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.

I'm acclimated to Mario 2 better than most, and after finishing it(bears saying with a healthy use of the rewind feature now and then) it really doesn't deserve the sour reputation it got. And people might hate that it includes very little in genuine graphical updates or mechanical additions but a sequel/expansion of this nature wasn't unknowable back then, and so many pivotal games had sister variants that expanded it or made its gameplay more difficult(like "Championship Lode Runner" or "Ms. Pac-Man"), but SMB2 still strikes and makes its way with a lot more originality and grace than those two games.

For me, the Japanese SMB2 is kind of like "The Stanley Parable" of Mario. I'm always the first person to bemoan over a difficult game but I was astounded how much enjoyment and connection I've managed to make with SMB2 - especially after going through what seemed like an interactive meta-commentary in every single stage. Playing "Lost Levels" feels like engaging a really intimate dialogue between the developer and the player, who are both well aware of the design nuances of the first SMB. Every level becomes a meta commentary subverting or examining core features of the first game.

Every stage the developer engages the player by asking: "Ok, but what if SMB did THIS? [presents]", and it becomes a novel thing where you are allowed to see Mario's gameplay features presented and experimented on in a different light, giving you an amazing shift of perspective: What if we included the water level enemies in the land levels? What if we can make a spring that launches you super super high up? What if we made a level entirely out of those springs? What if we gave you mushrooms that were an obstacle instead of a power up?. But crucially, you also get areas and experiments that give you a lot of clemency, like: "What if we gave you a starman at this particular spot where you need to jump over a bunch of piranha plants?". It's a brilliant, shocking insight into the nature of game development and it is superbly wonderful how this is a game that allows you to be on equal footing with a developer's headspace. That point about the starman and the piranha plants is exactly one of the many points in this game where the player's power just soars: you feel like you've gained the system and that the developer made this so you could feel a rush. It's a roller coaster. The highs of it are moments that I'm much fonder of than in Mario 1, and even the ending feels much more congratulatory, celebratory and welcoming of the player.

Every single addition here was an idea extrapolation and an experimentation of SMB1 that is akin to thought experiments and mental gymnastics and for me it is more quizzical than trying. Because of this, I've never seen the "Lost Levels" as cruel or tough, aside from the really inconvenient oversight that there is no way to save progress in the game, but instead you'll have to leave your NES powered on overnight. There are far crueler games on the NES: The basic "Mega Man" games will give you tons of unnecessary stress and I'm convinced "Zelda II" is for utter masochists. To say nothing of "Battletoads", or kusoge like "Spelunker", "Atlantis no Nazo", or the kaizo Mario hacks.

Without exaggeration: Mario 2 is hard, but not in a way people would imagine. People would imagine rows of enemies coming at you at once, shooting a swath of bullet hell pellets or having to spend an entire level just bouncing upon enemies like in the kaizo hacks, when really the difficulty is more based on placing key obstacles or enemies in testy places that are immediately observable. They are singular trick-shots, very naturally evolved from Mario 1, and not insurmountable challenges that require use of superhuman ability. Very often the tools to make it are right at your disposal.

Obviously "Lost Levels" hinges on the fact that you're familiar with the first SMB1 and that's a great backdrop to have to make an amazing exploratory meta-game of. After all, Nintendo would only do the exact same thing with Mario Maker, and hint at it in a no-small number of modern 2D Mario games. People would say that there are instances where the devs "troll" the player, but they are never cruel jokes and are just very light gotchas and temporary illusions, where usually the tools to solve it is right at your disposal. Like for example, there will be moments when you'll come across a huge dead end or a huge pit you can't leap over, but the solution it turns out is just to knock an invisible block right above you. There might be a row of spinies crawling on the floor, but you can use a koopa shell to knock an entire row of them. Plenty of these gotcha moments and gimmicks would be perfectly recycled for SMB3. Other NES games would be much more disrespectful to the player and deliberately punish them for innocent transgressions, but Mario 2 just isn't that. Not even the notorious poisonous mushrooms are that abundant - after its initial use in the first couple of levels, I've noticed that they just become quickly forgotten and discarded. They get used so rarely after World 1 and I swear that over 90% of the mushrooms in the game are normal, legitimate power-ups. Even world 8 in this game feels much fairer and more palatable than SMB1's world 8, and so many people are giving SMB1 a pass despite it being a very difficult game in its own right.

As a last point I need to mention just how utterlfy fantastic world 9 is, which you get as a reward for beating the game without using any warp zones. World 9 especially cements that it's a fun meta-commentary on Mario instead of aspiring to be the ur-kaizo. There's a whole lot of difference in intent, meaning and language used in Mario 2 that sets it apart from the kaizo community or the genre of immensely challenging games. It has more in common with developer commentaries in Valve games than "Cuphead".

If you consider yourself an enthusiast of SMB1 do give it a fair shake and get rid of the biases you might have heard. It's a great love letter and companion piece to Mario 1, but otherwise very inaccessible for casual Mario players, who have no shortage of introductory Mario games anyway.

Why yes, I did beat this game with Luigi! 💚

(Glitchwave project #016)

It's hard for me to look at or review Pokemon objectively because of nostalgia blindness but Genius Sonority's Pokemon Colosseum is one that deserves a proper examination. This game is, and will probably continue to be, the most creative use of the Pokemon IP to date.

The game immediately sells itself by purporting to break one of Pokemon's cardinal rules - that is, the capturing of Pokemon owned by other trainers. Rather than devolve into something that tries too hard to be edgy or provocative, it sets up a realistic and compelling scenario for the aforementioned "rule-breaking", where the Pokemon that the main character, Wes, is capturing using his trademark Snag Machine have been raised into aggressive and dangerous creatures by the villainous team, Cipher. They are no longer the Pokemon we know, but Shadow Pokemon that must be cured of their violent conditioning; and yet, even within the rule-breaking that snagging allows, we cleverly loop back to the series tenets of raising Pokemon with care in order to form a lasting bond. Colosseum does well in general to tread the line between dark and outright edgy and the result is a compelling, convincing atmosphere. The world design for the Orre region, based on the southwestern US, is nothing short of exceptional. The towns and dungeons are varied and eye-catching, yet manage to tie together the region's cohesive theme of being rough and barren, which in turn relates to its lack of wild Pokemon and the player's (as well as other trainers) dependency on Pokemon brought in from abroad or captured or "snagged" from Cipher. This fascinating world that Genius Sonority has built is given another layer of immersion when considering the great score composed by Tsukasa Tawada; a mix of jazz, prog rock and piano tracks that complement its scenes and battles perfectly. It is not only one of the most unique OSTs in a Pokemon game, but among the outright best. Years later, Tawada has done laps around Game Freak's sound team.

The character designs are quite different than Ken Sugimori's works for the mainline Pokemon series yet no doubt feel eye-catching, iconic and memorable. The flashy Miror B is remembered to this day while the main character Wes seems to perfectly capture that 2000s "Rule of Cool Above All" gaming zeitgeist in his capacity as the game's hero.

As for the gameplay and Pokemon themselves, Genius Sonority have once again knocked it out of the park. The game's focus on Pokemon from the Johto Region allowed these Pokemon to remain relevant even in the Advance Generation, even though their games (Pokemon Gold, Silver and Crystal) had been lost to time as Pokemon moved from the Game Boy Color to the Game Boy Advance. While this may seem unworthy of any attention today, it was massive in 2004, especially to anyone who endeavored to complete their Pokedex. The same goes for this game's decision to make Double Battles the focus of the game, something that had only been a bit-part feature in Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire. The focus on Doubles not only sets Colosseum apart from the mainline series of games but makes full use of the previously underutilized mode, with boss characters having true synergy in their lineups. Instead of merely sending out a Pokemon for you to wail on as a punching bag, your enemies will set up a Protect while their partner uses Earthquake, or utilize Skill Swap to unlock Slaking's latent potential and turn him into a monster. Like with snagging, Colosseum has managed to not only use the feature of a doubles-oriented campaign as an excited selling point, but baked it into the gameplay in the best way possible, adding an organic sense of challenge through enemy trainers exploiting strategies specific to doubles as a medium.

The game is not perfect, of course. It lacks a true overworld or routes, limiting exploration to towns and dungeons. The amount of Pokemon you can actually obtain through snagging is quite low [around 50~], owing to the game encouraging the player to transfer Pokemon from the handheld Pokemon games on the GBA. That said, neither of these is a problem for the experience in Colosseum itself, as there are more than enough hours of gameplay and the story-recruited Shadow Pokemon are more than capable fighters, albeit these drawbacks nonetheless leave one wanting for something more.

All in all, Pokemon Colosseum is the work of a developer that didn't behold itself to any preconceived notions of Pokemon, yet had the guile to work all of their ideas into something believable under the weight of its massive name. Every instance of gameplay and concept design is integrated well into the final product to the point where it has become something that sticks in the minds of those who have played it even years later. We will never see something like it again - it's lightning in a bottle. At the same time it's a rare glimpse of what Pokemon has the potential to be, beyond it's by-the-books campaigns, simple and static battle system, and carefully-branded IP. Beyond all that is the rebel that is Pokemon Colosseum.