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Pokémon is Technical
by Kayne Ruse (Ratstail91)
It’s been a few weeks since my first post about Pokémon Red, and in that time I’ve travelled from the end of Nugget Bridge to Celadon City, picking up two more badges in the process. Let’s go through the notes I wrote in that time, and expand on the interesting elements that caught my eye.
As before, spoilers for Pokémon Red and Blue, but if you haven’t played them yet you likely never will. You monster.
If Bill can screw up an experiment, I'm allowed to screw up a screenshot.
If you’ve watched the Pokémon anime, you’d know the character Bill as a well-spoken British scientist, so learning this character uses late 90s slang was quite funny. I know that’s just part of the localization process, but it also makes you wonder about the various other translation quirks, like Magikarp’s “Hop” becoming “Splash”. The series always builds on what came before, but sometimes what came before wasn’t as ideal as it could’ve been, and not rectifying it later could be a missed opportunity.
Though, there’s definitely some things that you simply have to accept, like the size of the S.S. Anne’s overworld sprite.
It looked bigger in the catalogue.
Exploring the ship was a fun experience, enhanced by the fact that once you’ve finished what is essentially a dungeon, it becomes totally inaccessible from then on1. There’s several TMs and other items here that become totally unobtainable once you’ve obtained HM01 Cut. There’s also some interesting characters, like “Le Waiter” (which may have inspired Restaurant Le Nah and Restaurant Le Yeah in Lumiose City), and the Global Police Agent, which almost certainly inspired the character of Looker.
I was serious about building on what came before.
One thing I did notice about certain NPC sprites though, that almost certainly flew over the heads of any kids playing, is the designs of the S.S. Anne’s crew. I know these are 16x16 sprites, but why are these characters, who are explicitly not from the Kanto region, designed to look like a caricature of Chinese sailors? It definitely threw me for a loop at the time.
Woke? No, these are my sleepy eyes.
I won’t go down that rabbit-hole - I’ll leave that to people who enjoy drama. I’m playing this game to learn more about the foundations of the series, and to make silly movie references2.
I'm king of the world!
Time for some rapid-fire notes that don’t need a deeper dive:
- The Daycare existed in gen 1, but could only hold one Pokémon, and was mainly used for levelling the more awkward Pokémon that couldn’t contribute to your party directly.
- There is exactly one Farfetch’d in gen 1, and he’s stuck with the nickname “DUX”. My guy deserved better.
- The critical path does a weird cross-shape through the underground paths below Saffron City: Cerulean City -> Underground Path -> Vermilion City -> back through Underground Path -> Cerulean City -> Rock Tunnel -> Lavender Town -> the other Underground Path -> Celadon City, where you can finally buy a drink for the gate guards.
- Lavender Town, with all the ghosts and such, is the first place you can buy Revives.
- The sprites on the Game Corner’s slot machines are unique, I haven’t seen them used elsewhere in the game.
Just 23 more years, buddy.
A note about my Nidorina, which I’ve been raising since Pewter City: When I looked up her gen 1 learnset, I realized Nidorina and Nidoqueen have entirely different moves! In fact, the best time to evolve her with a moon stone, as far as I could tell, was at level 22 so she’d have access to the best moves available. I can’t remember if there’s a move relearner in this game, but if there is, I wonder which learnset he’ll use?
OK, let’s get technical.
So far, I’ve avoided using any TMs in this run, simply because I know so many of them are limited to one-per-save, but I don’t know which ones off the top of my head. I’ve just been putting them into the PC for later, but I’ve also realized that making an optimal Pokémon is nearly impossible because of the limited nature of the TMs - and I suspect that was intentional.
I doubt competitions were on the developer’s minds during early development, but there’s a lot of things that seem to outright discourage min-maxing. The core conceit of the series has always been to form a bond with your team, which is at odds with the competitive elements baked into the mechanics. Most of us simply gloss over this incongruity, but I wonder if the series would’ve been anywhere near as successful if this central tension wasn’t there?
The fans have always done their own thing with the series, from nuzlockes to romhacks, to weird experiments-turned-phenomenons like Twitch Plays Pokémon, which pioneered a whole genre of viewer-engagement games. The Pokémon Company and Nintendo may not like it, and quite often use the threat of legal action to squash so many fanworks that encroach on the IP, but that itself feeds into the central tension of the series.
In it’s own way, maybe the tension is what holds the series up, and has kept it going for 30 years and counting?
PRAISE HELIX
When I’m not peeking into Erika’s Gym, I can usually be found on Bluesky or Discord. If you’d like to show your support, I also have a Patreon, and I’d love a Coffee via Ko-fi.