This game is such an interesting abstraction of the Japanese cityscape and countryside: I would say it feels most not like a central-Tokyo but like it was designed by someone who lived in one of the major cities an hour or two from central Tokyo. You get the occasional dense area with a skyscraper or two (Saffron City), dense collections of single family homes (Celadon City), but there's still the countryside running through mountains and forests, farming towns here and there.

That is easily Pokemon Blue's most interesting trait: it's a world based on reality, but not in the direction of an Earthbound that's more focused on constantly parodying America or people. Pokemon Blue is a game more interested in the idea of adding a layer of mystery (world of pokemon) and exaggeration (everyone catches pokemon!) to the mundane normal everyday life. I imagine this (and the affordances of the Game Boy and the 151 pokemon, and the marketing efforts of Nintendo) is what helped to capture the minds of the initial millions of players! I'm not sure how much of that exists today, where the series feels a bit more phoned in and calculated.

It's honestly quite disturbing the extent that Satoshi Tajiri's artistic idea become full-on media-mix/anime-ified - most symbolic of this is how sprites underwent slight revisions between the original JP red/green to US red/blue to yellow to bring things 'more in line with the anime' - a direction which, I think, informs the series direction today: something that's more interested in doing only what's necessary to keep the brand going, rather than an interest in the kind of design fundamentals Tajiri/team had that allowed them to conceive of Pokemon Blue in the first place.

The story in Blue is most interestingly not at all much of an anime story. Nobody is really fleshed out except potentially Giovanni, the game feels like a series of vignettes where the sport-like Pokemon battling at times briefly overlaps with the reality of our world. Lt. Surge fought with pokemon in a war, Mew is from South America, the moon landing happened in 1969, people are addicted to gambling, there's a crime syndicate, pokemon can die and become ghosts. There's a lot of room for your imagination to think about.

I loved the underground walkways that feel like the long, underground train station walkways in Japan, or even arguably underground shoutengai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Dtengai). How the Celadon "Mansion" is a mistranslation of the Japanese Manshon (often a 5-10 story apartment or mixed use building), how it has the Game Freak devs. The department store inspired by big Japan department stores.

I think the first 2/3 of this game (through Silph Tower) is really well paced, I love how you go between countryside exploration and weird little dungeons in urban settings or caves. The last 1/3 of the game feels a bit more out of place - the 'science' angle, while interesting, kind of starts and ends with Cinnabar island. Seafoam Island and Victory Road are fine, but they feel less connected to the whole game's sense of place compared to e.g. the rocket base or mt. moon. I don't think this detracts from the strength of the game, but the game did feel like it was dragging by that point - the fact it began doing block puzzles might be symbolic of that. (Ha ha)

An aside: The core of the "trainers are multiple pokemon, random encounters are one pokemon" is a brilliant design choice - they can express trainer personality through this, they can characterize spaces like dungeons or caves based on who is there. I actually wanted to see more of the Viridian Forest-type dungeon - where not everything is a random encounter tile.

--

After playing, it does feel like the game is at a bit of a crossroads. I think Tajiri definitely had more he wanted to do with his vision, but they may not have been in-line with the more obvious routes to 'improving' the game.

The more obvious routes, to me, neither of which interest me personally, are:

- Increasing the traditional storytelling: clear villain characters, more cutscenes, more regularly paced villain-related levels. This could help attract an audience put off by the way Pokemon Blue feels like falling into a story at times (which I personally prefer, haha). It would also increase franchise tie-in and business synergies!

- Making the battle system 'better' and not a pushover. Make the game more technical, increase training options, create harder battles or challenges - as this would be the only way to 'balance' the game from becoming too easy. This lays a lot of weird traps though, and I think pokemon's devs fell into most of them: stark divides between the 'true combat postgame', many compulsive traps around perfecting stats/builds (rather than letting you teambuild freely), etc.

Personally I would have liked it if the game went harder on the weird influences and level layouts, maybe experimenting with a smaller level range or different methods of training other than bland 'QoL' features to help even leveling... but hey! I'm not the billionaire company here...