As you can see, at first glance this is, if anything, a step backward. It’s nice that water is finally blue, but everything is now the same general muddy color, rather than being clearly defined as red in a world of blue. (Or green in a world of red, if you made the mistake of buying Red.)
It really can’t be overstated, when looking back on Yellow, how huge a deal the slightest changes were. The games had been so completely static. The stuff we saw in Yellow was like the realization of all the absurd codes, where the familiar would be suddenly changed in some way. Your house and the town were the same, and then you enter Oak’s lab and suddenly there’s a few pixels of difference: the three pokeballs are now only one.
You see, as Gary continues, he says more words! While the pokegods and such are the best remembered codes, there were less important rumors that were just based around getting NPCs to react at all – that if you talked to someone enough times they’d say to stop bugging you, that if you showed a completed pokedex to this person or that, they’d react. There’s a bird catcher who references the legendary birds when you beat him and I once deliberately avoided him on one playthrough and came back with the birds in tow to see if he’d react.
So what if what Gary says isn’t a particularly big departure from the previous games? It’s still exciting. Maybe next Oak’s pokedex speech might be reworded! Maybe he’ll finally give me a mew if I get everything!!!
And yet, despite my glee at every minor difference, I’ll be blindsided by what comes, even though it’s pretty easy to figure out if you put the two together.
I was partly thrown off by the fact Yellow was based on the anime, and so once again I was expecting things to go as in the anime, where Oak has one pokemon left by the time you show up and it’s Pikachu the mighty.
Note also the trashcan. As you can see, that’s been added so you can’t avoid what’s coming. Once I found out, my first plan was to try to get out of the way, but apparently my avatar’s tiny limb buds can’t move it.
Well, time to summon Oak and get my pikachu.
Huh. Nothing’s happening. Do I meet Pikachu out here? Can I run free before Oak realizes I’m escaping?
Or it could just mean I go one step forward.
That they do, Oak.
While the original games are a nightmarish cludge of coding, you can still feel the effort being put in. The lab’s been altered for the sake of a cutscene and this has been tweaked too because how could Oak trigger a battle if he didn’t walk into the grass after you?
But anyway, if we have no pokemon, are we doomed? Will Oak show his pokemon at last?
Nope! But on the other hand, new sprite!
And the change is going to be what the whole gimmick of Yellow hinges on.
…no, I’m not going to fall for this.
ARG WHY CAN’T I GET TO THE OTHER SIDE?!
Fine. No choice.
Fuck you, Oak. In Blue, you just seemed unable to do anything about Gary’s general rudeness, but this is ridiculous.
No! It’s mine!
So since Gary got my pokemon, I get his, right?
AAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGG
Now yes, technically in Yellow this is the only wild pikachu, but that doesn’t much matter if you’ve played the previous games and know you should be able to catch one yourself in the first dungeon. Come to think of it, this whole scene probably comes off very differently if this game is your first one. Then it’s just YAY I GOT PIKACHU STUPID GARY PIKACHU CAN BEAT ROCK TYPES!!!
…at the cost of attacks being black and white, for whatever reason.
Really not a difficult battle.
A line that frustrated me. If keeping my pokemon out is an option, why can’t I do it with any of them? Why am I limited to only if they outright hate pokeballs?
Not impressed. Fitting, as I’ll not be impressed with the implementation of this, much as I like the idea.
It seems very little attention was put into gameplay itself. Pickachu
made the first gym so hard. I always caught butterfree because I didn’t
know about the effectiveness of double kick versus rock type when I was a
kid.
Butterfree didn”t last long, and was typically replaced by the three starters, eevee, and snorlax; you only caught one of those using a pokeball. Yellow lost the spirit of having the player make their own team by having npcs giving you most of your pokemon.
For some reason I went with Golem and Alakazam to round out the team. The net result was having Alakazam vs. Alakazam battles in the Elite Four that would generally take an age and a half.
Uh, there was enough attention put into the gameplay to specifically weaken Brock’s Pokémon by two levels for Yellow and put Mankey on Route 22, both pretty clear attempts to help the player make up for Pikachu’s disadvantage. Nidoran learning Double Kick early is arguably also for that purpose. Though I also went with Butterfree, what with it being my first game and not yet having any idea Mankey was a Fighting-type or that that would be good against Brock.
Personally, while I’d eventually ditch Butterfree, I’d always have an early-game bird (Charizard can learn Fly in Yellow, but you’d generally get Fly way before Charmeleon evolves) and never used Snorlax. Even Eevee sat in a box until after I’d completed my Pokédex and wanted to fill the unoccupied sixth permanent spot.
Sounds like someone never tried playing the original games with charmander.
Also, it’s not like you have to use the pokemon you’re given. I’d always train new pokemon in any new game.
Charmander could do damage to onix and geodude a bit better than pikachu if I remember correctly. I was like 11 though.
You have to use pikachu no matter what so I prefered to go back to Red and Blue. The colors were the most impressive thing about Yellow to me.
It wasn’t until gen 2 that I started to like enough pokemon to have different parties each time.
You don’t have to use pikachu “no matter what”; you can always just put it in the PC. Sure, it’ll negatively impact how much it likes you, but after you get bulbasaur there’s no reason it needs to like you anymore.
Well yeah, charmander have ember and rock types have horrible special defense. But if you pick charmander, not only do you have to slog through IT’S NOT VERY EFFECTIVE! but then get through all the other rock types in Mt Moon, and then you face Misty.
Ember really destroys all the early game bugs and most of the trainers on Mt Moon don’t use rock types. The other starters don’t really shine until Brock. Charmander could easily get burn off and win. Bide also made it easy to defeat Brock. Misty was typically put off until after the detour to Bill’s house if you did go with Charmander.
I did not know what the special stat was when I played generation one. It was easy to figure out in gen 2 when they had special attack and defense.
I actually never played yellow – by the time I managed to get my hands on a Gameboy and a copy of Red, the hype for Gold and Silver was already starting. A remake of the game I already owned with some cosmetic changes didn’t seem worth the the allowance money when there was a whole new game to look forward to.
This retrospective is going to be very informative!
There’s pros and cons. Yellow’s a generally cleaned up version, and there’s Pikachu following you, and it’s got COLORED POKEMON SPRITES!!! but Red’s probably the better choice just because they fixed the missingno glitch in Yellow. I think that also Yellow has the fewest total pokemon available.
The Mew glitch does work in Yellow and can cause Missingno. encounters! I’m not sure Yellow version Missingno. triggers the item duplication glitch, though.
I actually did play Yellow first. The idea of wild Pikachu existing in the later games was profoundly weird to me, as was the idea you could just catch wild Pikachu in Viridian Forest in Red and Blue. Pikachu was special!
That’s how I felt when I first encountered them in Blue! But Yellow clearly shows that Oak gets the pikachu by the usual method of capturing a wild one, and yet there’s no explanation for where all the others are. You can understand why you don’t find snorlax running around because they’re from “the mountains” wherever those are, but Oak never says it’s odd there’s a pikachu there because pikachu are usually found at (inaccessable location).
“If keeping my pokemon out is an option, why can’t I do it with any of them? Why am I limited to only if they outright hate pokeballs?”
And that’s why Heartgold and Soulsilver are awesome. :3
And then they removed the option again in the later games.