Normally I try to have a somewhat recent (within the past 10 years) playthrough to tie these reviews to, but I'm trying to pace out my Crystal replay, and I don't want to let Review #251 pass me up without celebrating Gen 2 Pokémon, so here we go.
In my life so far, I've had two epoch-making games: games whose initial playthroughs were so important and influential to my development of who I am and how I understand the world around me that I can cleanly demarcate my life before and after I played them. The second of these was Persona 4, the game that, to this day, inspires me to love myself and try to find meaning in the people with whom I share a world.
But the first of these was Pokémon: Crystal Version. Bear with me for a bit before the review proper - I have to explain my background a bit before I get there.
I have a LOT of history with early Pokémon, going all the way back to watching the debut broadcast of the first episode of the anime a couple weeks before my fifth birthday. I was actually reluctant at first - I remember my sister hearing about it from a classmate, and I remember thinking her description sounded like the stupidest thing in the world (somehow I thought robots were involved?) - but I gave it a go, and found the whole thing surprisingly captivating. I really could talk at length about my time with Pokémon, but the gist of it was that I was in the thick of Pokémania in just about every way...
...except the video games. My father did not believe in letting his family own video game consoles. I was aware of the video games, between Blockbuster kiosks for Snap and Stadium, TV spots, and visiting my father's friends who let their kids have Game Boys, but for a good 5 years, I could only wonder from afar, occasionally asking my folks for a Game Boy and constantly being shot down. I watched the entirety of Generations 1 and 2 pass me by, and with prerelease and Japanese teasers for Gen 3 cropping up, I upped my game and kept trying to wear my folks down.
I think what finally did it was my changing schools. 2003 marked the year I switched from public elementary school to private middle school - a switch made because public school wasn't challenging me (I don't know if this ever occurred, but I like to imagine a conversation between my parents boiling down to, "Well, clearly, if he's doing THIS well in school, video games couldn't possibly slow him down...")
But they couldn't just give me a Game Boy, so my father cut a deal with me that summer. He told me that he'd buy me a Game Boy Advance, and he'd let me get Pokémon Sapphire for my 10th birthday - but ONLY if I finally learned to ride my bike. I'd held off for almost 10 years, and a kid my age should really know how to do so.
For almost 10 years, I had no real inclination to learn to ride my bike. But with a Game Boy and Pokémon in the balance? That was a complete game changer. I spent hours out there, learning to coordinate my body and balance without training wheels. It took about a week of falling off and getting back on, but by the end of the week, I was riding circles around my neighborhood.
(Let the record show that I haven't much ridden my bike since I learned. But I do indeed still possess the muscle memory, so if ever the need crops up...)
I'm not confident on the exact date, but I think it was Sunday, August 10th, 2003 that my father and I ordered my Game Boy online - a special, limited edition Torchic Orange Game Boy Advance SP, only available at physical Pokémon Center locations or - for a single month - online at Pokemon.com. Calvin and Hobbes had prepared me to expect it to take weeks to arrive, so I was delighted when the Game Boy came in the mail on Wednesday, August 13th. I knew I wasn't getting Sapphire until my birthday at the end of September, but I didn't care - just watching the animation for the GBA boot-up logo could be enough for me. I'd decided that would hold me over for a month.
It didn't need to. My father and I went out to a hobby shop that afternoon. When we came home, there was a copy of Pokémon: Crystal Version sitting on the kitchen table, waiting for me. A surprise from my mother.
A surprise indeed, because somehow - despite being aware of Gold and Silver for years, and frequenting websites like Pojo.com and Serebii.net and Poke-Amph.com and Marrilland.com - I had inexplicably never heard of Pokémon Crystal Version. I could tell from the boxart that it was part of the Gold/Silver series (as I knew it at the time), and I sorta recognized Suicune from my books and the anime, but I was mostly surprised that I had no idea what it was, nor what to expect. Added a whole new level of mystery and excitement to the adventure.
Now, I have no illusions that my fondness for Pokémon Crystal isn't rooted in this specific nostalgia. It's impossible for me to disentangle my feelings on Crystal when it represented, in many respects, the end of one chapter in my life and the start of the next. To be honest, I have no interest in trying to do so, since Crystal is so fundamental to how I understand myself, and so many of my tastes are informed by my experiencing things first through Crystal. But let me instead talk about the things I've noticed and thought about over the years with respect to Crystal, and how that enriched my love for the game.
First, regarding Generation II at large. I mentioned in my Yellow review how that game felt like the first core game developed as a mainstream phenomenon, and how that made for a compelling dichotomy with Pokémon's counterculture roots. By contrast, Gold/Silver (and Crystal by extension) feel like the last possible time Pokémon can be thought of as counterculture. The reason isn't complicated: there was always going to be a Pokémon Gold and Silver. Even before Game Freak knew they'd forever changed the world with Pokémon, they had plans and designs for a sequel duology. These plans changed considerably after Pokémon Red/Green proved to be megaton hits, and they continued to change as the series became an international and multimedia phenomenon, but the heart of these ideas stayed the same. The Gold/Silver series would be a post-script to the ideas advanced in the original series. Characters and concepts from the first game would receive their epilogues, new ideas would exist largely in service of complementing or commenting on original concepts... heck, it even comes down to the broad theming of each generation's regional theming: a contrast between Kanto and Kansai familiar to a lot of Japanese media.
And even with the version of the Gold/Silver series we got, we have the game ending on a fight against the protagonist from the original games, at a disproportionately elevated level. It's easy to look at this largely as a celebration of a success, but I dunno - so much of the understated rhetoric around Red carries so much more than a celebration of the past. Red has isolated himself from society in single-minded pursuit of the original games' selling points, so much so that his own mother has not heard from him in years. At the same time, Red has an Espeon, a Pokémon that (within the lore of the game and the language of the mechanics) cannot exist in the past and could only exist with love and devotion. There's a narrative here that does not serve as an advertisement of the past, but an acknowledgement that there is more than the past. If Pokémon had ended with this fight, and Red wordlessly walking away to find new purpose, the series would have told a complete story - something unimaginable for an eternal franchise, but within the vocabulary of a team looking to underline and conclude their 6-year passion project.
I think it's in this light that I choose to view Gen II: a melodic remix. This informs my response to a lot of the criticisms that exist for Gen II. Why is the level curve so low? Because the player is experienced with the composition of Gen I, and Game Freak decided to encourage further experimentation with rosters by making it easy to train a new Pokémon to the required level. Why is Team Rocket so lame here? Because they were defeated before, and the lack of strong leadership is its own commentary: a counterpoint that's never able to arrive at its own melody. Why is Kanto so abrupt? Kanto is a Coda to the adventure, not a second verse. Why are so many new Pokémon gated behind Kanto? Because the Coda is not a repeat, but a progression of the composition. I'm not claiming to love all of these things, or that the game might not have been more compelling otherwise. But I think there's a lot of artistic purpose to the choices here that are still fun and engaging.
As for Crystal itself, compared to Gold and Silver? Ampharos is my favorite Pokémon, so I definitely miss its presence, plus not having access to Aeroblast/Sacred Fire on Lugia/Ho-Oh is a little jank - but I think every other choice made here is a straight improvement. Because Generation II is such a deliberately casual experience, the world itself and its myriad NPCs feel like they take center stage; things like the Weekday Siblings, the PokéGear contacts, the Monday night Clefairy Dance, and the Friday Lapras sighting make for a lot of the flavor of what Johto is. Changes made in Crystal are largely in service of this: PokéGear contacts are more dynamic; there are secret early chances to catch Phanpy, Teddiursa, and Poliwag; Buena's Password ties the Radio feature to a specific character that encourages frequent interactivity; the Odd Egg makes each playthrough a little more unique and serves as an additional highlight of the Shiny/Baby mechanics; Suicune's subplot exists entirely as a sidequest to the game's light narrative; etc etc etc. And Kris hardly needs an explanation for why she's the best.
And it's weird - there are later Pokémon games that have expansive worlds with details that a person could get endlessly lost in. But I tend not to think as highly of those titles. Is it because I wasn't as impressionable for those as I was for Crystal? Yeah, at least in part. Like I said, I don't claim to be disentangling my own bias from my review. But I do think there's something to how understated and humble everything is in Crystal, in how everything just exists in its own quiet little rustic world, that I don't feel from any other mainstream interpretation of the series.
I'm long past the point of Pokémon being the single most important thing to my life, the way it was when I was a kid. I'm long past expecting to play every new release, or keep up with every new development, or anything like that. Crystal isn't my favorite game anymore, nor even my second- or third-favorite. Even so, Pokémon Crystal will always be in my heart and in my thoughts. It is a game for which I am incapable of holding any feeling but love, and it's a game that I will always speak of fondly.
In my life so far, I've had two epoch-making games: games whose initial playthroughs were so important and influential to my development of who I am and how I understand the world around me that I can cleanly demarcate my life before and after I played them. The second of these was Persona 4, the game that, to this day, inspires me to love myself and try to find meaning in the people with whom I share a world.
But the first of these was Pokémon: Crystal Version. Bear with me for a bit before the review proper - I have to explain my background a bit before I get there.
I have a LOT of history with early Pokémon, going all the way back to watching the debut broadcast of the first episode of the anime a couple weeks before my fifth birthday. I was actually reluctant at first - I remember my sister hearing about it from a classmate, and I remember thinking her description sounded like the stupidest thing in the world (somehow I thought robots were involved?) - but I gave it a go, and found the whole thing surprisingly captivating. I really could talk at length about my time with Pokémon, but the gist of it was that I was in the thick of Pokémania in just about every way...
...except the video games. My father did not believe in letting his family own video game consoles. I was aware of the video games, between Blockbuster kiosks for Snap and Stadium, TV spots, and visiting my father's friends who let their kids have Game Boys, but for a good 5 years, I could only wonder from afar, occasionally asking my folks for a Game Boy and constantly being shot down. I watched the entirety of Generations 1 and 2 pass me by, and with prerelease and Japanese teasers for Gen 3 cropping up, I upped my game and kept trying to wear my folks down.
I think what finally did it was my changing schools. 2003 marked the year I switched from public elementary school to private middle school - a switch made because public school wasn't challenging me (I don't know if this ever occurred, but I like to imagine a conversation between my parents boiling down to, "Well, clearly, if he's doing THIS well in school, video games couldn't possibly slow him down...")
But they couldn't just give me a Game Boy, so my father cut a deal with me that summer. He told me that he'd buy me a Game Boy Advance, and he'd let me get Pokémon Sapphire for my 10th birthday - but ONLY if I finally learned to ride my bike. I'd held off for almost 10 years, and a kid my age should really know how to do so.
For almost 10 years, I had no real inclination to learn to ride my bike. But with a Game Boy and Pokémon in the balance? That was a complete game changer. I spent hours out there, learning to coordinate my body and balance without training wheels. It took about a week of falling off and getting back on, but by the end of the week, I was riding circles around my neighborhood.
(Let the record show that I haven't much ridden my bike since I learned. But I do indeed still possess the muscle memory, so if ever the need crops up...)
I'm not confident on the exact date, but I think it was Sunday, August 10th, 2003 that my father and I ordered my Game Boy online - a special, limited edition Torchic Orange Game Boy Advance SP, only available at physical Pokémon Center locations or - for a single month - online at Pokemon.com. Calvin and Hobbes had prepared me to expect it to take weeks to arrive, so I was delighted when the Game Boy came in the mail on Wednesday, August 13th. I knew I wasn't getting Sapphire until my birthday at the end of September, but I didn't care - just watching the animation for the GBA boot-up logo could be enough for me. I'd decided that would hold me over for a month.
It didn't need to. My father and I went out to a hobby shop that afternoon. When we came home, there was a copy of Pokémon: Crystal Version sitting on the kitchen table, waiting for me. A surprise from my mother.
A surprise indeed, because somehow - despite being aware of Gold and Silver for years, and frequenting websites like Pojo.com and Serebii.net and Poke-Amph.com and Marrilland.com - I had inexplicably never heard of Pokémon Crystal Version. I could tell from the boxart that it was part of the Gold/Silver series (as I knew it at the time), and I sorta recognized Suicune from my books and the anime, but I was mostly surprised that I had no idea what it was, nor what to expect. Added a whole new level of mystery and excitement to the adventure.
Now, I have no illusions that my fondness for Pokémon Crystal isn't rooted in this specific nostalgia. It's impossible for me to disentangle my feelings on Crystal when it represented, in many respects, the end of one chapter in my life and the start of the next. To be honest, I have no interest in trying to do so, since Crystal is so fundamental to how I understand myself, and so many of my tastes are informed by my experiencing things first through Crystal. But let me instead talk about the things I've noticed and thought about over the years with respect to Crystal, and how that enriched my love for the game.
First, regarding Generation II at large. I mentioned in my Yellow review how that game felt like the first core game developed as a mainstream phenomenon, and how that made for a compelling dichotomy with Pokémon's counterculture roots. By contrast, Gold/Silver (and Crystal by extension) feel like the last possible time Pokémon can be thought of as counterculture. The reason isn't complicated: there was always going to be a Pokémon Gold and Silver. Even before Game Freak knew they'd forever changed the world with Pokémon, they had plans and designs for a sequel duology. These plans changed considerably after Pokémon Red/Green proved to be megaton hits, and they continued to change as the series became an international and multimedia phenomenon, but the heart of these ideas stayed the same. The Gold/Silver series would be a post-script to the ideas advanced in the original series. Characters and concepts from the first game would receive their epilogues, new ideas would exist largely in service of complementing or commenting on original concepts... heck, it even comes down to the broad theming of each generation's regional theming: a contrast between Kanto and Kansai familiar to a lot of Japanese media.
And even with the version of the Gold/Silver series we got, we have the game ending on a fight against the protagonist from the original games, at a disproportionately elevated level. It's easy to look at this largely as a celebration of a success, but I dunno - so much of the understated rhetoric around Red carries so much more than a celebration of the past. Red has isolated himself from society in single-minded pursuit of the original games' selling points, so much so that his own mother has not heard from him in years. At the same time, Red has an Espeon, a Pokémon that (within the lore of the game and the language of the mechanics) cannot exist in the past and could only exist with love and devotion. There's a narrative here that does not serve as an advertisement of the past, but an acknowledgement that there is more than the past. If Pokémon had ended with this fight, and Red wordlessly walking away to find new purpose, the series would have told a complete story - something unimaginable for an eternal franchise, but within the vocabulary of a team looking to underline and conclude their 6-year passion project.
I think it's in this light that I choose to view Gen II: a melodic remix. This informs my response to a lot of the criticisms that exist for Gen II. Why is the level curve so low? Because the player is experienced with the composition of Gen I, and Game Freak decided to encourage further experimentation with rosters by making it easy to train a new Pokémon to the required level. Why is Team Rocket so lame here? Because they were defeated before, and the lack of strong leadership is its own commentary: a counterpoint that's never able to arrive at its own melody. Why is Kanto so abrupt? Kanto is a Coda to the adventure, not a second verse. Why are so many new Pokémon gated behind Kanto? Because the Coda is not a repeat, but a progression of the composition. I'm not claiming to love all of these things, or that the game might not have been more compelling otherwise. But I think there's a lot of artistic purpose to the choices here that are still fun and engaging.
As for Crystal itself, compared to Gold and Silver? Ampharos is my favorite Pokémon, so I definitely miss its presence, plus not having access to Aeroblast/Sacred Fire on Lugia/Ho-Oh is a little jank - but I think every other choice made here is a straight improvement. Because Generation II is such a deliberately casual experience, the world itself and its myriad NPCs feel like they take center stage; things like the Weekday Siblings, the PokéGear contacts, the Monday night Clefairy Dance, and the Friday Lapras sighting make for a lot of the flavor of what Johto is. Changes made in Crystal are largely in service of this: PokéGear contacts are more dynamic; there are secret early chances to catch Phanpy, Teddiursa, and Poliwag; Buena's Password ties the Radio feature to a specific character that encourages frequent interactivity; the Odd Egg makes each playthrough a little more unique and serves as an additional highlight of the Shiny/Baby mechanics; Suicune's subplot exists entirely as a sidequest to the game's light narrative; etc etc etc. And Kris hardly needs an explanation for why she's the best.
And it's weird - there are later Pokémon games that have expansive worlds with details that a person could get endlessly lost in. But I tend not to think as highly of those titles. Is it because I wasn't as impressionable for those as I was for Crystal? Yeah, at least in part. Like I said, I don't claim to be disentangling my own bias from my review. But I do think there's something to how understated and humble everything is in Crystal, in how everything just exists in its own quiet little rustic world, that I don't feel from any other mainstream interpretation of the series.
I'm long past the point of Pokémon being the single most important thing to my life, the way it was when I was a kid. I'm long past expecting to play every new release, or keep up with every new development, or anything like that. Crystal isn't my favorite game anymore, nor even my second- or third-favorite. Even so, Pokémon Crystal will always be in my heart and in my thoughts. It is a game for which I am incapable of holding any feeling but love, and it's a game that I will always speak of fondly.