Nerd Mentality

G/S/C in retrospect

Posted April 3rd 2010 by Oliver Chen.

Let me cut right to the chase: Pokemon Platinum is the best Pokemon game of its time. Gold and Silver have kind of settled down to second place over time.

That being said, I should probably backpedal and explain where this is all coming from. A few weeks ago, Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver were released, remakes of what most consider the best Pokemon game of all time. In addition to giving the games a large graphical and sound upgrade, HGSS also folds in the modern Pokemon gameplay system, including the addition of Natures, the physical/special movetype split, and double battles. It also adds features not found in any previous Pokemon game, such as the ability to fully navigate the game using only the D-Pad and touchscreen as well as a few minigame shenanigans in the form of the Pokeathlon and Pokewalker (which just so happens resemble the Pokemon Pikachu tamagotchi-like from last decade).

Normally, one would think that piling all these new features onto nostalgic gold would create the best Pokemon game to exist, but herein the problem lies. The underlying games, Pokemon Gold and Silver, are not that good, and the remakes suffer for this reason.

The most glaring issue relates to the pacing of the game, particularly how the game becomes open-ended after clearing the third Gym and after arriving in Kanto. In the first case, you immediately gain access to three different Gyms, while in the second, the entire continent opens up to you (barring a certain large sleeping Snorlax). Due to this nonlinearity, the developers saw fit to set the trainers you can battle at a universally low skill level. The result? By the time your progression converges again and you have to fight Clair or Red, your party is horribly underleveled, but you've already beaten every trainer close to your skill level. The only thing left for you to do is to order your murderbeasts to headbutt everything that moves in the vain hopes that you can get enough experience to level up a bit.

These two bottlenecks seem to line up well anecdotally with problems other trainers have had on the internet. The amount of time wasted on pointless and boring grinding is stupid and adds artificial difficulty to the game. Was it this bad in the GBC games? Maybe my twelve-year-old self was able to handle this back in the day, but no longer. On the other hand, I was able to get my mons in Platinum up to around LV70 without dying from boredom since there were always a large handful of trainers around my skill level wanting to battle, and there was no shortage of compelling things to do in Sinnoh to take my mind off the grind I was in the midst of completing.

Also noteworthy is the lack of diverse Pokemon types and movepools before opening up Kanto. You can get completely wrecked by a Gym Leader or Elite Four member due to a glaring weakness in your party, or because you have very few moves supereffective against that trainer's specialty type. It's not your fault - the wild Pokemon you encounter are relatively homogenous from area to area, so your team will tend to end up that way, too. Wild Pokemon swarms have barely changed since Generation II, so again, poor game design on behalf of Gold and Silver. The new Safari Zone and Pokewalker goodies offer wild Pokemon that were previously difficult or impossible to find in Johto, which helps alleviate this problem to some extent. But again, these things take the place of advancing futher in the game, whereas you'd run into Pokemon with relevant typing or moves on the way to your next objective in Diamond/Pearl/Platinum.

My final beef with Gen II, and the one most subjective, is that the routes in Johto are just boring. Nearly every route can essentially be boiled down to:

• A short, straight grassy path
• A short, straight watery path
• A cave

Whereas Sinnoh's environments have much more variety and design. Swampy terrain, deserts, northern reaches covered in deep snow; heck, even Kanto has more interesting geology than Johto. When I went to the first remake-exclusive Johto route, I was completely blown away by the differences in level design. The sheer cliffs and tiered pathways are just completely different from the rest of Johto. I guess this issue has to do with the limitations involved with including two continents on one Game Boy cart back in 2000, which is just unfortunate.

Long story short, playing HeartGold and SoulSilver has made me appreciate where the series has gone on to since the second generation of Pokemon. HGSS has made some indispensable additions to gameplay (full touchscreen navigation makes traversing menus so much snappier), but the original content in Gold and Silver being not nearly as good as I remember them being really drags down the game. So until Generation V gets officially revealed sometime next week, Platinum takes the crown from G/S/C.

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