[Throughout this project, I will be handing over to the viewpoints of others for guest posts. For this one I welcome back Ryo Miyauchi, who you can find at This Side of Japan and @sneeek, and who previously wrote about Yoshi’s Story.]
For all that Pokémon has become beyond just a video game franchise throughout its long history, the various offshoots from trading cards to anime to trademarked characters continue to respect the video game as the main, central form of media: it remains the trunk of the enormous media tree. Pokémon Yellow, however, is a rare entry in the franchise where the offshoot inspires the main game with it incorporating elements introduced by the anime series, which began to air a year after the release of the first games in Japan.
Pokémon as a TV entity was a full-on phenomenon in the U.S. by the time I got my hands on Yellow here in 1999. Just a month after the game’s October 1999 release brought the U.S. release of Pokémon: The First Movie. Like a lot of other millennial kids, I not only had the movie-exclusive Ancient Mew trading card but also the Pokemon bricks promoted by Burger King as a kid’s-meal toy in conjunction to the movie. Of course, I watched the show. I tried to learn the Poke Rap. I had T-shirts, sticker books, the Pokedex toy. My guidebook to Pokemon Yellow was how I began to learn English. Pokemon was a full-on, life-changing phenomenon for me too.
If the TV show was the gateway to Pokémon as a franchise, Yellow might convince newcomers that the game is an offshoot of the show and not vice versa. I would not be surprised at all as a possibility with the franchise already being so ubiquitous, and TV or films begetting a game already a trend.
Like in the show, instead of choosing from one of three starter pokémon in Yellow, Pikachu is your first main pokémon by default. Pikachu refuses to stay inside its PokeBall and instead follows behind you throughout the game. You can talk to it as well, and you can check on how much it has grown to like you. They’re grumpy at first, but they quickly grow fond of you as you advance in the game. At various points, they also act on their own: when you find Bill, the great Pokemon Collector, in his Pokemon-hybrid form from an experiment accident, Pikachu walks up to him alone while expressing deep confusion at the situation.
The anime adapted most of its supporting characters from the game, like gym leaders Brock and Misty but also pedestrian characters like the Bug Catchers and the nurse working at the Pokémon Center. But Yellow also adapts its characters to the show, like Officer Jenny, who grants you Squirtle in the game, and Team Rocket members Jesse and James, who appear as event characters to battle. It’s a shame the duo doesn’t get more of a use in the game for all the color they add to the show. You almost miss their presence when you go back to Red, especially during the Silph Co. section of the game that largely features Team Rocket as a central part of the subplot.
Compared to Red, Yellow doesn’t enhance the gameplay, or make it particularly new per se, but those familiar textures pulled from a popular TV show help make the game feel more engaging and more accessible. Even if you never experienced a command-based RPG fighting sequence — not yet that mainstream as a form of video-game combat outside of Japan in 1999 — you might still get a grasp of what a Pokémon battle at least looks like if you watched a few episodes of the show. You tell your Pokémon to Tackle or perform a move like Thundershock to lower the other Pokemon’s energy. You do this enough to wear out all of your opponent’s party. A victory is extra gratifying when you win against a familiar character like the eight gym leaders — Sabrina is as brutal of an opponent as in the show — or Team Rocket’s Jesse and James, who sign off their battle with their famous catchphrase, “Team Rocket blasting off again!”
The game itself is relatively approachable for newcomers, but Pokémon, the game, becomes even more appealing if you’re a fan of the anime, as it projects back your own positive feelings of the TV show. As popular as Pokémon has become, it’s historically rare for the main Pokémon game to assume a player is familiar with its universe and mechanics. With Pokémon Yellow working so effectively with this assumed knowledge through its easter eggs, it went to show just how quickly the franchise as well as Pikachu as its mascot character had grown in popularity.
Pokémon Yellow spent ten successive weeks as UK #1. Click through to the next page for what else was topping charts at the time…