When Pokemon Red & Blue launched in Europe in October 1999, I was eleven years old, and had just started secondary school. As such, I was an excited recipient of incoming Pokemania, surrounded all day by other excited recipients of Pokemania.
As you’d imagine, then, I eagerly awaited the launch of the game, and then ravenously devoured every single drop of it on arrival. I’d talk endlessly about it with friends at school, fruitlessly attempt the up and B Pokemon-catching cheat I’d been told about that didn’t even work a little bit, and even collected the cards.
My school, like lots of others, banned the cards, which only meant that the three students remaining who didn’t care about them suddenly did. The picture I’m painting here is that I had an impressionable head just waiting to be filled with every single iota of Pokemon Blue (the version I insisted on getting even though I’m a Charmander faithful through and through), and I dutifully did just that.
It’s those early favorites that keep you topped right up with nostalgia all these years later, and Pokemon continues to be one of my all-time favorite series. Over fifteen years later, it was one of the very first topics my partner and I bonded over.
Lots of us like to revisit our most beloved games of all time on quite a regular basis, and I’ve found that this is easier with some titles than others. GameCube classic Resident Evil 4 and Metal Gear Solid, for instance, are two games from my list that somehow don’t seem to have aged every time I revisit them. Pokemon Blue, sadly, is a different situation altogether for me.
When Red & Blue were added to the eShop on Nintendo 3DS in 2016, I was thrilled. Downloading it with all the money-thrusting exuberance of Futurama’s Fry in that famous meme, I returned to Kanto and prepared to party like it was 1999. Sadly, it absolutely isn’t 1999 any more, and I quickly realized that the idea of playing a beloved game from the past is sometimes much sweeter than actually playing it today.
Naturally, a franchise is bound to have developed in all sorts of ways in over 25 years, and it’s absolutely unreasonable to hold a game from before the turn of the millennium to today’s standards. Even so, mechanics-wise, the first game just doesn’t hold up for me in hindsight.
What immediately struck me on leaving Pallet Town was how slow movement felt, before the Bicycle was obtained and without any running shoes in the original. It’s the classic RPG I remember so fondly, mixed bag of fantastic/questionable sprites and all, so I didn’t mind that slower pace too much. Inventory management is a major bugbear, though.
The Shape Of The Series, Then And Now
We had to make do with very little space for items before Pokemon protagonists were given bags with separate compartments for Poke Balls, TMs and such, with a seemingly limitless capacity. The most jarring thing I realized when returning to Generation I of Pokemon, though, was just how far certain aspects of the series have come.
Some types, primarily Ghost and Bug, barely had a move worth using at all, and some of the most seemingly-useless moves were beyond overpowered. The infamous Wrap is a binding attack that effectively just canceled out the target’s turns until its effects wore off. It could then just be used again, and switching would merely reset the process with another Pokemon.
If the Wrap-er (that just made me picture a young Eminem playing his Game Boy in 1999) was faster, the one and only counterplay would be to switch in a Ghost unaffected by this Normal-type move, and the grand total of options for that was: the Gastly evolution line (Gengar’s still a competitive mainstay today, incidentally).
Two and a half decades of Pokemon later, Game Freak still seems to hate the Ice-type, giving it a terrible balance of weaknesses to resistances. I continue to take this personally, because Ice is my favorite type, but never mind that. The important thing is that, by and large, Pokemon makes much more sense today.
Specific typings are no longer exclusively physical or special, and all types have a good mix of STAB moves and Pokemon representatives. Competitive battling absolutely has an RNG issue, but things are much more functional and less frustrating than they used to be, and strategic options have opened up far, far, beyond anything I’d have imagined playing the very first game.
From different battle formats to clever combos with held items and archetypes like Trick Room and weather, there’s a heck of a lot to Pokemon battling.
We’re now on the ninth generation of Pokemon games, and it’s fair to say that Game Freak has been less than super ambitious with the latest outings. In an era of ever-bigger and grander titles like (on the Nintendo side of things) The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (a potential Game of the Year is Baldur’s Gate 3 hadn’t been lurking in its way), it’s going to take more and more to impress and secure the series’ future.
Still, I’m grateful for the strides the series has taken over its many mainline entries, more so than ever after returning to where it all began. FireRed and LeafGreen are a more palatable way to do so.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
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