So?
All I can really muster is that this game, which took several nightly sessions every couple of days for a few weeks, was genuinely a bit mesmerizing for my short time with it. It’s just interesting to think about.
For one, boss battles in most games are treated as narrative climaxes. The main boss battles of Pokémon Red - gyms and gym leaders - are kiiind of climaxes here, but aside from a different soundtrack, are treated with very little urgency. Sequestering these gyms within towns is a shocking decision to make in a turn-based game with a limited inventory, and moves which cost a limited resource to even use. Towns... where you’ll always have access to a completely free full heal, a shop to buy items, and a storage system to deposit or withdraw items? It’s weird.
This architecture has been haphazardly carried over to nearly every future installment, but it's advantageous here in Red and Blue for at least one reason: the world. What would usually result in a game’s story lacking any sort of bite, the slow burn of your rivalry, the pokémon league challenge (gyms), and Team Rocket subplots intersecting with each other adds a surprising amount of texture to the experience.
You are let loose around the second or third gym but I’m not so sure “let loose” can get across just how relaxed the pace is. It’s less like you’re a rubber band being pulled farther yet farther back before being shot forward, and more like you’re walking down the sidewalk before arriving at an empty playground on a skin-meltingly hot day. From here you’ll fill out your team’s free slots, maybe bench a few of the stragglers. You'll build up an arsenal of items to teach your party new moves. It's a satisfying trajectory, all set to the undercurrent of uncovering Team Rocket’s plot to exercise control over the Kanto region's otherwise urbanist utopian post-war state.
Bag space is at a premium here and only here, leading to at least a few decisions to be made out in the world. Do I really need this item to teach my pokémon the move bide? Do I really need ten pokéballs when I’m newly able to buy something better? The single-file user-interface for said bag is contentious, but no schematic has come closer to emulating the feeling of rifling through junk in your shoulder bag, like an honest-to-god urban adventurer. Environmental hazards feel completely warranted given that the moves they require to be cleared are scaled much more in-line with the utility and power of the more battle-oriented moves on your team and that it’s easier to justify not carrying a whole team of six so you actually can have a straggler whose main duty is to cut down trees and light up dark caves.
Pokémon’s gradual appeal to convenience has pushed out and supplanted resource-management in exchange for a more accessible main campaign catered to casual players, a real competitive scene for aficionados, and a nod to completionists looking to go the rest of their lives without experiencing FOMO, the cowardly lot. Despite the problems whose seeds were sewn in this game, they’ve not sprouted due to that crucial lack of convenience. Finite bag space, limited mobility, slow menus, and environmental hazards pushed me away from repeat visits to pokémon centers - which would’ve trivialized long stretches of encounters in dungeons - because it was just too much of a hassle to get back to them. It’d be easy to call the future games in the series playgrounds for the core mechanics where anything goes and your experience is truly in your hands, but if anything, Pokémon Red and Blue evoke playgrounds more than any game in the series after it.
The intersection of safe environments, a relaxed, “save-anywhere” system, and the agonizingly long routes and caves and dungeons, jam-packed with encounters, trainers, and hazards, all contribute to the feeling that you are a child, poking and prodding at the membrane between the warm, safe world and the cold, urban, rural unknowns. You’re still young, exploring and pushing yourself beyond what is necessary because you know you’ll be able to make a safe landing. Where you’re encouraged to make your own fun but there’s a little bit more of a guiding hand to put you on the right track.
While I think the most important part of the series is the web of interactions between the player, the pokémon, and the world they both inhabit - something that’s been greatly expanded upon through the countless mechanical flourishes, systems innovations, and multiplayer considerations (which’ve turned the series into a storytelling medium all its own) - I think there’s a unique pull to Pokémon’s first generation that speaks to me. It says, “this one got it right from the get-go.” It just feels the most like an adventure.
At one point Pokémon Red was likely considered its own mechanical playground à la the later entries, but has now been rendered obsolete. But even today, as many words as I’ve written here could be put to the epic battles between friends, trades gone awry, the misinformation economy sprung up in the playgrounds of some now-thirty-something year olds, or the way glitch hunters and challenge runners have broken the game in two in the search for old myths and in-turn creating new ones. I also haven't even mentioned the absolutely incredible core mechanics of catching and battling which, though primitive in the face of future refinements, are perfect. I love this series, so much. Even if they lost some things special and ephemeral along the way.
