RPGs came in two flavors in 1998: the action oriented RPGs like Zelda or Diablo and the turn-based, story driven content of Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. Turn based RPGs were extremely foreign to me outside of the demo I had for Final Fantasy VII, and I didn't much like it. They were dense with stats and systems to learn, swollen with hours required to beat them, and often preferred the planning and building of characters over immediate, reaction based gameplay. But Pokemon Red/Blue had several things going for it to capture the uninitiated: it was portable, and its marketing toward the collector in everyone. Obviously, this game blew up. It is hard to overstate how impactful Pokemon has become as a franchise. It was extremely well marketed, with a trading card game and anime released soon after to help promotion, and suddenly the late 90s was engulfed in Pokemania. It can be hard nowadays to look at the games that started it all through the haze of cultural ubiquity, but this wasn't just some trendy garbage with a good trick up its sleeve. Piercing through the haze is a rewarding RPG. The original Pokemon games have their issues, but they are still incredibly fun and absorbing to play through, even if later entries in the series have vastly improved upon the formula.
The series' famous catch phrase was Gotta Catch 'em All!, and the game follows suit well, if as a "side quest" of sorts. You play as a boy set out on his own in the world of Pokemon, where kids take little monsters of the same name and hold glorified cock-fights to get stronger until they can finally earn all eight badges around the region and challenge the Elite Four, the best-of-the-best Pokemon Trainers, and become the Pokemon Champion. Along the way you encounter an organization called Team Rocket, who use morally corrupt ways to capture, abuse, and sell rare Pokemon, and to generally influence others for political gain. Naturally, you use your Pokemon to battle them and save the day. As a side quest, you are entrusted by Professor Oak, a mentor of sorts who gives you your first Pokemon, to fill your Pokedex, an automatically filling encyclopedia of Pokemon that updates every time you catch a new Pokemon. There are 151 Pokemon in total in the original game, many of which are difficult to get or exclusive to particular versions, and one that can only be caught through cheats or special Nintendo events. This latter part is particularly where a lot of the mania came from about the series. The idea of finding 151 of these weird and wild monsters, capturing them, befriending them, and pitting them against each other in battle was an insanely novel idea, even if it had been done in certain series to a smaller extent, such as in Dragon Quest.
You start the game with one of three Pokemon: Charmander, the fire type salamander that turns into the dragon Charizard on the cover of the Red version, Squirtle, the water type turtle who turns into the gun-toting Blastoise on the American only Blue version cover, and Bulbasaur, a grass type frog/dinosaur with a seed on its back that turns into a much larger version of itself found on the Japan only Green version. In most RPGs, your player character and those in your party level up and learn new attacks as you progress. Here, it is your Pokemon who level up, and at certain levels or under certain conditions they can evolve into stronger, new Pokemon. Charmander evolves into Charmeleon at level 16, for example, and Charmeleon to Charizard at level 36. Other Pokemon evolve with special items such as Clefairy when a moonstone is used on them, a rare item in the game. Pokemon can be discovered through random encounters (a staple in turn based RPGs I hate, but can tolerate here) and captured with a pokeball, of which there are several varieties, but should be battled to low health or different health status before attempting to catch to increase odds of capture. Pokemon can get health status debuffs such as being paralyzed (where speed is heavily dropped and they may be unable to attack), poison (where they take damage every turn in battle, and every step outside of battle), etc. Battling is turn based, where the speeds of your Pokemon and the enemie's Pokemon are compared and the faster of the two gets to attack first. Sometimes certain attacks have higher odds of attacking first, and other times attacks can cause turns to be skipped for a cool down or by affecting the status of the Pokemon doing the attack. You win or lose a battle by no longer having any more Pokemon to battle with in your party, of which you can hold six. Pokemon faint when they lose their health, requiring revive items or a trip to the Pokemon center in order to revive them. A Pokemon's typing affect what they are weak or strong against, and likewise attacks have typing that can cause critical damage if the opponent is weak to that type. Water is weak to electric type, grass to fire, etc. and in some cases being strong against a typing can render the type completely immune to damage, such as with ground typing to electric. More often than not, if you are strong against a typing you take reduced damage, such as water taking minimal damage from fire type attacks. Pokemon is a turn based RPG at its core, but it keeps things relatively unconfusing, easing you into things such as status effects, items, and typing. Because of this, your starter Pokemon can determine some early game difficulty, if you didn't know that the first gym was ground type, or the second water type (making fire type Charmander not ideal, and water type Squirtle and grass type Bulbasaur much easier in the early game), but picking up wild Pokemon on the way to the gyms can help mitigate any headaches tremendously. It creates a slightly different start for each player depending on starter, if only marginally so. There is a host of complexity behind the scenes as to how various stats grow when leveling up, and which to use for what situation, but the game keeps things relatively easy so you don't have to get a degree in Pokemon physiology to figure it out. The game has some serious balancing issues, particularly with the psychic type that dominates basically every type including other psychic types, but this is primarily the most broken part of the game, and there are only select sections of the game with proliferant psychic Pokemon about (and psychic Pokemon specialists), and you're more than likely to have some in your party at this point anyway.
Progress through the game's gyms, plot, and final challenges aren't going to give you too much trouble once you get your head around the game's few systems, but you'll have fun teasing out new parties as you grow your Pokemon and discover new ones in different areas. What will challenge you, however, is capturing them all. The game comes in two versions in order to encourage play and trading through he Game Boy link cable, something still novel to this day and one of its best features. Trading Pokemon between versions made the game inherently social, something a lot of games lack, and when they do include social aspects it is often mitigated to the competitive sphere. Here, you're making trades, working in each other's favor to try and fulfill that call the game's box placed centered and forefront. Want that Jigglypuff? Well, it's only found in Blue version, so you'd better find a friend willing to trade with you. Each version had several Pokemon exclusive to their version, and there was only one version of the starters you could get in the game, and it would be the one you chose. This meant needing friends to get even the three starters, a tough proposition and one unlikely to happen without grinding through the early game numerous times and just resetting one person's game until everyone had one of each. This was always the weakest part of the first generation Pokemon games, as we didn't have the breeding mechanic yet which would make this a viable option. No one was going to part with their starter as they were generally boasting the highest non-legendary stats in the game.
Legendaries and pseudo-legendaries are another compelling aspect to the game's gameplay. Extremely powerful, one-of-a-kind Pokemon called Legendaries could be found in specific places in the game world, and you had one shot to capture them, and they were often incredibly difficult. In the original games, there were three legendary birds and Mewtwo, the absurdly overpowered Pokemon you could capture after having beaten the Elite Four, essentially your endgame reward. Pseudo-legendaries were normal Pokemon that were also one-of-a-kind, such as Evee (which had numerous evolution lines you could choose from, rather than just the one like every other Pokemon), and Snorlax which serves as a plot device more than anything. Again, you only had one chance to collect these guys, but they weren't nearly as difficult as the legendaries. The last one-of-a-kind Pokemon in the game is Mew, often considered a "mythic" Pokemon, a banner used in later games to denote Pokemon not catchable in game, but rather through events at Nintendo stores or designated times online. Mew became the source of schoolyard legend, with tricks passed around as to how to capture the elusive Pokemon. Spoiler: you can't. Not without cheating or glitches, anyway. The Pokemon had to be attained at a Nintendo store or event, or by trading with someone who already had him. It wasn't exactly fair if you truly wanted to catch them all, but catching the original 150 without Mew was still an extreme challenge, and one my schoolyard buddies and I were more than willing to embark on.
What is incredible about these games are that such a large and obsession-festering experience could be had in your pocket. The fact these were on the Game Boy (thus able to go wherever you went) made the games social in an entirely new way than games had ever been before. It is interesting to see the rise of mobile gaming over the last decade take over so many people's commutes and idle time, and to realize how the Game Boy and Pokemon got there first. Having a Game Boy with Pokemon in your pocket wasn't just great for passing idle time at the grocery store when you were ten, it was also a way for you to socialize with friends, for you to play wherever, whenever, no matter if you were on a long car ride or shipping back and forth between friends' houses. It went with you, and everyone who had a game could sit right there next to you and participate in your journey with you, talk about where to go, who to catch, and what you'd be willing to trade. They could be played in bite sized chunks, or hours long sessions. It was a whole new way to play an RPG.
The game has some dated aspects that make it less than ideal to play nowadays. Sprites look a bit strange when compared to how the Pokemon look now, there isn't a run button making the game incredibly slow to get around in, and there are bugs that can get you stuck in the game, corrupt your save, or be exploited to the point of breaking the game (such as item duplication with the infamous Missingno. glitch). The remakes, FireRed and LeafGreen, are definitely the way to go if you want to replay the game as close to the original as possible without the rough edges, but if you chose to go with the originals you wouldn't be disappointed. Pokemon Red/Blue are substantial games in the video game cannon, not only as RPGs, not only as cultural touchstones, but also in the way they perfectly used mobile gaming as a way of always being connected, and always ready to connect with others. The original games are perfect for phone emulation, which can (illegally) be done with ease these days. I've played through these games so many times the Kanto region feels more like home than whatever apartment I'm living in at a given moment, and there's always a reason to jump back into those tiny pixelated shoes and try and catch 'em all all over again.
9.5
No comments:
Post a Comment