hey whoa, i’ve been thinking about pokemon a lot lately too, i’ve got an emerald going that i’m picking up here and there and my partner has just been playing through r/b and then g/s for the first time
i also really lament that the games gave up being chewy little jrpgs… finding, yes, a one-time-use tm in the depth of a fairly confusing dungeon was great jrpg execution, and nowadays tms carry a totally different weight and there are just no dungeons at all
i can’t believe the raw number of big ideas packed into g/s/c in particular though, really kind of staggering stuff. i think its bombastic lean in to the real-time clock guiding events and passage of time and etc is real radical in particular, it ends up as a way of exploring the idea of vidcon “sense of place” but on a new almost fourth-wall axis… real shame that it’s been explored almost not at all since outside of, what, live service games, animal crossing, and a few more pokemons
GSC are truly bonkers in how they focus on exploring and cqtching from mechanics introduced to game balance and scenario design!! like yeah there the clock cycle, theres the push and pull of returning back to earlier locations from the jump which also coincide with introducing nee mechanics like the togepi egg, which should hatch around buggsy’s gym or goldenrod city (by which point you have cut and can backyrack to the professor faster) theres the berries, theres trainers you know calling you up, theres getting the fishing rod early and the old rod being able to sometimes catch things that arent magikarp, theres headbutt again providing you new ways to meet buddies, theres so many things and NPCs and whatever else based around the day of the fucking week, theres everything going on with the radio, theres the old craftsman who makes pokeballs taking a day to make them, theres the fact that trainers levels raising much more slowly than any other entry means youre encouraged to keep rotating your party and using all these buds youre catching,
and thats to say nothing of the narrative and visual design of having so many places steeped in local traditions or old traditions or love for nature that pushes you too towards appreciating these places as you travel and continually return to them
its bonkers
EDIT: completely forgot ti mention that this walkaround back and forth exploring nature ALSO makes the happiness and egg hatching’s relationship to steps take. make extremely good design sense! in later games its like that cause well thats how it was but im GSC it ties into that being such a prominent action you take on top if being yknow cute like aww they like being walked
It’s really weird how little talk there is about them being the Sequel to Earthbound in a lot of ways too. Like the vibe of a modern but fantastical world where you’re just some kid with a baseball cap running into weird adults causing you problems is there!
Plus it has a lot of devteam crossover! Creatures Inc. was the remains of Ape!
Like obviously it doesn’t have the same depths in a lot of respects as Earthbound does, but it’s a really clear sibling.
thats true! i cannot ignore the pokewalker or the addition of your lead guy walking behind you, theyre good bits of hangoutitude… unfortuantely from most other perspectives i feel like HGSS lose some of what GSC had, but that’s an opinion i wont state confidently until i get up to playing them again to refresh myself
still yakkin’ away and i think i’d basically rather play as one of these crag-faced geezer lieutenants with their flamboyantly rolled Rs than the least 20-year-old 20-year-old ever written
i actually planned on playing this after i finish Dysmantle!! V much looking forward to it, GSC absolutely rule.
I think you’ve nailed why i don’t vibe with the modern entries. I liked ruby a lot but it’s a different game. i feel like it’s been “not for me” since then
I’m late to the party here but at least based on the demo lies of P feels 200% more self-aware than bioshock in a way that I really liked. I hope the full game delivers on the gleeful camp of the demo.
which turned out to be pretty much all I needed here. = oo That was pretty fun! He’s a big dude who smiles a lot and loves to dance and sing. ^ _^
Primo Capcom illustrator Shinkiro did the art for Dee Jay’s Story mode. = ooo It’s his sort of comic-book coloring style, and he gives Dee Jay a very generic face, so he looks odd with his glasses off,
I remember Gold feeling like a habitat similair to Animal Crossing, especially in the end game. Along with stuff like getting calls from previous trainers and checking your daily berry trees there were three legendaries that wandered around the world map, would flee from you, and maintained persistent health between battles. I had to hunt and battle them dozens of times before I caught them
In a more straightforward game all of that would I think be aggravating but in the context of Gold it felt more like digging up fossils in Animal Crossing, like a small daily activity that gave me a routine reason to check in on the world
yeah i’m of this mindset too and slowly realizing that i don’t like pokémon i just like gsc
an actual modern pokémon that would impress me would remove combat systems entirely and do some weird thing closer to black and white, the game by peter molyneux and not the pokémon sequels, where there’s a lot of system obfuscation that is afforded because animation systems are such that pokémon can express emotions without numbers telling us what they’re feeling
it’s like lttp vs breath of the wild, the dungeon mechanics were only ever meant to serve as abstractions in service of a sense of wonderment granted by limited hardware, now that we have the technology we should get rid of the numbers as much as we can
nika likes arceus more than violet/scarlet because the setting makes everything feel new and dangerous in a way that rewards exploration, like pokémon aren’t solved problems that you just crunch numbers around, they’re living creatures that do things you don’t know about for reasons you can’t comprehend
something i like about Pokemon R/B/Y in particular is how little it cares about balance vs ecological/mythological detail. like there are only a handful of fire-type Pokemon and theyre all rare folklore creatures like kitsune, shisa, ubicorns, dragons. but loaaads of water-types because youre in a big coastal region, and fishing is a major pasttime. ghost types are part poison gas as a way to elide the supernatural element – what if theyre a hallucination caused by fumes? psychic types are ludicrously overpowered but why wouldn’t they be, they have PSYCHIC POWERS in a world where you could be fighting with a team of rats and birds and bugs
the coolest thing about Pokemon imo remains their grounding in ecology (often contrasted with objects of human interference, eg Pokemon like Grimer and Trubbish or even more benign critters like Magnemite). like i love Pokemon like Relicanth or Nincada/Ninjask/Shedinja that are celebrations of the cool animals theyre based on
Also gen 1 has the most unanswered “lore” that i still enjoy fan theorizing about. is Gengar supposed to be Clefairy’s shadow? are Cubones orphaned baby Kangaskhan? what’s the connection between Clefairy and Jigglypuff? what the hecks up with that truck? its the kind of stuff you can only get in an uncodified universe
Finished up my FFIX playthrough. My final thoughts are that the first 2.5 discs are absolute top-tier Final Fantasy. I loved:
pretty much everything around the Zidane/Dagger relationship (which is basically the main through line of the story for the first half or so)
how the game has characters flitting in and out of your party as the story calls for it, which allows for each character to actually participate in the story (instead of getting some canned line every once in awhile)
The writing! I found the game legitimately funny
The entire secondary story happening in the background (that keeps intersecting with your story) with your Tantalaus bros
Steiner
Unfortunately, basically as soon as you get the ship and can select your party, it goes completely off the rails with the Terra/Gaia/Garland stuff, which isn’t nearly as good and also might be the most confusing Final Fantasy story of all time. And the worst part is that it just feels completely superfluous… you could have just had Kuja be the big bad without all of the second planet / souls thing and it would have worked out fine.
[lights blunt and takes a drag] Y’know for years I worry about bringing up the weirdest furry stuff I know and then I just scroll down and see this in games you played today.
He liiiiiiives… in a dreeeam, Cock Suckerrrrrr~~ 
