The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Remember when I said I’d keep writing these? I guess I am.

Pokemon Gold/Silver is a basically perfect game. It’s the sequel to Pokemon every single Pokemon game since wishes it could be, but has completely failed to be. It was full of plenty of new content, gobs and gobs of fanservice, and refined basically everything there was to love around Pokemon Red/Blue. It is THE Pokemon game.

First off, let’s just talk about the new Pokemon. All of them fit right in with the original 150, easy. You don’t feel like they’re stretching for design ideas. They just work, and it’s awesome. The only Pokemon I truly love are from this and the first game, (Let’s try a list off the top of my head… we’ll call this a list of Pokemon who, if I saw a toy of them, I would buy immediately: Eevee, Vulpix, Ninetales, Wobuffet, Skamoray) and while that’s a personal preference to be sure, I just feel like, in general, these Pokemon are just the ones with the design chops to make me love them.

In addition, Gold/Silver made much-needed changes to the formula of Pokemon to make it a more fun game. Eggs were a really good addition that let you customize your team more. The new types, Steel and Dark, dealt with the balance issues of the first game, as well as little things like giving us a Ghost Pokemon that wasn’t also Poison, so that Ghost could actually be useful against Psychic Pokemon. The timed events, based on a real-world clock, were also fucking fantastic, and I just can’t understand why every Pokemon game after this hasn’t had them. Those events kept me playing the game for a long time, and being able to only catch certain types during certain times of day was just cool.

The amount of content in the game just hasn’t been matched as well. Getting to go back to Kanto and face Red after being the game was totally and completely a HOLY SHIT moment the first time it happened. While it didn’t take as long to get through that content of course, what with your fully-powered team, blasting through the area you had so much trouble with in the past game just made you feel like a REAL Pokemon master, you know?

This was like the pinnacle of handheld gaming when it came out, and frankly, for the most part, I bet it still holds up. I wouldn’t touch it at all. (Well, okay, maybe I’d put the female trainer from Crystal into the original game, but that would basically be it, and I can live without that.) Pokemon Gold/Silver? You’re awesome.