Overall 8.6 Graphics 9 Sound 6 Addictive 4 Story 5 Depth 4 Difficulty 6
6.7
Where it all Started MechaMento
Hello readers of the hopefully many. As you may know I am MechaMento and today I shall be looking at the very beginning of what many of us vizzed users call special. I am not the biggest Pokemon fan so please do not be offended if I am a little harsh against the mother of Pokemon. A review is meant to be biased and from natural opinion so I guess you should keep that in mind. Finally this is also my first, what I call negative, review. This means I need your opinion to improve and by that I mean you actually read this rather than just saying this review is good without giving any examples. I will challenge you because I want to see some good criticism and hopefully praise. I hope you enjoy reading my review.
Pokemon GreenEven some of the biggest pokemon fans may not even know about this game, but the fact that there was a game called Pokemon Leaf Green for the Game Boy Advance kind of gave us a clue. At first you may of thought that Nintendo were a little mad by making a remake of a game that never existed. This was because they never released Pokemon Green in Europe or America or anywhere else in the world except Amazon, but let's be honest here, Amazon gets everything... and then sells it! Instead we had to sit and play Pokemon Blue instead, which was ok since it was pretty much the same game as was Pokemon Red.
There were a few changes made such as the Music and sprites but the region was the same, the pokemon were the same and trainers. The biggest change that we all should know about is the fact that the original Lavender Town theme cause violent headaches to children aged 7-12 and in worst cases killing them. If we actually use our minds and begin to search on google you can see that none of this happened! It is just a creepypasta and nothing more. Creepypastas are never true, they are just stories to make the reader feel uncomfortable. None of this actually happened, so kids you can calm down and maybe you can
sleep tonight :P .
GraphicsMost people will say that any Game Boy game has very crappy graphics. When you compare the likes of the Xbox One and the PS4 that statement is a little believable. However if we forget about those graphics power houses and look back about a decade and a bit into Video Game history, you beginning to realise that this was actually a little special.
The Game Boy was one of the very first handheld consoles. The screen was small, hard to see and everything was in black and white. It had a similar power to the NES but it could never produce a colour image. The Game Freak did relatively well to make their games look good on a weak console. The graphics were pretty close to the best you could get on the console and there were very few games that topped Pokemon Greens' standard. Every town and city was laid out generally well though some locations lacked diversity, creativity and more importantly beauty.
The opening cut scene before actually reaching the title screen was a highlight of pretty much all Game Boy games, if Game Freak managed to keep that same standard as they did in the opening cut scene then they will be sure to get a 10 from me.
Since they did not do that I decided to give the graphics a rating of 9 out of a possible 10 because personally I think that Game Freak did very well at their job however I did mention that some locations were a little boring and the developers of this game could of worked just a little hard than what they did.
SoundI have to admit, I crave 8-Bit themes. The likes of the Doctor Willy stages in Mega Man and the buzz tracks of the Journey to Silius opening theme really put a sense of satisfaction into my ears. The small music devices put into NES and Game Boy games created this wonderful synth that I can enjoy if used correctly.
Pokemon fans will hate me forever when I say this but the developers of Pokemon Green did not use this synth effectively. I am a bit of a grumpy guy but I just can not put up with that feel you get when you here a Pokemon song. Half the soundtrack is happy go lucky and the rest is epic, however it is epic in Pokemon style and as I recently mentioned I do not like Pokemon music. The quality might be great and that is why I am simply not giving Pokemon Green a very bad sound rating but it is just the basic use of the quality, it is just not fun enough.
The way I would put it is that you would never dance to a song from Pokemon. When I hear the Journey to Silius theme I really want to get up and dance, but since I am playing the game I find myself tapping the controller in sync with the rhythm of the song. That is what I want from a game. I want a game with an enjoyable play through with a just as enjoyable soundtrack, every experience must be at its peak to get a ten.
Depth, Story and AddictivenessI really want to put out a point about any Pokemon game... What more do you do than walk around and press A. I mean you press A at everything. You press A to attack, you press A to talk, you press A for everything! Pokemon Green does get very repetitive and it being the first Pokemon game does not give it an excuse. Take a look at Pokemon Gold and Pokemon Silver, yeah the region might be cool but the only new thing you are getting is a couple of new Pokemon so that it is harder to "Catch 'em All". The same pattern continues all the way to Pokemon X and Pokemon Y, it just gets boring.
At least it is better than Fifa Soccer and Call of DutyStory wise this game created a Pokemon cliche. Fair enough you go through the Pokemon league and stuff since that is just how a Pokemon game works but the same sort of events will happen. For instance in Pokemon Green and all of the other Kanto based games the player will seem to always end up fighting a evil group also known as team rocket. The same boring tradition continues through team Magma and Aqua past Team Plasma and then finally to who or what you are fighting in Pokemon X and Pokemon Y. It all seems the same and I do not think it will ever change. I can never seem to get back into Pokemon because of these annoying cliches but I want to since Pokemon dominated a good few years of my childhood.
OverallGame Freak made a lot of effort to make a game at this quality. This game is not for me as is almost all Pokemon games but I still have to consider the effort they put into this game. I have to picture how hard it must of been to get so many gamers under the influence to just keep playing more. Unfortunately I can never ever seem to find this feeling any more so I have been pushed to be negative about this games lack of depth. Again I apologize to all of the huge Pokemon fans for being so harsh on the mother of a revolutionary video game series but as I said this is all purely my opinion.
Thank you for reading. I appreciate your effort and respect to actually bother finish to read the entire review. Again, as always, I request some opinions or reviews on my review. Of course I would like some helpful, constructive criticism which requires you to actually read the whole review rather than just saying my review is good with out any reasons. I need reasons!
~ Thank you all very much :D
Graphics 9 Sound 6 Addictive 4 Story 5 Depth 4 Difficulty 6
Review Rating: 5/5
Submitted: 10-20-13
Review Replies: 6