Ah Pokemon, the iconic video game series with the creatures you can put in a poke ball and carry it around in your pocket. Hence the name, I only thought it was just an anime tv show the first time I knew about it but then one day for Christmas I had gotten the blue version of Pokemon and I was so psyched to start playing it immediately on my new Game Boy Colour. and eventually I learned I could play it on my Nintendo 64s Pokemon Stadiums game boy tower which was a great experience for me I just couldn't stop. And when I did it was usually to get a bite to eat. The very first pokemon I ever got, was a charmander  mostly because I wanted a charizard. This game and its counterpart, Pokemon Red version and later, Pokemon yellow, which was loosely based off of the anime, revolutionized the video game industry in several aspects including role playing games, virtual pets and having a great time trying to capture the original 151 creatures that you can put under your command. As of right now, we are about to start my first pokemon review so lets get right to it shall we. As always I shall begin with the story.

You are introduced to a quick briefing by an old professor, named Professor oak, who would be responsible for the theme of naming regional professors after trees. He will ask for your name (but strangely he seems to struggle with his own grandsons name, very odd, but when you get old I bet the mind is the first thing to go) after deciding names for the main character, and his rival, who I shall just call Red and Blue respectively, you are then shrunk down to a smaller size and enter the incredible world of Pokemon. In your home town of Pallet town (which incidentally the cities and towns are all named after colours in the Kanto region ) You are found by professor Oak who will escort you to his research lab and offer Red and Blue a pokemon each, Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle. once red picks his starter pokemon of choice, Blue will then pick the pokemon that has a type advantage over the one Red just picked and will result in the first pokemon battle ever as far as games go. After you win or lose the battle, (better to win if you want to earn some prize money) Your pokemon is completely healed and Red goes on a grand adventure to obtain every pokemon in existence during that time, fights against the notorious criminal gang team rocket and their boss Giovanni (who I think was based off of mob bosses especially with a name like giovanni and the fact that he looks like a mafia boss) and travelling all over Kanto to find and defeat the eight gym leaders to defeat the elite four and become a pokemon master. So thats a rough beginning of the two versions that started the franchise. Which I think may have been twenty years ago, hehe its almost as old as I am. But back to the review, its time to look at the graphics.

Boy, handhelds have come a long way as far as graphics are concerned, an average 3ds game is what I like to call, gamecube on a cartridge, but I'm here to look at the graphics for one of the best video games for the original Game boy system. Looking at the game itself, theres not much to look at being on a monochromatic scheme with no colour whatsoever but it doesn't really matter to be perfectly honest because while graphic are a video games many important attributes, its the games gameplay that matters to me and that right there is what makes Nintendo such a tech giant in the world of video games. The graphics look like something you would see on a Nintendo entertainment system but only its portable. so while the graphics of pokemon red and blue might not look so colourful on a gameboy, thats where the idiom, beauty is only skin deep . If you were to put a pokemon red or blue version into a transfer pack for the nintendo 64s pokemon stadium, you can play it in the games gameboy tower and everything becomes colourful. For me that is just incredible even for a game boy game, It just blew me and my family away. my jaw almost hit the floor when I witnessed that amazing change. now we move onto the sound of pokemon red and blue versions.

Like I said about the graphics being similar to a nintendo entertainment systems games its logical that the sounds would be 8 bit sounding as well but even to this day, the video game sound has always been identified with the 8 bit sound. Each pokemon has a unique cry unless its a rhyhorn in which case the cry is identical to a charizardsand when your pokemon is sent out with a critical condition like low hp, the pokemons cry becomes distorted indicating its weak condition. The attacks of each pokemon have nice sound effects and they are still etched into my brain today. the music is diverse as well such as Pallet Town which sounds like the ice cream man is driving down the street, even my Nanna pointed that out when I was visiting her. And many cities have a jolly theme like Viridian city and Pewter city. there even the creepy Lavender Town, which fittingly is a well know haunting ground for ghost pokemon, and speaking of the lavender town theme, children and adults allegedly hear the song differently which has led to some sort of creepy pasta story. But my favorite theme music includes the gym leader theme which i think is the best gym leader music ever, the music for Cinnabar Island, and the theme music for Cerulean City and Fushia City and the final rival battle theme. Junichi Masuda is by far the best video game composer in the business, there will never be another like him except for good old Koji Kondo.

Now playing pokemon is an extremely addictive game but what makes it lose a few points for addictiveness is that you only have one save game file and thats just flat out annoying but other than that the game is still super addictive and as time goes on, pokemon as a franchise becomes more and more addictive. What will Nintendo think of next for this milestone of a franchie, well I don't know, thats up to Nintendo to decide but the sheer addictiveness of this game and by extension the series is by far some of the best fun I had growing up. Period. the actual blue version cartridge is still in my possession today and while it has gotten a bit dusty over the years, it will always hold the titles of first ever pokemon game I got to play and the first game that made me a Pokemon trainer and when you throw in the fact that there were 151 different species of pokemon to catch and train, it set the bar towards that goal for every player and as a result turned this game into a regular addictiveness game that every trainer in my day went nuts over in the good way. That's all I have to say about addictiveness. of Pokemon red and blue versions, now we move on to the depth.

When this game came out and told us it had 151 different pokemon to catch, that was already a lot of depth and if I know a role playing game, they would have tons of depth. Not only was there that many creatures, but the world of pokemon at that time was already huge, even for a game boy game. And I love a game with a huge world to explore, you can cross the ocean, dig through caves and fly to cities which reminds me this game has an expanse of many different items, such as medicine, battle drugs (at least they aren't steroids right?) general use items, and items that can be used to teach your pokemon different moves, these are called TMs and HMs ( technical machines and hidden machines respectively.) TMs will teach your pokemon a new move but it is a single use only item so be careful and think hard before using it. Hidden machines, work a little differently in three regards. They can be used over and over again, (until generation five I believe where technical machines can be used again) second they are very important for making your way across Kanto, ad third, a pokemon who learns a hidden machine move can not unlearn it. Theres always a catch to something in this game called life and these catches are in our video games too. Items like escape ropes can help you get out of caves if you happen to get lost or if you want to make a quick exit.  and there are stat boosting items as well (eg: protein increases a pokemons base Attack while Iron improves the base defense of a pokemon.) The non player characters are great as well there's so many I don't even know what Kanto's total population is, maybe I should ask Bulbapedia.Well while the sprites for each NPC is different, they are more often than not the same character model depending on the trainer. Characters like Professor oak, Giovanni, Blue and Red are completely unique in their character models, each pokemon also has a unique front sprite that depicts the pokemon that appears on the screen. A few of these sprites did give me the odd bit of nightmare material, such as Golbat, Haunter, Gastly and the ghost of cubones mother, Marowak, when she is not exposed to the silph scope. but I'm older than that back then so I don't let those sprites bother me anymore. and then you have pokemon types like fire water and grass and each of these original types have a type effectiveness (eg Ice is super effective on types like grass, flying, and dragon types giving out 2x the damage of a regular attack formula, but if you use an ice type attack against a dragonite, the total damage will be multiplied to 4x the damage to poor dragonite.) there is also a formula called STAB which stands for same type attack bonus which will increase a fire type pokemons fire type attack by 50%, this applies to all pokemon. And thats all I can say about this games depth, in a nutshell, its perfect and now for the difficulty.

Being a role playing game, Pokemon red and blue versions are the type of game where the difficulty lies in level ups, strategy and common sense for the player, by understanding this an experienced gamer who knows what they are doing should have no problem with this sort of game, but like I said before it depends on a variety of common elements that form the core principles of a role playing game, strategy, leveling up and using your head to solve certain problems. Using your brain is essential to complete this game and there are some puzzles outside of the battle mode that involves the use of certain pokemon moves (example, pushing boulders down dark holes to stop an oceans current) so in hindsight I would recommend this game to anyone, its a national treasure for nintendo and it set the stage for a very successful multi billion dollar franchise that spawned an anime, several manga, toys, several animated movies and a trading card game. And its all thanks to a man named Satoshi Tajiri, who was inspired by collecting various insects as a child in his old hometown and wanted to share that experience with the creation of Pokemon, and finally as a fan I feel like I want to thank the incredible concept artist, Ken Sugimori without him pokemon designs could have been a little different, thanks to all the staff at nintendo for making this revolutioary game franchise, Arwingstarfighter signing off

Yeah, I know about the lack of save states; it was a fight between my brother and I when we played Shining Force II (our father had the other).

Otherwise you wrote another fine review mate. I never played any Pokémon game, but your review is probably the one that made me see how addictive that game can be. I might give it a try thanks to you!

janus : Anytime, my good mate anytime