>>36360345RB's pacing and design is so absolutely brilliant that I've written a huge breakdown of the first half of the game.
And it's actually incredibly impressive considering it's one of the first, if not the first, JRPGs based solely on monster battling
not counting games like Wizardry IV or SMT, which while absolutely fantastic games, don't even try to teach the player the mechanics or have a difficulty curve. So Tajiri was basically going into this with only what Miyamoto taught him and what he had picked up about RPG design from Mother, Dragon Quest and SaGa.
I feel like the lack of Tajiri and his original team are a huge part of why every game afterwards just tries to use RB's framework without actually considering the individual design elements. Gen III and especially IV are a complete mess and resort to just making the player way too powerful and giving tutorials instead of using smart design to teach the player through experience.
And when it comes down to it that's the only important thing that really separates the first gen from the later games: lack of smart design. You can go on all day about how the designs lack "soul" or how the rivals are too friendly or how there's too much plot focus, but all that is just presentation, and if the games were still designed well, people would still be enjoying them.
I will say though that the game really is not non-linear just because it has one or two branching paths, because those paths reconverge immediately afterwards. There's a lot of horseshit about the game that people like to spout like that it's open ended, it's "scary", it's "epic", or whatever and it's all just nostalgia and pseudo-intellectual shit. But also people complaining that the Pokemon are unbalanced or whatever which misses the entire point.
