There are only a couple of problems with the Pokémon series of games. The first is that they’re incredibly addictive. I spent six months on LeafGreen, forsaking all other video games in the process, and raking up over 120 hours of gaming time. Luckily, a friend was playing the sister title FireRed alongside me, so some of the ridiculous nerdy-ness of playing a game which involves collecting imaginary animals was waived as it became more of a social experience. The game will grab you and draw you deep into it, so terms like ‘pre-evolution’, ‘Fire Stone’ and ‘Charizard’ will become common phrases. If this is what you want from a game, you’re definitely reading the right review. Well, whoever you are, you're reading the right review. I wrote it.
While I’m on the topic, if you really want to get the most out of this game, play it alongside a friend. Not only will you be able to explore the game world together (helping each other when you get stuck etc), but if you have the two different colour versions, then theoretically you can collect all the available Pokémon between you. If you want to get everything out of the game, you need to have access to someone with the other colour cartridge – consider this a warning, before you get too deeply involved!
The second problem is that there is not much to the game. Fair enough, there’s a good 20 hours or so of actual storyline, and once you “complete” it, you unlock a few more new areas to explore. That would be fine for a regular RPG (somewhat exceptional, actually), but Pokémon is no regular RPG – it’s a game focused on training and breeding over three hundred monsters, and so never properly ends. If you’re going to try to put together a massive team of well-trained, evolved Poké critters, be prepared to get bored. I spent hours upon hours on this game simply running around, waiting for eggs to hatch, or having mindless, predictable battles with the same old trainers over and over again to get more experience. While this game could never be accused of having no longevity (120 hours, for God’s sake!), it gets stale after a while. You can only ask for a certain amount from one GBA cartridge, but it would not have taken much to add some more conversation with the trainers, and some variety in what Pokémon they throw at you.
However, the incentive to play is there, and if you don’t mind it eventually degenerating into a mindless button-bashing task, you could theoretically spend years on it. There’s something hypnotic that keeps you wanting to collect them all, to train them all, to get all the pre-evolutions and TMs. It's testament to how awesome the concept of the game is when you want to keep on playing and playing even when you've drained every ounce of gameplay out of it. There’s something to the game that will keep you up until the early hours of the morning, just hunting for experience points. Get a friend to play with you and you'll be even more inclined to waste your life on your GBA. You can battle with your finest beasts, or trade for rare and odd examples of Pokérama, either by traditional link-up or with the infrared adaptors that come bundled with some versions of this game. For every one friend you have playing this game alongside you, add 100 hours to how long this game will keep you hooked.
The game itself is pretty simplistic, clearly targeted at the younger player. The RPG elements are far from taxing, and I can’t recall a single instance when I was stuck somewhere on account of not being able to solve a puzzle (rather, I would get stuck because my Pokémon were lame and kept on getting smacked about by some smarmy fisherman). The battles themselves only really take the smallest out of tactical thinking to overcome - it's pretty much an overblown paper-scissors-stone game, just with twenty times as much fun. Take all the collecting and training elements out of the game and it would really fall flat on its face, a simplistic walkthrough of a game. But I guess the RPG is only there to fill in the gaps between Pokémon hunting – that is clearly the main point – I just wish the rest of it was a little more challenging on the ol' grey matter.
LeafGreen and FireRed are remakes of the original Pokémon games, but don’t write them off as cash-ins or lazy ports, they’ve been completely refurbished and brought up to the new generation. They lack some of the top quality attributes of the newer games, for example the clock that features in Ruby and Emerald and makes the game time-sensitive, but they’re still big, good-looking games. The original system has been polished and tidied up, as have all the sprites and graphics. The soundtrack has a couple of stand-out numbers, but expect to laugh at the sound effects and the animation - they're both awful and lazy at once. Complete the game and you gain access to a host of new islands, and most importantly, brand new Pokémon – this is the first game where you can (theoretically) collect every single one of the critters.
Got a spare year? Like the levelling up and collecting items aspects of RPGs, without the head-scratching and problem solving? Want to train a yellow mouse to gnaw someone’s head off? This game’s for you. Pick LeafGreen, FireRed, Emerald or Ruby, and throw yourself completely into the Pokémon universe. See you in 2009.