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 Back at home |  Pallet Town |  Choosing a Starter |  First Fight |
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 Inside a house |  Route 1 |  Wild Pokemon |  Viridian City |
 Pokemon Centre |  Gramps is feckin' blotto |  PokeMart |  Gotta Catch 'em All! |
The most celebrated roleplaying game since Final Fantasy, revamped for the new millennium. Explore the Kanto region as either a boy or a girl for the first time in 16-bit living colour!
When I first played Pokemon Yellow back in grade school, I wasn't really used to roleplaying games as a genre. My introduction to them was Paper Mario, which, as far as RPGs go, is rather strange— you don't have to wander back and forth, fighting the same enemies over and over again to level up before going to the next area. It's expected that you will just go to the next area and damn the consequences. However, as a rule, this is not how RPGs work. Usually, it's advisable to level up many, many times before facing the area's midlevel boss, so you can be relatively assured of victory without leaving anything up to random chance. This is not how I played Yellow; I wanted to get to the next town as quickly as possible, so I just jumped right into gym battles. Also, Pokemon Yellow had the interesting property of forcing you into starting with Pikachu, who would follow you around like in the anime, and if you tried to switch partners on the world map, it would adversely affect its battle stats if you switched back to it during a battle. Something about "offending" it. But, like— I was Satoshi, really wasn't I? I didn't want to main any Pokemon except Pikachu. And that caused problems at the Pewter City gym, amongst various other places. I also didn't care about attacks that weren't purely offensive: if it didn't cause immediate damage, I didn't pay it any attention. This, as it turns out, is entirely the wrong way to play Pokemon.
This time, inspired by WoL's longplay of EarthBound, I'm going back and forth between Routes 1 and 2, picking fights with wild Pokemon for the sake of levelling all 6 of my Pokemon up. Also, since I was playing LeafGreen, I decided to go ahead and main Bulbasaur, 'cos why not? It's Venusaur on the box and on the title screen, so why not start with Bulbasaur, right? Even though I did catch a Pikachu in the Viridian Forest, I'm not switching mains. In fact, I'm not even going to level it up until after I'm done in Pewter City. As I recall, Pikachu will be more help against Misty than Brock. But, that's the main thing I'm doing differently this time than in grade school: I'm grinding to get my stats up. As a personal challenge, I'm trying to get all 6 of my Pokemon (Bulbasaur, Rattata, Weedle, Pidgey, Fearow, and Mankey) up to Lv.10 before I challenge the Pewter Gym.
Enough about me, let's talk about the game. I would imagine it sort of flew under everyone's radar since it was released so soon before the Nintendo DS. While Nintendo probably greenlit it to show they were still serious about the Game Boy Advance, what with the DS having a GBA built into it and everything, society has always been gadget-crazy. When the next-gen thing shows up, the last-gen thing is chopped liver. What with people still playing Ruby / Sapphire and a new generation of Pokemon being teased for the Nintendo DS, who would want to go back to the beginning and start over again from scratch? Fortunately, quite a bit of time has passed (21 years at the time of writing) and what was once a HD remaster is now considered retrogaming. For all the kids whose parents were still in grade school during Pokemon Gen 1, games like LeafGreen have newfound interest that it never had back when it was new. While I'm still of the opinion that you should start with the Game Boy original before touching FireRed or LeafGreen, just to see how it all started, maybe you could take up the GBA remaster for your second playthrough. I can't really attest to anything that's been done different about the GBA version for a couple of reasons. First, like I said, I'm still on Route 2, picking fights with wild Pokemon. Second, the last time I played through this game, I was in 3rd grade. While some memories from those days are coming back as I'm playing this, I had a mad Pokemon obsession back then and fully absorbed myself in everything I could get my hands on: toys, spinoff games, whatever episodes of the anime I could find at Applause Video, and certainly the film about Mewtwo. I even wrote a few Mario/Pokemon crossover fanfics on gran's old Selectric. So, I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't really know what happened in Pokemon Yellow versus what happened in everything else. I was 8 years old, I still occasionally think dreams that I woke up in cold sweats from were genuine memories. Anyway, none of those dreams were about Pokemon, so whatever. I'm just chattering at this stage.
10/10, would recommend with only one reservation. You owe it to yourself to try out Pokemon Red / Blue / Yellow on Game Boy Classic before playing FireRed / LeafGreen. As far as the gameplay is concerned, it's Pokemon, it hasn't really changed all that much in the intervening time. I think Ichinose Go could have gone a different direction with the music, but I'm a stickler perfectionist. It's still better than any of the Shin'en crap that we all had to live through back then.
