Some idle thoughts about Pokémon Crystal

Over the past week I’ve been revisiting Pokémon Crystal for no particular reason. I’m not much of a modern Pokémon player or enjoyer these days (though I adored Legends Arceus), but something about Pokémon Generation II has always been oddly compelling to me. As a kid, it was the Gen II games and card sets that lit a fire under me; when everyone else was still obsessed with Charizard and Pikachu I was tearing up issues of Beckett Pokémon Unofficial Collector for any information I could get about the Neo Genesis card sets.

Even by 2001 Pokémon was kind of a solved problem; if you were having trouble in your own game, there was always that one rich kid in the neighborhood who had both Red and Blue who could hook you up with a team that could kick a new mudhole in the Elite Four; barring that, someone always knew someone with access to a GameShark. Gen II, on the other hand, was new territory for everyone. 100 new monsters, an entirely new region with new secrets; not to mention, we whispered to each other in hushed tones, there’s a rumor that you could go back to Kanto after you beat the Johto Elite Four.

Wild shit. Of course, it’s all nostalgia memories now. I wanted to see if the game held up even a little bit in the intervening two decades. I’ve played a lot more games, have more experience in the series that inspired/competed with Pokémon, and have a better sense of what works in a game like this vs. what doesn’t. The thing is, I’ve put almost 19 hours into Pokémon Crystal and I’m not even out of the training wheels area. I’ve caught or evolved 32 monsters just fucking around between New Bark Town and Azalea Town. When I’m not trying to capture literally every monster in each area, I’m grinding—slowly trying to build every Pokémon I catch up to be a potential competitor in a gym battle. It’s a war of diminishing returns I’m waging on myself; the time is coming, and quickly, where I will grow impatient with this slow plodding crawl through the baby mode area where every wild Pokémon has barely reached level 9 and every encounter barely provides me with a small drip of experience. A switch will flip in my head and I will simply choose the six Pokémon I like the most/are the strongest in my collection at this exact moment in time to be the team that wipes out every other gym in Johto. There is just simply no way to carry every single Pokémon you catch across that finish line unless you want to make any of these games your forever game. It has already cost me maybe a dozen full hours.

But this is a key point: in any other Pokémon game I would have already given up, would have already passed that threshold. For some reason, I feel more lenient with Crystal about the things it does consistently poorly than I do with modern Pokémon games and the things they do well but sometimes mess up on. Like I’m sitting here grinding every single individual monster out until they evolve because – unlike more modern Pokémon titles – there’s no party-wide EXP share. Endless processions of Rattata, Pidgey and Zubat have fallen to my pursuit of a Computer Box full of well-trained and conditioned Pokémon. I spent several hours the other day walking a single line in Dark Cave, a small tunnel off Route 31 just outside of Violet City, just to catch a level 2 Teddiursa. That Teddiursa is now at level 11 and has one of the strongest Attack values in my party.

Was the game meant to be played this way? I don’t know. I don’t think so. You’re not given very much money to start with, and there aren’t that many trainers in your first few areas to replenish it. Either you’re breezing through the first two gyms (Violet City’s Gym Leader was a flying-type trainer, while Azalea Town’s Leader was a bug-catcher) in hot pursuit of the stronger, higher EXP-yield monsters (and trainers) past Ilex Forest, or you’re doing what I’m doing and spending too much fucking time making your pet fire mouse beat the shit out of equally small critters until either it evolves, they stop being worth fighting, or you lose patience with the game entirely.

What I like about Pokémon Crystal is that it gives you the space to figure your shit out. I don’t feel in any way pressured to keep moving or stay in one spot bashing my head against the wall. Its clumsy implementation of systems and flows the series would later massively optimize and improve on is offset by the fact that it genuinely does not care what you do. You are genuinely free to play the game more or less according to your own desires and goals, in spaces that don’t feel so cramped as to force you to move before you want to. Whether that means endless EV grinding or the shiny hunt or simply beating the shit out of YOUNGSTER JOEY and his singular Rattata til he gives you enough money for one or two more Poké Balls so you can be ready in case you run into a Dunsparce in Dark Cave (1% chance of appearance), the world of Pokémon Crystal is genuinely a sandbox for you to play however you want.

Will I feel differently about the game in another 20 hours? It’s possible. But for now, I’m just having a good time and relishing in the warm, familiar-feeling clunkiness of the first game I ever truly adored.

Some even smaller idle thoughts:

• The real-time day/night cycle rocks. I wish they had kept that gimmick going in future games. Especially with services like Kurt’s Apricorn Poké Ball business that make you wait a real human day to collect your prize. It’s by no means efficient but it makes the world feel much more genuinely real and lived-in (especially since there’s no incentivized line-jumping with bullshit microtransactions).
• The Poké Gear is a genuinely incredible piece of sci-fi tech, when you think about it. It’s just simply and pointedly predicting how the app-centric smartphone and social media would be used two or three years before MySpace existed and a full five years before the LG Prada came out. (I know Japanese cell/smartphone culture has always been Built Different but when Pokémon Crystal came out NTT DoCoMo had still only been a thing for like a year and a half. Crystal was genuinely out here doing some Speculative Fiction regardless of which side of the pond’s lens you’re viewing it through. Maybe it didn’t hold a candle to Shin Megami Tensei‘s horror future but then, what else did/does?)
• Every sprite and sound file in this game is fuckin gorgeous. I just want to sit in it forever.
• Lugia, Ho-oh, and Suicune, Entei and Raikou are my favorite sets of Legendary Pokémon ever made. Even going past my fascination with Mew.