Last time on Pokemon Blue,

I know Oak is looking for me, but I have nowhere else to go. This is the only place I haven’t tried.

The question of where the hell Oak was hiding before this is a mystery for the ages.

OAK: It’s unsafe! Wild POKéMON live in tall grass! You need your own POKéMON for your protection. I know! Here, come with me!

I was absolutely amazed by the awesome following coding this displayed. Also, I thought it was really cool that Oak’s little sidebang thing flipped from side to side as he walked instead of keeping it the same the whole time, which in retrospect is just an artifact of them flipping the walking animation sprite. I just liked that it was extra animation It’s more noticeable with Gary and I took it to be a sign of their relatedness and also that they just walked so determinedly it was messing up their hair.

Oddly, you don’t continue inside the lab. Upon entering, Oak moves while you’re stuck in place, and then you start walking.

Maybe there’s some coding problem with that, it always struck me as strange.

Time to get my first pokemon!

GARY: Gramps! I’m fed up with waiting!
OAK: GARY? Let me think… Oh, that’s right, I told you to come! Just wait!

Time to listen to Gary bitch and then get my first pokemon!

I imagine that Let me think… Oh, that’s right is commonly heard in the Oak household. Oak may be playing with a full deck, but he’s playing 52 pickup.

Anyway, let’s consider this scene. I really feel Blue is the better color scheme and it’s still strange to me that Red is considered the iconic one. While that’s undoubtedly in part to encountering it first, look at the images here. The pokeballs are red and white. They and other things contrast well with the blue background. Red, in contrast, has sickly green pokeballs on a red background.

Here, FARLA! There are 3 POKéMON here! Haha! They are inside POKé BALLs. When I was young, I was a serious POKéMON trainer! In my old age, I have only 3 left, but you can have one! Choose!

One of the results of the anime version dominating fandom as the real opening is that all the little tidbits here went largely unexplored. What happened to the rest of Oak’s pokemon? This might be a hint pokemon age within pokeballs, or, if he let them out, at least age at a much faster rate than humans.

Also, you’ll note that Oak has absolutely no plans to use one to go get more pokemon. Combined with his mention earlier about how pokemon are needed for protection, and you’re left with the sense collecting pokemon is too hard for someone his age. Recall also his emphasis on how he knows that it’s dangerous to go out without a pokemon.

Finally, continuing our grammar sidecommentary, you’ll notice that POKé BALL is followed by a lowercase s for the plural. It’s quite clear that important terms are written in caps, not because there’s any broader reason.

GARY: Hey! Gramps! What about me?

While Gary will proceed to be more of a dick, he’s pretty understandable in the early parts. His grandfather can’t even remember his name, then talks to the other kid without acknowledging him. Yellow manages to fix this moment of non-complete-hate.

OAK: Be patient! GARY, you can have one too!

So, this sets up the whole rival thing where he’ll pick whatever’s strong against what you pick.

If you check to see if Gary’s okay with this, we get the promised rival dickery already!

GARY: Heh, I don’t need to be greedy like you! Go ahead and choose, FARLA!

So everyone agrees I get to go first. In replays, you’ll realize he’s presumably doing this to get the advantage over you, which makes his greedy accusation all the more galling, although in fairness, he never actually says that’s his reasoning and he does have a fifty-fifty chance of picking the stronger one by chance.

So let’s consider the pokemon. Clicking each pokeball shows you the pokemon and the pokedex data about it. And since I think it’s pretty definite from the description earlier that pokedex data is your own observations, this is probably best read as you releasing each pokemon for consideration.

As I mentioned, I restarted my first game. Part of this was because, when presented with the booklet, it said bulbasaur was the easy choice and charmander the hard one. Like so many people, I bristled at the idea I wasn’t awesome enough to handle things and picked charmander, who I nicknamed CHARMER. I thought that was so damn clever of me, because it was a nickname based on my charmander’s name! Brilliant. (I later topped myself in a later playthrough with CHAR, which was just as applicable after evolution.)

I got as far as Cerulean before deciding to restart. In some ways this is probably a good way to play for the first time, because it let me make various mistakes with TMs, moonstones and other limited resources before my real playthrough.

Point is, no way.

It does look cool with its colors all done in blue, though.

I’ve never given much attention to squirtle. It always felt boring to me. It’s the best of the three for OT interactions, being the most cuddly, but that’s fic and here it’s just a sprite connected to a bunch of stats.

No question about it.

Oak informs me the bulbasaur is energetic, and I’m asked if I want to nickname it. Nope nope nope.

And Gary saddles himself with the stupid charmander. Haha, sucker.

One of the things I used to do when abusing the fact I could trade with myself was pick charmander, then trade for a bulbasaur with cut, thus making Gary have the type weakness and letting me skip the SS Anne for…reasons. This ensured that in the endgame Venusaur got its butt kicked with ice beam. I was not a clever child. In my defense, it took everyone a while to work out that pokemon type and move type wouldn’t always be the same and that you needed to consider the latter as well as the former when sending out your pokemon.

GARY: My POKéMON looks a lot stronger.

Charmander does have the higher attack stat of the two, but Bulbasaur will be sturdier.

See that final pokeball? It’s going to sit there all game, taunting you with the only one of that pokemon in existence, saying that it’s Oak’s last one. Obviously he isn’t using it, so who cares if it’s his only one? You can’t offer to trade for it. You can’t promise you’ll bring it back once you’ve evolved it. You can’t even look at it long enough to fill out that pokedex slot – yes, despite displaying the data for you now, the pokedex you get only records pokemon you see after that point.

This is not because we just don’t have a pokedex, as the pokedex counter still exists. And it’s not quite as simple as being a way to force trades to fill the pokedex, because after all, the starters all evolve twice, so you’d still need the next two forms.

More, the pokedex will record pokemon you see past this point despite you not having it yet. And at other points in the game seeing pokemon information outside of battle will count for pokedex credit, so that’s not it either.

A little-considered game fact is that no one actually knows all the pokemon there are at this point – that’s why your pokedex will keep track of both those you’ve caught and those you’ve only seen. As long as you’ve seen more pokemon than you’ve caught, you obviously haven’t caught them all. But if you have the data for everything? Then you must have completed your pokedex. So instead, you don’t get to keep the pokedex data you see initially, but it will record you seeing your rival’s starter in a second. Since getting the other starters was one of the biggest challenges in the original games (as no one could breed new ones, so you could only get a first form starter from someone who didn’t evolve theirs or was willing to restart for you, and yes, you had to save to trade even back then), this was a great way to ensure the pokedex wasn’t filled anytime soon.

And that’s right! In the original, you fight immediately after getting your first pokemon, while both are the same level. Every generation after this point is easy mode.

For some reason, the game will change the color of the upper half of the sprite as the battle opens.

Then you go back to solid once you’re in place. I could never make sense of this. It seems like the idea is to cause your hat to be a different color, but the red continues a few pixels past the brim, and it’s only there for a few seconds anyway.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll probably start off with offensive attacks (in so much as you can even figure out what the attacks do), then start using defensive ones one you realize that’s an option – which is the worst order to use them in, and your rival will kick your ass. It’s a good lesson about the importance of status-effecting moves, one you’ll quickly forget because in short order you can just power through anything.

This is what you’d see after your first attempt.

The game is also a lot more punishing with the critical hits. If you’re in a battle, you can reasonably expect at least one critical hit. That can work in either side’s favor, but mostly the game’s, as you’re more likely to be trying to whittle a pokemon’s health down for capture or relying on the status altering moves critical hits bypass as part of a plan.

The only thing the game doesn’t have going for it is that the AI is an idiot. It’ll do things like keep using a status move after it’s maxed out.

So, even if you know what you’re doing, a lot of the first battle boils down to luck.

That’s why the potion is considered so important. It’ll completely refill your pokemon’s health, which is usually enough to guarantee a win. Personally, I hoard my healing items (frankly, all items), generally splurging them all at the end while I try to force my way past the elite four.

The sweet taste of victory! And leveling!

As you can see, SPECIAL is just one stat. This will have numerous ramifications, but the most obvious gamebreaking comes from the fact the ultimate boss pokemon is special based and that it’s a foundation of the game that you can get any pokemon that exists. As a result all endgame battles with other players were just a matter of seeing who can beat the other person’s mewtwo.

This is an important component of why Gary is such a great rival. His response to your every victory is just “What a bizarre fluke that had nothing to do with your own ability!” You always want to beat him, but you’re never satisfied by any particular victory. At the end of each battle, you should be thinking you can’t wait to power your way through the next areas to get to him again.

Also, to my recollection the game was pretty consistently on the side that pokemon win battles, not people. So Gary isn’t necessarily shifting blame here.

Regardless of if you win or lose, Gary then says Okay! I’ll make my POKéMON fight to toughen it up! FARLA! Gramps! Smell you later!

As you can see, names aren’t consistently all capitalized. Unless it’s their plot-important term, it’s written normally.

Anyway, with that he swaggers off.

Lest you think his bit about fighting is just because he’s a rival, we can talk to Oak.

Gary’s comment was just supposed to be a clue about what you’re supposed to do.

Anyway, let’s see my pokemon.

As you can see, Bulby here has two types while the other two have only one. Of course, charmander will eventually gain a flying type. It’s an interesting decision to not try to make the initial starters exact mirrors. And odd, with that in mind, that Nintendo turns its back on this idea so completely with those stupid fifth-gen monkeys. The fact the starters weren’t perfectly balanced was one of the charming things about the game, and gave a better sense that these were actual creatures, not just designed for our convenience. On a broader scale, the same thing is true about how unbalanced they are for the early game. My bulbasaur will have the advantage at the next two gyms. Squirtle will do well against the first and struggle with the second, and a charmander will be at a disadvantage for both. Things aren’t arranged so all choices are equal, and they certainly don’t adjust the initial gym based on what pokemon you picked!

Sticking poison on all the grass types, though, that’s more just a dumb move. Not sure even now what the reasoning was. It also ensures they can’t really stand up to a mewtwo despite their nice special (defense).

There’s also no way of knowing what the actual power of a move is. You can figure out what most of them do by trial and error, but it’s quite hard to figure out exact strength differences, particularly once type interactions get going.

Well, that’s all for Pallet Town! We’re off.