I want to be the very best, like no one ever was...
I've covered a lot of obscure games since I started GOTBP ore than three years ago. Even some of the "bigger" titles I've covered aren't really that popular in the grand scheme of things. Well, this time it's going to be a little different, because it's time to talk about the single largest merchandising brand in the world: Pokemon. But we aren't going to be discussing the new Arceus games, or Pokemon Go, or how people are literally fighting each other to get their hands on the cards right now. We are going back to the beginning: back to a little game, for a little console that made a big amount of people pay attention to what was, at the time, a relatively niche form of entertainment.
I'd like to start by talking about Pokemon, the little Game Boy game that could, which came out of nowhere and changed the world of gaming. I'd like to do that, but it would be a gross exaggeration. While I don't think they ever thought it would become as big as it did, Nintendo knew they had something with Pokemon and their marketing blitz is proof. The original games, Red, Blue and Green, had already been out in Japan for quite a while (Red and Green in early 1996, Blue later that year) before they made it to the west, and they were very successful. Pocket Monsters (it's a fact that's kind of been lost to time, but that's what Pokemon is short for) was a big deal in the Land of the Rising Sun and while there was some uncertainty around if it would be quite as successful in the west, it was clear to Nintendo that they were on to something. I remember a writeup in Nintendo Power about the Japanese versions of the game, something you rarely saw. I mean, the anime series came out not long after the games, so it's not like they didn't know it had legs. That being said, I don't think anyone could have seen Pokemon, or any video game, for that matter, becoming as gigantic as it did. Many of Nintendo's higher ups believed the franchise would be "too Japanese" for western audiences. But when Pokemon Red and Blue (for whatever reason, the original Green was never released here) finally did make it to North America in late 1998, it was an instant success. To think, the world's most unstoppable merchandising juggernaut came from series creator Satoshi Tajiri's childhood love of, of all things, collecting bugs.
There are a bevy of reasons as to why Pokemon became as popular as it did. It was well marketed, with an iconic catch phrase (Gotta Catch 'em All!) that was easy to remember while also nudging gamers to both put more hours into the game and buy more Pokemon stuff (much to the chagrin of our parents). It offered a social element to the game, as trading was required to get all the Pokemon and battling against friends was a major draw. The link cable, once a throwaway Game Boy accessory, became essential almost overnight. Anyone who was in elementary or even middle school when these games came out will remember everyone walking around at recess with their Game Boys, challenging each other and looking for trades of inaccessible Pokemon (at least until your school inevitably banned Game Boys). In another brilliant marketing ploy, not every Pokemon was available in every version. The two versions had ever so slightly different rosters, and there were several Pokemon that could only be found once per game. This was cool for people that played a lot of videogames, but also a gateway into the medium for a lot of people that didn't. As a kid, I remember seeing others with Game Boys that never would have had them before Pokemon. I especially remember adults being shocked that a video game was actually causing people to talk to each other and make friends. This was one of the first times I ever remember that made people reconsider the whole "video games are for losers that never leave their poorly lit rooms" line of thinking. That's all well and good, but none of it would have mattered if these games weren't good...and, despite what detractors will try and tell you, they were.
For all their cultural impact, the Pokemon games are, at their core, simple, beginner level RPGs. Despite slightly different rosters, the Red and Blue versions of the game are functionally the same. Yellow, which came out a year later, has a few more differences. Inspired by the popularity of the anime, it features Pikachu as the starter and allows him to follow you throughout the story. It also has some new sprites and stat rebalancing but again, it's functionally pretty much the same. They don't have ton's of crazy stat building or battle preparation, they don't have deep and engaging stories or intense character development, there aren't any zany plot twists or clear indications that Pikachu is actually an allegory of King John just before he signed the Magna Carta. But the Pokemon games are engrossing and addictive, and they focused on doing the best they could with what they had rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. The Game Boy wasn't exactly a powerhouse, so the developers had to make do. Full disclosure, I did this playthrough using a Super Game Boy, which basically allows you to play Game Boy games on your SNES, in color if they are optimized to be so (which Pokemon was). But that wasn't how most people played the game. It really is impressive how they managed to get the level of detail they did on a tiny, monochrome screen. Pokemon really stood out amongst its peers visually and while I don't think that necessarily helped sell copies of the game, I do think it helped keep people who bought it hooked.
As I alluded to, Pokemon really doesn't have much of a story. You play as a ten-year-old boy from Pallet town (most of us named him after ourselves and canonically I think his name is supposed to be Red, but for continuity's sake we are going to refer to him as Ash, which is essentially who he is), who's on his way to receive his trainer's license from Professor Oak. With nothing but his starter Pokemon, your choice of Squirtle, Charmander or Bulbasaur, and his Pokedex in hand, Ash sets out to accomplish his dual goals of catching all 150 Pokemon and becoming the Pokemon league champion. He must travel the Kanto Region, defeating eight local gym leaders and collecting their badges. Along the way, he will contend with his rival Blue/Gary, who also has his sights set on becoming world champion, as well as the villainous Team Rocket, who use Pokemon to commit crimes and cause general chaos. So yeah, this isn't a big, sweeping, epic Square Enix RPG. It's not Final Fantasy or Suikoden or Star Ocean, but it wasn't meant to be. The plot didn't need to be epic, it needed to be relatable to the target audience. As someone who was just about the exact targer audience when it came out (I was 10, just old enough to have my Pokemon trainer's license!), it worked.
It's the gameplay that really made Pokemon stand out, even if it was similarly simple. Ash travels from town to town, battling wild Pokemon in random encounters and other trainers in contact based battles. Towns are connected by routes, which essentially serve as the overworld map. There are eight gym leaders, who serve as bosses, as well as a few dungeon areas along the way. Trainers can carry up to six Pokemon at once, with others stored in a PC dropbox. You can switch your Pokemon in and out at Poke-centers, which are also used for healing and accessing PvP battles. You can also visit the Poke-mart, where you can purchase the most important and iconic items in the game: Poke-balls. These are essential to capturing wild Pokemon, which can be found in grassy areas and dungeons. Capturing is critical for filling out your team and Pokedex, which can give you access to special items. But it isn't as simple as just throwing a Poke-ball. You need to wear the wild Pokemon down, attacking and inflicting status effects until they can be captured. It's sort of a game within a game, which I think is cool. It also differentiates wild encounters from trainer and gym leader encounters, which are all about knocking out the other Pokemon. These battles are the meat of the game, as they are more challenging than wild battles and critical for gaining experience.
Battles usually come down to exploiting your opponent's type weaknesses while protecting your own. Their are 15 Pokemon types throughout the world, each with their own advantages over others. Knowing and taking advantage of these is the most important part of the game and essential to beating opponents later in your journey. Most of the type weaknesses make sense, they are logical and even a younger gamer would be able to figure them out. Fire Pokemon are weak to water, grass Pokemon are weak to fire, water Pokemon are weak to electricity, etc. Even some of the more obtuse weaknesses make sense when you think about them. Ground Pokemon are immune to electricity (like grounding wires, get it?), fighting Pokemon are weak to psychic (because it's hard to punch someone when you're being mind controlled), etc. Either way, it's a simple yet fun system that's logical and easy to figure out even for RPG newbies. Each of your Pokemon can learn four moves, which have typing of their own. They get a bonusess for using moves that are of their same type, but can often learn others as well. This allows for a lot of unique team combinations and allows you to surprise opponents with weakness attacks out of nowhere. This is more prevalent in battles with friends than against the AI, but its a nice feature either way.
For as simple as the game was, I really liked the dungeon and town design. The dungeons are all fairly straightforward, but most offer some level of extra challenge to keep gamers on their toes. I will also say the difficulty curve is on point here, starting with the so easy it's painful Viridian Forest and ending with the legitimately challenging Victory Road. It may seem simple, but it's amazing how many games, even great ones, can't get that right. There's just enough variety here to keep players guessing and even a few puzzles for good measure, like the teleporters in the Sliph Building or the alternating doors in the Cinnabar Mansion. Not all the dungeons are hits, I hated Rock Tunnel back then and I realized on this playthrough I still hate it, but they are definitely a strong point. The same can be said for the towns, which feel surprisingly lived in for a game with few relevant NPCs and little story. Ash's sleepy home of Pallet town, the bustling central Hub Saffron City, the shopping and gambling center Celadon City, the dark and moribund home of Pokemon Tower Lavender Town, there are so many iconic and memorable towns in the Kanto region and each offers something different and unique. It really is incredible how much world building they were able to do with so little actual plot or deep characters. Pokemon may have expanded far past Kanto, but the fact that its story is built on a foundation laid by a simple Game Boy game is astounding.
Pokemon was also one of the least linear games of its time. Remember, this was a world before every other game was an open world adventure. Straying off the path just wasn't a thing that happened all that often, especially in console games. But Pokemon allowed players to do just that, even more so than most of the top flight RPGs of the era. The first quarter of the game is fairly linear, their are some deviations you can take but they aren't usually significant. But once you get through rock tunnel, everything opens up. You can pretty much work through the second and third quarters of the game in any order, with only one or two items required to get access to everything. You can take a variety of routes to get where you need to go, avoid some of the most challenging dungeons until you are ready or capture some of the world's most unique Pokemon. You can even skip the Seafoam Islands if you so choose. This may not seem like much now, but it was a huge deal in 1998. It was just another example of how Pokemon used something incredibly simple to make itself stand out.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the player vs. player element of Pokemon, even if it wasn't a part of my most recent playthrough. This was one of Pokemon's biggest differentiators and a major factor in why it became so popular. Two Game Boys could be connected via the link cable, allowing two players to either trade or battle one another. This was one of the first truly social games I remember and it was amazing how seamlessly it worked in the pre-wireless age. Trust me, if you were walking around school in 1998 with a link cable, you were the man. Everyone wanted to battle, but not everyone had the cable and before Pokemon fully blew up, you would see kids trading link cable uses for lunch money or candy or whatever they could get. The battles functioned exactly as they did in the game, just with the added level of strategy of having to actually out think another person. We all spent hours battling each other to see who's team was the strongest, which lineup was the best and who was the true Pokemon master.
Trading was also a major part of the game. Anyone who wanted to truly "catch 'em all" needed to trade and trade often. I mentioned before that there were some Pokemon that weren't available in both games, but it was beyond that. Those were easy to find. You were limited to one fossil per game, so you had to find someone willing to trade their Kabuto if you had an Omanyte. The same was true of Evee-lotiouns, it was just Jolteon, Flareon and Vaporeon in those days, and it wasn't always easy to get someone to trade you one of these. But by far the toughest was getting someone to trade you their starter. It was a revelation if someone was willing to part with one of these guys and if anyone heard someone was willing to do so, the schoolyard dealings would start up again. I definitely once gave someone a brownie from my lunch tray to entice them into trading me their Bulbasaur. The easiest way to get a starter was to find someone who wanted to make their playthrough "more like the show" and would trade one of the three straight up for a Pikachu. Good times. There were also a handful of Pokemon that required a trade to evolve, so those had to be factored in as well.
Of course, even the best games have flaws. The thing with Pokemon, though, is that the flaws are kind of part of the game's charm. Everyone knows the first generation of Pokemon games are incredibly broken, almost comically so. This is largely due to the special stat, which wasn't properly implemented. Pokemon who predominately use physical attacks have much of their damage determined by the attack stat, while defense against physical attacks is determined by the defense stat. But the special stat governs both attack AND defense, meaning special-based Pokemon have an inherent advantage when defending against special attacks, while also being able to boost attack and defense by just building one stat. Psychic Pokemon are insanely overpowered, due to the aforementioned stat issues and the fact they have no major type weaknesses. Their only weakness is to Bug types, but bug types are...not good. And don't even get me started on the glitches. These things were as much a part of the game as anything else I mentioned before. I didn't have to look them up online, the Safari Zone glitch and the item duplication glitch are burned into my brain forever. It caused a lot of controversy back in the day, there were always accusations thrown around about who was buffing their lineup by creating infinite rare candies or stat boosting items, or who was catching the level 78 Rapidash that sometimes appeared during the glitch. Obviously, these glitches are a technical flaw and a problem in many ways. But to those of us that started with Red and Blue, MissingNo was as big a part of our Pokemon lives as Pikachu.
I feel like this has been less of a review and more of a rambling about the first generation Pokemon games, but it's really hard to quantify how meaningful these games were, both to me personally and to the gaming industry as a whole. I guess it isn't that hard to quantify the latter, you can do that with the billions of dollars in sales this franchise has had over the last 25 years. But even that doesn't really do the original Poke-hype justice. Sure, Pokemon is still huge. But the original release of Red and Blue in the United States hit the gaming populace like a meteor. It changed the way a lot of mainstream gamers, and even non-gamers, interacted with video games on a day-to-day basis. And it all started with a Game Boy title released halfway into the 5th generation. It may not be a perfect game, and I'm sure a lot of the love for it is nostalgia, but that doesn't detract from how truly great it was. Not every game has to be this big, sweeping, super epic top end title and no genre has a harder time grappling with that fact than RPGs. I've discussed before just how few entry points there are into the genre and how few games there are that are beginner friendly. Even all these years later, Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow might be the first game I point people to who ask me where to start if they want to get into the genre (Super Mario RPG is a close second). I guess that's a way of saying that if you look past all the hype, you will find an outstanding game. They may not have all the bells and whistles of the newer games, or the big time feel of other RPGs, but the original Pokemon titles are simple, classic and timeless.
Comments
Post a Comment