Pokemon Crystal review
Returning to Gameboy Pokemon if a fascinating affair. Gen 1 laid the foundation of what it means to be a Pokemon game, establishing trends that continue on to this very day. Gen 2, on the other hand, is something of an evolutionary alternative showing what Pokemon could have been. A beautiful, ambitious look, and one which was not totally discarded, keeping it from having a reputation as a black sheep. It’s still a core, critical step into what Pokemon would become. But it does have enough unique to it alone; Johto has garnered a significant following among people who appreciate engaging with Pokemon this way for a reason. And that goes for me too, HG/SS remain my favorite games in the series. I was the right age for it when I first played it. Mature enough (at a whole 10 years old) that I was able to engage with the game more thoughtfully. Young enough to feel a wonder and joy at the prospect of having my game be reactive to the actual date and time. On the internet enough to look up details on things I should try in the game. Heck, it’s the Pokemon games I actually engaged in the events the most with, even if those save files have long since been wiped. But, this is a meditation on Gen 2, not the remakes. I think a lot of that still applied to this game as well, making it all the more engaging to see these ideas on an 8-bit device.
It has many ideas on how you approach the game that I think, for the era the game was released in, are quite revolutionary. Gold and Silver were still two years before Animal Forest burst onto the scene, and the prospect of having a video game actually track your time and react accordingly was fascinating. More on that later.
Creating reactive trainer encounters means that you can theoretically see the teams of random trainers grow along side you. They’re training too! Isn’t that so cute? Look at ‘em go! As fun as this sounds, it is not a very well implemented system. The limited phone space means that you’re constantly juggling your contacts list, and suddenly that shuljunge on route 32 isn’t quite as exciting as an ace trainer en route to victory road. But that is a bummer in its own right as the later ace trainers generally have moderately high level (for a main game Johto trainer) and evolved Pokemon. Their growth isn’t interesting and doesn’t tell a story in the same way. But also, the Picknickers camping just south of Violet City’s teams don’t keep pace to remain interesting later on either. That results in you essentially humoring them with a fairly easy battle for that point in the game to… see progression of an NPC with 10 sentences of unique dialogue throughout the whole of the game. I’m sorry, I am not ready to engage on that level. Also, Crystal also added random conversations with no prompts for items or battles, making me end up skipping past a lot of the dialogue without reading it (the fact I was playing in a language I de facto cannot read beyond simple phrases didn’t help this fact, and I didn’t feel like translating random dialogue like that, but I digress). All of this compounded to me essentially ditching any sort of Pokenav usage during my playthrough. If I was younger, or if this was 2001, I might have been more primed for something like this, but unfortunately neither of those things are true. Being 10 fucking sucks, you have no autonomy and are forced to go to 5th grade. Nightmare existence. And if the latter was true I could’ve tried to stop 9/11, which is a huge burden on me, so probably glad that it’s no longer 2001. This is a really dumb tangent with little of value, sorry.
The non-linear options of Gen 1 felt just like that, options. The game still generally funnels you down the proper path, and you’d only really go out of order naturally by going to Blaine before Sabrina. The other non-linear-ness the game offered felt almost like a fun quirk of the game than something anticipated. Gen 2 expands on that, cultivating those options and making them something that makes a lot more sense to do. Unfortunately, the execution on this aspect of the game was largely a failure. The game still expects you to get the badges in order, and accounting for this non-linearity means that the back half of Johto is a generally unbalanced experience. If you go from Chuck, to Jasmine, to Pryce, you will have a nightmare of a time trying to fight Jasmine who has mons 15 levels above you, will largely trivialize the Mahogany town Rocket encounter, and has rightfully given Pryce the reputation of being a big wimp loser who can easily be curbstomped.
The route I went in was lighthouse -> Chuck -> Lake of Rage -> Mahogany Town rocket -> Pryce -> Jasmin -> Ice Path (to catch a Jynx and Skarmary, some late additions to my team) -> Goldenrod Radio Tower. It feels like that route is probably the best way to engage with the game, in my opinion, except maybe the Ice Path part. There is no fixing the Johto level curve (hi Elite Four and Red level spikes) but it does provide a more balanced experience than going in the ‘standard’ order.
It’s a game that almost feels like it wants to become part of your daily routine. If you engage the game at its fullest, you have a routine where you are going to do specific things at specific times each week. To make a somewhat anachronistic comparison, if I was a child that was playing this and it was my main Pokemon game, I can very easily see myself setting reminders on my phone for myself to do specific weekly and daily events. It encourages you to stop and smell the roses, appreciating what the game has to offer in short bursts for a specific period of time. It is almost like them setting the seed for making Pokemon a lifestyle, something that is just part of your daily life. That ethos within the company continues to this day, even, but has instead shifted to having it be via ancillary content as opposed to within the game itself. It’s telling that the day/night cycle of Gen 9, which I would argue is the defining characteristic of Gen 2, has been de facto removed in favor of a large number of shorter days. Instead, you have the option to play Pokemon sleep, energize your walks with Pokemon Go, go to your weekly Pokemon TCG nights at your card shop, and… improve your teeth brushing capabilities? I say all of this to emphasize that this was on their mind from a very early period when building out this franchise. Pokemon is not just a video game, or an anime, or a card game. It’s something that becomes part of your daily life and you will engage with as much as possible. Cynically, you can say this is entirely for profit reasons, and it certainly is, but I think that their intentions began as something more innocent before reaching that point.
I did not engage in daily routine aspect game quite at the level they want me to, though. I did specifically plan parts of my day around certain events, like staying up until midnight to have the barber refresh to raise my Eevee’s happiness, waking up at 4AM due to insomnia to text my wife and also go for the 5% Phanpy catch chance, seek out the bargain shop on Mondays to raise a bit more money, and even get to the game corner early to play the best slot machine (before I remembered that the game corner is a nightmare hell spawn I never want to engage with). But I was not going to refight Angler Angelo who kept calling himself my uncle and telling me to say hi to my mom for him (a woman he ostensibly has never met), or seeing what’s new in the world of Picknicker Anette, as I talked about before. I’m just not quite at that level in my life these days to engage to that degree.
The postgame of Johto is interesting as it’s such a high effort affair for a fairly small amount of overall payoff. Kanto has a fairly decent amount of effort put into it, and it makes up a good amount of the game world. Even with the abbreviations (RIP Viridian Forest, Safari Zone, and Pewter City museum) it is still a fun ‘where are they now’ affair through a well worn and loved Pokemon locale. And it’s important to remember the context as well-Kanto was driven into the ground like it has been today. However, it is such a brief affair. I knocked out half the Kanto league on a plane ride, not even a long one, a regional trip that lasted like an hour and a half. The overall trip is fairly open ended and unabrasive, with only things like the Kanto Power Plant and waking up Snorlax (again) being the only real blockers in progression. This isn’t a bad thing, the fact we got Kanto at all is a miracle, but it still does stand as some of the most high-effort yet low-return Pokemon postgame content
What is my overall thesis of this? Reading back over everything, I find that I am coming off as largely negative. Despite that, I had an excellent time with the game. Johto is so well designed and fun to explore. There is a reason why Gen 2, but more so its remake, has a generally well liked reputation among Pokemon fans. It is a game that I love in spite of its flaws and shortcomings, and is something that I still find exceptionally playable and easy to enjoy all these years later. It is a really rock solid RPG experience, providing a fun (if uneven) run through an interesting region that manages to set itself apart from Kanto in a meaningful way. Perhaps Pokemon returning to some of the core RPG aspects of their games could see a more interesting result than their current open world direction (see my Scarlet review for details).
The fact that the rival never gets a name is wild. The cop asked me what his name was, and he told me it’s ???, so that’s what I gave to the cop. Kind of a weird oversight on their part.
