Pokémon Red and Blue: Is It Still Good?

i never thought i'd be reviewing gen 1 again to be honest i thought that 25 years on i and everyone else had probably already said all that there was to say about these games there have been enough memes enough infographics enough popular folklore and criticisms that everyone has seen for there to be two commonly accepted assessments of these games they're simultaneously extremely overrated and easily the worst of all pokemon games by most of the fandom's estimates at the same time there's such a reliable way to grab back the og fans no matter what stage of life we're at but they get used by game freak this way over and over and over again no one is really looking at what they were trying to accomplish with the set of mechanics they chose or how the formula they were building from scratch came together so i guess that there is a little bit more to add to this conversation and i've been thinking about these games a lot lately when you cut through all of the hype and hate what is gen 1 like really well actually and stick with me here they're really pretty well-designed games sure they're a little rough around the edges but what's at the core is really solid traditional rpg inspired game design what we have here is actually a pretty good game not just good asterisk but really solid game design what some of this is going to sound familiar to you if you've seen my gold and silver video but i find that the gen 1 games are somewhat unfairly maligned in similar ways to those games the generation 1 pokemon games are enduring for a reason and much like gold and silver this doesn't all just boil down to nostalgia the early pokemon games lean much more heavily on classic jrpg game design than the later games and as a result offers something uniquely fulfilling and increasingly rare in current day there's something fundamental about it subtle themes and style game design that have kept it relevant for 25 years at this point like remember they started a franchise that has endured its fad status and continued on to become a mainstay in our collective consciousness i'm not giving gen 1 credit for the entire franchise and things that came after it and improved on the things that originated but remember there was no blueprint they were starting from scratch and built so many successful concepts in one game from the ground up and while these ideas might seem old hat are taken for granted now they still deserve some credit for getting it all so right the very first try of course red and blue are not perfect games far from it but i don't think a lot of the criticism it gets is coming from people who are keeping the context of what games are like at the time in mind or really looking at why some of the decisions they disagree with were made in the first place so get ready for some hot juicy analysis you nerds part one aging in my last video about fire and link green i talked about how kanto is mostly perfunctory a lot of the space for world building is used teaching the player how the mechanics work and big picture stuff about the world that pokemon takes place in in case you missed that video what i mean is compared to later games in the series most of the dialogue given to npcs around the kanto region mostly exists to teach you basic things about the world of pokemon how the mechanics work and what different stats do whereas other pokemon games might use the space for world building or to elaborate on the theme or message in some way kanto has to use this space to get everyone on board with the premise instead of a basic framework for a bigger universe to be built upon in future installments we've benefited from pokemon being an established franchise with material and other mediums that might supplementarily teach the player about this stuff the gems the typings the different creatures things like that but at the beginning there wasn't anything they could rely on that could be used to do that job so kanto has a specific job to do and it does it well for the most part and that was the point i made the last time i talked about it but i didn't go a step deeper and really ask a lot of questions about what kind of framework it does set up what is the very essence of the world that pokemon the entire series but especially pokemon red and blue takes place in well the first thing to consider is what kind of perspective we're taking this information in through i'm far from the first person to notice this but red and blue established that pokemon takes place from a child's perspective not just in that it's designed to be played by children but also in the way the world is set up it's sort of a subtle thing but there are some ways in which the game is framed that indicate we're seeing the world from a kid's point of view children seem small from an adult's perspective but in pokemon children are roughly the same size as adults the way we see ourselves at that age just as capable and with as much ability blind to our own inexperience and limitation things like the government and the economy are largely absent from this world because they're not things that children really understand as part of their daily life if you've ever wondered what the system is why there are gyms how you become a gym leader who's in power you can keep wondering because your perspective is the same as a kid that doesn't understand the broader world yet kids are still asking these kinds of questions too the only times these things are relevant is when they intersect with your daily life if there's a cop in your way there's evidence of the state if there's something you need to buy there's evidence of money but the larger systems that produce these things are absent abstract undefined so whatever age the player is the game is experienced through the lens of childhood and that's important to how the game handles its conflict all pokemon games since the very beginning also more or less center around the same conflict set up in this one which is human progress versus preservation what things the value are lost or left behind would be advanced as a society as we all know very well by now the concept of pokemon was based on the lost felt when satoshi tajiri's home in the tokyo area became urbanized in the 80s and all the natural scenery he grew up in and experienced childhood in was paved over the social and economic progress during that time period created more room for the people in the crowded city of tokyo to live necessary progress that better the lives of many people but at what cost in the past we examined this conflict through hoenn which represents this through the lens of preservation of natural resources versus expanding space for a growing society but there are less on the nose way as this theme appears in the series as well in sinnoh this conflict was represented by preservation of spirituality and tradition versus scientific progress and the ability to play god what can we learn from traditions and how can science be a tool we use to help ourselves rather than harm ourselves and of course kanto even with limited traditional story and character dialogue does introduce this conflict for the very first time it's interesting looking back through the development information about red and green while games like gold and silver would see extensive map overhauls throughout its development cycle the region of kanto was more or less already decided on in the first original pitch for what was then called kapumon it is after all based on the real-life greater tokyo area and kanto region of japan which is the area where the staff grew up and lived and worked there were a few areas that never got worked into the final game or change shape in one way or another but kanto itself is very much the bedrock to the rest of the game was molded around staying consistent throughout development telling the story of tokyo was obviously very important to them it was their home where they experienced both loss and success and it ends up being basically the most important character in the game telling the story the dialogue and scripting alone could not kanto takes you through an increasingly urbanized landscape and palette town buildings are spread out in sparse there are long empty routes with few people and nature is evident all around in woods and mountains as you progress you start to see more and more buildings rubbing up against the natural landscape and more of the dungeons move indoors more towers and underground hideouts and abandoned buildings contrasted to the natural woods and caves earlier in the game the routes get denser and full of people and as that happens you start to see the ways in which nature is lost or destroyed pogon themselves are creatures that kind of personify nature in a way and help illustrate the way that the environment is being impacted by human presence earlier in the game there were more natural animal-like pokemon in the wider less urban spaces bugs rats birds rocks bats snakes all with very basic designs that are familiar to us as wildlife and natural scenery but then as you get into the grass around the densely populated areas like celadon or fuchsia city pokemons start looking more like monsters or have man-made appearances doduo with its two heads magneton with its metal body ghosts made of poisonous gas whatever the hell ditto is some of the only natural looking pokemon in the late game are in captivity in the safari zone why would there need to be a nature preserve like the safari zone unless nature itself is threatened and if pokemon themselves are emblematic of nature in this story they're also the vehicle through which human characters directly interact with nature humans have a relationship with pokemon that can be either beneficial or parasitic and pokemon don't really get a say in that it's up to us to decide what role nature plays in humanity i think that could be one of the reasons that the relationship between pokemon battling and consent is left so vague early on it sets up a parallel to the ethical dilemma we face in real life when it comes to existing as a species of consumers we're designed to consume it is our nature and yet unchecked it causes ecological damage so much like in real life in pokemon all people use nature for different ends some to get richer some live side by side in harmony and some study it team rocket is a stand-in for humanity's greed and how it disrupts and destroys in the name of capital they're obsessed with using nature to become more wealthy even to the point of blatant destruction hurting people and pokemon best illustrated by the marowak and pokemon tower that a straight up killed by team rocket or the hostage situation and take over itself it's actually kind of interesting to think about mr fuji in this context he's found a pokemon tower and living in lavender town caring for orphaned pokemon and that's how he's first introduced to you working to help heal nature damaged by humans but there is text indicating that he founded the pokemon lab in cinnabar which implies that he may have once owned the abandoned pokemon mansion which has journals talking about the discovery of mew and creation of mewtwo at some point the mysterious mr fuji may have abused human progress and science to try to synthesize a powerful pokemon presumably in the pursuit of power itself though mewtwo is never explicitly referred to as a weapon it does have some parallels to the kaiju's stories that inspired game freak originally godzilla for example is a narrative metaphor for man's hubris in creating the atomic bomb perhaps mewtwo is a smaller version of the same concept mr fuji atones for what he did by leaving his past behind and in the present trying to protect threatened natural life but the lab itself still runs and speaking of mr fuji the incompetence of adults is everywhere at this game it's in your parents to let you wander into strange cities far from home all alone it's in your teacher who asks you to do work that he can't do because he's too old it's in giovanni and team rocket and how their misguided plans are foiled by just one kid and it's in the largely absent state that does not hold bad people accountable for doing bad things leaving the job up to the very type of person it should be protecting in the first place a child at the very beginning of the game you are not asked to collect all the badges and become the champion instead professor oak asks you to help him study nature remember how he established your playing from the viewpoint of a child well he asks you the next generation to become curious explore and understand the world in a way the very game itself is built that way to force you to use the part of your brain that learns about things takes an information solves problems it's simple but it is a story from a child's perspective after all one in which the child grows and gains more understanding of the world they live in even more than the destructive adults around them the game asks you to be curious learn grow and discover that adults aren't always right even in positions of authority learn how to be better than the adults that raised you learn from their mistakes and maybe go on to make better decisions as you inherit this ruined earth that's what makes this story which in a way is part of all pokemon games so timeless and why we keep coming back to it despite its simplicity learning to be a better person in the example you are molded by is difficult and something you never stop learning to do even in adulthood part two pokemon games aren't difficult kanto is not only the basis for storytelling through its environment but also a big player in the flow of the game and even how the game is balanced after all once the team rocket stuff is resolved the game doesn't end there's still a lot more to discover through exploration and getting into every nook and cranny to find pokemon remember your job isn't actually to solve the problems of incompetent adults that's just dumb adults doing what dumb adults do and wasting your time by making their problems your problems your job is to learn about pokemon and to do that you have to find them all and that doesn't end once team rocket's out of the way as you're exploring kanto and looking for all of those hidden mons and crevices and caves you might notice that there are actually more dungeons in this game than there are gems and it feels fitting to call them dungeons because the traditional jrpg influence is more strongly felt here than anywhere else in the series gen 2 may have perfected this concept by really tying all of the ideas together and presenting them more neatly than before but gen 1 was very heavily inspired by the games that the developers enjoyed playing and they wanted to throw in as many traditional elements as they could fit you might have multiple different areas to clear before you can even move to the next city and though not all of them have pokemon to catch they do all have their own puzzles and gimmicks most dungeons will have a unique environmental obstacle like darkness or spinning floor tiles or mimics and almost all of them have an item hidden inside that you need to collect to get access to other parts of the same dungeon or even access to other dungeons entirely for example the whole middle of the game revolves around getting to the top floor pokemon tower you need the still scope to get past the ghost that is blocking your way to the top floor so you have to go to the neighboring city celadon find a secret switch to open a door to team rocket's hideout in the celadon game corner then navigate the environmental puzzle of spinning floor tiles then you need to find a key to the elevator in order to get to the deepest level in battle giovanni who finally gives you the soft scope to get through the tower what's your reward once you finally get to the top of the tower a pokeflute used to wake the sleeping snorlaxes that block your path to the west and south keys to keys to keys to keys you know how in later games there's a section of the bag called key items well in this game you understand why because if you don't drop off a ton of items in your pc after you finish each area you're going to be carrying a ton of literal keys around with you and not have room for loot one thing i often hear people say when discussing difficulty in pokemon games is the idea that pokemon games were never difficult you only found them difficult because you were a kid and actually they kind of have a point but they're missing something too pokemon games most of them anyway are designed to be intentionally difficult for their assumed audience children but that's actually really important for them to do because the whole point of pokemon is to encourage kids to learn and designing your game specifically to be challenging for children accesses the part of their brain that is learning how to solve problems kids need games that are designed to challenge them specifically to push them and help them learn important deductive skills and reasoning and even open their minds to broader ideas about the world but at the same time they can't be completely inaccessible and keep in mind kids aren't stumped by everything they're very sharp because a lot of these skills are fresh and being used all the time but they also probably don't want to play something that's designed to be difficult for adults either if all games were designed to not be challenging for kids at all or if all difficult games were designed to appeal only to adults kids would miss out on this important opportunity to grow these skills so it's actually pretty important to have games that are difficult specifically for kids and pokemon does this really successfully i'm sure every single one of us can remember being stumped by something in one of these games as a kid and figuring out how to overcome it either by finding the knowledge in a resource like a guidebook or the internet or a schoolmate or just by trial and error in your way through it it also gave us opportunities to fail and get comfortable with the idea that you can keep trying again if you don't succeed at something like trying to beat brock with charmander i tend to forget this as an adult and i do wish the pokemon game still challenged me in the same way they used to but they fill an important role in the lives of children that play them i know they didn't mind so while this game is not difficult necessarily for an adult it is a difficult game for children and it lands harder on the problem solving than pretty much any other pokemon game it isn't afraid to make you stop and grind even as early as the first gym and it wants you to get stumped and slow down pretty often there are so many dead ends in this game virtually every location becomes important because you have to spend so much time in each space trying to figure out the one thing that will open up your next path forward i often forget playing through as an adult how much time i had to spend solving these problems and getting past each roadblock on my first playthrough for a game that's asking you to learn about the world around you by introducing obstacles that you have to think about and overcome it does a good job of mounting a challenge that a kid can figure out by exploring enough and gathering enough context clues exploration is the answer every time and it's how the themes and the game mechanics really come together into a solid cohesive design the world you live in is full of obstacles and things to learn and the only way forward is to do just that as you travel there are item balls areas and secrets that are just out of reach everywhere and the world wraps around so you often find yourself re-exploring these areas you traveled through earlier before you found the tools to help you progress to overcome these things that were once dangling just out of reach it rewards you for coming back to acknowledge how far you've come and celebrates your progress with you of course your reward for beating the elite four might be bragging rights in a credits role but your actual in-game reward is access to yet another final dungeon one so confusing to navigate that they had to redesign it three times at the very end of this dungeon is that powerful pokemon mr fuji made mewtwo the same pokemon that was made out of a selfish lust for power so mewtwo has to be super powerful somehow to drive that point home and this is where the game's balance comes in you see having typing was actually a unique idea that pokemon introduced to the genre at the time most other jrpg series focused on building up a small set of party members through better gear and leveling up but this game had so many different characters and party options that each needed a unique role in the party one way they accomplished that was by giving each pokemon a type that would be strong against and weak against other types so try to keep in mind that this system was designed from a single player's standpoint first that they wanted each pokemon to have a role in your journey not necessarily just multiplayer and they needed some types to be stronger than others as a whole to accomplish that see the two most overpowered types on paper compared to the rest of the game are set up basically solely as boss encounters before you fight lance at the elite four with his dragonites you have scanned few opportunities for an ice type they're only available on seafoam islands a completely optional dungeon that some players might just skip or your other option is that you're given a single under level lapras that is so far below you by the time you get it that it's basically unusable without deliberate effort you also have very few opportunities to ever see a dragon type before the end of the game and both of the chances that you do have are non-traditional encounter types there's one that you buy at the casino and the other you can catch in the safari zone i know this is hard to imagine now but in these days before everyone knew what dragonite was they really set it up perfectly as a surprise boss and went out of their way to make it unlikely that you would know how to counter it it resists the strongest attacks of every starter and the game makes it so that you'd have to have gone out of your way to have raised an ice type by this point for 4 times damage dragon might be in theory stronger than other types in the game but it is that way on purpose imagine what a shock the elite 4 lance fight would have been in 98 before anyone knew anything about pokemon and mewtwo is much the same there's nothing to counter it because it's supposed to blow you away it's the tragic atomic bomb pokemon created by man in hiding as far away from civilization as it can get psychic is a slightly more common type than dragon but there aren't actually a ton of really big powerhouse psychic types in the main story of the game besides mewtwo and almost none of them learned the really hard hitting moves by level up i will say that this is more true in red and blue than it is in yellow though since yellow gave enemy trainers access to tms and arbitrarily beefed up the levels on a bunch of later gyms so psychic being more op is much more of a problem there than it is in the other gen 1 games of course some might argue that since multiplayer battling was designed as part of the original pitch that they should have taken it into account when designing the types and that it is still a bad game designed to have an unbalanced game and i guess that's a fair complaint but as someone who has spent a lot of time battling in gen 1 outside of the main story i don't ever notice the typing being a serious issue what is more of a realistic problem someone might have are some of the mechanics like how critical hits work some unfair or poorly implemented move mechanics like hyper beam toxic or leech seed or things that were seemingly designed to be on purpose like one hit ko moves and rap but in my opinion there's actually something fun about how the battling is sure not everyone will feel that way and that's understandable but after playing through all of stadium 1 with my in-game teams including round two it has unique strengths compared to later games for starters it's super lethal because of the way crits are tied to speed and the fact that so many of the best pokemon have heavy hitting moves but low defenses that's exacerbated by the fact that special is a single stat so any pokemon with really high special like the scarier pokemon like alakazam are typically super weak physically which is what every single other pokemon you're likely to use is good at because almost all the pokemon with high enough speed to create are physical attackers it's all about speed really and because of this battles tend to move really fast unless you get tangled up in someone's intentionally irritating stall gimmick it almost ends up playing out like a standoff in a western movie crits and one-hit kos make speed management essential so you end up needing a decent electric type to spread paralysis and with some of the most reliable and hardest hitting physical moves being ground types that also means you have a good reason to carry a grass or water type to counter to deal with the inevitable grass type you'll need a flying type and so on so though the objective best team is six mewtwo's take a look at some of the teams that ranked in regional contests in japan at the time or even some of the prime cup teams in stadium there's a surprising amount of variety in top teams for something so badly balanced sometimes gimmicks are fun to use and while they're not fun to be on the receiving end of they really spice things up in what could otherwise be just a slam fest there are a ton of different strategies to take advantage of here and while a lot of it is still and unfair and that might not be everyone's thing in my experience it's the perfect mix of simple hard-hitting fun and variety and strategy that makes for a great time while still being designed first and foremost to set up some memorable challenges in the single players story this battle system accomplishes a lot all at the same time and i feel like a lot of people overlook that i don't think that they weren't thinking about it or were totally inept buffoons that didn't know how to balance a game i think that the final outcome is working pretty much as designed with the exception of some glitches part three duct tape and wishes for example let's address the most often repeated line i hear about these games which is that they're held together by duct tape and wishes some internet famous boy must have said this somewhere because of how often i hear this exact phrasing regurgitated of course i have to acknowledge that this is pretty true this is an extremely buggy game but i do think that it's unfair to pretend that the bugs ruined the game in any meaningful way or that it ended up this way out of sheer incompetence sure gamefreak were inexperienced and had a very small staff to be working on something of this scale at this point but a lot of people who played these games either did so as their first video game ever or are returning to an era just for this one title that they otherwise have no experience with so no one is really looking at the context of what games were just like back then when they call these games the buggiest ever when you consider the platform as a whole the game boy library is actually kind of insanely buggy especially other games of similar scope legend of zelda link's awakening is an extremely buggy game that i never hear anyone give it for the same way people rag on about pokemon being buggy i even ran into some glitches in the dx version the re-release on the game boy color that was supposed to be designed to patch out most of the really egregious bugs without even looking for them the final fantasy games for the game boy which would arguably be pokemon's closest peers also have serious glitches that can according to this wiki render the game unplayable the reason for the prevalence of glitches and more complicated game boy games of this era is that they were all coded in assembly a programming language that is heavily dependent on where things are stored in memory and programmers have to be very careful in how each bit of data is routed and how much memory is used when they had so little to work with so yeah the game boy pokemon games were buggy but it's actually kind of a miracle that a most of the glitches you have to go really out of your way to find and b almost none of them have any potential to soft lock your game or damage your save data again unless you really go out of your way to accomplish that the average player in 98 had no idea how buggy the games were until missingno became a playground in internet rumor because you can play the whole game without ever realizing something isn't working as intended of course when people did find out it was pretty much just fun and games trying to see how far we could push it and how much we could exploit each opening it actually makes the gen 2 games even more impressive in hindsight with how many of these holes they were able to close in the code and how few glitches there are compared to the original games considering they were running on a modified version of the first engine i don't think that these games ended up the way that they did out of a lack of care or effort just that what they were trying to do was really difficult with what limited resources they had to work with it says something that instead of continuing to release buggy unpolished games forever the same way other developers like bethesda have they immediately made a concentrated effort to make the follow-up games cleaner to the point that the bugs from that point on have been even more minor and out of the way there might even be more documented glitches for pokemon than other titles in the same system because by now there have been hundreds of people dedicating decades to finding and documenting every possible unintended outcome and oversight in the game nobody gives a about anything else on the gameboy anymore so nobody is spending this amount of time and energy digging up every broken thing that you can find in every other game now when people say that the games have aged poorly on the basis of quality of life and graphical polish that is really the only one of these arguments that holds any water the monochromatic color scheme the simple sprites things just barely graphically representing what they're supposed to be in the overworld that sort of thing can be off-putting if you're used to more modern games even other 2d games things like having to open the menu to use items or hm abilities not being able to tag anything to the select button having very limited bag space and the pc menus being kind of confusing i get it even going back to these games if you just play gold and silver you notice things like not being able to just walk up to water and press a to surf obviously i can't claim that i am in no way influenced by nostalgia or have no bias because i played these games extensively during a period of time in my life where i had the patience and time to deal with some of their more poorly aged aspects those things are just not going to be a roadblock for me the same way they would be for a newer player i tolerate them now just as well as i did back then because i know what to expect this sort of thing is ultimately just subjective in the end i guess actually all of this is subjective but this is especially the sort of thing that's going to be impacted by what your experience of gaming was formed by and what your expectations are and is going to vary from person to person when i played these games as a kid i had no expectations i started here if you started somewhere else it makes sense that you might prefer something a little prettier or less tedious or maybe even if you started here and then saw how much more improved a lot of this stuff got it's fine to prefer modern installments but in my subjective experience there are a lot of games that are much harder to go back to than this and there is a lot of value here if you can cut through some of the discomfort that you can't get by playing games with a more modern design ethos in mind let's go back to that theme again as i said earlier pokemon games are asking the question what things of value are lost or left behind when we advance as a society these games were made in and for a slower moving and less connected world a time where we didn't have nearly as many constant demands on our attention or intense information fatigue on a daily basis and sometimes that slower pace is nice to go back to for a little break from all the demands of today the world back then was also a lot shittier for a lot of people which i don't mean to gloss over progress is also about what we have to gain right but sometimes it's good for your brain to get some perspective on where we've been and where we're going even if it isn't always comfortable the reason i've been thinking so hard about gen 1 lately is that when i started writing this video in november of last year i had just released my fire red league green video in which i'm very harsh on those games i got a lot of comments from people saying things like well it's absolutely necessary that they made these remakes because the original game boy games are bad and now we finally have a playable version of kanto and i was torn on that because while i don't think that i could fault anyone for not wanting to play a 25 year old gameboy game in 2021 or enjoying a game with a much faster engine and prettier graphics that keeps a lot of the same content from these games intact i actually can't agree that these are the worst or even a worse version of kanto now kanto itself is not my favorite region to revisit so many years on as we discussed at length last time but if i have to play a kanto game i pick red or blue every time to me the simplicity of the mechanics and being able to see the bare skeleton of what the rest of the franchise would be built on means it offers a completely unique experience from every modern iteration it's a perfect time capsule of what was important to the people who made it when they made it and it's nice to see a game aimed at children that doesn't pull all its punches and trust them to learn and overcome everything thrown at them it's actually kind of ironic that kanto is one of the most remade regions because is that not precisely the conflict that these games examine that some things are lost when progress is made i guess it may not be the perfect rpg experience for everybody but it is the game that taught me to love rpgs and all the crunchy rough edges that sometimes come with them so even if i would prefer not to play them again in particular just because i think in my lifetime i've gotten my fill i don't think that they belong in the garbage or that all the things that they have to offer have been made obsolete or i could just be turning into a boomer [Music]

Channel: Tama Hero

Views: 200,071

Keywords: pokemon, pokemon red, pokemon blue, gen 1, pokemon gen 1, national dex, pokedex, brilliant diamond, shining pearl, diamond and pearl, pokemon unite, pokemon brilliant diamond, pokemon shining pearl, pokemon brilliant diamond shining pearl, pokemon go, retrospective, game review, game reviews, pokemon news, best gen 1 pokemon, generation 1, analysis, review, pokemon yellow, mewtwo, kanto, game freak, nintendo, tamashii, tama hero, tamashiihiroka, dykg, didyouknowgaming

Id: ha3AGv27Aro

Length: 30min 8sec (1808 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 27 2021