Game Debate #157: Pokemon Gold/Silver

[Reed Rothchild | 9,510]

 

[Brickman | 3,982]

Haven't played this one but I'll get around to it one day.

You missed a perfect opportunity to make game debate #151 Pokémon red/blue!

[Webhead123 | 675]

I think it's been established that I'm not a Pokémon guy. I see nothing wrong with it but the series and concept never really spoke to me. Kinda after my generation, I guess. I've played a couple hours of Blue and a couple hours of Leaf Green and I have to admit that I could see myself messing around with them on occasion because there is some RPG-lite fun to be had. But yeah, I don't see myself ever playing a particular game in the franchise other than that.

[DarkTone | 984]

8. Crystal is my favourite from the series. 

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

Never played them or any other Pokemon game.

[Gloves | 11,761]

The best gen. 

[Tanooki | 4,930]

I still prefer the original series, specifically yellow, but given the minor but quality additions here, alterations, and inclusion of what was the original all rolled into this (and crystal) it's a quality pokemon release that shouldn't be missed of the old style of play.  Before it got into the weeds of lame temporary super evolutions and other oddball stuff, this one kept it real still before they started being desperate for new and not all that great ideas.

I don't have much experience on it at least that it, I do through soul silver mostly, but I can recognize what good work was put in here and easily recommend it if you're an old GB fan or do it over the DS either way.  Personally more onto Crystal than G&S just as I was with Yellow over R&B but core game is the same.

[wongojack | 211]

9 hours ago, Webhead123 said:

I think it's been established that I'm not a Pokémon guy. I see nothing wrong with it but the series and concept never really spoke to me. Kinda after my generation, I guess. I've played a couple hours of Blue and a couple hours of Leaf Green and I have to admit that I could see myself messing around with them on occasion because there is some RPG-lite fun to be had. But yeah, I don't see myself ever playing a particular game in the franchise other than that.

This is pretty much me 100% except that a couple years ago, I made a point to play Pokemon Gold.  I didn't get through the whole story, but I played it A LOT.  It is definitely a great game, so I rate this one 8 out of 10.  I'm not sure that I ever need to play another Pokemon game again, but I get it.

[Webhead123 | 675]

9 minutes ago, wongojack said:

This is pretty much me 100% except that a couple years ago, I made a point to play Pokemon Gold.  I didn't get through the whole story, but I played it A LOT.  It is definitely a great game, so I rate this one 8 out of 10.  I'm not sure that I ever need to play another Pokemon game again, but I get it.

Yes, I can see the addictive loop behind it, so I can appreciate how this became such a phenomenon for the audience and time that it did. It's that raw dopamine rush of leveling up, unlocking new powers, finding new Pokémon and repeating the cycle. That said, now that I've seen that core loop, I think I'm good with what I have. There are only so many ways to reiterate on that concept meaningfully, so if I'm ever gonna spend any more time with it (and that is a big "if" with all the other things I've got going on these days), I'll just go back to Blue or Leaf Green (or was it Emerald? Now I'm questioning myself) and continue that journey.

[Tanooki | 4,930]

44 minutes ago, Webhead123 said:

That said, now that I've seen that core loop, I think I'm good with what I have. There are only so many ways to reiterate on that concept meaningfully

Which is why I started to skip games and play less of those I did.  I had written it off entirely, then I took a gamble on a 1/2 off ($20) UltraSun and found they do know how to not make another sad re-run of itself.  That one if you want pokemon and not being bored works since the gyms are gone, it's island hopping with a boss (gym-ish like) battle at the end.  There's a strong story, sub-plots, there are various totem pokemon (mid-boss) fights to do, and more.  That one is more JRPG than pokemon and it works.  Same can yet again be said with Arceus on Switch as it so mixed that up too how to approach it that one isn't a sad snore either.  It's a good way to experience the franchise and not suffer burnout.

[CodysGameRoom | 2,008]

8/10. 2nd gen is great.

[DefaultGen | 5,400]

I went 9/10, even though in a vacuum it's a 10/10. They're basically strictly better, more expansive games than Red/Blue but by the same token, HeartGold/SoulSilver are almost strictly better and more expansive games than G/S, so they are a bit of a middle child.

[DefaultGen | 5,400]

On 6/7/2023 at 3:00 PM, Webhead123 said:

That said, now that I've seen that core loop, I think I'm good with what I have. There are only so many ways to reiterate on that concept meaningfully, so if I'm ever gonna spend any more time with it (and that is a big "if" with all the other things I've got going on these days), I'll just go back to Blue or Leaf Green (or was it Emerald?

I skipped a few generations and came back with Sun/Moon and couldn't believe just how similar everything still was. It was still full of tons of annoying random grinding and an outdated skill-less battle system as far as single player is concerned. Every Pokemon game I've played since has felt tedious, easy, outdated, and harder to "forgive" than a groundbreaking 20 year old Game Boy game. The JRPG genre has advanced so much further in 25 years than Pokemon has.

[TDIRunner | 2,725]

Never played any of the Pokemon games, and it's likely that I never will.  My kids loved Let's Go, Eevee! and they played a little of Sword and Shield, but I have basically no experience with any of the games.  

[RegularGuyGamer | 2,011]

This is one of my favorite games but I can't give it a 10. The nostalgia factor is so high but there are some glaring flaws like the leveling when we get back to Kanto and not having access to some of the best Pokemon in gen 2 until the end of the game. Steel was the type I wanted in the whole game but I couldn't get a steelix or Scizor til after I beat the elite 4? I can't get Tyranitar until I go to Mt Silver?

T-tar is still top 10 Pokemon for me and I don't understand why they hide my boy like that. I get the stats are big but he's weak to literally everything so what's the reason to essentially lock him behind post game?

Anyway, there is a ton of things the game does correct and it stands as the peak of the franchise for everyone older than 30. 

8/10

Edited June 8, 2023 by RegularGuyGamer

[phart010 | 1,705]

Is it still worth it to play these games on GBC since they were remade on DS?

[Tanooki | 4,930]

10 hours ago, phart010 said:

Is it still worth it to play these games on GBC since they were remade on DS?

I'd argue for Crystal but outside of nostalgia not the other two.  There's just enough to crystal much like Yellow vs R&B where it would be fine to go for it.  Then again if you don't have or want a DS then it's your only choice outside shadier ways.

[Ankos | 433]

If I am going to be 100% honest with myself I'd say they are kinda like the RPG equivalent of a Kirby game. They don't play it super risky, but they have good polish (music, art, etc.). I don't think many people would hate these games if they played them. I also don't think that they are that enjoyable if you focus super hard on beating them. Just relaxing and goofing off is a good way to play these. They don't have a a really gripping story, but they have a pretty good world to explore.

[SailingWiimote | 16]

Gold/Silver are still my favourites. Not Crystal, and not HeartGold/SoulSilver. I rated it 10 for one of my all time favourite games.

[Makar | 1,946]

Gave it a 9 only because I still prefer Firered and leafgreen over this and if you count gold and silver as different from heart gold and soul silver, then hgss is better than gold and silver

[JamesRobot | 5,786]

Pokemon kinda sucks.

[theirontoupee | 43]

I had Gold when I was younger. It was a fun game with good gameplay, but I was always a fan of Blue since that was my first Pokemon game.

[koifish | 555]

On 6/8/2023 at 11:36 AM, DefaultGen said:

The JRPG genre has advanced so much further in 25 years than Pokemon has.

Yeah, Pokemon seems to have wanted very hard to be like Dragon Quest and stay as a permanent "mainstream" JRPG that doesn't deviate or change how it works too much. I get why; Their target audience is children who haven't seen a Pokemon game before. Just doesn't do anything for long-term audiences, which I guess is okay, since you aren't really supposed to play these things forever anyway. It's kind of like super sentai, they make what can feel like the same show over and over, but it's because each one has to be "my sentai" for some kid out there watching now. Somebody who watches every season is probably a weirdo like me, who you don't want to listen to for good advice on your media franchises.

[MagusSmurf | 577]

I don't really care for the formula at this point and this doesn't have much going for it to change that. Really feels like "just another Pokemon game."

As is well known, the level curve falls off a cliff when you hit Kanto.

The removal of Missingno. (as it was, anyways) might have been basically inevitable but it's still quite a shame.

The rival isn't as fun as Blue and the game doesn't really have much else to make this particular region stand out as worth caring about.

They really went out of the way to make getting a lot of Pokemon annoying. Chasing the legendary dogs, how late the RBY evolution stones become available, trying to get a Heracross out of a damn tree, expanding on the (already bad) idea of trade evolution with held item trade evolution (many of which are also only available really late), happiness evolution, those super-rare pokemon that you needed to add particular trainers to your phone to viably run into...so much bad stuff. RBY's only comparably painful pokemon issues were trade evolutions (there were only 4 of them and Haunter and especially Kadabra REALLY don't need a boost) and the Safari Zone (and you can remedy the latter with a glitch to make those ones normally catchable).

Also baby Pokemon really didn't need to even exist. And nobody sane is ever going to use, like, Delibird or Unown for anything. RBY had Ditto I guess? Effectively doubling down on Ditto tier Pokemon was not a good idea though! I have complaints about the availability vs. usefulness of some of the not-totally-worthless stuff here too, though I'm not sure RBY would hold up much better. Pokemon like Murkrow probably didn't need to get held off all the way until Kanto.

Despite the issues, this game is, like, fine? I enjoyed it back in the day. It's just we're not back in the day at this point. It's more a good time sink than a genuinely great game and the options for what games to play on the go have vastly expanded since 2000.

Edited June 16, 2023 by MagusSmurf

[koifish | 555]

Now then, time for me to make people irritated again. I will confess that I am probably the only person out there who feels this way. I was 6 or 7 when red/blue came out, right smack inside the target audience for the American phase of the phenomenon. I played Pokemon Red/Blue on release, I watched the show, I bought into the toy empire with so many random little bits and pieces that I can barely remember, I tortured my father by dragging him to the movie (AND the sequel), you name it, I did it. Pokemania was real, brother, and in 2000, I was really, REALLY ready for Gold/Silver. But in all honesty, when I got them, my first impression was "wait, THIS is it?" Nothing set me up for a bad impression like walking out of the new town with the new starter and the new rival, excited to find out what new things I could catch, and my first two encounters are a rattata and a pidgey. And then the new ones were basically just off-brand rattata and pidgey (or maybe it was nighttime pidgey since they added a new gimmick). My disappointment was real, and it really just set the tone for how everything was gonna be an underwhelming experience. The best I can describe is it that for me, gens 1 and 3 were "new" while gens 2 and 4 were "expansion packs". It's like GS would have been DLC in another era, and sometimes I feel like it deserves to be just that. I freely admit that my experience is entirely one driven by how I felt when I got the games as a kid. Had I never played the series as much as I did, had I never been through the hype wave around red/blue and the excitement over gold/silver, maybe I'd come back and say it was worth it. In fact, I wouldn't say that G/S are bad games. They're probably better than red/blue, especially for fixing the game balance and making some types actually worth using (even if I find their lack of ghost and dragon types disturbing), but for me it is just a real hard thing to like. I have a lot, a LOT of personal emotion wrapped up in this, and it is hard to separate from the game. Also, I find the extreme love given to Gold/Silver online that I have seen over the years to be really annoying, and so that has also worked itself into my feelings as well.

Now that said, I do have some honest complaints that aren't just me being an angry old man. I don't think Gold/Silver are super great games, and I will add some of my gripes, which have been mirrored above by some:

• The gym leaders had bad movesets and were not good opponents, aside from maybe the first few.
• The whole game's leveling is messed up. You are so overpowered by the time you reach kanto that it's basically meaningless.
• on that note, kanto was gutted, which ultimately just felt like a slap in the face to me given how much I had played pokemon red/blue (which was multiple times through, often restarting my save just for fun). Let's face it: Despite fans constantly talking up how "amazing" it was to have two whole regions inside of one game, the real truth is that G/S kanto is a worthless faceroll nostalgia romp whose only purpose is to make grinding for the red fight be less boring. I can care less about the "where are they now" stuff around the trainers from R/B and where they show up. They turned my nostalgia region into a crappy theme park!
• there were 100 pokemon added to G/S, but 80-90 of them were useless filler, and as RegularGuyGamer pointed out, the cool and interesting ones were locked away for far too long. Plus, if you were like me, and saw pokemon fans start to thin out around this time, then all the obnoxious trading evolutions became tough to get without just buying another GB (which over time for me started a trend of hardware buying...I wonder how I ended up on a site for game obsessives? :P).
• Gold/Silver added a lot of mechanics that ended up just being gimmicks. Affection level was cool for all of two moves that IIRC were okay and at worst, were a waste of TM slots. Night and Day as an abstract was okay, but it really just got used for (again) a couple of throwaway gimmick moves.
• Another gimmick is refighting trainers. The trainer fights aren't that good and there aren't very many of them, and worse than that is them calling you all the time. You might be able to turn your phone off or something, tbh I just don't remember. I do remember this feature being half-baked however (IIRC they started doing better with this in later games).
• On the subject of time, I really don't like the real time clock. It was cool at first, in concept, but then it just gets annoying because of events happening in real time. If you have ever worked or lived in off hours before, like being a night time desk worker in college, or doing a third-shift job, then you can understand why it is annoying to try and escape to a fun virtual world....driven by the same clock that is fighting against you in real life. I don't want to have to schedule my life around a video game's time card. I don't want to manage a game clock as if it is part of my daily task list. If I wanted games to feel like a task list, I would play crappy smartphone games and do dailies like a sucker (sorry not sorry mobage players). Also, the clock kills your save battery, which is another annoyance.
• nitpicky I know, but too many water HMs that are, AGAIN, only useful like, one time, and yet you have to waste another move slot on them (the series had a lot of HM problems as it went on, I quit playing before I found out if they fixed them however)
• also nitpicky, but the radio is another useless thing that people overrate. The ability to put music on wherever is awesome, but the rest is a waste IMO.

 

Okay, now before anyone accuses me again of having no heart or soul (heh), I will talk about what I like about Gold/Silver:

• they fixed the type balance, thank god.
• The music is some of my favorite in the entire series, and probably some of the best GB music ever, and that comes from someone with some DEEP love for game boy and its music
• like I said, some of the new pokemon are good

 

Struggled to think of any more so I'll stop.

The best I can sum up my feelings is that gold/silver tried very hard to expand on red/blue, and it sort of succeeded but ultimately just felt like a heavy retread that spent too much time on gimmicks and not enough time on meaningful changes.

I will now proceed to further offend my audience by saying that, for me, ruby and sapphire were better games. Yes, they are missing certain things, like the truly excellent style of gold/silver, the music quality (unless you love synth trumpets), and I don't really like that they removed night transition entirely, but for me, gen 3 was a necessary and well-made step in the right direction. They pared back a lot of the gimmicky stuff, focused more on the gameplay and on setting up a solid foundation, and they made a new world that for me felt new, instead of feeling like kanto wearing a new coat. They also addressed some of the glaring problems with missing types of pokemon and they didn't go overboard with gimmick mons like they did in 2nd gen (but don't worry, they got back to their old tricks with gen 4...). I don't for a second think that ruby and sapphire are the peak of the series, but they set up the future of the series on solid ground, and brought focus back onto the game instead of onto the gimmicks.

All this said, I can't really give Gold and Silver a bad score, because they aren't bad games. I don't care for them, but they are not bad. If I were to recommend them, however, it would be tough. Frankly, I don't see a reason to recommend these over the DS remakes other than nostalgia. It's the same feeling I get about dragon quest 1; The original is iconic to me and that 8-bit soundtrack is permanently burned into my brain, and yet why would I recommend anyone play it over the SFC/GBC remake? As far as I am concerned, the DS remakes are the great ones, and honestly they might be the best pokemon games period. The DS is where the series hit its stride, to me anyway (notwithstanding diamond and pearl which are a real slog). I think I would recommend someone play the DS games, but maybe play the GBC game for a bit first to get that nostalgic feeling.

I guess I give the GB games 5/10, maybe 6/10, and the DS games 8/10. And if you haven't played a pokemon game before, then play the DS remakes, and makk sure you only play one. Don't fall into the pokemon pit. It's a dark place.

Incidentally, I haven't been able to play pokemon since 2009 or so, but last year I spent a few hours with a crystal romhack called "Crystal Clear" which lets you pick from a large pool of different starters and lets you start in any town in johto or kanto, and then go whatever way you want. I thought that was a good time, since it frees you from the monotony of the typical linear pokemon experience. Plus, it put all the cool pokemon up front and center, so you didn't have to wait until the end of the game to get them. Overall though, I'm happy that I won't have to play a pokemon game ever again.