That breeze of this time of year; the one where you know spring is turning into summer, something about it turns back the clock. For me, it always brings me back to Pokémon on the Game Boy Advance. I’ve been wanting to go through this game again, and feeling that breeze, really made me want to go home. Sometimes I feel silly about this being my favorite game, ‘cuz it’s just a Pokémon game, nothing cool or out-there, and it’s just FireRed Version, to boot: the first remake of the first game. But, this game is so special to me and I think is so well designed and feels like the team at Game Freak were trying to show that they can do this.

Before I get into it all, I just wanted to touch on something that I never realized. Something I did was set LR to “Help” for the first time. Pokémon comes really naturally to Pokémon players. There are fundamentals that define this series that we all know so well, just like there are fundamentals to all video games. Though, Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen have a mission statement, that they want everyone to enjoy this adventure to the fullest. They state that is “our” goal in a note of text that appears before the player even before Professor Oak introduces the world of Pokémon. This little thing at the beginning is not something that stuck with me every other playthrough, but this time I realized that they not only want new gamers to try Pokémon, but they want new people to try video games. When you press the L or the R button, you are allowed to ask the game nearly any question you can think of, from “What do I do now?” to “What is the Dark-type good against?” It was interesting, up until the first badge, reading through all the copies that were written to explain adventure RPG games.

It’s this nice little companion that FireRed and LeafGreen have because, no matter how much a player needs their hand held, whether it’s because they’re young or because they don’t play a lot of video games, the designers want so badly for as many people as possible to enjoy the entire adventure of Pokémon. to explore every town, every cave, every forest, and meet as many Pokémon as they can.

And that’s what I’ve been trying to do lately. The past few years, I’ve been trying to take my time in Pokémon games by getting into the role of a kid out on their own adventure for the first time. What this has allowed me to do is really appreciate how each Pokémon games’ scenarios are laid out. I think it’s Game Freak’s biggest strength in these early games to design a game scenario that really gets a player to each corner of the map in a non-linear way. In a recent playthrough of Crystal Version, I found myself rebuking the common pacing critique of that generation, finding that it is perfectly paced if you properly explore the world as the Hidden Moves you unlock open it up more. every single Pokémon game, even the new ones, are built around “HMs.” Once you get a new overworld move, the world opens up more and there are new people to meet, places to explore, and of course, Pokémon to catch. Talking to NPCs, walking into every building, it allows the world to sink in so much more than if you just play Pokémon so passively, just going from
necessary objective to necessary objective. It’s what the game is designed around, and it makes these games fit in with other JRPGs of this era.

My final was…
Campfire the Charizard, met in Pallet Town
Lemontart the Jolteon, met in Celadon City
Rageroom the Primeape, met on Route 22
Yachtclub the Lapras, met in Saffron City
Drumstick the Marowak, met in Pokémon Tower
Flowershop the Vileplume, met on Route 24

I picked Charmander, just like I did for the first time. Good ol’ Kyle. I always like planning out my teams, and this time i felt like planning out a character. I chose ‘GIRL’, like I have been for, like, nearly a decade, now, but also named myself ‘RED’. Just a little trans girl leaving home like all kids do, nervous to go out on an entire journey dressed as herself. Pokémon, at its core, is about the first time you feel like you’re growing up. This feeling that the first step to becoming an adult is doing things yourself for the first time. This rite of passage is told through the story of a kid going on an errand, that turns into an adventure, and stumbling into a situation that adults usually handle, and takes it on alone. But, of course, they’re not really alone. They have their Pokémon, and that’s what Pokémon is about: growing up, and leaving the house, can be really scary, but you’re never as alone as you feel.

I love getting to the end, facing down your rival. That Champion battle is pretty tough in set mode, but for the first time, with a team of six, I didn’t have to do any grinding before my league challenge. Whenever I use Jolteon, they always are a shining star on my team. Didn’t even need Thunderbolt, Shock Wave + Toxic helped get rid of Pidgeot, Blastoise, and Alakazam. It came down to my Charizard versus his Arcanine, and my boy clutched it out (with the help of my fourth Max Potion used, the last I’d be comfortable using while keeping my dignity).

There’s just something about the Kanto region’s vibe that I love. Half of me wishes Pokémon kept going the route of “this is basically the real world but with little freaks in capsules.” there’s an NPC in Pewter’s museum that tells you about how he remembers the moon landing from 1969. Compre that to when you play Omega Ruby and you go to space on the back of Mega Rayquaza and fight Deoxys. I don’t know, it just gives Kanto this specific feel to the region that can be easily overlooked, but after playing this and Yellow Version back-to-back, I’m very interested in the world of Pokémon where the “great Pokémon war” that Lt. Surge and other lore refers to is just, I don’t know, the fucking Vietnam War.