Despite Pokemon both being an insanely successful franchise and one that I personally hold in very high regard, I also cannot deny the fact that I’m very much not a fan of its first 2 generations at all. It’s sadly not really a case of a game simply not trying at all and ultimately falling flat due to having no ambition, but the opposite problem, where it really feels as if the game ended up crumbling under its own weight as it attempted to further expand upon where the first game left off without always being exactly clear about what would result from many of these decisions. You’ve got not only a lot of improvements to many core mechanics that served to make things a far smoother experience overall, but a lot of neat, interesting gimmicks and ideas that would become core to future games both to provide further variety and attempt to make the created world feel far more alive, but many of these still feel either very simplistic or flawed in their execution or just don’t work as they really should. While this certainly makes the gen 2 Pokemon games a very interesting case to look at, it also makes it all the more unfortunate when looking through and seeing the amount of potential buried beneath an ongoing wave of bad decisions that caused this to easily become the least enjoyable experience with this series as a whole.
One of the biggest aspects about Crystal that I like so much is the way it feels like it really took full advantage of the hardware it was on, making for a lot of really clever moments throughout or simply more impressive presentation that made things flow much smoother. The proper colour is a big one in this regard, serving to make the game feel considerably more vibrant and generally nice to look at, compared to the monochromatic art of the first games. This somewhat offsets the issue of it often being somewhat hard to tell what you’re looking at from moment to moment, and the variety really does help long-term to stop the game feeling nightmarish to stare at for longer periods of time. The addition of some more detailed UI, with more elements being represented through proper graphics as opposed to lines of text is also a huge help at making things flow easier and just look nicer. This is especially true for the inventory system, which also had the upgrade of being split into different sections so it no longer felt as if you were being punished for every key item you picked up, along with a few other sections to make all of this a far less painful experience. That said, they didn’t fix this entirely either, as the limited inventory space still ends up being an annoying problem later down the line, with the player constantly having to rearrange their bags in order to leave room both for restorative items and the various held items that were introduced in the game. Once again , this hits a point where it just becomes tiresome to see another item lying on the ground, making you essentially hope that it’s something you already had, which feels completely counterintuitive in a game that wants the player to take their time to explore so much of the world.
While the inclusion of held items theoretically was a huge step forward, they didn’t really do too much in this game, with fairly trivial bonuses for the most part eliminating the future strategic depth to the team building aspect of the games. The idea of adding the phone to this as a way to essentially be able to interact more with certain NPCs, contributing to things feeling more fleshed out is another example that ends up falling flat. This is both thanks to the way the player can only have a limited amount of them without knowing which ones would be important to keep around, and also because of the way they’ll make random notifications that appear, having the game reach a grinding halt in a similar way to the day/night transitions of Castlevania 2. This issue of ideas that didn’t see their full potential at all can be seen in many other core aspects of this as well, such as the way Pokemon breeding was implemented so haphazardly in a way that didn’t contribute anything to the game loop, instead allowing the player to acquire certain “baby pokemon”, which were functionally useless in battle and felt more like a poor attempt at providing some more significance to certain ones without realising that nobody would really use these since they’d already have to have access to their more powerful evolutions to acquire them. This adds an additional layer of frustration to the idea of attempting to collect even the majority of Pokemon here, even though it’s not quite as egregious as some of the other obtuse ways in which they lock things off from the player. Whether it’s certain trees that are shuffled along that will rarely give you a special Pokemon, the 1% encounters across the board or the amount of these locked behind the postgame, it almost feels as if the game is attempting to stop the player from even attempting to spend time collecting so much of the new stuff introduced here. This needless overcomplication of things can funnily enough also be found in the soundtrack, with a lot of interesting ideas being drowned out by additional layers of melodies that ultimately serve to remove some of its unique character and intrigue, instead being far messier than they could have been.
The biggest issue this game has however can be found in the form of its mostly awful balancing and the way it contributes to other flaws within this design, aspects which can mainly be chalked up to a few flaws that pervade the vast majority of content here. The attempt at nonlinearity the game makes ultimately muddles a lot of the difficulty thanks to the way that the game needs to account for the possibility of the player fighting a selection of 3 gym leaders in any order, meaning that even the strongest of these still needed to be feasible for someone who’d only just gotten to the halfway point of the main game. This results in only the first of these actually having any sort of challenge to them, since if you beat one, you basically can beat all of them, especially since by the time you get to these other ones, you’ll have become even more powerful. This leads to a dramatic lull in difficulty where everything around you feels horribly underlevelled and the game turns into an act of button mashing through hours of content without any resistance. This underlevelling ends up being a further issue once the game attempts to provide some moments of difficulty, as it often leads to huge spikes in it to the point where even if the player has spent the time to take on every possible encounter, they’ll still likely be woefully unprepared. When the exp distribution is so lacklustre that it’s recommended the player only has a team of 4 or is alternatively told that they can just win with nothing but their starter, there’s something fundamentally off about the way things have been balanced. While Pokemon games tend to be considered way too easy for the most part, I feel like this one is so braindead in this regard with how weak everything is, but in such a way that it can lead to some downright infuriating encounters by the end.
The low level of everything makes the idea of effective grinding a pipe dream as well, with the divide in what’s required for the player and what they’re given being so absurdly large that it’s both unreasonable as a way to attempt to strengthen your current team, and also makes adding something new out of the question as well thanks to how much weaker it will be than the rest of your team for the most part. This effectively reduces playstyle variety dramatically and feeds into a feeling of aimlessness that increasingly becomes a hindrance to the overall experience as time goes on. Much of this aimlessness also stems from the aforementioned nonlinearity the game attempts to provide leading to a much less structured story being able to happen, making the character feel more like a spectator in events just wandering from town to town with nothing much to do, rather than actually interacting with the world in a meaningful way. This all culminates in an overwhelming feeling that there’s no major drive actually pushing you along beyond the sight of numbers going up and the game explicitly telling you that there’s definitely some progress being made, even if it doesn’t feel like this at all. This also makes the game feel rather anticlimactic for the most part, with the villains contributing practically nothing, with no sense of looming threat or stakes making them feel like they have even less of a presence than they did in Red and Blue and making the encounters with them feel more like padding than an integral part of the experience. This is made all the worse by the way the battles were made so slow, with long pauses inbetween each attack, animation, and text box creating a sense of boredom during even the most significant of moments.
With all this said however, the game could have been a very small, concise experience that had some flaws but overall one that felt like a step forward in spite of its many issues if not for the fact that every negative thing said feels as if it’s worsened tenfold by everything in the post game/path to the true ending. While I admire the idea of allowing the player to explore the region of Red and Blue, its effect on the overall experience is so egregiously bad to me that I’d have genuinely rathered if it had a similar idea to gen 1, where it just unlocked an extra cave and then had its climactic moment at the end of it and that was it. The player exploring the Kanto region after making their way through Johto has very similar issues to that of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night’s inverted castle in its sense of total aimlessness and ease. This takes my issues with the nonlinearity the main region suffered from to a whole new extreme by essentially giving the player free reign over an entire region with no set order. What makes this even more problematic is the fact that it’s the Kanto region but without any significant landmarks, whether it’s the safari zone being closed, having so many routes get dramatically shortened, or having so many of the iconic buildings and caves being completely sealed off, this just feels like a gutted version of what was already a relatively uninteresting area to explore in gen 1. This means that for a solid few hours, there will be literally no challenge thrown towards the player at all, as they’re essentially going on an oversized fetch quest to key locations, battling weakling after weakling that would have often belonged in the game 5 – 10 hours ago until they’ve gotten all of these essentially arbitrary rewards to unlock the only worthwhile parts of the game, the fights with Blue and Red.
Despite my issues with literally everything else this part of the game, having the player fight these two is a stroke of genius in the long run, after all, after the player has defeated literally everyone else of note in 2 separate regions, what else is there to do other than battle the former champion and the player character from the first game? It’s made even more brilliant by the fact that both of these actually feel like the logical extreme of the game, with their higher levelled teams that provide a variety of threats to watch out for, rather than being easy to sweep with a single party member. While admittedly the difficulty spike was obscene for the Red encounter, I appreciated the way everything really came to a boil at that point, it felt like the game decided to try and make up for how much time had time been spent slogging through the previous few hours with a truly climactic conclusion to everything, and felt like a genuinely perfect way to close off the game, feeling like a true boss fight as opposed to just a slightly stronger than average final encounter.
While I also have some other issues with this game, such as the way so many bits and pieces don’t work properly, the fact that there are so many places that feel like they serve 0 purpose, and the fact that the lineup of newly introduced Pokemon is lacklustre and weak for the most part, going over every individual issue with this game would take far too long for it to be readable in any capacity. Overall, I appreciate this game a lot for making an attempt at pushing the series forward in a lot of ways and making it an overall far more complex and detailed game, having a ton of niche interactions that add a lot more personality to things, but it still feels so limited in a lot of key areas along with frankly poorly balanced in some regards that I found the majority of this to be a borderline miserable experience unfortunately. No matter how much potential this had, it manages to simultaneously feel light on meaningful content while also being ridiculously bloated, with the technological limitations from the Gameboy making things feel overly clunky, and it all culminates in a game that I’d rather not touch again any time soon. Once again, the optimal way I’d consider to play this game is its HeartGold and SoulSilver remakes, which might have some of the same problems, but overall feels far more polished and well-rounded and the only way one should really play a Johto game outside of nostalgia reasons.
One of the biggest aspects about Crystal that I like so much is the way it feels like it really took full advantage of the hardware it was on, making for a lot of really clever moments throughout or simply more impressive presentation that made things flow much smoother. The proper colour is a big one in this regard, serving to make the game feel considerably more vibrant and generally nice to look at, compared to the monochromatic art of the first games. This somewhat offsets the issue of it often being somewhat hard to tell what you’re looking at from moment to moment, and the variety really does help long-term to stop the game feeling nightmarish to stare at for longer periods of time. The addition of some more detailed UI, with more elements being represented through proper graphics as opposed to lines of text is also a huge help at making things flow easier and just look nicer. This is especially true for the inventory system, which also had the upgrade of being split into different sections so it no longer felt as if you were being punished for every key item you picked up, along with a few other sections to make all of this a far less painful experience. That said, they didn’t fix this entirely either, as the limited inventory space still ends up being an annoying problem later down the line, with the player constantly having to rearrange their bags in order to leave room both for restorative items and the various held items that were introduced in the game. Once again , this hits a point where it just becomes tiresome to see another item lying on the ground, making you essentially hope that it’s something you already had, which feels completely counterintuitive in a game that wants the player to take their time to explore so much of the world.
While the inclusion of held items theoretically was a huge step forward, they didn’t really do too much in this game, with fairly trivial bonuses for the most part eliminating the future strategic depth to the team building aspect of the games. The idea of adding the phone to this as a way to essentially be able to interact more with certain NPCs, contributing to things feeling more fleshed out is another example that ends up falling flat. This is both thanks to the way the player can only have a limited amount of them without knowing which ones would be important to keep around, and also because of the way they’ll make random notifications that appear, having the game reach a grinding halt in a similar way to the day/night transitions of Castlevania 2. This issue of ideas that didn’t see their full potential at all can be seen in many other core aspects of this as well, such as the way Pokemon breeding was implemented so haphazardly in a way that didn’t contribute anything to the game loop, instead allowing the player to acquire certain “baby pokemon”, which were functionally useless in battle and felt more like a poor attempt at providing some more significance to certain ones without realising that nobody would really use these since they’d already have to have access to their more powerful evolutions to acquire them. This adds an additional layer of frustration to the idea of attempting to collect even the majority of Pokemon here, even though it’s not quite as egregious as some of the other obtuse ways in which they lock things off from the player. Whether it’s certain trees that are shuffled along that will rarely give you a special Pokemon, the 1% encounters across the board or the amount of these locked behind the postgame, it almost feels as if the game is attempting to stop the player from even attempting to spend time collecting so much of the new stuff introduced here. This needless overcomplication of things can funnily enough also be found in the soundtrack, with a lot of interesting ideas being drowned out by additional layers of melodies that ultimately serve to remove some of its unique character and intrigue, instead being far messier than they could have been.
The biggest issue this game has however can be found in the form of its mostly awful balancing and the way it contributes to other flaws within this design, aspects which can mainly be chalked up to a few flaws that pervade the vast majority of content here. The attempt at nonlinearity the game makes ultimately muddles a lot of the difficulty thanks to the way that the game needs to account for the possibility of the player fighting a selection of 3 gym leaders in any order, meaning that even the strongest of these still needed to be feasible for someone who’d only just gotten to the halfway point of the main game. This results in only the first of these actually having any sort of challenge to them, since if you beat one, you basically can beat all of them, especially since by the time you get to these other ones, you’ll have become even more powerful. This leads to a dramatic lull in difficulty where everything around you feels horribly underlevelled and the game turns into an act of button mashing through hours of content without any resistance. This underlevelling ends up being a further issue once the game attempts to provide some moments of difficulty, as it often leads to huge spikes in it to the point where even if the player has spent the time to take on every possible encounter, they’ll still likely be woefully unprepared. When the exp distribution is so lacklustre that it’s recommended the player only has a team of 4 or is alternatively told that they can just win with nothing but their starter, there’s something fundamentally off about the way things have been balanced. While Pokemon games tend to be considered way too easy for the most part, I feel like this one is so braindead in this regard with how weak everything is, but in such a way that it can lead to some downright infuriating encounters by the end.
The low level of everything makes the idea of effective grinding a pipe dream as well, with the divide in what’s required for the player and what they’re given being so absurdly large that it’s both unreasonable as a way to attempt to strengthen your current team, and also makes adding something new out of the question as well thanks to how much weaker it will be than the rest of your team for the most part. This effectively reduces playstyle variety dramatically and feeds into a feeling of aimlessness that increasingly becomes a hindrance to the overall experience as time goes on. Much of this aimlessness also stems from the aforementioned nonlinearity the game attempts to provide leading to a much less structured story being able to happen, making the character feel more like a spectator in events just wandering from town to town with nothing much to do, rather than actually interacting with the world in a meaningful way. This all culminates in an overwhelming feeling that there’s no major drive actually pushing you along beyond the sight of numbers going up and the game explicitly telling you that there’s definitely some progress being made, even if it doesn’t feel like this at all. This also makes the game feel rather anticlimactic for the most part, with the villains contributing practically nothing, with no sense of looming threat or stakes making them feel like they have even less of a presence than they did in Red and Blue and making the encounters with them feel more like padding than an integral part of the experience. This is made all the worse by the way the battles were made so slow, with long pauses inbetween each attack, animation, and text box creating a sense of boredom during even the most significant of moments.
With all this said however, the game could have been a very small, concise experience that had some flaws but overall one that felt like a step forward in spite of its many issues if not for the fact that every negative thing said feels as if it’s worsened tenfold by everything in the post game/path to the true ending. While I admire the idea of allowing the player to explore the region of Red and Blue, its effect on the overall experience is so egregiously bad to me that I’d have genuinely rathered if it had a similar idea to gen 1, where it just unlocked an extra cave and then had its climactic moment at the end of it and that was it. The player exploring the Kanto region after making their way through Johto has very similar issues to that of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night’s inverted castle in its sense of total aimlessness and ease. This takes my issues with the nonlinearity the main region suffered from to a whole new extreme by essentially giving the player free reign over an entire region with no set order. What makes this even more problematic is the fact that it’s the Kanto region but without any significant landmarks, whether it’s the safari zone being closed, having so many routes get dramatically shortened, or having so many of the iconic buildings and caves being completely sealed off, this just feels like a gutted version of what was already a relatively uninteresting area to explore in gen 1. This means that for a solid few hours, there will be literally no challenge thrown towards the player at all, as they’re essentially going on an oversized fetch quest to key locations, battling weakling after weakling that would have often belonged in the game 5 – 10 hours ago until they’ve gotten all of these essentially arbitrary rewards to unlock the only worthwhile parts of the game, the fights with Blue and Red.
Despite my issues with literally everything else this part of the game, having the player fight these two is a stroke of genius in the long run, after all, after the player has defeated literally everyone else of note in 2 separate regions, what else is there to do other than battle the former champion and the player character from the first game? It’s made even more brilliant by the fact that both of these actually feel like the logical extreme of the game, with their higher levelled teams that provide a variety of threats to watch out for, rather than being easy to sweep with a single party member. While admittedly the difficulty spike was obscene for the Red encounter, I appreciated the way everything really came to a boil at that point, it felt like the game decided to try and make up for how much time had time been spent slogging through the previous few hours with a truly climactic conclusion to everything, and felt like a genuinely perfect way to close off the game, feeling like a true boss fight as opposed to just a slightly stronger than average final encounter.
While I also have some other issues with this game, such as the way so many bits and pieces don’t work properly, the fact that there are so many places that feel like they serve 0 purpose, and the fact that the lineup of newly introduced Pokemon is lacklustre and weak for the most part, going over every individual issue with this game would take far too long for it to be readable in any capacity. Overall, I appreciate this game a lot for making an attempt at pushing the series forward in a lot of ways and making it an overall far more complex and detailed game, having a ton of niche interactions that add a lot more personality to things, but it still feels so limited in a lot of key areas along with frankly poorly balanced in some regards that I found the majority of this to be a borderline miserable experience unfortunately. No matter how much potential this had, it manages to simultaneously feel light on meaningful content while also being ridiculously bloated, with the technological limitations from the Gameboy making things feel overly clunky, and it all culminates in a game that I’d rather not touch again any time soon. Once again, the optimal way I’d consider to play this game is its HeartGold and SoulSilver remakes, which might have some of the same problems, but overall feels far more polished and well-rounded and the only way one should really play a Johto game outside of nostalgia reasons.