Compared to the pop culture behemoth it’d so quickly become, it’s easy to dismiss the first entries in the Pokèmon series as “having not aged well.” And perhaps there’s at least a little truth in that: as the first game in the series, many of the quality of life features present in later generations aren’t quite present, and are sorely missed. It’s certainly rather annoying to be perpetually in contention with the item limit, where often you’re going to have to drop things as routes and dungeons have more things on the floor than you’re ever going to have free space in your bag. It’s certainly rather finicky to have to manually go into the menu and select the HM move you want to use, and it’s certainly rather tedious to have to navigate the PC every time you’re suddenly required to use Cut. Pokèmon learn either every move or no moves, which not only makes training up something in the latter category feel like pulling teeth, but also makes a lot of the game's difficulty fold perhaps more easily than it should: the Ghost type, in particular, being incredibly adept in a player’s hands because so many Pokèmon only ever naturally learn normal type moves.

Not to mention how… it’s a game held together by duct tape and dreams. A type meant to be super-effective against another type actually doesn’t do any damage at all. The so-called “good” AI — an RNG stratagem given to important fights, meant to push them towards super effective moves and away from not very effective moves — is anything but, making it oh so easy to trap certain important fights in a loop because they failed to take into account whether the super effective move they’re programmed to prioritize actually does any damage. Sometimes when you get the catching tutorial and then go to Cinnabar Island you rip the game open, a malignant piece of code emerging from the shoreline, irreversibly corrupting the world around you, before then challenging you to a Pokèmon battle. Between the bugs, between the bits of design philosophy that took years to be iterated on, Pokèmon Red and Blue are more of a stepping stone: important to understand just what the appeal was and how the franchise took over the world, but perhaps, in the full context of what we have now, not the best Pokèmon games to actually play.

But that’s the thing: Pokèmon Red & Blue did not set out to be Pokèmon games, they set out to be RPGs. An RPG with a central mechanic that completely reimagines how said RPG gameplay traditionally works, yes, but an RPG nonetheless, and one that hews much closer mechanically, thematically to being one than any Pokèmon game afterward.

Because, on one hand, it would be easy to say the game folds to any player who knows what they’re doing. On the other hand, that’s coming from a world where you’ve gone through Kanto in so many other games. That’s with the years' worth of accumulated knowledge of the type chart — or the years spent playing games that’ll just tell you if a given move will be effective against another Pokèmon the moment they’re registered in your Pokèdex. Pokèmon Red and Blue, on the other hand, run under the impression that they’re the only games of their kind, for better or worse. Specifically, they kind of run under the old RPG paradigm where finding the way forward often required you to take in context clues, or often explore for exploring’s sake. Kanto is huge, and after a certain point, notably open-ended: moving forward only requires whatever you need to move forward, be that a key item, a HM, or the permission to use said HM. Once you beat Misty the game becomes one huge scavenger hunt, where you’re unlocking something that’ll unlock something that’ll unlock the way forward, and oftentimes, that whole process starts with you hearing what a random NPC has to say, or you just picking a direction and walking towards the horizon, hoping there’s maybe something on the other side.

This approach isn’t limited to merely what governs progress, either. The type chart, and the way certain Pokèmon evolve, while you can certainly find all this out in-game via brute force, exploring the region and listening to what people have to say tells you so much of what you might like to know. From the gym guide giving you the lowdown on what to expect as you go up to face your next challenge, from the guy in the Celadon Department Store who gets traded a Graveller and is shocked to see it evolve, to the random trainer on the seaside who informs you how Nidorino evolves via MOON STONE, you learn so much from the people you meet along the way, and you never know just who is going to give you the exact info you might happen to want. I love how indirect this can be, too: for example, how the positioning of the Fighting Dojo relative to Saffron City’s gym tells you about how Fighting types are weak to Psychic, or Diglett's cave giving you the exact tools you need to beat the gym right next to it. If I got to have all my memories taken of a certain thing, a chance to go through the whole game blind once again… I’m not sure Pokèmon Red would actually be the pick, but man, is it up there. I love how, theoretically, the road to progress is marked by exploration, through interaction, through solving the giant fetch-quest that makes up the Kanto region. It’d be awesome to see how that all works in practice.

What I also love about the more RPG-inspired design is how nearly all the Pokèmon you encounter serve some sort of clear mechanical purpose. They’re not just cute little creatures you sic onto other people’s cute little creatures, they lean into the RPG design philosophy too, and often have a clear role in how the game is constructed. Brock’s Onix and Misty’s Starmie aren’t just each leader’s ace, they’re boss fights: who, should you know where to look later on, you can then adopt into your own team, Shin Megami Tensei style. The Dragon and Ghost types, while they play rather oddly in further generations, make sense here when they each only have one representative: the player needing to figure out what works and what doesn’t against Ghost types for them to reach the top of the Pokèmon Tower (nevermind how you need to do another dungeon to perceive them in the first place) and the Dragon type’s notable strength compared to everything else makes sense when they’re only used by the most powerful member of the Elite 4, thus making sure what the player thinks is the final boss is not a battle you can merely cheese with type advantage. Voltorb and Electrode are this game’s take on the Mimic. Mewtwo is this game’s take on your typical RPG superboss. Zapdos is the boss — and reward — of an optional dungeon, whereas its brethren in Articuno and Moltres are rewards for delving into the Seafoam Islands and Victory Road deeper than the player ever needs to. While mons like Butterfree and Beedrill emerge from their chrysalis early, and are rather powerful for the point in the game you get them, they both fall off curve hard once you start encountering other evolved mons, imparting a lesson in the player that sometimes growing up is letting go of the things you used to cherish. In the same vein, while it quickly plateaus into merely being as good as everything around it, Dugtrio is a godsend for the part of the game where you can stumble across him, going up to level 31 when most everything around you struggles to pass level 20, and singlehandedly allowing you to bypass what could be a difficult boss battle with Lt. Surge. Mankey (at least from Yellow onwards) is an early method of mitigating Brock should you have picked (or forced into) a starter that’s weak to his Rock types. While rather rare Pokèmon like Porygon, Farfetch’d or Lickitung aren’t quite worth the effort it takes to obtain them, that’s partially the point — they’re merely the more tricky steps in the process of catching them all, and the game is nice enough to put the Pokèmon more useful in terms of beating the game right in plain sight. While later generations would mostly shy away from this idea (though with some individual exceptions), the original set of Pokèmon games, even today, stands out for how it makes certain Pokèmon fill specific mechanical roles, and from a game design perspective it's fascinating to see in action, to try and guess what the idea is behind each member of the original 151.

I like how the game counterbalances its kid empowerment plot with its loose coming of age themes. Like, it’s super cool to imagine yourself at ten years old taking on and beating an entire criminal gang, but the game itself addresses that this doesn’t meaningfully stop them: even if you foil whatever caper they’re up to today, that’s not gonna keep them from doing whatever they’re going to do next. Even Giovanni, the last time you fight him, says that this won’t be the end of Team Rocket, and I think it’s this kind of, like, kid’s storytelling of singlehandedly saving the day by sailing through the bad guys’ hideout, combined with the reality of how organized crime is like the hydra growing new heads and that you can't ever meaningfully put them in the ground, that really stands out as a somewhat notable plot beat. I love the loose implication that you’re growing older as you go through the region: your rival’s sprite continually changing each time you catch up with him, starting off as a little kid yet clearly looking so much taller by the final time the both of you fight. I too love the way your path through Kanto more than likely loops you back to Pallet Town right near the end: what once was your home becoming just a quick pitstop, a quick moment to say hi to your mum, before you’re off on your way to Viridian for your last gym badge. For games that don’t necessarily focus on a clear-cut plot beyond the premise — probably in part because of Kanto’s more open-ended progression — there’s a decent amount put into theming here, at least from what I could extrapolate. Maybe I’m just reading a lot from a little (though given Professer Oak saying "You have come of age! You've grown so much older since you left Pallet Town so long ago" upon beating the champion I'm fairly sure that theme was a conscious inclusion), but the fact that the game is capable of evoking those themes so continuously I felt was rather worth note, and a loose highlight of the experience.

There are some other things I quite liked: the music is so continuously stellar, and iconic for a reason. Playing this on a system where the game had backlighting let me see the towns in the hues they’re named after, providing a rather pretty visual shorthand of where the player is at any given time. Overall… I’m never quite going to have that special connection with this particular Pokèmon game that others might have — I never had a Gameboy as a kid, my first Pokèmon experience was a couple of generations down the line — so all I’m gonna see is something… with perhaps a bit less polish than what I’m typically used to with a Pokèmon game, but even then there’s so much here that’s so cool to look at. The non-linear, old-school RPG design. How each individual Pokèmon does something for the overall construction of the game. Narrative theming that, um, perhaps takes a bit for the series to attempt again. Maybe it’s a little buggy, a little bit of a relic quality-of-life wise compared to the juggernaut it’d later become… but this was the thing that ignited the craze in the first place, and there was certainly a reason it managed to do so.