An extremely underappreciated and underrated game that was bashed because of a herd effect and because most people haven't truly understood what it is and means.

LR is not a standalone game. Yes, it was sold as a standalone game, but it very much is the end of Lightning story and the end of FFXIII. The whole FFXIII saga should be treated and appreciated as a single game, rather than three separated and different games.

That's the reasoning behind the structure of LR: it's the traditional sidequest rush and worldbuilding before the last boss. While Lightning is in the cover, the main characters are the world and it's people, the discussions on eternity, longing, loss, end and new beginnings. The game portrays a dead world and you're the merciful executor. There is beauty in its themes that is almost always ignored by people who consume for pure consumption and take their worldview from youtube essayists and opinionated hacks.

The class system with different outfits is good and reminisces of another ill-received but mechanically sound FF entry, X-2. It is also a reflection of the pacing choices made the creators in turning the entire game into the pre-ending portion of a traditional jRPG.

The soundtrack is effective in conveying its themes for those who want to hear it. It is a Final Fantasy entry, so this is something that should be the case anyway. Graphically, the game is competent - not groundbreaking as the debut of the Crystal Tools engine, but still pretty good.

The pacing is weird, but deliberately so. The game is, as mentioned, just the latter third of a larger game so it might have weirded people out that the whole game feels like an ending portion - there's no discernible early or middle story portions. This weirdness is the thing I'm most fond of about the game, however.

The ending was cute, but I'm still kinda torn about it years later. While I like it, I can understand those who think it's too corny.

Terrible story, extremely badly written characters and a dragging pace made this exprience very much unpleasant.

Game-wise, there is nothing terribly offensive. The game is very much eyecandy, with a good soundtrack (as always in this series) and impressive visuals, especially in the UI front.

However, the main point of the game, the story, storytelling and characters (as should be in any jRPG) seems to have been written exclusively for maladjusted, edgy and barely literate teenagers. It's corny, it's full of self-aggrandizing and righteous bullshit and treats anyone who isn't an entitled child as the Devil walking the Earth. The pace is terrible and the game eats at your time with badly written dialogue and plot twists that are as predictable as death and taxes. In fact, both are preferable to playing this steaming pile of dung.

This score reflects the whole first generation.

There are few franchises that have changed the world. Pokémon is one of them. It may be easy to look at the nuts and bolts of the first generation today, with hindsight and in a vacuum. Videogames, however, are less of a linear technical field than an interactive artform. Pokémon is part of the cultural zeitgeist of the last four generations because of the impact the first generation caused.

The feeling of wanderlust and adventure is something that a human constantly seeks in life. Pokémon awakened and fed this in the hearts of millions of people worldwide.

The premise of the series, in it's time, was groundbreaking: be the protagonist of the perfect adventure, with fantastical friendly monsters in a world that is recognizable and parallel to our own.

The execution may not have been technically perfect, but it was artistically perfect. The design of the characters, the monsters and the world was created expertly to cater to young children but alto to spark the inner child in every single one who got into contact with the world of Pokémon.

The gameplay loop, while a little bit dated, could hook any who tried it in a heartbeat, and the concept of growing together with you monster partners was innovative and addicting. The arstyle was cartoonish enough that any holes left by the low fidelity of GameBoy graphics could be promptly filled by the player imagination. However, the sprite art was phenomenal and is still cherished my a large part of the playerbase, who eschew the 3D transition post 7th gen.

Yes, there are some bugs. Who gives a shit? At the time, pre-internet, bugs were even part of the mystique of games, as if they were a supernatural secret only known to a select few. The experience was almost never impacted by them and it is not only unfair, but extremely shortsighted to dim the legacy of these games because of niche glitches.

And what a legacy. Not even talking about the personal mark the first generation left in the ones who had the privilege to experience them, the systems Pokémon created are part of the foundations of modern jRPGs and the template of any monster collecting game - from Pokémon ripoffs to cardgame roguelikes, to games with elemental tables to even modern collecting gacha games.

The soundtrack is immaculate and the sound design is impeccable. There are few games with tunes as recognizable and timeless as Pokémon. There are few thing that scream "start of the adventure" as the Route 1 theme.

There is no nostalgia tint - the game could have issues, but they are so minuscule in face of the importance of the final product and the monumentality of the fun it brought, they are easily ignorable.