This is my first time playing a Game Boy Pokémon game. I am two of three years too old for me and my friends to have been the ones captured by the Pokémon phenomenon at the time, but I saw it in action on school bus journeys. I learned in overheard conversations, in between dodging apples thrown from the back seats, about how pokémon battle, and about different types of pokémon and their eventual evolutions. I also learned of the difficulty and trading required to move towards the all-important full collection of pokémon. Younger children compared cards and notes and, crucially, views of their Game Boy screens.
Pokémon is a reversal of a common thread throughout the story of Super Chart Island to date, that of the success of games based on existing things. Sports, activities, films, TV programmes. Some of the biggest and best games have stood more apart, but those links are one of the things that remained constant even as technology and other changes rendered 2000 a very different place from 1984. In 1999, there were three different UK #1 games based on Star Wars alone.
Entering the charts at #3 and #4 behind The Phantom Menace in October 1999 were a pair of Game Boy games called Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue, released three and a half years later than their equivalents in Japan. And the most obvious reason for the timing of one of them reaching UK #1 five months later still is that the first animated Pokémon movie was just weeks away from release here.
The games’ new peak of success came as part of a wave of Pokémon mania that included the trading card game, released here before the Game Boy games, and the TV show. It was very rare for a Japanese animation to make it to UK television at all, never mind to CITV with most of the country as potential audience. (ITV’s attempt to follow this up with a heavily edited Cardcaptor Sakura was short-lived). But in the case of Pokémon, all the other things were supplemental extras to the centre of the whole phenomenon: the games.
Back in the earlier days of computer games that Super Chart Island started from, that wouldn’t have been possible on such a scale, because games didn’t yet have the cultural reach to allow make it possible. Pokémon had a lot more players familiar with games (and maybe even RPGs, post-Final Fantasy VII) to reach. Its accessibility to new players, particularly to children, was further helped by the way in which the Game Boy, while still by far the leading handheld games machine, was also a decade old and priced accordingly. The PlayStation coming down to £99.99 in 1999 brought it within the reach of my Christmas list, but the Game Boy was still less than half the price at £44.50 from Argos even for the updated Pocket version — about £75 in today’s money and not much more than the price of a single PlayStation game at the time. There was a low barrier to getting involved compared to most other games newly released here.
The low barriers extend to within the game itself, although it isn’t easy in the way I was perhaps expecting. It is simple in ways dictated by the technology and ways which aren’t. It is very fair in having you battle opponents working within the same framework, often without giving them the options you have to call on. And I haven’t encountered anything I would call a particularly difficult puzzle. On the other hand, it has tough boss battles and plenty of long and difficult caves in which you have to plan and think carefully to stretch your resources and get through.
Most of all, it makes you work out a lot for yourself. In that, it often feels like a throw-back to times more distant than even its 1996 release date, but not in a bad way. It rewards exploration, both in the literal sense of moving around its locations and in the sense of figuring out strategies for battle. Pokémon Red gives you a literal map of the whole world right at the beginning, with routes numbered to make it even clearer, but it trusts you to do the map-reading and navigating.
Pokémon Red’s sense of freedom is one of the best things about it, and one which gives its adventure an urgency even as its narrative stakes remain low. Right from the beginning you get to choose a starter pokémon to use in battle, selecting from three different potential directions. And after that you are free to compose a team of up to six as you see fit, catching new pokémon as you go. You can discard the starter if you really want. Battles are smartly organised, with random encounters with wild pokémon only within specific locations, and trainers who you can often see coming, but it’s the collection aspect that makes all of them more compelling. Each encounter is a chance to learn about strengths and weaknesses, every new pokémon sighted a new potential team member.
The overarching aim to, yes, catch ‘em all, is a further encouragement to explore and experiment. I caught a Metapod early on, a pretty helpless pokémon whose only move was ‘harden’, raising its defence. That isn’t completely useless — stalling for time is beneficial when pokémon can only use each move a certain number of times — but it wasn’t going to win any battles. Based on my limited knowledge recalled from bus journeys and conversations about later games, I decided to stick Metapod into my team’s opening slot. I figured there must be more to it than being useless. Every battle started with it going out to fight before I withdrew it in favour of something with actual attacking abilities, splitting experience points between the two.
Eventually I was rewarded by Metapod gaining enough levels to evolve into Butterfree. Triumph! I looked forward to my new opportunities. Then I found that Butterfree had exactly the same moveset. What the hell. Still I stuck by it through this extra trial, and hit the point where it gained the move ‘confusion’, my most devastating attack against most opponents for a long while afterwards. It felt so much more rewarding for the intuition and faith that I’d had to put in to get to that point.
That highlighted the single best bit of Pokémon in my experience, but the charm of the world was a strong contender throughout as well. That obviously includes the pokémon themselves, some of which you will definitely be familiar with (although it took me until a Red Velvet song nearly two decades later to finally clock that Pikachu’s name is a pun). It extends to the music, often a highlight of Game Boy games and a particular success for composer Junichi Masuda here. My favourites include the haunting beeps of the Pokémon Tower, the strut of the main character’s rival trainer who keeps showing up, and the occasional overworld theme that sounds like it’s marching into the Zelda one before twisting intriguingly.
Beyond that, there’s the range of characters you meet, glimpses of lives in a few lines. Pokémon Red’s world is one that clearly exists to bend around the player’s journey (I had a sneaking suspicion a couple of times that gym leaders deliberately weren’t finishing my pokémon off when they could, so that I could win by the tightest of margins) but it has a lot of personality squeezed into it nonetheless. So many different challenges at the start of battle and resigned statements of defeat afterwards made me smile. Along with many of the joyfully stupid puns in pokémon names, they’re examples of a very well done translation. Thanks to Lt. Surge, lightning American, it’s also a translation into English which doesn’t clearly locate its setting but identifies it as specifically not America, which is a nice change.
The little vignettes even manage to bring through a fair bit of emotion. For now it’s just “all boys leave home some day” but it’s a pretty bittersweet note to begin a journey on. Lots of the bits about how pokémon are central to people’s lives are cute, but one of the very first being “I’m raising pokémon too! When they get strong, they can protect me!” is an early hint of sadness. It’s one that the game more than follows through on what you get to Pokémon Tower. Get through that, with all of its ghosts and the people praying for dead pokémon, think you’re out of it and in a nearby observation tower someone tells you with heartbreaking straightforwardness that their pokémon’s ashes are stored there and they’re giving you a technique item because they don’t need it anymore. Gulp.
The charm of the world and the freedom the game grants you go together perfectly. The sparseness of specifics help act as the foundation for expanding the concept out in to all kinds of other media while retaining the essence of its appeal. Before all of that, though, it’s what makes the game such a consistent low-key joy. More fool me for thinking at fifteen that I was too old for it to be for me.
Top of the charts for week ending 25 March 2000:
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