Those of you who got to grow up in the modern era of games won’t understand this, but that opening was mindblowing. There were colors! Colors appropriate to what they were showing!! And there were more than two of them!!!Pokemon Yellow would also be the last gasp of the insane rumormill of the first-gen games. See the surfing and flying pikachu? They were clearly sprites, and in Pokemon Red and Blue, if you could see it, it was something you could stuff inside a pokeball. How exactly a pikachu covered in balloons would work didn’t matter. It was there. It wa s probably part flying or something (you must remember at this point there were no new pokemon and people were currently going mad over “pikablu”, the teddy bear with a pikachu tail that your friend’s cousin’s friend’s cousin had totally seen on an ACTUALFAX POKEMON CARD in Japan, because as far as we knew, there would otherwise be no new pokemon, since it wasn’t like there was a whole new game coming out soon… So really, the idea a pikachu with balloons tied to it was something you could get was totally reasonable.
So yes, let’s dive into the next game.
And it’s the same thing as always. Oak’s a different color, but you could accomplish something similar by pressing select and an arrow key in the previous games to swap between various color pairs. All that’s changed is you can’t change Oak’s color this time. Eh.
New sprite though! Yes, that was a shock. When I first discovered information about Gold and Silver, I would also be amazed at the fact the sprites were slightly different in each game.
But that seemed to be it. Same protagonist you name, same rival…
Just in reds and oranges not too far off from what you’d have seen if you played Red. And I had, since by then I owned both cartridges. Was this just a version of Red with a pikachu opening?
Yes and no.
Yay!