Pokémon Crystal Version

Pokemon Yellow debuted the concept of re-releasing the latest addition of a Pokemon game with a slew of extra content to justify its existence. However, I wouldn’t consider it to be the definitive version of the original Kanto journey. The bells and whistles attached to Pokemon Yellow deviated far too much from the core narrative and progression of pokemon catching than what was displayed in the Red/Blue entries. For the fans of the Pokemon anime that Yellow was catered towards, it set an inaccurate precedent for every Pokemon generation that followed where they’d have to manually type in Ash’s name for their character and Pikachu would not act as their little staticky shadow step by step. Pokemon Crystal, the subsequent release acting as a sister version of Gold/Silver, is the first instance of what I’d consider a definitive edition for a Pokemon generation.

I can’t believe no one at Game Freak thought to include the option to play as a female protagonist before Crystal. I understand that Pokemon’s target demographic (and video games as a whole) is young boys, but is it outside the realm of possibilities that girls would be interested in a game revolving around collecting cute, fictional animals and bonding with them like pets? Is it the battle system and conquest arc that inherently cements Pokemon as a male-centric series? Hardly. The ability to swap the protagonist’s gender is a brilliant tactic from a marketing standpoint, garnering a crucial audience whose newfound interest in the franchise is because of this new feature giving them a chance to be a contender as a Pokemon master. For the boys who already experienced Johto in either Gold or Silver and are confident in their masculinity, the female protagonist should also mix up the familiar backdrop adequately.

Really, a definitive version of any game should remedy the mistakes made by the rougher iteration it’s sprucing up. One new feature introduced in Gold/Silver is the ability to save the phone numbers of a select few trainers after defeating them in battle, and I didn’t care to humor this feature. Every time one of these people called me to give me an unsolicited rundown of their day, I immediately deleted their contact information. In Crystal, these trainers will notify you of when swarms of rare pokemon are occurring, plus give you various gifts they scrounge up. Socializing finally pays off. The select pokemon found in seasonal packs are also much easier to obtain than the less than 1% chance given in Gold/Silver, which should honestly only be entertained for Remoraid and Snubbull anyways. Gold version exclusive Growlithe is catchable around Violet City to use against Bugsy if your character didn’t choose Cyndaquil as a starter, and dark-ice type Sneasel can be found in the Ice Cave. It’s a far more sensible spot to put a new pokemon with a beneficial typing for both the dragon and psychic challenges the player will face before shipping off to Kanto. Also, if Gold/Silver’s onus was to give the ugly Red/Blue a makeover, surely the moving pokemon sprites that introduce a battle are a pleasant little touch that give these creatures a boosted speck of personality.

Crystal’s slight narrative deviation seems to revolve around the Suicune, one of three legendary dogs that succeed the legendary bird trio from Kanto. Like in the base game, the elemental dogs will scurry from their resting place in the basement of Ecruteak’s Burned Tower and run frantically around Johto. I did not mention the side quest involving capturing them because stumbling upon them is a rarer occurrence than catching a pokemon only found during swarms, and the exciting moment of finally finding them just to have them roar your pokemon away from battle adds too much insult to injury. At least encountering Suicune periodically finally culminates to potentially catching it in Kanto, unlike the tortuous hunt for Entei and Raikou.

Pokemon Crystal isn’t merely Gold/Silver for girls, even though the addition of playing as one would naturally entice the other half of the gender demographic. Like Pokemon Yellow, its quality-of-life enhancements from the base game are relatively minor, but it doesn’t inject any outside influences from other Pokemon media in order to discern it for a different player base. Crystal is Gold/Silver plus one, which inherently makes it the definitive version by clear definition.

It's difficult for me to be objective about games sometimes. If I'm playing a new game in an unfamiliar series and I'm not immediately engrossed in it, I tend to overanalyze the aspects of it that turn me off. Even then, by the time I'm finished with said game, whether I fell in love with it or not, I don't tend to forget the grievances I had with it. It's not exactly a fair system I run. I try to be critical of nostalgic games and I try to see the best in new ones, but sometimes a game's psychological hold on me is to much for me to be honest with myself about what it is. All of this is to say Pokémon Crystal isn't the "best" Pokémon game, not by some distance. That honor would probably belong to Platinum or Black 2/White 2. However, I went a long time without playing Platinum between my childhood and adulthood because I saw it as being beholden to the same problems as Diamond and Pearl, and Black 2 I had never completed until a few years ago. If you've never played a Pokémon game before, I would highly recommend starting with the fifth generation of titles, arguably Junichi Masuda's magnum opus in terms of both form and function. And yet, despite that, I find myself with the maybe strongest sense of attachment to series creator Satoshi Tajiri's final game.

Tajiri was never much of a game designer, frankly speaking. He was a man with a wild, runaway sense of imagination and curiosity; someone who could conceive of great ideas and have no clue how to implement them. It's probably by the grace of God and the savvy of those around him that the first two generations of Pokémon even function as games let alone games you would ever want to play. They tend to betray everything we understand about progression within an RPG, even the stuff that was understood back then. About halfway through both Red, Blue, and Yellow and Gold, Silver, and Crystal, the games seem to give up on giving the player a logical path forward and leave them to their own devices, usually only offering a bottleneck very late into the game, inviting brutal level curves that requires the player to bring their journey to a screeching halt just to survive the upcoming progress checks. That's enough about Gen 1, Gen 2 has its own host of confounding issues, chief among them being the bizarre decision to restrict the player's ability to capture newly-introduced Pokémon until they unlock the hidden second region, a rework of the Kanto region of the first games. And this section of the game isn't much to write home about - it's been greatly reduced in size, both in terms of size and things to actually do. It mostly amounts to an underwhelming chore that can be beaten in about 2 hours, save for another late-game bottleneck against the true final boss. The gym leaders of this region are piss-easy, so there's basically no use in adding Pokemon to your roster that late into the game.

Alright, I've done my due diligence in shitting on this game enough, I suppose now is the time for explaining why I hold it in such esteem, and the real answer is probably about as unsatisfying as it is boring - this game simply just came to me at enough times in my life to impress upon me. I first played Pokémon Silver (which this is a remake of) at age I don't know, seven? A hand-me-down (aka game I stole) from my older brother. My memories of it as a kid are bit foggy, but I most vividly remember the quaint vibe of the Johto region as compared with the Sinnoh, Kanto and especially Hoenn that I was used to. The regional dex was familiar, warm to me, and there was a peculiar novelty in seeing Pokemon that were typically available later in the game in Kanto like Geodude and Gastly available near the beginning. I remember being on a camping trip when I discovered the day-to-night cycle in the game and just being blown away by something as simple as seeing Hoothoot instead of Pidgey and the background turn a purple hue. It made the game's world feel like my own. After a spell of losing interest in the series (and games in general) between the ages of about 13-17, I sought this game out on a cross-country train trip for reasons I can't remember now. It was around that time that the things I liked about this game started to cement themselves, and when I played this game for a third time on the 3DS Virtual Console, I had graduated high school and was once again presented with an optimistic time in my life.

Yes, my real world experiences did impact my appreciation of this game by quite a margin, but it's worth mentioning that there are still qualities about this game I dearly admire beyond the scope of nostalgia. Mainly is my appreciation of the attempt at creating a cohesive world; one where the earthy traditions of one region contrast the progressivism of the other. The disparity between Kanto and Johto is greatly felt, particularly when you clear the Kanto quest and come back to hear the Johto trainer/wild music again. Obviously I wish more had been done with this disparity; a greater sense of interaction between these two worlds, but I find what he have in this game compelling as is. I appreciate the fact that the player has to use their imagination with the Pokémon they're given. It feels more like a traditional JRPG to have a more balanced roster with only a small handful of "nukes" that the player can obtain throughout the course of their journey. Think Moneyball with Brad Bitt; in order to win, you have to consider the roles that your frankly middle-of-the-pack Pokémon in terms of power take within the team, rather than just grabbing the prerequisite monsters that are strong, fast, and hit each gym super-effectively. And for your troubles, although you miss out on fan-favorites like Houndour or Tyranitar until the end of the game, the Pokémon you can capture ooze charm. I am particularly partial to the Teddiursa, Phanpy and Skarmory lines, and nearly all of these Pokémon come with enough perks and cons to at least consider snagging them during a run. I've managed to come at this game year after year and still find new ideas for teambuilding without scraping the bottom of the barrel. It seems that every time I play this game, my opinion of various Pokémon's utility wax and wane. In that sense, despite the dearth of chewable post-game content, the game still retains a lot of replay value for me, and it hasn't completely lost its flavor the way the first three games have for me by this point.

I absolutely adore the Johto region itself. I love the idea of having a whole tower of monks seeking enlightenment by training with Bellsprout - a totally arbitrary and random Pokémon that just happen to be decently common in that area of the game. This portion of the game is entirely optional and in no way serves as a focal point for your journey - it's just there because it's kind of cool to have it there. It makes the world feel more realized. I love how various gym leaders will bicker with the player about whether or not they really earned their gym badge or not; it's bitchy but adds a lot of personality. I like the largely forested backdrop of your journey giving way to large channel.

All of this may scan as supplementary and subjective criteria. It may seem as though I've chosen to ignore or reframe gaping flaws in design in service of defending my subjective stance on this game. Hell, this is probably my review which contains the phrase "I" the most. But I don't pretend that these things that are beautiful to me necessarily overwrite the flaws present, it's just that I choose to prioritize these things because I don't see Pokémon as a series defined by solid mechanics. Functionally speaking, Pokémon games always tend to suffer from flawed mechanics, strange progression patterns, mechanics that don't work the way they should, and a sense of bemusement at the concept of balance and implementation. I do sometimes get cynical about these flaws, but in the end I love these games because I choose to see them as aesthetic exercises in world building centralized around the inherently fun mechanic of capturing and raising monsters, and to me, Pokémon Crystal reminds me of the magic of this exercise in a way that isn't necessarily functionally better than every other game in the series, but in a unique enough way that stands alone and makes itself essential.

Despite Pokemon both being an insanely successful franchise and one that I personally hold in very high regard, I also cannot deny the fact that I’m very much not a fan of its first 2 generations at all. It’s sadly not really a case of a game simply not trying at all and ultimately falling flat due to having no ambition, but the opposite problem, where it really feels as if the game ended up crumbling under its own weight as it attempted to further expand upon where the first game left off without always being exactly clear about what would result from many of these decisions. You’ve got not only a lot of improvements to many core mechanics that served to make things a far smoother experience overall, but a lot of neat, interesting gimmicks and ideas that would become core to future games both to provide further variety and attempt to make the created world feel far more alive, but many of these still feel either very simplistic or flawed in their execution or just don’t work as they really should. While this certainly makes the gen 2 Pokemon games a very interesting case to look at, it also makes it all the more unfortunate when looking through and seeing the amount of potential buried beneath an ongoing wave of bad decisions that caused this to easily become the least enjoyable experience with this series as a whole.

One of the biggest aspects about Crystal that I like so much is the way it feels like it really took full advantage of the hardware it was on, making for a lot of really clever moments throughout or simply more impressive presentation that made things flow much smoother. The proper colour is a big one in this regard, serving to make the game feel considerably more vibrant and generally nice to look at, compared to the monochromatic art of the first games. This somewhat offsets the issue of it often being somewhat hard to tell what you’re looking at from moment to moment, and the variety really does help long-term to stop the game feeling nightmarish to stare at for longer periods of time. The addition of some more detailed UI, with more elements being represented through proper graphics as opposed to lines of text is also a huge help at making things flow easier and just look nicer. This is especially true for the inventory system, which also had the upgrade of being split into different sections so it no longer felt as if you were being punished for every key item you picked up, along with a few other sections to make all of this a far less painful experience. That said, they didn’t fix this entirely either, as the limited inventory space still ends up being an annoying problem later down the line, with the player constantly having to rearrange their bags in order to leave room both for restorative items and the various held items that were introduced in the game. Once again , this hits a point where it just becomes tiresome to see another item lying on the ground, making you essentially hope that it’s something you already had, which feels completely counterintuitive in a game that wants the player to take their time to explore so much of the world.

While the inclusion of held items theoretically was a huge step forward, they didn’t really do too much in this game, with fairly trivial bonuses for the most part eliminating the future strategic depth to the team building aspect of the games. The idea of adding the phone to this as a way to essentially be able to interact more with certain NPCs, contributing to things feeling more fleshed out is another example that ends up falling flat. This is both thanks to the way the player can only have a limited amount of them without knowing which ones would be important to keep around, and also because of the way they’ll make random notifications that appear, having the game reach a grinding halt in a similar way to the day/night transitions of Castlevania 2. This issue of ideas that didn’t see their full potential at all can be seen in many other core aspects of this as well, such as the way Pokemon breeding was implemented so haphazardly in a way that didn’t contribute anything to the game loop, instead allowing the player to acquire certain “baby pokemon”, which were functionally useless in battle and felt more like a poor attempt at providing some more significance to certain ones without realising that nobody would really use these since they’d already have to have access to their more powerful evolutions to acquire them. This adds an additional layer of frustration to the idea of attempting to collect even the majority of Pokemon here, even though it’s not quite as egregious as some of the other obtuse ways in which they lock things off from the player. Whether it’s certain trees that are shuffled along that will rarely give you a special Pokemon, the 1% encounters across the board or the amount of these locked behind the postgame, it almost feels as if the game is attempting to stop the player from even attempting to spend time collecting so much of the new stuff introduced here. This needless overcomplication of things can funnily enough also be found in the soundtrack, with a lot of interesting ideas being drowned out by additional layers of melodies that ultimately serve to remove some of its unique character and intrigue, instead being far messier than they could have been.

The biggest issue this game has however can be found in the form of its mostly awful balancing and the way it contributes to other flaws within this design, aspects which can mainly be chalked up to a few flaws that pervade the vast majority of content here. The attempt at nonlinearity the game makes ultimately muddles a lot of the difficulty thanks to the way that the game needs to account for the possibility of the player fighting a selection of 3 gym leaders in any order, meaning that even the strongest of these still needed to be feasible for someone who’d only just gotten to the halfway point of the main game. This results in only the first of these actually having any sort of challenge to them, since if you beat one, you basically can beat all of them, especially since by the time you get to these other ones, you’ll have become even more powerful. This leads to a dramatic lull in difficulty where everything around you feels horribly underlevelled and the game turns into an act of button mashing through hours of content without any resistance. This underlevelling ends up being a further issue once the game attempts to provide some moments of difficulty, as it often leads to huge spikes in it to the point where even if the player has spent the time to take on every possible encounter, they’ll still likely be woefully unprepared. When the exp distribution is so lacklustre that it’s recommended the player only has a team of 4 or is alternatively told that they can just win with nothing but their starter, there’s something fundamentally off about the way things have been balanced. While Pokemon games tend to be considered way too easy for the most part, I feel like this one is so braindead in this regard with how weak everything is, but in such a way that it can lead to some downright infuriating encounters by the end.

The low level of everything makes the idea of effective grinding a pipe dream as well, with the divide in what’s required for the player and what they’re given being so absurdly large that it’s both unreasonable as a way to attempt to strengthen your current team, and also makes adding something new out of the question as well thanks to how much weaker it will be than the rest of your team for the most part. This effectively reduces playstyle variety dramatically and feeds into a feeling of aimlessness that increasingly becomes a hindrance to the overall experience as time goes on. Much of this aimlessness also stems from the aforementioned nonlinearity the game attempts to provide leading to a much less structured story being able to happen, making the character feel more like a spectator in events just wandering from town to town with nothing much to do, rather than actually interacting with the world in a meaningful way. This all culminates in an overwhelming feeling that there’s no major drive actually pushing you along beyond the sight of numbers going up and the game explicitly telling you that there’s definitely some progress being made, even if it doesn’t feel like this at all. This also makes the game feel rather anticlimactic for the most part, with the villains contributing practically nothing, with no sense of looming threat or stakes making them feel like they have even less of a presence than they did in Red and Blue and making the encounters with them feel more like padding than an integral part of the experience. This is made all the worse by the way the battles were made so slow, with long pauses inbetween each attack, animation, and text box creating a sense of boredom during even the most significant of moments.

With all this said however, the game could have been a very small, concise experience that had some flaws but overall one that felt like a step forward in spite of its many issues if not for the fact that every negative thing said feels as if it’s worsened tenfold by everything in the post game/path to the true ending. While I admire the idea of allowing the player to explore the region of Red and Blue, its effect on the overall experience is so egregiously bad to me that I’d have genuinely rathered if it had a similar idea to gen 1, where it just unlocked an extra cave and then had its climactic moment at the end of it and that was it. The player exploring the Kanto region after making their way through Johto has very similar issues to that of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night’s inverted castle in its sense of total aimlessness and ease. This takes my issues with the nonlinearity the main region suffered from to a whole new extreme by essentially giving the player free reign over an entire region with no set order. What makes this even more problematic is the fact that it’s the Kanto region but without any significant landmarks, whether it’s the safari zone being closed, having so many routes get dramatically shortened, or having so many of the iconic buildings and caves being completely sealed off, this just feels like a gutted version of what was already a relatively uninteresting area to explore in gen 1. This means that for a solid few hours, there will be literally no challenge thrown towards the player at all, as they’re essentially going on an oversized fetch quest to key locations, battling weakling after weakling that would have often belonged in the game 5 – 10 hours ago until they’ve gotten all of these essentially arbitrary rewards to unlock the only worthwhile parts of the game, the fights with Blue and Red.

Despite my issues with literally everything else this part of the game, having the player fight these two is a stroke of genius in the long run, after all, after the player has defeated literally everyone else of note in 2 separate regions, what else is there to do other than battle the former champion and the player character from the first game? It’s made even more brilliant by the fact that both of these actually feel like the logical extreme of the game, with their higher levelled teams that provide a variety of threats to watch out for, rather than being easy to sweep with a single party member. While admittedly the difficulty spike was obscene for the Red encounter, I appreciated the way everything really came to a boil at that point, it felt like the game decided to try and make up for how much time had time been spent slogging through the previous few hours with a truly climactic conclusion to everything, and felt like a genuinely perfect way to close off the game, feeling like a true boss fight as opposed to just a slightly stronger than average final encounter.

While I also have some other issues with this game, such as the way so many bits and pieces don’t work properly, the fact that there are so many places that feel like they serve 0 purpose, and the fact that the lineup of newly introduced Pokemon is lacklustre and weak for the most part, going over every individual issue with this game would take far too long for it to be readable in any capacity. Overall, I appreciate this game a lot for making an attempt at pushing the series forward in a lot of ways and making it an overall far more complex and detailed game, having a ton of niche interactions that add a lot more personality to things, but it still feels so limited in a lot of key areas along with frankly poorly balanced in some regards that I found the majority of this to be a borderline miserable experience unfortunately. No matter how much potential this had, it manages to simultaneously feel light on meaningful content while also being ridiculously bloated, with the technological limitations from the Gameboy making things feel overly clunky, and it all culminates in a game that I’d rather not touch again any time soon. Once again, the optimal way I’d consider to play this game is its HeartGold and SoulSilver remakes, which might have some of the same problems, but overall feels far more polished and well-rounded and the only way one should really play a Johto game outside of nostalgia reasons.

Pokemon Crystal was my introduction to video games entirely, and I like to blame my sibling (who put me on them) for influencing my life so much by introducing this game to me. When I was little, this game was the shit. And upon replaying it, it still kind of is! But there are some issues with it.

First of all, the pacing is terrible! Especially in the post-game kanto region where you'll be fighting mons that are 20 levels below yours. It makes progression pretty hard, especially if you're playing on a cartridge and not an emulator. And the pokemon introduced in Gen 2 don't really stack up in terms of raw stats and movesets. And some of the cool ones like Tyrannitar which DO have the stats and movepool are locked in the endgame. Nonetheless, this game remains a very solid Pokemon game and expands on the mechanics correctly where it needs to in terms of IVs, EVs, the Night day cycle and the many cool events scattered around the Johto region.

Basically, Gen 1 but better - which many will try to say is bad as it does not have it's own identity. But the aesthetic of the Johto region on top of the new mechanics it introduces certainly makes it it's own. While I do recommend Heart Gold and Soul Silver over this, this is a great game to pick up and has not aged so poorly as some will claim.

I'll be honest, I never played a single Pokemon game growing up, which is funny because the anime on TV was probably my favorite thing as a kid. I watched every episode in the first season multiple times and is one of the first TV shows I have fond memories of watching. I remember all the gym battles Ash went through, the different towns and locations, and even knew most of the original 150 Pokemon (I think I had a book detailing all 150 from the 90s). Hell I even collected the cards and had 100s of Pokemon cards and saw the first movie when it originally came to theaters. However I never played the games, and I think thats mainly due to never owning a Gameboy, and even when I got a little older I just never had motivation to play any of the games since I really had no nostalgia attached to Pokemon through the games, and back in those days I really did not like JRPGs at all, I didn't get into turn based RPGs until my final year of college. In college I had some friends who were absolutely obsessed with Pokemon they would always talk about how great the games were and my one friend who doesn't really game that much was a complete Pokemon nerd who valued most of the games and I even remember him buying Pokemon X&Y during my Senior year in college on the night it released.

He made Pokemon seem like the coolest thing ever and would always talk about it with his other friend who he was also roommates with. I recently found of means to play these older Gameboy games and decided to check Pokemon out because it is such a big franchise and I was curious to see what I've been missing since Pokemon is just such a huge enigma in the gaming World and I've since warmed up to JRPGs and the concept of Pokemon seemed kind of interesting. I did research and Crystal is considered by many to be the peak of the franchise. It was the 2nd generation and made many improvements over the original games, which many claim to be dated badly.

Now I tried hard to get into this game, and can say it did some decent things. It had a big World to explore, tons of Pokemon, and it even the ability to choose your genders, which at the time was somewhat of a big deal for games. I get that this game for its time was revolutionary, and the improvements it made over the 1st generation were big. However, this game still feels quite dated. The biggest issue is the fact that leveling up Pokemon in this game is a chore, and I found it too easy. I only used my starter Pokemon and one other and was able to cruise through 90% of the game just using my starter for all battles. I know the concept of playing this game is to catch as many Pokemon as possible, but I found my starter was just effect at stopping everything and never needed to change to another until near the endgame and even then I still mostly used my starter. Leveling up other Pokemon in this was just a chore since you had to use them separate and Pokemon don't level up when you aren't using them, which means I found little motivation to use any of them since my starter Pokemon did a fine job and I'd have one other on standby since I got an item later in the game that let me share experience between 2 Pokemon. The other thing is Pokemon just didn't have a story really, it did but it was so basic and almost irrelevant that I felt the game didn't even need it. It felt like filler, sure you had Team Rocket and trying to become the ultimate Pokemon master but the game is essentially going to different towns collecting the badges then facing off against the top Pokemon trainers until you beat the ultimate Pokemon trainers and then you become the new master. Its essentially a very similar story to the first games.

Now if the game had ended when you beat the first area, it wouldn't be as tedious, after all you got your 8 badges, went through some side stuff to take out Team Rocket and then beat the elite 4 and become the new master. But then after you beat the game, you enter the next half of the game where you go to an entirely new region, which is essentially a redone map of the 1st generation, and you go to all the towns and gyms from the 1st generation and face off the gym leaders to get 8 badges again so you can face off against the main character from the 1st Pokemon game. I get that this part of the game adds extra content and it gives you more areas to explore and gym leaders, but by this point my main 2 Pokemon I used were pretty powerful and I just cakewalked through these final 8 gyms and even the final battle with Red was way easier than the battle with the elite 4. On top of that there was just less to do in this new region and it was essentially just walking from town to town to go to the gym get the badge then repeat, there were no side things really like in the first region, and this second part of the game just got tedious fast. Yeah it was cool they redid the towns and gyms from the 1st game, and I recognized most of these places from the anime, but lets be honest, this was only 1 generation ago, so what was the point of even including the same place we've already been to, I"d rather have seen an entirely new area than go back to a place we've already seen in the previous Pokemon game. This 2nd half of the game just doesn't really add anything and at this point in the game you are already pretty powerful so you just steamroll through everything. It really drags the game out way longer than it needs to be.

I gave Pokemon Crystal a chance, but ultimately it just felt way too tedious, easy, and didn't offer much. Most of the game was just traveling between different towns and facing trainers along the way, which got tedious, then resolving a basic problem in a town then going to that towns gym and facing the gym leader to get a badge and repeat that. The fact that Pokemon don't level up when you are using them gave me little motivation to use more than 2 or 3 Pokemon. Also the lack of story really made me not care for the characters in this game, I couldn't have cared less about any of the gym leaders or different characters you run into throughout the game, they just lack character development. I get that this was the first Pokemon game for many and playing this on Gameboy Color was probably revolutionary, but there have been much improvements to the Pokemon franchise, and this game feels really basic and dated, and is more tedious than it is interesting. Not to mention other annoyances like getting random phone calls and needing to equip special moves to your Pokemon to do things like move boulders or cut trees. Pokemon Crystal may be the best of the 3 2nd generation games and may even be a huge improvement over the 1st generation, but it just hasn't aged as well as other games, and as someone who never played a single Pokemon game before this, it really didn't impress me.

Memories of me and my friends playing Pokémon Crystal Version on our Game Boys are still quite fresh in my mind. Trading Pokémon, battling the Elite Four and winning for the first time... the blue and glitter-spattered cartridge was a benchmark of my childhood, a sign of good times, and a sign that Pokémon was here for good. It wasn't just a fad, and it wasn't going away, no matter how much our parents and teachers told us it would. Following in the footsteps of a very successful first generation of games, a trading card game, an anime, and various collectors' items and toys, the success of Silver, Gold, and Crystal was the final piece of validation Nintendo needed to ensure they had a strong foothold in the global market. Pokémon was hot, and in the forefront of the minds of millions of teens and children everywhere. Introduced to and subsequently given Pokémon Blue Version by my older brother, I was hooked by the time Crystal came out.

Pokémon Crystal Version is an entry in the second generation of games in the Pokémon franchise and was released for the Nintendo Game Boy Color in 1999. It is an expansion and rework of the two games that came before it, Pokémon Silver Version and Pokémon Gold Version. Taking place a decade after the events of the first generation of Pokémon games, it follows the tale of a young trainer who sets off to become the Pokémon Champion after a fetch quest ends with a rare Pokémon (the trainable, tamable monsters of the franchise) being stolen from a laboratory.

At face value, the mechanics of the game are relatively simple yet standard for an RPG. Like most Pokémon games, you must defeat several gym leaders and then take on the Elite Four by capturing and raising Pokémon, which you train by fighting. You must also take on a plethora of trainers and wild Pokémon along the way. Different attacks and skills carry different strengths, status effects, and elements, which determine the usefulness of those skills. Pokémon's strengths are determined by stats and levels, which rise as you gain EXP by fighting others. Most Pokémon have the ability to evolve at least once, significantly altering their appearance and boosting their stats. Pokémon can be caught with Pokeballs of which there are several varieties, varying in quality and effectiveness. Items such as potions can be bought and sold in Pokemarts scattered in towns around the world, as well as found on the ground and given by NPCs. Pokémon can be fought and traded with other players with the help of a Game Boy connection cable, making the Pokémon series stand out as a competitive multiplayer RPG.

New to the second generation is time sensitivity. The sun and moon cycle in real time, and some Pokémon only appear at certain times. For example, some might only appear in the mornings, like the ladybug-inspired Ledyba. Others might only appear on Friday, like the seafaring Lapras. Time sensitivity is a definite plus in this generation and makes the games much more immersive. It can be exciting to wait for Wednesday for a certain character to appear, or to drop in on a radio station program that only plays on Saturdays. Having Pokémon hold items during battle for automatic use is another new feature. Utilizing both time and holdable items allows for a berry system - various berries grow on trees and can be plucked once daily per tree. All berries are holdable and can cure various status effects during battle without using up a turn. Pokémon can now also be bred, making it possible to obtain many Pokémon in a species by catching only one. Various benefits to this include better movesets, better stats, and the increased ability to trade rare Pokémon. Since it is the first generation to utilize color, "shiny" Pokémon have also been introduced - extremely rare Pokémon with variative palette swaps that are highly sought after by collectors. Players may now also choose whether their character is male or female. Specific to Pokémon Crystal Version as upgrades to Silver and Gold are animated sprites, a slightly different set of available Pokémon in the world, and a side-quest about the legendary Pokémon Suicune, which is interwoven into the primary story rather than given its own arc. Most of these new additions to the Pokémon series would carry over to later generations, becoming staples of the main series of games.

Pokémon Crystal Version takes the player on a long journey filled with interesting creatures and characters galore. There are a lot of new and old places to explore in two separate regions of the Pokémon universe, which gives the game a sense of longevity.

The enemies in the game are very well-balanced in regards to difficulty. The enemies' levels are just right, and the player can always backtrack for training if the need arises. The player always needs to grind a little bit to have a solid team if they want to have an easy playthrough but isn't terribly necessary. However, a more serious player that wants to "catch 'em all" will be looking at hours upon hours of training, which can be tedious. Pokémon Crystal Version has a very nice learning curve, though it may take some who are unfamiliar with RPGs to get the hang of it, and those who don't like exploring a lot or talking with NPCs are likely to miss out on much of the content.

The graphics are the best of its kind on the Game Boy, but the color palette of the game hasn't aged too well, especially in the overworld. The locations tend to be either too brown or too gaudy, never seeming to find that middle ground and always over-saturated. However, the graphics for the battle scenes as well as the animations for the Pokémon in Crystal have fared a bit better.

The soundtrack is excellent, and remains on-par with the first generation of Pokémon games. However, the Game Boy's limitations still mean that sound effects take up channels that are normally reserved for some portions of the music, meaning it can't play both sound effects and background music at the same time uninterrupted. The sound effects haven't changed much at all from the first generation games due to the Game Boy's aforementioned limitations.

Pokémon Crystal Version is one of the Game Boy's best, boasting improved graphics, a pleasant chiptune soundtrack, lots of monsters and trainers to fight, and a huge, immersive world to explore. Only held back by the threat of becoming (or being) dated, lack of improvements found in later games, and the fact that no one wants to play it anymore, Pokémon Crystal Version stands as one of the best entries in the Pokémon franchise, a shining example of what the Game Boy and The Pokémon Company are capable of. It is a piece of nostalgia as much as it is a piece of gaming history, and there's always time to start up a new journey and play it again.