Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow started a series that would end up becoming a monolith of game history, but it’s not easy to tell what game design landed them in the hall of fame at first glance. Monster collection RPGs had already been an established sub-genre in Japan, after all. Though when I look back to what first transfixed me about Pokémon, I see one obvious lead. Pokémon really felt like it was my own journey, and then its social aspects let me compare my journey to others. Your Pokémon adventure wasn’t going to be exactly like anyone else’s, and every team member would have a history and grow up by the end of the game—And then you fight! Pokémon had delicately sprinkled Tamagotchi game design over a fine foundation of D&D era team building concepts. Alongside this, the games focused on a modern day setting in which you’re a kid growing up in an urban fantasy world, where everyone is in on the same thing as you. Pokémon had this fantastical sports fantasy-esque pitch to it; it didn’t even need a compelling villain for the setting to immediately bring something vivid to the eyes of many.
You explore this setting through a grid-based constant overworld, with towns connected to each other through straightforward routes. Certainly a casualization compared to other RPGs of the time, but it’s a choice that has aged very well. Even some Final Fantasy games are built like this now! Pokémon Red and Blue have solid pacing as well, Gyms lay out an easy-to-track goalpost of progress. More uniquely in comparison to games to come, Red and Blue follow a very strict formula of having dungeons between every single Gym (although the game doesn’t make you do them exactly in that order). There’s some clear game designerly intent behind the early dungeons: Viridian Forest teaches you to manage your health against status effects in larger areas, Mt. Moon forces you to deal with encounters before you obtain repels, and Rock Tunnel teaches you the importance of Hidden moves. Unlike future games, there’s also a ton of variety in what order to play through the game. Everything from Celadon to Fuchsia can be played in whatever order – you can go to every area in the game (except the League) with only 4 Gym Badges. The best part of this isn’t just the non-linearity, it’s that there’s always going to be trainers you can fight if you’re under-leveled.
Fighting in the singleplayer campaign of this game is split between unique battles and taking your time to get some catches. Especially returning to this game immediately after playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus, it’s easy to see that catching in this game is a bit messy. On one hand, catching is a pure numbers game, with catching being available at any percentage of health, but damage and status effects making Pokémon easier to catch. This is good, since catching would be a very monotonous process otherwise. On the other hand, the game’s math encourages brute forcing a bit too much, especially when weakening a Pokémon you want is so scary with the damage potential of random critical hits. Beyond the faults in the experience of catching itself, Pokémon catching feels inherently rewarding. Knowing that any Pokémon you capture could become essential to your experience makes completing the Pokédex feel worthwhile.
Though for all of the aspects of personalization to feel rewarding, the battles need to work well, and they’re decent. More than later games, the combat is slow paced and often broken down by things like Wrap and sleep status effects. You don’t get strong elemental attacks until much further into the game; there’s a big chunk of time where a lot of Pokémon fight with strong normal type attacks instead. This makes the game feel a bit more methodical at times, and makes the game feel much duller at other times. Pokémon is an easy game, unless you don’t want it to be easy. I didn’t grind at all in my latest playthrough, and I beat the final boss with all of my team being 20 levels below their opponents, and that was pretty satisfying.
What really sets apart Pokémon from other RPGs is that you could take your Pokémon into battles against your friends. It’s hard to rate Pokémon PVP, because there’s so many factors to what makes battling friends interesting that exist outside of the PVP itself; the balancing is literally what you and your friends decide it to be. Having that option really just heightens the whole experience, the feeling that every choice matters because you could eventually take these Pokémon into a fight for real. It’s really the type of game design you see in a lot of games now, having something you can really apply your game knowledge to in a meaningful way beyond just the campaign of a game itself.
This game also has some glitches, it’s kind of infamous for it at this point. Most of the glitches you see in a run are miscellaneous rushed programming resulting in faulty mechanics. The most interesting bugs you can find are things you have to do very intentionally – usually defined by memory manipulation. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to seriously critique this game as buggy when most of the faults of the game are oversights that you might not even notice in the runtime of a single playthrough. Personally, I love a lot of the weirder, harder to activate glitches. Something about manipulating the game into getting weird things to happen was so intriguing to me after playing it normally for so long. But I certainly wouldn’t want stuff like Focus Energy not working to persist into future games, it is a flaw.
The game’s presentation has aged dubiously. The overworld looks totally fine for a Game Boy game, but some of those Pokémon sprites were really weird. Even the Yellow version keeps the old back sprites, which often display the design incoherently, even having factual errors about them. The music sounds pretty good though; not exactly good in quality as Link’s Awakening for example, but it’s a deservingly iconic Game Boy soundtrack.
Finally regarding Pokémon Yellow version itself, this isn’t a luxury definitive edition or anything. It reminds me of a holiday themed reskin of a game; it has that amount of substance to it. It would’ve been worth critiquing back in the day as a shallow re-release, but these days it’s fair to regard it as the best version to replay the games through by default. Those new battle sprites are just that good.
The real thing that makes Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow so interesting to go back to is that everything that I’ve ever loved Pokémon was in this game already. The feeling of going on a personal adventure with a team that I had nicknamed and given personalities to. The social aspects of the game that allow me to heighten my experience through friends. Everything was already here, from the very beginning. If anything, that’s probably why these games become so easy to compare and downplay compared to sequels; Pokémon is still about these exact same things, it’s just better at them now. But just as Pokémon already had everything it’s ever been good at, it already was a game you didn’t have love everything about. You didn’t have to play Pokémon for the collecting, you didn’t have to play it with friends, you didn’t even have to feel invested in your team, you could just play it, and it’d be a good role playing game. You could play it again, and have a completely different experience, and you’d know it was one of the best experiences on the Game Boy. You could even play it now, despite all that lost polish, and you could appreciate that this game knew exactly what it wanted to be.
You explore this setting through a grid-based constant overworld, with towns connected to each other through straightforward routes. Certainly a casualization compared to other RPGs of the time, but it’s a choice that has aged very well. Even some Final Fantasy games are built like this now! Pokémon Red and Blue have solid pacing as well, Gyms lay out an easy-to-track goalpost of progress. More uniquely in comparison to games to come, Red and Blue follow a very strict formula of having dungeons between every single Gym (although the game doesn’t make you do them exactly in that order). There’s some clear game designerly intent behind the early dungeons: Viridian Forest teaches you to manage your health against status effects in larger areas, Mt. Moon forces you to deal with encounters before you obtain repels, and Rock Tunnel teaches you the importance of Hidden moves. Unlike future games, there’s also a ton of variety in what order to play through the game. Everything from Celadon to Fuchsia can be played in whatever order – you can go to every area in the game (except the League) with only 4 Gym Badges. The best part of this isn’t just the non-linearity, it’s that there’s always going to be trainers you can fight if you’re under-leveled.
Fighting in the singleplayer campaign of this game is split between unique battles and taking your time to get some catches. Especially returning to this game immediately after playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus, it’s easy to see that catching in this game is a bit messy. On one hand, catching is a pure numbers game, with catching being available at any percentage of health, but damage and status effects making Pokémon easier to catch. This is good, since catching would be a very monotonous process otherwise. On the other hand, the game’s math encourages brute forcing a bit too much, especially when weakening a Pokémon you want is so scary with the damage potential of random critical hits. Beyond the faults in the experience of catching itself, Pokémon catching feels inherently rewarding. Knowing that any Pokémon you capture could become essential to your experience makes completing the Pokédex feel worthwhile.
Though for all of the aspects of personalization to feel rewarding, the battles need to work well, and they’re decent. More than later games, the combat is slow paced and often broken down by things like Wrap and sleep status effects. You don’t get strong elemental attacks until much further into the game; there’s a big chunk of time where a lot of Pokémon fight with strong normal type attacks instead. This makes the game feel a bit more methodical at times, and makes the game feel much duller at other times. Pokémon is an easy game, unless you don’t want it to be easy. I didn’t grind at all in my latest playthrough, and I beat the final boss with all of my team being 20 levels below their opponents, and that was pretty satisfying.
What really sets apart Pokémon from other RPGs is that you could take your Pokémon into battles against your friends. It’s hard to rate Pokémon PVP, because there’s so many factors to what makes battling friends interesting that exist outside of the PVP itself; the balancing is literally what you and your friends decide it to be. Having that option really just heightens the whole experience, the feeling that every choice matters because you could eventually take these Pokémon into a fight for real. It’s really the type of game design you see in a lot of games now, having something you can really apply your game knowledge to in a meaningful way beyond just the campaign of a game itself.
This game also has some glitches, it’s kind of infamous for it at this point. Most of the glitches you see in a run are miscellaneous rushed programming resulting in faulty mechanics. The most interesting bugs you can find are things you have to do very intentionally – usually defined by memory manipulation. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to seriously critique this game as buggy when most of the faults of the game are oversights that you might not even notice in the runtime of a single playthrough. Personally, I love a lot of the weirder, harder to activate glitches. Something about manipulating the game into getting weird things to happen was so intriguing to me after playing it normally for so long. But I certainly wouldn’t want stuff like Focus Energy not working to persist into future games, it is a flaw.
The game’s presentation has aged dubiously. The overworld looks totally fine for a Game Boy game, but some of those Pokémon sprites were really weird. Even the Yellow version keeps the old back sprites, which often display the design incoherently, even having factual errors about them. The music sounds pretty good though; not exactly good in quality as Link’s Awakening for example, but it’s a deservingly iconic Game Boy soundtrack.
Finally regarding Pokémon Yellow version itself, this isn’t a luxury definitive edition or anything. It reminds me of a holiday themed reskin of a game; it has that amount of substance to it. It would’ve been worth critiquing back in the day as a shallow re-release, but these days it’s fair to regard it as the best version to replay the games through by default. Those new battle sprites are just that good.
The real thing that makes Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow so interesting to go back to is that everything that I’ve ever loved Pokémon was in this game already. The feeling of going on a personal adventure with a team that I had nicknamed and given personalities to. The social aspects of the game that allow me to heighten my experience through friends. Everything was already here, from the very beginning. If anything, that’s probably why these games become so easy to compare and downplay compared to sequels; Pokémon is still about these exact same things, it’s just better at them now. But just as Pokémon already had everything it’s ever been good at, it already was a game you didn’t have love everything about. You didn’t have to play Pokémon for the collecting, you didn’t have to play it with friends, you didn’t even have to feel invested in your team, you could just play it, and it’d be a good role playing game. You could play it again, and have a completely different experience, and you’d know it was one of the best experiences on the Game Boy. You could even play it now, despite all that lost polish, and you could appreciate that this game knew exactly what it wanted to be.
2 Comments
togepis better
FunBus
1 year ago