>>58933284Industrial waste becomes a part of the ecosystem, and the electrical grid attracts strange creatures that are as artificial as they are biological. Life, the cute, the cool, the strange, and the ugly, blankets this world.
Gen 1 was the first and only time that Pokemon had a unified art style and design sensibility. The Pokemon share an angularity and visual cohesion that begins to slip as early as Gen 2 (later designs intentionally contradict themselves often). The technology is chunky and analog. There is a roughness to the world that slims and smooths and “plushifies” as the series went on.
People roast Gen 1 over its shoddy code and bugs (as well they should), but I believe that in doing so they miss a lot of the genius in its design. How the world is gated and paced is the best in the series, and the early game is structured in such a way where it tutorializes you without much interruption (there is a little). The actual map structure of Kanto is great, opening up just enough to be interesting. Small ideas like early bugs evolving quickly, weedle introducing you to poison in the tutorial “dungeon” just in range of a pokecenter, Voltorbs functioning as item mimics, there’s some good stuff here. The games are rather easy, so most of the oversights can be missed by the general audience. But the stuff that works, works well.
Gen 1 IS the idea, before the brand, before the expectation of being the biggest franchise colored by its anime adaptation instead of the other way around. It’s a video game that wants you to go outside, and link up with other people, the game does what it’s about.
I have some respect for the later entries (2-5) for various reasons, (Gen 2’s ambition, Gen 3’s quality of life features, Gen 4’s competitive viability and Gen 5’s curation of elements from the previous entries), but Gen 1 IS the Pokemon vision, realized, warts and all.
