Why Pokémon GSC is the old mobile phone you left behind
Pokémon Gold, Silver and Crystal (2001)
Pokémon Gold, Silver and Crystal (2001)
I was cleaning out my old bedroom the other day, always a thankless task that ends up getting cut short by all kinds of distractions. You'd need a team of top archaeologists to sift through everything in my room. And even if they got past the first few layers of clothes, they'd have to resort to using proper Carbon-14 dating to detail everything else that's buried in there.
On this occasion, I found my first ever mobile phone: a Mitsubishi Trium Geo flip phone. It'd probably still be working too, if only I had the charger for it. Actually, I’m surprised it wasn’t still holding on to an inkling of battery.
This was a phone from the days when they were designed to last through a nuclear war, if they had to. Well, let's be fair - the old phones had very large battery packs, which didn’t need to power highly complex operating systems, architecture and dozens of applications. I doubt this old phone could have even handled the Chess.com app.
Even before I got the Trium as a hand-me-down from my brother, it had the hell of a lump taken out of its screen. It was a chunk so deep that it actually exposed the black and green goo inside the screen, but do you think that stopped it? Not a chance. These old phones were tough enough to eat nails and ask for seconds, unlike modern iPhones, which shatter as soon as you look at them.
Texting was the big order of the day, and indeed there was a time when sending SMS messages was completely free. That kind of thing became simply unimaginable as personal mobile phones really started to take off. Then, ironically, free messaging mostly came back around in the form of WhatsApp, Line, Viber and whatever your own regional variant of always-on connectivity is.
Naturally, you could also make and receive phone calls using these phones - they weren't that old, and they were radioactive for a reason - although I maintain a strict policy of not answering the phone in most circumstances. And I'd certainly never do someone the disrespect of ringing them. As a result, phone call capabilities never meant anything to me.
Still, just holding those early clamshell phones in your hand puts you back to the turn of the millennium, when phones were getting ubiquitously popular, but not so much that they became an extension of one’s arms. Phones can do anything for you now - they can be your own TV, music player, camera, fitness aid, and strobe light if you get the right app for it.
For better or for worse, a phone keeps you always connected - even to your working life, most unfortunately. How did we ever manage before? Doesn’t it make you wistful for the days before iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, and whatever the hell they’re coming out with in China?
Listen, if you put a gun to my head and asked me if I really, truly, posit-absolutely wanted to go back to an era where there were no smartphones, I’d say no. But one can’t help wondering what if. What if Pandora’s Box hadn’t been opened? What if the art of conversation hadn’t died? Or has it really died, since we’re now more connected than ever before? Just how would the porn industry struggle on, without having their product in your pocket?
Giving the main character their own mobile phone was probably one of the few times the Pokémon series found itself on the bleeding edge of technology. The games were Pokémon Gold, Silver, and… surprisingly not Bronze, but Crystal. Pokémon Platinum would come a little bit later.
This was the second Generation of Pokémon. And players of present-day Pokémon won’t believe it, but Game Freak's focus at the time was improving absolutely everything they could from that iconic first Gen. If you were around at the time, you'll know how mind-bogglingly popular Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow were, so you can get a bit of an idea about just how much the next instalments were hyped.
Indeed, I first attempted to play Pokémon GSC on a pirate cart, translated in a horrendously haphazard fashion from Japanese into Proto-English. And it was worth it; the Japanese versions of Gold and Silver originally released 18 months before the localised games came out over here in 2001. Imagine a release delay like that now?
Well, no matter when it came out, or what the hell the onscreen text was saying, Game Freak definitely achieved their aim. I can hardly think of a single facet that Pokémon GSC didn’t improve upon, in addition to a legion of new features.
The most obvious of these is an in-game clock, that brought with it a full day/night system, with different characters and events popping up on different days of the week. Long term, this did have a most unfortunate effect, in that it turned the game’s internal battery to mush only a short number of years after release. You mustn’t expect this game to have lasted as long as your old Nokia 3210, that’s for sure.
Hidden away at the end of the game, a proper old fashioned gaming secret just before the internet rushed to spoil everything before you've even played it, is the fact that the entire region of Kanto is replicated in this game, or as near replicated as possible. They delivered this with not a single bit of pre-release hype, and you can stick the words 'DLC' where the sun don't shine.
Including Kanto, the region from the first Generation, was a tremendous feat of programming and engineering, and it’s something that Game Freak have never bothered repeating, outside of the excellent DS remakes of these very same games. Giving you that exciting opportunity to revisit the old region simply must rank as one of the greatest gaming surprises in history. It means you've got 16 badges to collect on your quest to become a Pokémon master.
Beyond that, the flow of the game is broadly similar to Generation 1: pick a starter Pokémon, and journey through two regions, catching a litany of wild Pokémon - 251 on offer this time - battling trainers, and building your team.
There's only two criticisms or strange aspects that I'd have to level against Pokémon GSC: firstly, the difficulty curve is a bit off. By the latter stages of the game, you're up against Pokémon trainers whose teams' levels average in the 50s. You might find them a bit tough to beat, so you elect to do some grinding - but you're left grinding against Pokémon that might be around Level 28, meaning this takes an awful long time.
Secondly, while there may be 100 new Pokémon on offer in this generation, they're a bit reluctant about showing them to you. Some of the new class, you won't even see them until the last wee hours of the game. Part of Game Freak's reasoning for this was to not alienate Gen 1 players, in case they got triggered about not seeing enough Rattatas or something. It shouldn't spoil any of your enjoyment of the game or anything, but it's worth mentioning.
It was suggested that Pokémon Gold, Silver and Crystal would be the denouement of the series, because the boys and girls at Game Freak could not conceive of a way of topping the improvements of this generation. Arguably, they haven't managed to better Gen 1 or 2, remakes aside, and they're still hugely playable games.
Still, you wouldn't retire your cash cow and keep it as a statue just like that, now would you? Nintendo could never allow that. So the Pokémon song and dance continues to this day, getting a bit sameier and staler each time. If I didn't know better, I'd swear that the newer generations of Pokémon included some sort of planned obsolescence... no, I'm being silly. What industry would do a thing like that?!
30 January 2024