Between the creative limitations imposed by the need to adhere to the series’ formula and the technical limitations imposed by the Game Boy itself, it struggles to find its own voice in a meaningful enough way to make the single hour it takes to finish feel worthwhile.

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Whilst it’s obviously been refined and perfected, there’s still a place for the janky, ugly original for just about anyone who’s after an engaging platformer and doesn’t mind having to wrestle an absolute hunk of a camera into place every fifteen seconds.

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An astoundingly well put-together game that’s not afraid to put its systems to full use and force players into mastery, and it is a genuine shame that there isn’t more of it.

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If you’re into this kind of game enough to be willing to try something as dated and technically limited as this, I do genuinely think that this is one of the best games on the Game Boy. It’s easy to see why this game exploded the way it did and why the cultural ramifications of that explosion are still being felt today.

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A deeply enjoyable and surprisingly nuanced game that does enough right in most respects that I feel like it’ll have a place in the memories of many for a good long while.

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A handful of new missions with a slightly different flavour that add nothing meaningful to the game as a whole and are so brief that even the most obsessive completionist will be done with it in about an hour.

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A very short, uninteresting series of highly specific objectives that are far too interested in showing you how many orcs it can throw at you and not interested enough in giving you something to do that might keep you from falling asleep.

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If you really want to play one of the first generation games, Yellow Version is really the only way you can go wrong; it arbitrarily limits your choice of Pokémon and adds too little to the experience to compensate for this major inhibiting factor on your enjoyment.

I had fun, and for a game as simplistic and accessibility-oriented as this series, I think that’s the high-water mark of success. Just… do yourself a favour and don’t venture out into the big, wide world. There’s nothing but misery there for you.

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I do obviously recommend this game to anyone who’s a fan of any of the things that it’s about, because it’s perfectly executed and supremely well put together. Just don’t ask me to tell you which of these games is which in a few months’ time.

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I find it difficult to come up with even the most minor way in which it’s better than just… playing an actual Pokémon game.

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It’s one of the most memorable experiences I’ve had in a video game and I really don’t think it’s one that anyone should skip out on.

It has none of the charming creativity with which the franchise has since distinguished itself, and it is an outlier in enough other ways that it can comfortably be skipped even by those who want to play the whole series back to back.

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Even if you’re already infatuated by later games, I wholeheartedly recommend trying this one, even if it’s just for the bizarre experience of being quietly despised by an entire community of adorable little animals.

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I don’t recommend this game, but I also understand that its place in the modern video game industry is not to be fun—it’s to be the reason why all the good Street Fighters have numbers after their names.

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