the first pokemon game i've played all the way through since i wasn't a DS/gameboy kid. played the story alongside an old friend who had some experience with semi-real-deal competitive pokemon, with all the grinding for the good mons and stats and all that shit. wanted to give it a whack myself. i remember spending at least a few hours running around in a circle in the same place on the map to get the good ditto. i started doing battles online and, within 15-30 minutes, was crushed so badly that i immediately quit, uninstalled the game from my console, never even considered picking it up again, haven't been at all tempted to try another older pokemon game now that i'm into retro gamin', and look back on all this semi-wistfully a few times a year. 130 hours total invested. this game hurt me.

I played this with save backups so I didn't get the tense, fragile experience I think you're supposed to have. Playing it like that, it's still hard as fuck, has arguably the most insane and meticulous crafting system of any video game, ever -- seriously, you need to have multiple MSDN-ass wikis with conflicting data open to navigate it -- and just generally conveys how dreary and repetitive and hopeless it would be to smoke meth, constantly maneuver unmanageable and unpredictable threats, and loot abandoned houses for eyeglass lens and scrap metal and powdered milk. This game started to weigh on me in an almost physically palpable way after a good no. of hours and I stopped playing it completely in an instant.