version. The animations for enemy Pokemon are particularly welcome and do much more than you'd think toward making the world feel more lively and detailed.

This is one of the high points of the series when it comes to mystery, hidden depth, and of course postgame bulk. These are major upsides for children with extremely active imaginations (especially those playing at the time) and while I certainly still appreciate those elements, it's not quite the same as an adult. It's not really possible to get lost in things in the way kids do so effortlessly. I prefer the straightforward and excellently paced nature of generation 1 to the bursting at the seams clumsy open-endedness of 2, but I'm sure I wouldn't feel that way if I encountered both at the same time as a child.

It was my feeling before that HG/SS pretty much made generation 2 irrelevant. While I still much prefer the remakes, I think that's unfair. There's such absurd ambition here and while these games are much rougher around the edges and lack the little flourishes that make HG/SS so special, there is an undeniable soul to GSC that I can't ignore.