Pokémon Red was good, but the new games are better.
If Pokémon Red or Blue ever get casually brought up in conversation, it’s quite possible that a whole ream of nostalgic memories will come rushing back. For me, it’s beating the elite four with my Charizard and Snorlax for the first time and running round the house like a maniac.
However mention the newer Pokémon games, and people suddenly get defensive: “It’s not as good as the originals” I hear. But why?
Certainly they aren’t going to be as nostalgic, but in my opinion they’re just as good, given the chance.
Let’s take Pokémon Black as an example. Set in the brand new region of Unova, this game introduces over 150 new Pokémon of interesting type combinations, a mildly gripping story and, most importantly, lots of new trainers to beat. Are these not the basic principles of Red? But not wanting to stay static, Black provides a load of new features to ensure that the franchise keeps moving forward, such as triple battles (as fun as they sound with 3 Pokémon out at the same time), and the Entralink to meet up with strangers and swap items.
These new features extend the experience that Red or Blue could provide, without compromising the classic combat that fans would know and love. Moreover, despite Red and Blue being nostalgically good, technically there were a lot of things wrong.
The most infamous of these being rare candy glitch, which while a load of fun, took any challenge out of the game and exposed your save file to the dangerously game corrupting ‘Missingno’, who would ruin all your progress with the slightest touch.
In addition to this, using attacks like ‘wrap’ and ‘focus energy’ broke the combat system, with the latter CUTTING your critical hit ratio as opposed to raising it as it is supposed to do! The final clinching point in this is that getting the game and Nintendo DS to play it on these days isn’t that expensive, especially when sourced on internet sites like eBay.
I would suggest that we never forget the genius of Pokémon Red, but not at the expense of the newer games. And with X and Y just around the corner, the world of Pokémon looked so good, so go get your gym badges!
Oscar Maddox
exeposedev 