Pokemon Red (Game Boy)

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Retrology
Posts: 438
Joined: July 17th, 2015, 2:45 am

Pokemon Red (Game Boy)

Postby Retrology » April 13th, 2018, 3:45 am

With all the RPGs I've played, I decided to pop in my Pokemon Red cartridge into my GameCube's Game Boy Player. Having been one of the first games I played as a kid in the late 90s, I can say this has surprisingly aged well.

What's made the Pokemon series refreshing compared to other RPGs are three things. First, you can save at any time. Second, you can see your enemy's life meter in every battle. Third, the battles are way quicker than most RPGs, so they're short and sweet for the most part.

Exploring is a lot of fun, but I hate how you can't access moves like Cut or Surf unless you pull it up from the menu (this would be fixed in later generations of the series), and there is a good amount of backtracking and tedious training early on. But the payoff is tremendous, and once you collect enough Pokemon and train them to high levels, you can breeze by levels, earn items, and get more experience.

So this game is still great. It's extremely accessible to those who aren't familiar with RPGs, and it's probably the best selling one of all time. Just be prepared because you'll still have to dedicate a lot of time to fully appreciate this game.

Thoughts?

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Retro STrife
Posts: 2531
Joined: August 3rd, 2015, 7:40 pm

Re: Pokemon Red (Game Boy)

Postby Retro STrife » April 15th, 2018, 2:22 pm

Of all the things I've been wrong about in gaming, the biggest was my belief in the 90s that Pokemon was just a fad. I know I wasn't alone, but I thought Pokemon and Pokemon Cards would be dead and gone by 2000. Despite being a big RPG fan, I skipped over the Pokemon phenomenon and never got into it. I did play a few hours of Pokemon Blue in the early 2000s and thought it was really fun, but never went too far with it.

Now that the series has thrived for this long, I feel like it's one of those franchises where everyone should try at least one game in the series, just to see what it's all about. Do you have any thoughts on that? Should I pull out Pokemon Blue again? Or the best-reviewed Pokemon game - Pokemon Silver? Or a newer one like Pokemon Sun?


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