Pokemon Kanto Hit or Miss? (Part 1: The set-up)

I'm going to be straight with this one. I am SEVERELY biased in my opinion on these games. Pokemon Yellow was the first video game I ever beat. Pokemon Gold (and later on Crystal) took the majority of my playtime when I was a kid. Pokemon in general IS my favorite video game franchise. I will do my best however to put that bias aside while writing this review as often as i can.

Pocket Monsters Red, Green, and Blue
Japanese Box art

For this review i will be covering all of the first gen games AND the remakes from gen 3 and what differences the versions have. Yes, that's 6 games in one review (Pokemon Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Fire Red, and Leaf Green.) For this review I played both Pokemon Blue and Pokemon Fire red. I played Blue through BGB and Fire Red through VBA.

Pokemon Red, Blue, Yellow English Box art

Now before anyone yells at me for using emulators I would like to point out that I do own both Blue and Fire red. I own a Virtual console version of Blue on the 3DS and I still have a original cartridge of Fire red on the GBA but, the save battery of my Fire red cart is dead so it doesn't save and I wanted to start fresh in Blue rather than continue the save i already had started on the virtual console and didn't want to reset it.

Pokemon Fire red and Leaf green English box art

For reviews i generally like to avoid using emulators and play them on the hardware I remember them on but, for those reasons I used emulators instead for this one. I will point out in the future if something like this ends up happening again (which i can already think of one or two occurrences.) That being said I have a lot to cover for this so we'll move on.

There really isn't much story to Pokemon games in general. You basically go through the same motions in most games. You start you're Pokemon journey with your best friend(s) or rival as the Pokemon professor of the region gives you a choice of 3 starters in your quest to travel the region, see the sights, capture some more Pokemon, and build a team of Pokemon to take on the gyms and the Pokemon league of the region. Some time during your travels you will run into a crime syndicate that will impede your progress until you deal with them. This will happen multiple times until you fully defeat their leader and you, a ten year old (or in later games a teenager), thwart their plans and they disband.

This is true of all of the Gen 1 games and the remakes. They were the first games after all and they set this standard for the main series games. There are some small differences however for Pokemon Yellow. Pokemon Yellow follows the Pokemon anime including having Pikachu be your only starter and having Ash and Gary in the default names section of the player character and rival respectively. Jesse and James from team rocket even make a cameo in Yellow.

For those who didn't know when Pokemon released in Japan its first two versions were Pocket Monsters Red and Green. Pocket monsters Blue was an updated version of the original two versions and then Blue was the template that was used when translating them to English to be released else where as Pokemon Red and Blue (which explains why the remakes were Fire red and Leaf Green instead of Fire red and Water blue or some other such title.).

So before picking which version I played I looked through the exclusives for each version. Pokemon was made essentially to be a more social video game back then to justify the link cables that were used at the time to connect game boys for various features (in Pokemon's case to trade and battle other people) so they took the 150 Pokemon and made some of them only appear in the wild to be captured in one version but not the other. This made you , if you wanted a Pokemon that was an exclusive for one version and you had a different version, either have to buy that version, another game boy, and link cable to trade from one to the other or have a friend who had that version and one of you has a link cable to trade with each other. I ended up picking Blue version for the originals and Fire Red for the remakes for one exclusive in each. Pokemon gen 1's exclusives can be found here and the exclusives for the gen 3 remakes can be found here.  I picked Blue for Ninetales and I picked Fire Red for Arcanine.