This review contains spoilers
This was a fun game to revisit. It's been a long while since I last remember beating this game, and it was almost nostalgic for me since I was thinking back on my memories with this one. I remember seeing ads for this on TV (back when I actually watched cable lol) and I remember being there at the GameStop with the big Ho-Oh box in hand after a preorder. At the time, I had never played the originals, but the 3DS VC allowed me to play through almost the entirety of Gold's main campaign. Never reviewed it on here, but, if anyone's curious, I thought that one was just alright, though I was really impressed with how many issues it seemed to have fixed from Red and Blue. As for HG/SS, I recall liking this one quite a lot, but without much desire to return to it as often as I did Pearl and Platinum.
As far as I can remember, HeartGold is a pretty faithful remake of the original Gold, just with the major gameplay changes that Gen 4 and Gen 3 made to the series included (Physical-Special split, double battles, Abilities, Natures, no limited bag space, etc.), as well as adding in some of the Pokémon from Gen 3 and Gen 4 through special methods. IIRC some Pokémon spawn locations got changed as well, but I can't confidently say that's true. There isn't much in the actual dialogue or story beats that got changed aside from maybe the Kimono girls and Eusine since I don't remember them being in the original. The changes are definitely mostly for the better in my opinion, with the Physical-Special split especially being a huge boon since it made some Pokémon no longer feel completely misclassified (like how Kingler has high Attack and very low Special, but its a Water Type, which used to only have Special moves until Gen 4). Unfortunately there are still some very strange learn-sets, with some really bad examples out there. I used a Jynx on my team and was surprised to see how abysmal its learn-set was for the kind of Pokémon it is; I don't know who the hell decided that a Pokémon with 115 base Special Attack and only 50 base Attack should learn only physical moves. It also carries over another annoying problem with learn-sets from the older generations in that some dual type Pokémon don't learn any damaging moves of one of their types, with Jynx yet again being another example since it does not learn a single Psychic Type move. Its not going to completely ruin your playthrough, especially since TMs help patch up learn-set oddities, but it is pretty bizarre and makes me wonder what the reasoning behind this was, if there even is a reason. If it's this consistent, clearly there's gotta be some reason why, right? Anyway, as a remake, this definitely succeeds, its a stark improvement in my opinion.
As far as story goes, this does feel much more involved than Gen 1, but it does feel pretty small scale and formulaic. Then again, I don't know why you'd be playing a classic Pokémon game expecting some grand narrative, so its not really a problem. I'm the guy that actually praised Gen 1's lack of major story elements. Nonetheless, this one does have a little meat to it, mainly in interactions with other characters or small side plots. The gist of it is, you're a kid trying to become the champion as per usual, and that is the main focus. However there are some fun side things you do as part of the main story that makes it feel more involved. For instance, Team Rocket returns in this game and you get to be the one to take them out, like in Gen 1 but more climactic since they got shut down for good here. It was fun watching Lance decimate some Team Rocket grunts as you fight your way through their hideout with him. The rival has a small character arc that was pretty cool to see, starting off as an arrogant moody teen who hates everyone and thinks power is all he needs but gets humbled through getting pummeled by you several times as well as Lance's team that one time. Again, story is very minimal here, but there's nice bits here and there that are cool.
Going to dedicate this paragraph to slight nitpicks of mine. First of all, this game seems designed to annoy you when it comes to enemy teams; I swear, it felt like every major trainer has Confuse Ray or Supersonic and it was so painful to sit through my Pokémon constantly hitting themselves thanks to Confusion. Especially irritating with Team Rocket grunts, though their Pokémon are meant to be weak so that's not too much of a hassle. The Elite Four were quite irritating with statuses, I hate Evasion and Confusion so imagine my face when I realized Koga and Karen both have Pokémon that love to use those status effects. When it comes to complaints and nitpicks, something people often criticize with these games is the level gap. I agree with those critiques and I certainly felt the gap here, wild Pokémon are much weaker than trainer Pokémon so adding new Pokémon to your team is a struggle. Naturally, it makes team building pretty tedious, since getting them on the same level as the ones you already have takes a while. Although it is good that the game is designed to where you can beat Pokémon that are higher level than you if you know what you're doing, some teams will still sweep you if you aren't high enough level. Before fighting the Elite Four, I had to grind my team out from Level 34 at the lowest to Level 44, constantly beating up the same enemies on Victory Road. It was very mind-numbing. Speaking of grinding, I know this one's on me, but having to play that Voltorb Flip minigame for 10,000 coins took me such a long time and I hated it. Its the only way to get the Ice Beam TM, which is pretty much required to make sure Jynx has an Ice Type move it can actually make good use of since, again, for some reason it only knows Physical moves when its focus should clearly be Special moves. Ice Punch is garbage on Jynx, Ice Beam is amazing, so it was basically a necessity to grind for unless I wanted to rely solely on Blizzard, which is a very strong move but has a high chance of missing. Also, I really don't like how much this game closes off until post-game when you get the opportunity to explore Kanto. This is a cool idea and it does make sense with the design philosophy of the game, considering it crams two different regions into one, but, if you're like me and you just didn't feel like playing through the post-game, you miss out on a lot of stuff. You can't get a Dark Type at all until you reach Kanto, many new Johto Pokémon are ironically confined to Kanto, certain Evolution Stones are only in Kanto, some really good TMs like Psychic are stuck in Kanto...you just kinda can't get any of that if you end the game after beating the Elite Four.
Despite all my gripes with this one, I still really appreciate it for what it is. I can definitely see why it was commonly considered the best one until massive opinion shifts in the fandom made everyone praise Black and White as the new Pokémon messiah. Gold and Silver were already quite the bold Pokémon games, with them still being the only games in the whole series to have more than one region to explore and a meaty post game that actually matters, and HeartGold expands on that and so much more while correcting some of the more glaring flaws of the originals (though unfortunately it was a little too faithful in some areas so it inherited flaws as well). It gets a solid 4 stars out of me.
As far as I can remember, HeartGold is a pretty faithful remake of the original Gold, just with the major gameplay changes that Gen 4 and Gen 3 made to the series included (Physical-Special split, double battles, Abilities, Natures, no limited bag space, etc.), as well as adding in some of the Pokémon from Gen 3 and Gen 4 through special methods. IIRC some Pokémon spawn locations got changed as well, but I can't confidently say that's true. There isn't much in the actual dialogue or story beats that got changed aside from maybe the Kimono girls and Eusine since I don't remember them being in the original. The changes are definitely mostly for the better in my opinion, with the Physical-Special split especially being a huge boon since it made some Pokémon no longer feel completely misclassified (like how Kingler has high Attack and very low Special, but its a Water Type, which used to only have Special moves until Gen 4). Unfortunately there are still some very strange learn-sets, with some really bad examples out there. I used a Jynx on my team and was surprised to see how abysmal its learn-set was for the kind of Pokémon it is; I don't know who the hell decided that a Pokémon with 115 base Special Attack and only 50 base Attack should learn only physical moves. It also carries over another annoying problem with learn-sets from the older generations in that some dual type Pokémon don't learn any damaging moves of one of their types, with Jynx yet again being another example since it does not learn a single Psychic Type move. Its not going to completely ruin your playthrough, especially since TMs help patch up learn-set oddities, but it is pretty bizarre and makes me wonder what the reasoning behind this was, if there even is a reason. If it's this consistent, clearly there's gotta be some reason why, right? Anyway, as a remake, this definitely succeeds, its a stark improvement in my opinion.
As far as story goes, this does feel much more involved than Gen 1, but it does feel pretty small scale and formulaic. Then again, I don't know why you'd be playing a classic Pokémon game expecting some grand narrative, so its not really a problem. I'm the guy that actually praised Gen 1's lack of major story elements. Nonetheless, this one does have a little meat to it, mainly in interactions with other characters or small side plots. The gist of it is, you're a kid trying to become the champion as per usual, and that is the main focus. However there are some fun side things you do as part of the main story that makes it feel more involved. For instance, Team Rocket returns in this game and you get to be the one to take them out, like in Gen 1 but more climactic since they got shut down for good here. It was fun watching Lance decimate some Team Rocket grunts as you fight your way through their hideout with him. The rival has a small character arc that was pretty cool to see, starting off as an arrogant moody teen who hates everyone and thinks power is all he needs but gets humbled through getting pummeled by you several times as well as Lance's team that one time. Again, story is very minimal here, but there's nice bits here and there that are cool.
Going to dedicate this paragraph to slight nitpicks of mine. First of all, this game seems designed to annoy you when it comes to enemy teams; I swear, it felt like every major trainer has Confuse Ray or Supersonic and it was so painful to sit through my Pokémon constantly hitting themselves thanks to Confusion. Especially irritating with Team Rocket grunts, though their Pokémon are meant to be weak so that's not too much of a hassle. The Elite Four were quite irritating with statuses, I hate Evasion and Confusion so imagine my face when I realized Koga and Karen both have Pokémon that love to use those status effects. When it comes to complaints and nitpicks, something people often criticize with these games is the level gap. I agree with those critiques and I certainly felt the gap here, wild Pokémon are much weaker than trainer Pokémon so adding new Pokémon to your team is a struggle. Naturally, it makes team building pretty tedious, since getting them on the same level as the ones you already have takes a while. Although it is good that the game is designed to where you can beat Pokémon that are higher level than you if you know what you're doing, some teams will still sweep you if you aren't high enough level. Before fighting the Elite Four, I had to grind my team out from Level 34 at the lowest to Level 44, constantly beating up the same enemies on Victory Road. It was very mind-numbing. Speaking of grinding, I know this one's on me, but having to play that Voltorb Flip minigame for 10,000 coins took me such a long time and I hated it. Its the only way to get the Ice Beam TM, which is pretty much required to make sure Jynx has an Ice Type move it can actually make good use of since, again, for some reason it only knows Physical moves when its focus should clearly be Special moves. Ice Punch is garbage on Jynx, Ice Beam is amazing, so it was basically a necessity to grind for unless I wanted to rely solely on Blizzard, which is a very strong move but has a high chance of missing. Also, I really don't like how much this game closes off until post-game when you get the opportunity to explore Kanto. This is a cool idea and it does make sense with the design philosophy of the game, considering it crams two different regions into one, but, if you're like me and you just didn't feel like playing through the post-game, you miss out on a lot of stuff. You can't get a Dark Type at all until you reach Kanto, many new Johto Pokémon are ironically confined to Kanto, certain Evolution Stones are only in Kanto, some really good TMs like Psychic are stuck in Kanto...you just kinda can't get any of that if you end the game after beating the Elite Four.
Despite all my gripes with this one, I still really appreciate it for what it is. I can definitely see why it was commonly considered the best one until massive opinion shifts in the fandom made everyone praise Black and White as the new Pokémon messiah. Gold and Silver were already quite the bold Pokémon games, with them still being the only games in the whole series to have more than one region to explore and a meaty post game that actually matters, and HeartGold expands on that and so much more while correcting some of the more glaring flaws of the originals (though unfortunately it was a little too faithful in some areas so it inherited flaws as well). It gets a solid 4 stars out of me.