Game

This is gonna be a different kind of review.

Allow me to tell you a story. It’s 1998, probably October or November, and I’m 5 years old. My parents have taken me to the local skating rink to ride around in circles, or more accurately for me, fall on my ass a bunch. After falling on my ass a bunch, I went to the break area and saw my neighbor playing on his Gameboy. I asked him what he was playing, and he showed me this new game he had recently rented called Pokemon. He described it as, and I’m not making this up, a game where you rent monsters to battle other monsters. Anyways I thought it looked like the sickest shit, so that night I went home and went to my brother and said “Jeff, I saw a new game we have to get! Pokemans!”

He will never let me live that down. Anyways, the rest, as they say, is history.

Game

Trying to review Pokemon Red/Blue is a fascinating task. This game is so etched into history at this point, but in a completely different way than other games. Let me peel back the veil for a bit. When I’m writing these, I usually grab an image or two from Google so it’s not just a wall of text. As an example, I’ll use a game I just beat, Dragon Quest 4. I go on Google, search “Dragon Quest 4 NES” and I get two box art images, and the rest are in game pictures. That’s cool. But if I search “Pokemon Red Gameboy” or anything like that, I do not get in game images. I get box art and cartridges. I have to scroll a LOT to get any in game pictures at all.

I think Pokemon has outgrown its video games. Pokemon isn’t really a game series anymore, it’s the largest multimedia franchise of all fucking time. To Google, the idea of Pokemon, and specifically owning one of the millions of shitty overpriced repro carts that are on marketplaces that everyone is still buying for some reason, is far more important than the actual game itself. Now, I don’t respect Google or its algorithms, at all, so I’m not about to say that’s reflective of all of culture. But it’s at least a small window into the realities of it.

Game

The Pokemon story has evolved into a kind of mythos. You can find videos online talking about everything about the series, and I watch them all, because I’m a fan. Though I hate calling myself that, because in my personal opinion, there are NO fans worse than Pokemon fans. People will shit talk every Nintendo series fandon, but let me tell you, I didn’t get THREE SEPERATE EMAILS from those fan groups because I dared to showcase a woman runner on a speedrunning marathon.

The mythos of Pokemon Red/Blue also has a lot of discourse around it, too. Some will tell you this game is actually dogshit garbage, and has no business being played today. Just play FireRed/LeafGreen. I mean sure, those are good games too, but bugs and questional design decisions don’t ruin the enjoyment of a game. This game is pure nostalgia bait, and it makes me happy to play it, and really that’s what matters. I don’t care that you literally cannot play the game without running into some kind of bug, or that the balance is so fucked. Those poor, poor Bug/Dragon/Ghost types, jesus. And that’s not even getting started on the Fighting type. Yes, that’s all bad, but this game has grown so far beyond it and its own personal flaws that I really don’t care that much.

I go back every few years to play this one. This is actually my second time recently, I did a Prof Oak challenge last year. And I’ll probably play it again sometime soon in the future. It just makes me feel good.