Was it Good? - Pokemon Red / Blue

now if this works i'm about to fulfill a childhood dream to confirm a schoolyard rumor and my god it's actually real ladies and gentlemen welcome i'm josh dreyface and today we're going back to 1998 and replaying the classic game boy rpg pokemon generation one red and blue i'll be going through the whole game beating all the gym leaders finding all the hidden legendary birds and then showing you some of the more famous exploits and glitches because honestly with the amount of shortcuts and coding hacks they had to use it's a miracle this game even runs at all we'll be looking at the broken combat system the exploitable encounter rate the dark and hidden law and then confirming that rumor a kid once told you because his uncle works at nintendo about mew and no it's not under the truck before we start our pokemon journey to take down the elite four a massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon and twitch who allow me to make longer form videos like this more on how you can support at the end for now grab a drink and settle in as we ask pokemon generation one was it any good pokemon is the highest grossing franchise in the world it's made more money than marvel more money than star wars how it's made more money than mickey mouse disney's flagship mascot cowers in the shadow of the famous yellow mouse and it all started with this game pokemon green released only in japan the game was then localized for western audiences and re-released as pokemon red and blue it always seems strange to me that the game boy games released before the card game if you played these games then you were there at the start you lived through the birth of the biggest franchise in history in this video i'll be playing through pokemon blue because it was the one i owned as a kid and i'll be pointing out the differences with the red version as they happen at the main menu you can choose new game or continue now because this game was made for old game boy hardware you can only have one saved game at a time if you mess up or corrupt your game which is extremely easy to do you need to restart from the beginning choosing new game we are greeted by professor oak and he explains what pokemon are the word pokemon is the combination of pocket monsters wild animal type things which roam the world so humans capture them and train them to fight each other while it's generally accepted now that pokemon only attack other pokemon and not humans this game proves that wrong while the lore of pokemon now might be all child-friendly and sanitized in generation 1 if you read deeply you'll discover it's pretty messed up you can give yourself a name and then you meet your rival professor oak's grandson now in the games this is not gary oak like in the anime the game is based on the original manga and in the manga the main character is called red and the rival is called blue but you're able to name your rival which of course if you play this game as a kid is the most powerful thing you've ever been able to do so of course his name is butt we're now shrunk down to sprite form and the adventure begins pokemon red and blue are top-down rpg adventures you explore the tiled over world adventuring through forests caves towns and even the ocean the first thing we're going to do is activate the pc in the corner of our room the pc is the pokemon and item storage system you can only carry six pokemon on you at a time if you catch a pokemon while already carrying six it's sent to the storage system you can find pcs at any poke center or even in glitch places they shouldn't be we'll look at this later access the item storage system and withdraw the single potion sat waiting for you we'll need this in a minute and then you can leave we begin the adventure in pallet town because an artist's palette is used for holding colors and every other town we'll visit is named after a color viridian pewter cerulean vermilion lavender celadon fuchsia saffron and cinnabar the first few easter eggs there's a snazz or a super nintendo entertainment system in your own room you can examine it and get told this is not the time to play or if you examine the tv in your house it says there's a film playing four boys are walking on railroad tracks the film playing is stephen king's stand by me the 1987 coming of age story about four boys walking to find a dead body generation one pokemon games were completely self-aware they break the fourth wall often and later will even meet the actual writers directors and graphic artists in the game because of the limited graphical power of the game boy all the buildings in the game look similar and have little signposts outside explaining what they are meaning you've got to be doing a lot of reading and then remembering where places are in any given town because while you eventually get a world map you do not have a localized mini-map there's nothing to do here so we leave but we get stopped and yelled at by professor oak he explains pokemon live in tall grass and so we need a pokemon of our own to protect us so we walk back to the lab then butt shows up and we get given the greatest choice in video game history which pokemon do we want to start with charmander bulbasaur or squirtle this game sold so well and the franchise became so popular that this choice is basically a litmus test for personality there are videos of parents placing three plushy pokemon in front of babies and seeing which one they crawl to one of my friends did this if you're an edgy edge lord you choose the fire pokemon charmander if you're a tactical genius you choose the grass pokemon bulbasaur and no one chose the water pokemon squirtle and then butt pulls what scholars have come to call the greatest dick move in gaming by choosing whatever pokemon you are weak to elemental strengths and weaknesses can swing the tide of battle and the move being super effective or not very effective against an opponent really matters so with our pokemon in hand we go to leave and butt challenges us to a fight and here begins the true rivalry so let's look at the battle system in a bit more depth a pokemon battle is you versus another trainer you'll send out whatever pokemon is at the top of your list and then you've got some choices you can attack use an item like a potion or temporary stat boost switch to another pokemon or try to run away but you can't run away from trainer battles so you have to fight if you choose to fight you and your opponent actually choose attacks at the same time and then the pokemon with the highest speed rating will attack first in generation one pokemon had five important base stats hit points attack defense speed and special hit points are how much damage a pokemon can take before it faints in battle and needs to be switched with another you'll notice i said faints and not dies this will matter later defense reduces damage taken from physical moves and special is interesting some attacks count as special attacks and the strength of the attack and your defense against it both use this stat speed determines which pokemon attacks first some moves such as quick attack give a speed bonus and always hit first when a pokemon wins a fight they gain experience and when they gain enough they level up increasing these base stats and learning new moves certain pokemon at certain levels evolve into their more powerful forms others only evolve when you use a special elemental stone on them evolution is a permanent change but you can stop the evolution process by pressing b while it's happening the only reason you'd want to do this is because the lower evolution form of some pokemon actually learn moves earlier than their higher evolved versions in generation one you've broadly got two types of fighting moves moves which do damage and moves which do not do damage if a move does not do damage it could reduce the opponent's accuracy like sand attack it could increase your own pokemon's defense like barrier it could increase the damage of your next attack like focus or it could restore your pokemon's hit points like recover a pokemon can know four moves at any one time and learning a new move requires deleting an old one and there are 165 moves available in generation 1. this may sound impressive but the problem is these moves are not balanced at all and many of them are downright broken you have moves like tackle which is the default move every pokemon knows and hits with a power of 40 and 100 accuracy as standard although 100 accuracy moves can still miss based on the opponent's evasion and the random miss glitch you have moves like fury attack which hit with a power rating of 15 and an accuracy of 85 the only upside being they can hit twice sometimes up to five times but then you've got super powerful moves like hyper beam which is essentially a guaranteed one hit ko but you need to recharge next turn or psychic which is a special attack does a ton of damage with 100 accuracy and lowers the opponent's special defense for your follow-up attack each move has a number of power points or pp and using up a move uses up one pp when you run out you get told there's no pp left which of course resulted in lots of memes generation one had a diverse moveset and as a kid this was amazing because you just see variety but as an adult you realize there are only a few moves worth using because they'll let you win in one hit and then you realize the coding of them is broken like if you do knock out an opponent pokemon using hyper beam you don't need to recharge next turn making it objectively the best move for every situation and the broken moves don't stop there focus energy is meant to increase your critical hit chance to four times but in generation one this move actually sets your crit rate to one quarter swift is meant to have a 100 hit chance regardless of modifiers but it can still miss because when the game calculates a hit chance it generates a number from naught to 255 with the instruction that less than 255 is a hit but if it happens to generate exactly 255 it's not less than and therefore still misses if you use a stat boosting attack like sword dance to boost your attack and you boost it past 999 it actually rolls you back to zero so boosting hugely decreases your attack for that battle if you use the hp recovery move rest soft boiled or recovery and the amount of hp you should recover is either exactly 255 or exactly 511 the move will recover zero because of how the game's coding ignores the first byte of the recovery check and doing this makes these values look like zero to the game in generation one your critical hit rate was also based off your speed meaning a fast pokemon not only got to go first but it also always scored a critical hit making most battles one hit ko's so the combat system has broken but that's okay because in this run we're going to break it in our favor the first battle with butt is pretty basic just keep attacking and he'll use non-damaging moves on you ignore them and keep tackling and if you get low on health use the potion you withdrew earlier you will never lose winning gets you exactly 69 experience points which is nice and levels you up so now we have a pokemon the adventure begins walk north adventure through the long grass and encounter wild pokemon each encounter gets you this cool screen blackout effect and the battle music starts up which we can all agree is nostalgic as hell one of the most impressive things about the battle screen is its layout the use of four diagonal quadrants to imply depth in many rpgs you have the player's team on one side and the enemies on another or you have the player's team in the foreground and the enemy in the background and you simply have one image for each sprite if the sprite is facing left or right you just flip it and it would have been much easier to just do that but look at what they've achieved here by having your active pokemon bottom left and the enemy top right with your view of your pokemon showing the back of its head and the opponent showing the full sprite they've actually managed to imply depth like you are standing on the battlefield watching your opponent in the distance and it's so simple you don't realize until you start looking for it and then you've had the opponent's health shown to the top left and yours to the bottom right which frees up the dead center of the screen for the rudimentary combat animations and it works because your pokemon is facing to the right and up and the enemies is facing to the left and down and when the moves the actual action which took place is shown as a representation of a graphic it allows the game boy screen to imply dynamic 3d depth with the facing of 2d sprites you are looking over your pokemon's shoulder and because the battle begins with the opponent sliding off to the side the pokeball animation appearing in the pokemon popping out you know you're watching two pokemon actually staring each other down right now we don't have any pokeballs so all we can do is fight so we adventure on and talk to this dude and he gives us a free potion and tells us to go to the pokemart in the next town over and this is good design especially for an rpg because we've talked to the first random person we've bumped into and we got rewarded for it so now the player is encouraged to talk to more people and hope to find more rewards which is going to let the game designers hide the game's law within conversation dialogue knowing it's more likely to be found the menu we start with is pretty basic we can see our pokemon our items and our progress through the gyms but oddly there's no world map you actually need to find the map as an item and you can completely miss it as a kid i missed it and i had to navigate the game by memory or by going into random houses in villages and admiring the town map on the wall to work out where i was while traveling you'll also see these ledges you can jump down them or over them if moving down left or right but you cannot jump back up them setting a really basic but effective one-way travelling system in the overworld in the first town we'll find our first pokemon center identified by the words pokey on the building inside you can walk up to the counter and have your carried pokemon healed if you've played the game you will have this sound burned into your memory [Music] the only other building with a nameplate is the pokemon these places sell pokeballs for capturing wild pokemon potions for healing and repels which keep wild pokemon away from you we'll need these later heading into the first pokemon actually begins the main story you're asked to take a parcel back to professor oak in pallet town so we do that and now oak explains his plan he always wanted to capture every pokemon ever and to track which ones he'd caught he has a pokedex but now he's a bit too old so he gives both you and butt a pokedex and says go forth and capture all the pokemon side note you could actually buy the pokedex as a toy it was one of the most wanted christmas gifts in 1999 and today they sell for around 50 pounds so armed with the pokedex catching all 151 should be pretty easy right well not unless you own both games because here is the incredible marketing catch while pokemon red and blue are essentially the same game the pokemon you can encounter in them are slightly different like ekans and arbok only being in red meowth and persian only being in blue quick side note in case anyone hadn't noticed ekkins is snake backwards and arbok is cobra backwards the naming wasn't exactly complex stuff not all pokemon names work when spelled backwards though like it doesn't work with muk so if you have red and your mate had blue you'd need to both complete your own pokedexes and then trade with each other and trading was a major part of the game you trade by going to the trade center in any poker sector talking to the trade manager and waiting for your friend to do the same trading back then needed a physical link cable to actually hook two game boys together and they've thought trading through because you cannot trade at the first poker center you need to adventure further into the game before the ability unlocks so you can't just choose one of the three starters and give it to your mates within a few minutes you need to play for an hour at least and some pokemon only evolve when traded like cadabra becoming alakazam or haunted becoming gengar so trading is a needed mechanic to actually complete the game so why don't you just give your mate over-leveled pokemon via trade and let them steamroll the game well once a pokemon reaches a certain level or if it's traded to you over a certain level you lose control of it in battle it might still fight or it might ignore your commands and just sit there doing nothing and the gym badges you earn from defeating gym leaders as you progress the main story actually increase the level of pokemon you can control until you beat misty the second gym leader you can only control pokemon up to level 30. if you're given something stronger they just won't listen to you this is an excellent system to prevent early game power creep once oak has given you the pokedex pay a visit to butt's sister and she'll give you a town map you can check this from your inventory and navigate slight issue with that though you press left and right to move the highlighted location but it moves in a set order you cannot press up or down to move this select square freely you cannot scroll the map as you like you have to move through the locations in a set order right now it's time to progress we get to killing some wild pokemon bulbasaur levels up and learns leech seed this attack saps health from the enemy each turn and refills ours and it's going to be essential for the first gym oh also leech seed uses the same damage multiplier as toxic for some reason so if the enemy is poisoned with toxic leech seed will hit them for way more than it's meant to because as i've said before combat is broken in the first village there's an old man who offers to teach you how to catch pokemon you basically just use a pokeball from your inventory while in battle now i don't need the tutorial but remember this dude he is going to be essential later when we break the game and catch the rarest pokemon there is oh quick note about using pokeballs to catch wild pokemon the catch algorithm is also broken you've got different types of pokeballs your standard pokeball then great ball and ultra ball and a single master ball now ultra balls are meant to be better than great balls but that's not always true you also get told that the chance of catching a wild pokemon depends mostly on how much health that pokemon has left but that's completely untrue health is a tiny tiny part of the whole calculation what matters far more is if the enemy pokemon is under a status effect like poison or paralysis or frozen in generation one pokemon games ultra balls and great balls are pretty much equal until status effects gets involved and then well catching a limited pokemon like snorlax or the legendary bird is so difficult without them i will show you the maths later so first things first we're going to catch a male nidoran because we need horn attack for how completely broken it is for the first half of the game i find one pretty quick and get to training it up the only other pokemon i'll need now is mew and yes you can get mew in both red and blue without using a game genie or without hacking the cartridge and i am going to show you how early on on your journey you'll travel through viridian forest and face your first opponents other trainers if you walk into the eye line of another trainer they will walk up to you and you will battle you cannot run away from a trainer battle it's a case of fight until you win or until you're out of pokemon and when you win you'll get some money and this is important because money in red and blue is basically limited once you've beaten the trainer you can't fight them again and they are your only source of early game money there are only two very time consuming ways in red blue or yellow to grind infinite money either repeatedly fighting the elite four at the very end of the game or using meowth's attack payday which scatters coins and you pick them up after the battle both are extremely slow so money will be something you want to keep a close eye on don't go wasting it on pokeballs when you really need potions now some of the early game fights aren't exactly thrilling like fighting a cocooner who only knows harden which increases its defense and your attacks don't hit much anyway at this point so you end up in this several minutes long slogging match against an opponent who has no way to win nidoran hits level 8 learns horn attack and the first half of the game is now basically sorted sometimes you'll spot items in the overworld they're shown as little pokeball icons and you can go and pick them up but in a pretty cool twist there are loads of hidden items which you can't see and can walk right over pressing a on the right tile picks them up and once you've found one you will remember where they are forever 23 years later i still remember there is a rare candy on the floor of the back garden of this house welcome to pewter city first gym leader brock every main town has a gym inside are some trainers and a gym leader fighting the trainers for money is advised because once you beat the leader of a gym none of the trainers in that gym will fight you oh and if you try to leave the town and journey onward early this dude tells you to go back and beat brock so you have to do this brock uses ground and rock based pokemon which is great because that means they are weak to grass and bulbasaur happens to be grass so leech seed rips them apart but here's something you might not have noticed about the gym design you can catch the pokemon used against you directly after any given gym so you fight brock and you see how tough rock pokemon are and you think i want a geodude and i want an onyx and then you journey through mount moon and you can catch them you fight misty and you see how good water pokemon are and then you get given a fishing rod so you can catch them the game is designed to show you a type impress you with its power and then let you go and catch it which is a great bit of design taking down brock gives us the boulder badge and lets us use the hm flash outside of battle he also gives us tm 34 byde so let's have a look at what they are pokemon learn moves by leveling up but you can also use a tm or technical machine to teach a move a tm is a one time use item you can get them for beating gyms you can buy them from some shops or find them lying around on the floor in red and blue there are 50 tms now not every pokemon can learn every move a ground type cannot learn flying attacks a fire type cannot learn water attacks in fact there's only one pokemon in the game who can learn every single tm and we're going to catch them pretty soon the main issue with tms is you don't know what they are until you boot them up and it asks you if you want to teach it to a pokemon the items are just called tm and then a number from 1 to 50. it's a very clunky system for finding out what's in them along with tms you've got hms or hidden machines there are only five of these cut fly surf strength and flash each hm is both a combat move and a game mechanic usable out of combat once you've taught a hm move to a pokemon they cannot ever forget it you cannot replace it with the tm or have them forget it when leveling up teaching a pokemon a hm move is permanent and you cannot use that hm out of battle until you've beaten a specific gym leader and have been given the permission to use it with brock defeated we can head off to the east fighting many trainers along the way including this absolute legend who likes shorts because they're comfy and easy to wear and now a speed running tactic when a pokemon's health is full the health bar is green half is orange and low is red and when your own health is red the game will begin beeping this state is known as red bar and it's a major mechanic in the speedrun community while in red bar certain combat animations and sounds will play faster and you can input commands while enemy pokemon do their intro battle screech which you can't do when you're not in red bar this saves several seconds every fight which adds up to minutes over a full run thankfully i'm not speed running you will discover in the early game you'll be backtracking to pokey centers often after two or three battles you've often used or you attack pp up or you don't want to waste money on potions but battles can be avoided because in generation 1 enemy trainers do not change their facing they do not turn they will always stand facing one direction so you can walk around most of them into mount moon we go and prepare to get swarmed with geodudes and zubats so the encounter rate in the first few pokemon games wasn't super balanced in the overworld you'll only encounter pokemon while in long grass or in the water but in caves every step you take is a potential encounter you can buy the item repel super repel or max repel to reduce the encounter rate but even that doesn't entirely stop it silver lining of all this grinding nidoran has evolved into nidorino and now we meet the first team rocket grunt team rocket are an organization dedicated to using pokemon for evil they are so cartoonishly over the top evil in this game it is almost a parody of evil organizations they openly describe themselves as using pokemon for evil mount moon is also named for the moon stones which fell here many years ago and these will actually be used to evolve anderino into nidoking later on and now another choice because the game is built to be replayed multiple times fighting this super nerd lets you choose a fossil this is one of the game's many many optional side quests take whichever fossil you want to the museum later and have it cloned into either an ammonite or a kabuto you have to pick a fossil to continue and the dude will choose whichever fossil you didn't choose reach cerulean city and if you have a game boy color you'd marvel at the pixels changing color but if you had a regular game boy like me you'll wonder why they went to a slightly different shade of grey okay look at that guy standing by a cave when i was a kid i thought that was a dude wearing one of those big hats the london guards in the castle wear or he had some crazy tall hair like gerald from hey arnold and it took me years to realize he was standing in front of a cave and not just any cave that is the cave we'll be coming back to later once we've beaten the game travel north onto nugget bridge and bump into butt again cue the first unexpected unavoidable rival fight as a kid knowing that i could bump into my rival anywhere had me paranoid i'd be keeping my pokemon on max health and maxed attacks just in case this idiot showed up somewhere oh and very important law moment you'll notice butt is using a rattata remember this it's a playground rumor but i think it has some weight after beating butt we fight across nugget bridge and finally get the great prize of a nugget now you're meant to sell these for 5 000 coins but 10 year old me didn't know that and just collected them and then the first time i was disappointed in a video game this dude asks if we want to join team rocket and i go to say yes but there's no choice you can't join them don't give me a choice like that game if you're not prepared for me to say yes with nugget bridge down we can begin the glitch to catch one of the rarest pokemon in the game mew remember how this code is absolute spaghetti well here's how we exploit it this takes a while but it's definitely worth it step one catch an abra this is incredibly annoying because abra only knows teleport and so bumping into a wild abra means it definitely will teleport away so just pray that you get lucky when you try to catch it abras are found in the long grass to the left of nugget bridge but whatever you do do not fight this trainer standing in the top right of the long grass because we need him later we need an abra for its teleport ability you can actually do this later in the game when you get fly but teleport lets us do it now once we have abra walk into this trainer's sight line and immediately pause the game then use abra's teleport ability it's not technically a hm but it can work outside battle it sends us back to the last poker center we used the trainer will notice us try to fight us but then we just teleport away we're no longer there but now the game thinks we should be in a battle if done properly you won't be able to pause the game from now until the glitch is finished now walk across nugget bridge round the corner and fight this kid with a slow puck it is essential that you stand at least one tile away from him so he walks up to you once you're in his sight line if you walk directly in front of him or you talk to him your game will soft lock and freeze this kid matters because of how the game stores internal battle memory and how slowpoke is the key slowpoke's special attack stat is 15. so once you beat the battle 15 remains loaded into memory after this we teleport back to the pokemon center using abra again and we walk across nugget bridge making sure not to pause the game talk to anyone or go into any buildings when the game loads the next area it knows you're meant to be in a battle so it will start with and for some reason it uses the last known special stat as the identifying number of the wild pokemon you should spawn because you're not standing on grass and 15 special stat happens to be as a pokemon identifier mew generation 1 had 150 pokemon with mu as the hidden 151st and playground rumors of mew spread like wildfire with everyone insisting it was under the truck and don't worry we'll get to the truck later but for now mew does exist it's in the game it has insanely good stats it can learn any tm or hm and at level 40 it will learn psychic which is going to let us dominate the second half of the game so with nidorino knowing horn attack and mew eventually knowing psychic we're basically all set we can now go and take on misty and win by using horn attack on absolutely everything which gets us the cascade badge and the ability to use the hm cut outside of battle so we can now cut down small trees we don't actually have cut yet so that's not really an issue oh here's another speed run bug if you go to the bike shop and try to buy a bike without a bike voucher which is the only way to get one the text changes usually the text in conversations or in battle is typed out letter by letter but after talking to this dude it will appear all at once and it will remain this way until you talk to him again this saves a load of time in speed runs when you're not waiting for the text to be typed and now the game opens up and becomes almost overwhelmingly freeform and i bet not many of you realize just how open this game now is there are eight gyms in the game you need to fight brock and misty first and you need to fight giovanni last but the middle five gyms there's no actual order you need to do these in the only real limitation is you need to defeat kogert before blaine because koga lets you use surf and you need serve to reach blame but the game doesn't have a set defined order what this means is this after beating misty you actually have 59 possible orders to beat the remaining gyms in this is crazy one kind soul on reddit actually worked out all the possible variations so from here on out the game is open to you this is the point it becomes a real rpg you've had your training go and explore the only limitations you'll face now are police or team rocket guards blocking certain doors or buildings meaning you need to trigger a certain event to get them to move like how we need to go and visit bill the dude who designed the pokemon storage system we've been accessing via the pc bill has turned himself into a pokemon and we need to use a machine to turn him human again this whole section has massive law implications can people just become pokemon are some wild pokemon potentially people the canon answer is maybe bill rewards us for saving him by giving us a ticket to the ssn cruise ship we'll use this later then we traipse through this couple's burgled house because apparently it's the only through route in town to reach the eastern exit that is terrible town planning now between major cities you've got these guard houses and you can't go through yet because the road is closed but note how the guard says he's thirsty that is an rpg hint and we'll be coming back to it later now a neat little design in this underground pass there's an npc who offers to trade with you i like this because it means even if you're a solo player with no friends around you you still get the feeling of trading pokemon and some rare pokemon are actually hidden within the mpc trade system like how you can only get far-fetched by trading a sphero for it later in the game including the trade mechanic between the player and the npcs is a really nice touch by now i am falling into the classic rpg trap i am over levelling one pokemon i'm basically putting all my eggs in one basket and just brute forcing fights with nidorina i know as long as i don't face anything immune to normal type attacks i'll be fine spoiler alert exactly that is about to happen arrive in vermillion city the gym here is blocked by a small tree so we can't cut it down yet because we don't have cut so we head on board the ssm now here's another rumor if you have your friend trade you a pokemon with surf before you complete the ss and section and you complete the gyms out of order to be able to use surf you can actually surf on the small amount of water surf around the ship and find a truck on a small island this is the fabled mew truck the one the rumors were all about some say you can use strength to move it and find mew under it or find keys in the game corner and move it then but the truth is it's just forgotten content but there's another way to reach the truck even if the ship has left here's how return to the docks do not trigger the guard's dialogue by trying to walk past him if you do he'll block you and this won't work instead stand to the top left of the guard walk in front of him by moving to the right and then immediately pause the game now save your game then load your game back up and immediately use surf you'll surf south despite facing right and be able to move over the guard once you're back on the ship map you can now surf over the small amount of water and find the truck on the land to the right hand side you cannot move it with strength and you cannot start it with the keys that you can find in the game corner we've already got mu this truck is not how you do it on the ssn you can fight all the passengers and here i encounter one of the most mechanics in the game confusion when your pokemon is confused there is a 50 chance they'll do what you say and 50 chance they'll just punch themself in the face nothing is more annoying than reading it hurt itself in its confusion oh look it's butt again another rival fight note how he still got his rat attack it's actually evolved into rata kate clearly he's training it and he loves it and he would never be seen without it with butt down we go and find the captain he is feeling a bit seasick so we rub his back and help him feel better and he gives us the hm cut even as a child i did not understand how the captain of an ocean liner is suffering from seasickness remember hms cannot be unlearned so just because i know it's going to irritate some viewers i teach cut to mew mew is now my hm slave like and sub if that annoyed you cut lets us show these small trees whose boss and opens up more of the world to us chat to the fishing guru in his house and he gives us an old rod to catch some fish notice how we've just battled misty and now we're given the chance to catch water pokemon very well designed but also quite badly designed because you can use the old rod while facing any tile of water and in strange gen 1 coding these statues at the start of every pokemon gym for some reason count as water don't know why but you can fish in any gym and if you use the old rod you'll only ever catch magikarp who only ever knows splash which actually leads to a full health exploit where you can keep using leech seed life drain or rest to refill your health and then just run away from wild magikarp with cut we can get to the third gym lieutenant surge but he's hiding behind this absolutely god-awful bin puzzle you have to check a bin and if there's a switch you'll press it and then you have to find the second switch and if you find both of them in order you'll get in and if you get it wrong the puzzle resets while this puzzle has now been decoded there is still a huge amount of randomness this puzzle can kill a speedrun or infuriate a child now some more dark lore lieutenant serge says he uses electric pokemon because they shocked his enemies into submission during the war which implies there's been a major war and at least one side used pokemon which means pokemon can attack people and are definitely used by the military beating a gym leader as usual rewards you with tms but the limited inventory space is very quickly becoming difficult to deal with it's making me throw away items or teach random moves to random pokemon just so i can keep picking up new things with five gyms left to go and multiple orders to finish them in i just keep adventuring on battling as i go and one great touch is as you take on more opponents you begin to realize each trainer has a style the gyms of course are well defined brock used rock pokemon mr used water surge uses electric but then you've got the regular trainers and they still have style like mountain climbers using pokemon you can find in the mountains or gamblers using psychic pokemon because they'd help assess the odds or engineers using electric pokemon it's this personal identity which made every player think what's my identity are you a fire trainer are you a ground trainer back in the school yard or the playground you'd battle people and your team would represent you your pokemon were your style because we were young we weren't meta gaming we weren't simply going for the most powerful we were going for what represented us as trainers and it's the small attentions to detail which really stand out like how when a battle begins the screen transition animation of fading to black and the intro sting of the battle music are the same length when something works well you often don't notice it but when you realize the designers had to agree on how long a visual transition would take and match the audio up to it or how the text box caps the corners off with little pokeballs you can see a deep level of care for the player experience the biggest hurdle you'll face in the early to mid game is navigation the game blocks your path often like how there's a snorlax sleeping at the crossroads remember this he'll be needed later snorlax is one of the few pokemon you only get a limited amount of tries to catch so let's discuss this pokemon appear in wild grass with each zone having specific spawns but some pokemon are hidden and some only appear once in the game and if you fail to catch them you lose them forever because of the trading focused nature of the game anyone with all the rare pokemon was a god in the playground and could trade them to anyone else to help that person complete their pokedex you just had to hope they traded you them back this means it's always worth carrying a supply of pokeballs because missing the chance for a rare pokemon means you need to reset your game to find them again i travel through the diglett tunnel curse myself for not buying repels because the encounter rate is far too high and then get told about hm05 flash which lights up dark areas and oh i've got a story about that hm which i'll tell you later by now i'm backtracking pokemon shares this with early legend of zelda games acquire a skill back track use the skill in an earlier area i am cutting trees so i can find any path blocked by a small tree and i can now take it make my way through this absolute maze of trainers and reach this patch of long grass and a thin strip of water running north and east around the edge remember this water it's a secret area we'll need to return to later just south of the water and we reach rock tunnel here is where flash is needed so let's take a look at the loot of oaks hidden items around the world you might find some scientists working with professor oak they're normally in the guard towers between roads and they'll give you items if you've caught enough pokemon at 10 pokemon in the pokedex they'll give you flash the light hm at 30 you can get the item finder a tool which tells you if there are hidden invisible items on the floor nearby and at 50 pokemon you can get the experience all which shares experience to all pokemon in your party not just the ones who took part in the battle now as a kid i never knew this so i never got flash so when i walked into this tunnel well it's dark very dark now you can see the edges of the walls and the ladders because i'm playing on the super game boy emulated version but when i was a kid playing on an original game boy you can't see the edges but i discovered a trick if you pause the game it would very briefly light up the screen before the menu opened allowing you to see where you were so i navigated this entire cave system by moving a few tiles at a time pausing and unpausing it took ages but i did it and it's one of my proudest achievements to this day this tunnel is hellish a high encounter rate loads of hidden trainers i even run out of power points for horn attack and the opponents keep using self-destruct so my potions are dwindling eventually just i make it out and then stupidly talk to the girl by the entrance and get into another battle i am not ready for this after the rock tunnel we reached lavender town the birthplace of all the creepy playground rumors lavender town became infamous for its dark plot and creepy music and everyone knew a different legend the most famous probably being the elusive lavender town syndrome which claimed the music of the town used special high-pitched notes only children could hear which led to depression or worse or the creepypasta lavender town missing frequencies which say if you ran the music through a spectrograph you could see the pokemon haunter or saving the game here too much would haunt your gameboy there were loads of rumors about this place because well it's creepy but most of them were just that rumors but there's one which i absolutely believe just watch lavender town is home to the pokemon tower a pokemon graveyard filled with the angry spirits of dead pokemon it's also full of people visiting to mourn the loss of their pokemon and wouldn't you know it you run into butt and battle but look he's not running a full team of pokemon he's missing a pokemon he had since the beginning i fully subscribe to the theory that your rivals raticate has actually died and he is mourning it let me know what random rumors you heard about this place in the comments below now you can't fight any of the wild ghost pokemon yet because we need the silth scope to make them reveal their true form without it you just see a ghostly mass and your pokemon is too scared to fight back so for now we need to leave outside there's even more rumors apparently the pokemon cubone's mother was killed in the tower while trying to escape team rocket reinforcing the fact that rocket are evil and that pokemon can definitely die next up is celadon city one of the biggest cities is actually a major shopping district but if we creep around the back of celadon mansion one of the biggest optional buildings and we use the hidden entrance and climbing these stairs we can find the first of several fourth wall breaking rooms the i know everything guy and on the table is the only eevee in the game now evie has three possible evolutions depending on which elemental stone you use jolteon vaporeon and flareon another road bump in your step to finishing the pokedex and another reason trading was essential we need a silk scope to fully explore the pokemon tower back in lavender town so we pop over to the game corner a gambling den ran by team rocket there is a grunt at the back of this den guarding a poster so we battle him then we press the poster and unlock a hidden room and this is the exact moment the focus of the game changes the area we've unlocked is a huge puzzle it's a multi-floor building with an elevator moving between floors but we need to find the elevator key to travel around so we use these spinny tiles you step on one and it sends you in that direction until you hit a stop tile sort of like the ice puzzles from the old legend of zelda games this whole section switches the focus of the game from whimsical adventure of a young child exploring the land and catching pokemon to child uses pokemon to take down international terrorist organization hell-bent on world domination this is the moment the actual collection of pokemon takes a backseat and we begin the whole stop the bad guy plot and i remember having mixed feelings about this as a child and i still do when i replay it i don't really care if team rocket want to go and be evil i honestly just want to get back to the overland adventure from city to city fighting gym leaders and filling my pokedex up this area is huge and there are a load of opponents and then the game does something really annoying to get the elevator key you need to beat this opponent and then to make him drop the key you need to talk to him after you've beaten him this is the only time in the game you need to talk to a defeated opponent to progress and if you didn't know you had to do this it is super easy to miss with the elevator key found we can fight our way to the boss giovanni this guy rules team rocket with an iron fist and despite being a fully grown adult with a literal army of goons at his command we solve our little dispute with a pokemon battle giovanni focuses on ground types which have high defense and in a horrible taste of my own medicine his rye horn uses horn attack the one i've been cheesing the game with beating giovanni gives us the silk scope but we're not quite done with celadon city yet we can't gamble at the game's corner until we have a coin case so if we chat to this dude in a cafe he will give you his and now for some maths the game's corner needs you to buy coins with your regular in-game money and then gamble on slot machines which pay out a tiny amount of coins if you win you then use these coins to buy rare pokemon rewards pincer in blue and cipher in red although both of these can be found rarely in the safari zone the only exclusive pokemon to the game corner is porygon which will set you back 6 500 coins in blue and 9 999 coins in red another reason blue is superior because there's no real trick to winning these machines and it is gambling the best strategy is often to just buy 50 coins repeatedly from the main counter and this takes an absolute age and actually costs you more money than is in the game as standard the only way to do this is to perform the missingno nugget duplication glitch or to grind the elite four at the end both of which i will show you how to do when we get to them and now another glitch you know how there's a pc in the corner of each pokemon center well this is a human hotel and even though there's no pc sprite the coding for the pc is still there because they just reuse the pokemon center room layout so you can still access your pc next up remember how the guards in the guard tower stopped us passing through but then complained about being thirsty well on the roof of the shopping center you can buy some drinks from a vending machine and if we give these to the guards they'll let us pass now it's important to note you don't have to do this you can complete the entire game without buying this drink it just makes it easier and i like this it's rewarding the player for exploring and for paying attention to the dialogue and the game does this a lot the drinks the hm fly the bike they're all option last easter egg before we leave if you head to the celadon mansion but use the front door this time head up you can meet the development team in the game complete fourth wall break you can meet the artist who drew you the script writer the programmer generation one was full of little fourth wall breaks and hidden easter eggs like this because i don't think they ever expected the silly creature capture game to become the biggest franchise of all time also if you were one of the few people that owned one of the game boy printers and you managed to catch all 150 pokemon not including mew you could talk to this guy and print off an exclusive certificate proving you did indeed catch them all because the game boy printer didn't sell very well and getting ink refills for it now is almost impossible these certificates are extremely rare now we can finally head to celadon's gym leader and this pervy old man outside lets us know this gym is great because it's full of women the gym leader here is erica and she uses grass-type pokemon and this is the first time we see an opponent trainer actually use tactics this gym is the first time you will see an opponent switch pokemon mid-battle before it's knocked out and the first time you'll see an opponent use an item on a pokemon erika heals her victory bell with a super potion and this is a lovely sign of things to come opponents are about to get smarter and tougher beating erica gives us the rainbow badge and the ability to use strength outside of battle we need to go back to lavender town and explore the pokemon tower but if we take a detour through saffron city we can get another optional pokemon the saffron gym leader is sabrina and she's not available right now because team rocket are blocking the door but this side gym the dojo is open despite saying gym on the building this isn't actually a badge giving full gym and it's optional but if you beat the martial arts master here you can choose either the fighting pokemon hitmonchan or hitmonlee these are named after jackie chan and bruce lee i go with hitmonchan because when i was a kid i had the hitmonchan card so it has a special place in my heart with the drinks acquired and the guards now letting us pass travel is much easier no more using tunnels or underground passes back into the creepy lavender town and here is where i realize i've made a massive mistake i've been going all in on training nidorino and using horn attack to dominate but horn attack is a normal type attack and the tower is full of ghost pokemon and ghosts are immune to normal attacks so i can't hurt them with my best pokemon combine this with the fact that ghosts no confuse ray and lick the potential paralyze attack and i'm in trouble my other pokemon can't stand up to ghosts and even if they could the confused ray is a guaranteed confusion status thankfully abra is a psychic type pokemon and in generation one psychic was broken remember how there's different elemental types of damage and defense well abra is psychic and psychic is super effective against ghosts not only does it do insane damage it's immune to several ghost type moves in fact the only thing psychic is weak to in generation one is bug type pokemon and bug type pokemon suck psychic was so strong they actually added the new types dark and steel from generation two onwards just to give psychic something to be weak against fighting through the tower is an extremely slow process thankfully there's this white magic healing square in the middle floor stepping onto it heals your pokemon and restores all your power points it's basically a pokemon center and this is the only time the game uses this mechanic eventually i figure if you can't beat them join them so i catch a ghastly and start wrecking things with ghost type moves at the top of the tower you meet the ghost which has been causing all the trouble the silk scope reveals it to be a marowak cubone's mother now you can't catch this one you have to defeat it and then you get access to the top floor quick note you can glitch by just using a pokedoll to stop the fight and then moving one step forward so you don't actually need the silk scope to get to here we now fight through a gauntlet of team rocket grunts beating them all lets you free mr fuji this dude loves him some pokemon and he came to try and calm down the restless spirit of marowak to show his thanks he gives us a poker flute a key item which can be used in battle to wake pokemon up from the sleeping effect but more importantly it can wake up snorlax so we head back west to safwan city we've already beaten the martial arts gym here but we need to beat the main gym sabrina unfortunately there's still a team rocket grunt blocking the door the middle section of the game is basically stop team rocket doing various things to free up various gyms for saffron city this means heading into the silvco building and fighting through all 11 floors this is probably the grindiest puzzle section in the game we need to find the card key to open the various doors on this map and then we need to access the elevator but this building has a new mechanic teleport squares these tiles bounce you to another room now it's not random but because there's no mini-map you don't know where you are in relation to where you just were and with 11 floors to fight through it's an incredibly time consuming process to explore the whole place this section probably took about an hour and a half of my 13-hour run and eventually i find the card key and i head to the top floor to rescue the president of silco from the hostile team rocket takeover and wouldn't you know it but is here as well and this is the first time i lose a fight unfortunately but has a very high level alakazam a psychic type and he wrecks my team psychic is so broken i can't stand up to it and this is the first time in the game i actually need to go and grind for levels so i go and do some training well i've got the poker flute so this means i can go and get snorlax and he'll be a decent level so i go and get him oh super random fact almost no one knows if you use cut while standing in long grass it cuts the grass around you so you can move through it without getting into fights it only cuts a small area so it's not super practical but i'm still amazed that it took me years to even learn you could do this using the poker flute wakes up snorlax and it attacks and now you've only got two chances to catch this and i want both of them thankfully one of snorlax's attacks is rest which heals its own health but puts it to sleep and for me this is great so let's just take a deeper look at the catch rate in generation one the website dragonfly cave has a complete breakdown of all the mechanics involved in the catch rate but it basically boils down to this status effects are king when trying to catch any pokemon if a pokemon is asleep or frozen the catch rate will go way up if it's poisoned paralyzed or burned it will go up slightly remaining health is almost irrelevant it's the status effect you need to focus on along with this the great ball is often better than the ultra ball because of dodgy coding for example a level 40 snorlax at full health has a 7.8 chance of being caught with a great ball and a 3.4 chance of being caught with a regular poke ball or an ultra ball so with no status effects the great ball is better but if that snorlax were asleep you've now got a 25 chance of catching it with an ultra ball and 19.6 percent with a great ball in gen 1 capture rates status effects matter the most with snorlax captured and the team trained up we take on but again remember snorlax can use rest to recover its health but it goes to sleep well you can then use the poker flute in battle to wake it back up so now i have a two turn full health recovery strategy beat his alakazam easily and his charizard despite being his flagship pokemon is an absolute joke then another hidden pokemon have a chat to this npc and he just gives you a lapras this is the only way to get lapras and again you can easily miss this top of self company building we have a rematch with team rockets boss giovanni he is much easier than butt team rocket leaves and we chat to the self company president he's so thankful that we rescued him he gives us a one of a kind super special poke ball called the master ball this is the only master ball in the game and it's guaranteed to capture any pokemon you throw it at so we'll be saving this for something super special unfortunately the image of the master ball was ruined for me many years ago when someone pointed out it looks like a regular pokeball with wario's thong stretched over it i can't unsee this so i need to ruin it for you too you're welcome with team rocket gone the gym is open more teleporting tile puzzles inside and lots of ghost type pokemon which is an issue because i'm strong but i'm not that strong and my whole team gets wrecked by a level 34 ghastly a combination of status effects and being immune to normal damage means i just don't have the variety needed in a well-balanced team so you know what i'll come back here later this is the freedom of open order gyms i don't need to do this now one of the most effective ways to grind levels in the mid game is to arrange your team with a weak pokemon at the top of the list this means you'll always open the battle with that pokemon and then you instantly swap it for a more powerful one because switching pokemon always happens before attacks then you win the battle this way the weak pokemon gets half the total experience which is often enough to power level it up until it can stand on its own two feet a few hours of this and my mew is much stronger more adventuring and another optional secret this house behind cycling road gives you the hm fly teach it to a bird pokemon and you can instantly fly to any previously discovered town once you get fly the whole game becomes much easier to navigate and again you'll notice it's a navigation reward for exploration completely optional but makes the game easier if you find it with snorlax gone we've opened up the path south of lavender town and this brings us to a game design feature i love seeing an item before you're able to access it there's something on that platform but there's water in the way and we can't cross water yet so you know we'll be coming back here i love when games do this because it actively goes against linear design it's letting the player know the land they're in now will still be relevant later and this is a fantastic way to make a world feel real it's not simply an adventure line it's an adventure area get into this dramatic battle opponent uses hypnosis and puts me to sleep so i use the poker flute to wake up opponent uses hypnosis again i use the poker flute again repeat for about 10 minutes reminds me of that episode in the anime when two metapod fought each other using harden what a dumb episode that was arrive in fuchsia city home of the safari zone and the ninja gym leader koga koga's gym is full of invisible walls which you can just make out by looking at the edge of the tiles and here we are assaulted with endless poison and paralysis and now your opponents switch from focusing on damage to focusing on status effects and if you are not prepared they can be deadly and poison might be the worst of them because if a pokemon is poisoned in battle it remains poisoned outside of battle and it keeps losing health if a pokemon in your party is poisoned it will take damage every five steps the screen will flicker and you'll hear a noise and now here's a touch i don't think was intentional but actually makes the game really dramatic it is exactly five steps from the poker center door to the poker center desk meaning when you enter a poker center as you walk up to the desk you are guaranteed to take at least one tick of poison damage meaning it's possible for your pokemon to faint exactly as you arrive at the desk i don't think this was intended but it's super dramatic when it happens eventually i grind my way through the poison laced koga battle and earn the soul badge along with the ability to use surf outside of battle so i suppose we should go and get surf to the north of fuchsia city is the safari zone an open zoo for rare pokemon and you can pay a little money to walk around and try and catch them while in the safari zone you can only use safari's own pokeballs and pokemon encounters aren't battles anymore you now need to throw bait to make the wild pokemon stay still and then throw rocks at them to annoy them which make them easier to catch but also more likely to run away or you can run away yourself your time in the safari zone is also limited but not to time it's two steps you can only take 500 steps and once you run out you're called out and have to start again one interesting design fact shows how rudimentary this game is remember when you catch a wild pokemon if your team is full it gets sent to bill's pc well on bill's pc you've got 12 boxes and each box can only hold 20 pokemon and the only way to switch your active box is to do so manually at a pc when you enter the safari zone the guard actually warns you to switch to an empty box so you don't potentially lose any captured pokemon i find it amazing the game can't just do this automatically this is a feature you'd expect would be really simple but no if you fill a box up and then try and catch a pokemon the game just doesn't let you throw pokeballs in battle the safari zone is big and you need to follow a very specific route and find two key items along the way first the warden's gold teeth and then just next to them the hidden building which gives you the surf hm once you've got the teeth give them to the warden south of the village and he'll give you the hm strength which lets pokemon move boulders outside of battle also some great design here because there's an item stuck behind a boulder encouraging us to teach strength to a pokemon and use it right now unlike cut which is use on selection strength is a passive buff you give your pokemon and then it remains on them for that map if you change maps you need to reapply it we now need to head west through cycling road through the sea foam island cave maze to cinnabar island but allow me to suggest a much simpler route at least for now fly back to pallet town the very start then just surf south i'm using snorlax as my surf pokemon by the way so make of that mental image what you will all water tiles also act like grass you can encounter wild pokemon every step thankfully it's not a long journey and we finally arrive on cinnabar island the gym is locked but the abandoned mansion formerly a scientific research center is not the mansion is full of fire type pokemon and the encounter rate is way too high you'll take five steps and be attacked again and by now fights are more of an immersion breaker less of a fun enjoyable mechanic i want to explore the land i don't want to be stopped every few seconds and forced to one hit kill something else another new mechanic limited to this area these thieves npcs looting the mansion their opponents but they won't fight you unless you talk to them this is the only part in the game where being seen by a trainer doesn't immediately start a battle the mansion is another giant puzzle secret switches hidden inside statues control pairs of doors and you need to fight through until you can jump off the edge of the screen from one floor to another and this mansion contains a lot of law if you're willing to look for it like this diary july 5th mew was discovered in the jungle february 6 mew gave birth they named the offspring mew2 now mewtwo had been heavily modified before birth through gene splicing and after it was born they experimented on it some more enhancing it even more until it became so powerful it broke free of the lab destroyed the mansion and is now hiding somewhere in the world after spending all my money on repels i'm able to walk the mansion without constant battles and find the key hidden on the bottom floor this key opens the gym and i can begin my fight through to blame the fire type leader this is one of the only gyms where you have to fight the majority of trainers to reach the leader and i honestly admire this trainer who says i just like using fire pokemon there's no deep emotional reason he just thinks they're cool and i can respect that during the gym leader fight mew levels up to 40 and learns psychic and now the game is basically solved psychic is such an incredibly powerful move it should help us one or two hit kill anything blame down volcano badge achieve with mew knowing psychic i should be able to blitz through sabrina once you reach this part of the game the only problem is it feels less focused it's less about being a light-hearted adventurer and it's now a more serious game it's like the plot has matured in the last 10 hours the whimsy of travel and exploration is replaced with the jaded and somewhat repetitive task of using one-hit kills and you've gone from a fresh-faced novice full of wonder and excitement to a grizzled veteran playing when you are the most powerful thing isn't always fun the battles which up until now were always engaging are now just same old same old i feel like i'm just going through the motions the rpg element has been reduced to win the battle once you can move around the land easily it's just about the battles and the battles themselves aren't that good return to sabrina's gym fight my way to her and absolutely annihilate her team with mew this means there's only one gym left and in an interesting twist it's the first town you arrived in so we travel back to viridian city whose gym leader has finally returned and inside we have to fight our way through a maze of trainers and more spinny arrow puzzles and now another mechanic the game only uses once when an enemy trainer spots you they walk up to you and when you win they remain in that new spot now if you leave and return they'll reset to their original spot but this gym is the only time you can beat an npc by manipulating them to walk up to you and doing so creates a shortcut behind where they were standing it's a shame the game didn't do this more and now a twist the viridian gym leader is giovanni the leader of team rocket and he's meant to be tough but psychic when i say this is powerful i mean this is powerful i one hit kill every pokemon he has except rydon well five out of six ain't bad with all eight gyms down we can now go and take on the pokemon league and defeat the elite four you might be wondering who are the eight for and well so am i because the game has never mentioned them until now this is one of the weaker story elements the four final bosses aren't even touched upon until you actually get to them it would have been nice to have a little build up to know about them from the start to have them as a goal this whole time but before we travel through victory road to the indigo plateau we have some more secrets to find including the three legendary birds and we'll get them in their name order because every legendary bird in every generation of pokemon is actually suddenly numbered in generation one you've got articuno the iceberg zapdos the electric bird and moltres the firebird and their names are their element arctic zap and molten and then the spanish numbers uno dos tres like most of the powerful pokemon they are completely optional and completely missable but i'm being thorough so here we go you may have noticed i've made it this far without the bike that's because the bike is optional too but if you did want it head to the pokemon fan club in vermilion city and listen to the fan club president drone on about how much he loves rapper dash and as thanks for indulging him he'll give you a bike voucher trade this in with the bike shop in cerulean city and you'll get the bike an item you can use on the overworld to massively increase your travel speed you'll also need this if you want to access cycling road which again is a completely optional area so arctic uno surf south from fuchsia village and then west into the sea foam islands and remember everything we're doing now is completely optional this cave system links fuchsia to cinnabar we've skipped it before by doing the fly to pallet town trek but now we need to journey through seafoam cave is a big 3d boulder pushing puzzle we need to reach the bottom floor and surf around the edge to reach arcticuna but if we surf in the water as it is now the current will wash us back to the start so we need to push these boulders from the top level through holes in the floor all the way down to block the flow of water this takes about 15 minutes if you know what you're doing and have a healthy supply of repel so you don't get into fights if you're not using repels to avoid encounters this could take the best part of an hour eventually we reach articuno and now you have to save your game because if you fail to catch this you need to turn your game boy off on again and try again this is your only chance and the catch rate is extremely low in fact with 100 health and no status effects the catch chance with a great ball is 1.6 with an ultra ball it's half a percent to show you how little remaining hp really matters in the catch algorithm if octaguno only had one percent of its health left your catch rate would only go up to 3.7 percent but if you get it poisoned the rate goes up to 11.5 percent with an ultra ball even at full health status effects are king it takes me a few resets and more than a lot of holding left and b at the same time but i finally catch it oh that old rumor about holding a direction and a button when the pokeball closes completely on trip doesn't do anything but i still do it out of habit one down two to go remember that thin strip of water north of the rock tunnel well we're going back there because now we can surf and if we surf all the way around the edge we'll find the hidden power plant this place is full of electric pokemon and the encounter rate while here is stupidly high if you don't use repels you'll be lucky to make it three steps between fights and it gets incredibly tedious in fact using a basic repel here brings the encounter rate down to what i think it should be as standard the power plant is also full of items but be careful because most of these aren't items they're aggressive vault orbs and trying to pick them up gets you into a battle there's also no way to tell which are items and which pokemon so get used to just fighting everything eventually you'll reach the final room no puzzle here just a long route to follow and you'll meet zapdos the flying electric bird pokemon again save before the fight try to get a status effect on it and then just pray thankfully the final room here has an exit in it so we don't need to go back through the whole power plant the third and final legendary bird is actually encountered on route to the elite four so we'll head that way now unfortunately we bump into butt again and the worst part about this fight is his alakazam has learned recover a move which restores a load of health and has no downsides and he uses it almost every turn so this fight is a constant slog of hoping you get a critical hit and he doesn't keep regenerating health defeat butt and move onwards through victory road this is a linear badge check section you need to pass eight guards to each check you've got one of the eight gym badges you'll also need a pokemon with surf as some of the journey is through water i like this it's essentially eight locked doors that you can actually access at the start of the game and you've been collecting the keys to those doors on your journey it's a linear beginning to the adventure with brock and misty and a linear end with the elite four but a free-form middle which again is the formula the old zelda games followed collect enough items to access the final boss in fact i've noticed more and more similarities to zelda as i've been writing this script getting past the eighth guard gets us into victory road one of the final puzzles in the game this is a huge cave system where multiple mechanics all combine we need to push boulders onto switches fall down holes and climb around surf to different places take on trainers and again the encounter rate is way too high eventually we will find the third and final legendary bird moltres and this fight is just god damn infuriating the catch rate is not in my favor and it seems my luck has run out eventually i managed to poison it it drops to one hit point i pray to all the gods that will listen this is the last chance saloon because i've already reset my game so many times and eventually it gets caught and all three legendary birds are mine my dream team is coming together with moltres court we can finally get our way through the remainder of the cave and make it to the indigo plateau the final section of the main story this is the only time you see a combined poker center and shop and thankfully we're now the only part of the game you can legitimately generate and grind unlimited money we now need to take on the elite four one after the other and if you lose to any of the elite four you need to start a game but you get money for killing each one so winning three times and losing to the fourth one is the only way to grind money quickly the final story challenge the elite four we need to fight four powerful trainers using some of the highest leveled most powerful pokemon with the most powerful attacks in the game and normally this wouldn't be a problem because we can return to a poker center to restore our health and our power points for every move but you need to fight all four of them with no breaks first up is lorelei with her ice pokemon who would freeze me but zapdos takes them down pretty damn fast because electric is powerful against ice next up is bruno with ground pokemon but his ground attacks don't hit some of the birds this is why i went to go and get the birds to use as cannon fodder and to save mew for the final fight agatha is a ghost type trainer easily dealt with by muse psychic and then we auto walk to the leader lance the dragon trainer i always wondered if his name and pokemon type was a nod to the dragon lance dungeons and dragons setting lance ends the fight by using dragonite this is the most powerful trainer pokemon you will face and he one hits most of my guys thankfully i've got some max revives so i can survive but i still think it's a real shame there isn't a bigger deal made of the elite four before we face them would have liked to have some kind of build up to this epic battle maybe a statue to them in one of the cities this whole section sees the difficulty curve greatly increase each fight on its own is fine but facing four without a break is draining and when lance goes down it's not the end it seems our old friend butt made it here first and is now the pokemon league champion and so begins the final battle a fresh-faced and fully healed butt against our team of bruised and battered weak pokemon this is hardly fair and this final fight is hard because all of his pokemon out level hours and to mark the occasion the game uses exclusive music you'll only hear in this fight [Music] it's a tough fight but eventually i win and when you win your current team get added to the hall of fame so now we're done right we get to see all the pokemon we use to win and we've finished the game well not yet once the credits have finished rolling the game saves itself and if you try to continue from the main menu you'll be back at the beginning but with all your pokemon and you're now the champion we can go and catch every pokemon we've missed but there's one final pokemon we can now access remember that dude standing by a cave entrance who i thought had a hat on or tall hair he's gone and that cave is now open you need to surf round the edge from nugget bridge and prepare for the toughest section in the game even with max repels used you will still get into fights with wild level 50 pokemon this is the final cave a multi-story puzzle with every mechanic boulders buttons floors surfing ladders hidden paths dead ends it is a nightmare to navigate but it's worth it because eventually all the way in the deepest recess of this cave you will find him the most powerful pokemon in the game mewtwo and this is what we've been saving the master ball for a 100 catch chance to get the most powerful psychic type in generation one with mewtwo court the fastest way to leave the cave is actually to let yourself be knocked out and respawn at a poker center instead of spending 15 minutes traipsing back through the maze so now we're definitely done right well no there's one final not pokemon but thing we need to catch to finish this legendary dream team the pokemon spoken of in hushed rumors the pokemon who would cause nintendo to come and delete your save because some kid's uncle said they would the pokemon who would break your entire game cartridge missing no remember how broken the code in this game is well it's a miracle it works at all and now we get to exploit it in the most insane way to catch a pokemon that doesn't even exist and to duplicate an item while doing so just for good measure here's the steps go to viridian city remember the old guy who teaches you how to catch pokemon ask him for the tutorial and watch it all the way through now because of the game's coding it treats this battle like an actual battle and you'll notice it changes the player's name to old man while this is happening it stores the player's actual name in a section of memory and that memory section is normally used to decide which pokemon should be encountered in a random battle oh by the way you can actually soft lock your game here because the game treats this as an actual battle and an actual pokemon catch attempt if your pokemon box is full on the pc the old man can't throw the pokeball to catch the pokemon so the game just locks at this screen forever once the tutorial is over your actual character name is still stored in the memory section that relates to wild pokemon encounters but if you just go and walk into long grass it will get reset so fly to cinebar island then surf up and down this thin strip of land on the right-hand side these tiles are very strange because they are programmed to allow wild pokemon to encounter but for some reason they haven't been limited to what can be encountered think of it like this computers store data in strips of ones and zeros and the variables of these ones and zeros are available in powers of two so you can store 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 and so on there are 151 pokemon the game needs to store so the smallest power of two variable available to use is 256. that leaves 105 pokemon storage spaces effectively empty now normally in areas like grass or ocean there's a limited number of available pokemon which can actually be encountered but on this strip of water that limit is removed on a regular tile when you encounter a random pokemon it will roll to see what you get and if you get a number that shouldn't exist it just re-rolls until it gets something that should exist but now if we get into an encounter and roll and we get a number that shouldn't exist the game just goes with that and when we encounter something the game checks which variable we should face and it sees the variable for our actual name since it's still stored there since the old man tutorial this means we end up fighting a pokemon called missing number shortened to missing no this is a very surface level explanation for why this happens for a much more thorough rundown of exactly what happens in the background you can read the excellent essay the deepest secrets of missing no by crystal encountering missingno causes a few things to happen firstly the battle screen stays blacked out for quite a lot longer than usual secondly its graphics are completely messed up its level 128 has a random cry and then the sixth item in your inventory will be increased to 128. this is the unlimited money glitch i talked about earlier you can duplicate nuggets and then sell them for 5 000 coins a time or you can put master balls there and have unlimited master balls i did it with rare candies so i can level everyone up to 99. but now the big moment can you catch missing no yes you can but you need to make sure you capture missing no and not the evil version known simply as m m has even more problems associated with it and having m in your team will mess your game up but missing no is safe enough as long as you don't put it in your pc because it will lock your storage system down if you do that with missing no court you'll see its in-game sprite is a man and if you use it in battle you'll get an even bigger mess of pixels as you look over its shoulder after battle by the way it will also level up and it will level down from 128 to 100. sometimes it will even level up and evolve into a kangaskhan and now we are done all three legendary birds mew mewtwo and missingno i can finally lay my childhood dream to rest i have my ideal generation one pokemon team so pokemon the first generation red blue and yellow were they any good honestly from a game coding point of view they're a complete mess they are full of shortcuts quick fixes and variables sharing memory locations which makes certain game tricks happen and it's incredible they weren't even more broken given the amount of stuff they've crammed into a game but it's only by using these tricks they've managed to get so much data so much adventure onto such a small cartridge to put it into perspective how amazing it is how much adventure you get on one of these games pokemon red and blue are 512 kilobytes large each to put that into perspective this png image of arbok is 591 kilobytes there is more data in this single image than in the entirety of pokemon red as a game they're a great rpg with a lot of high quality design choices the looping nature of the adventure starting and finishing around the same place the linear beginning opening into 59 possible orders of gyms the freeform team building system the essential nature of trading with other players to complete your collection the splitting of the game into red and blue was a marketing masterstroke and of course the 151 pokemon are now iconic it was the rpg which launched the largest most successful franchise of all time it was held together with stringent shortcuts and the battles did get incredibly repetitive toward the end but all in all it's pretty good fun playing it through today you do miss the quality of life like not knowing what a tm is before you boot it up and having your map be a specific item in your inventory having to manually change boxes but even approaching this without nostalgia there's still a great adventure to be had here so to end the review i will award pokemon generation 1 151 out of 10. cheers for watching another massive thank you to the supporters on patreon and twitch who keep the channel alive and allow me to make these longer form reviews you can support from only one pound a month check the video description for links to the patreon twitch twitter and discord and as always remember shorts are comfy and easy to wear [Music] you

Channel: Josh Strife Plays

Views: 946,735

Keywords: classic gaming, retro games, older games, retro review, gaming reviews, nostalgic gaming, nostalgia games, playstation 1, playstation 2, n64, dreamcast, classic rpg, pokemon

Id: g_Aa38-lUtw

Length: 80min 6sec (4806 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 01 2021