Recommend me a Pokémon game

[Herr Schatten]

The feature in the latest issue of Retro Gamer magazine brought to my attention the fact that I'm one of the two or three people in the world who have never played a Pokémon game in their lives. I wonder if I'm missing out.

My interest is mildly piqued now, but I find the number of games confusing and I don't know where to start. So please recommend me one of the games. I'm not necessarily after the most refined entry in the series, just the overall most enjoyable. Which one is it? The original? One of the proper sequels? One of the remakes?

I have the hardware to play each incarnation on except for a 3DS, so the latest games are out. Other than that, I'm open for suggestions.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Never played any either, only because I don't like the stories of the batteries not lasting long. The way I play games nowadays, it's a deal-breaker.

[Pretas]

None of them. Play SMT instead.

[Mortificator]

Crystal. It's still 8-bit and has that early Pokemon style, while being more fleshed-out than the first generation.

[Bananamatic]

black 2/white 2 is easily the best out of the first 5 generations

or the blaze black 2/volt white 2 romhacks if you want to go that way, more content and way higher difficulty (without any grinding)

Never played any either, only because I don't like the stories of the batteries not lasting long. The way I play games nowadays, it's a deal-breaker.

the batteries were only an issue in the first 2 or 3 generations IIRC, more so in the second because of the internal clock
my yellow cartridge battery lasted for over 10 years, gold/silver slightly less

the games get way too much shit imo, it's a decent RPG but it's still aimed towards younger players somewhat so the difficulty is really a bit too low

[drauch]

Yeah dude, those batteries are a problem now, but they take about 5 minutes to replace by even the most noobish solderite, and they'll last another 10ish years. 10 years for a battery isn't too bad in my book.

Gold/silver got me hooked about two years ago, and seems to be about the highlight for some fans, although starting at the beginning is still a fun experience.

[BryanM]

Pokemon 2, aka, Silver/Gold/Crystal, was the creative peak of the series. Nearly everything about it was improved tremendously from what came before; the only way they could have been any better is if they went with a true Gameboy Color mode for the art, instead of going the just enhanced Gameboy style. [1] I'd recommend Crystal for the battle tower (the only offer of difficulty in the games; they can be pretty damn complex when your opponent is trying to actually win), and if you can play it with a fast forward feature, it would be much more fun.

Alternatively just play whatever newest one you can. Pokemon Black or White, 1 or 2 in your case, according to the OP. It ultimately doesn't matter much - each game in the series after 2 is just a slight remake of the one that came before it. Extremely conservative and only of interest to new generations of customers (kids) or those who feel like playing through the exact same game again, slightly remixed.

Bonus - Cool kids start with the NES version first.




[1] And it is truly hideous some of the palettes they selected. The monsters are drawn in greyscale first and foremost, so you get ugly ass speckling on tons of them since they use soft outlining. Outside of questionable color choices to begin with.

[opt2not]

Gold edition, w/ the emulator hack (if you're playing on a flash device, or emulator). This hack enables the ability to catch all pokemon and not rely on trading:
http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/1109/

[cave hermit]

My personal favorite pokemon games are the 2nd generation remakes for the DS (Heartgold and Soulsilver). Those games are pretty much packed to the brim with stuff to do, and like the original gold/silver they last almost twice as long as most pokemon games since you get to visit Kanto and fight all the gym leaders from the original games.

[cicada88]

I was in this situation awhile ago. I went with Soul Silver for DS and I would recommend it. Other suggestions I got were Silver / Gold / Crystal if I wanted to go old school.

[quash]

If you've never played a Pokemon game before and you're only interested enough to play one game, I'd actually recommend Ruby/Sapphire for the GBA. It has fewer monsters than Gold/Silver, but nearly everything else is improved. Not to mention it's probably the shortest Pokemon game (haven't played since Diamond/Pearl, so forgive me if I'm wrong).

I'm also a big fan of the calm aesthetic of those games. The first Pokemon games are simply off-putting and odd, while the second games are cleaner looking but still occasionally jarring. Ruby/Sapphire looks nice all around, and while it didn't push the GBA to its limits or anything, it made use of the extra power with neat little effects like footsteps in the sand, grass parting when you ran through it, etc.

[BPzeBanshee]

the batteries were only an issue in the first 2 or 3 generations IIRC, more so in the second because of the internal clock
my yellow cartridge battery lasted for over 10 years, gold/silver slightly less

the games get way too much shit imo, it's a decent RPG but it's still aimed towards younger players somewhat so the difficulty is really a bit too low

My Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald cartridges lasted 10 years. And as I recall 2nd gen (Gold/Silver/Crystal) didn't have a real-time clock and replacing batteries in those is easy, 3rd gen (RSE) did.

RSE however has a RTC with a check in place regarding the existing save file (which doesn't need the battery to save btw unlike previous gens) that makes it a pain to get stuff like berry growth working again without a bit of Action Replay hackery. I mentioned the details I went through with this in another thread, but if you go the emulator route of course this won't be an issue. I recommend NO$GBA, one of the older versions since the newest one seems to have framerate/stability issues.

Obviously I'm advocating for Ruby/Sapphire, but I'm thinking Emerald may be the better choice if you go the GBA side as its essentially what Crystal is to Gold/Silver on GBC. Otherwise as BryanM said, doesn't matter so much which one you do. Personally I've owned all of them from 3rd gen onwards except Black/White 2 and Platinum.

[null1024]

Heart Gold or Soul Silver.
Most bang for your buck, has a fair few Pokemon that would be familiar to those who aren't too acquainted with the series, and is probably the best Gen 4 version [I still say it's the best Pokemon version in general]. HG/SS is also pretty easy.

Although, I still love Gold for the GBC. It's one of the few RPGs I've bothered playing through multiple times. It's the Pokemon game with the least stilted dialogue [R/B/Y have moments of complete silliness, and from Ruby onwards, characters tend to talk in terribly cheery ways that just sound wrong, and it intensifies like hell in Diamond/Pearl/Platinum -- and what they changed in HG/SS is a bit affected by it too], it has great music [not as catchy as R/B/Y, but more technical and interesting], great visuals for the GBC [not the absolute best -- it still had to run on a grayscale GB, which had a slower CPU and less memory], and was fairly simple.

Either way, you want to play a Pokemon game set in Johto.

Even if you had a 3DS, I dunno if I'd suggest X/Y. They're pretty, but that's about it [cleared it in 20 hours exactly, and there's almost no postgame, so I restarted and haven't touched the game in forever]. I am excited about Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire though, hopefully they keep certain things from Emerald [like a proper Battle Frontier, fuck].

Yeah dude, those batteries are a problem now, but they take about 5 minutes to replace by even the most noobish solderite, and they'll last another 10ish years. 10 years for a battery isn't too bad in my book.

Gold/silver got me hooked about two years ago, and seems to be about the highlight for some fans, although starting at the beginning is still a fun experience.

my new Gold battery is held inside the cartridge with duct tape
It lasted quite a while before starting to fail though [13 years or so], noticed that the game stopped keeping time when it was turned off, had to keep doing the clock change code [which doesn't exist in Crystal, mostly because that was a left in developer thing].

[drauch]

my new Gold battery is held inside the cartridge with duct tape
It lasted quite a while before starting to fail though [13 years or so], noticed that the game stopped keeping time when it was turned off, had to keep doing the clock change code [which doesn't exist in Crystal, mostly because that was a left in developer thing].

Yeah, I've done stuff like that, and almost did it with my Pokemon Gold! I suck at soldering, but really, if you've got a cheapo and don't know what you're doing, you can basically wiggle some solder around and slather some on and it'll hold just fine.

[BPzeBanshee]

Yeah I went with the electric tape option myself. If it's the right stuff and you're precise about how you cut it you're not going to see it in the cartridge anyway. Unfortunately the GBA counterparts don't have a clock change code or anything like that, they have an additional hidden timestamp in the save file and if the RTC isn't matched to the timestamp RTC-based events STILL don't happen so save hacking or do a new game is the only way to go (and fuck doing that on my one save I've had since launch 2003 with 384/384 Pokemon caught).

[Herr Schatten]

Thanks for the recommendations so far. It seems like the second generation games or their remakes are the way to go.

Bonus questions:
Crystal's basically the same as silver/gold but with added goodies, right? So it's preferable to those two?
And do SoulSilver/HeartGold improve on their source material in significant ways or should I stick to the originals?

[null1024]

Thanks for the recommendations so far. It seems like the second generation games or their remakes are the way to go.

Bonus questions:
Crystal's basically the same as silver/gold but with added goodies, right? So it's preferable to those two?
And do SoulSilver/HeartGold improve on their source material in significant ways or should I stick to the originals?

Crystal is improved from Gold and Silver, so yes. If you go the GBC route, it's the way to go.
HG/SS is probably the nicest Pokemon experience you'll have [from little things like your lead Pokemon following you around, to larger things like more stuff to do after you've beaten the game, as HG/SS feature a full Battle Frontier to screw around in]. It expands a fair bit, and won't have any sort of battery issues in its lifetime [if you're purchasing a Gold cart, you might need to change the battery immediately]. HG/SS take their plot from Crystal. The entire UI is designed to be touched, which is something I dunno why they didn't implement in later Pokemon games.

also, there's a good deal more Pokemon in the remakes, although many are post-game only

Some of the changes won't matter too much to you [very improved battle system compared to G/S/C, but most of the details won't be apparent unless going against other people].
Some of the changes are much better [since the game ROM isn't completely full like G/S/C's, you now can go to the Safari Zone, Viridian Forest isn't cut down, certain areas are larger, etc].

I can't remember if the remake makes you do the [Johto] Gyms in a fixed order, G/S/C let you do the gyms after Goldenrod [except the last one] whenever you want.

tl;dr:
I'd just say go with the remakes. They're the most polished version, they take the improvements from Crystal, there's just more stuff to them.

[nasty_wolverine]

Dragon Warrior: Monsters

[soprano1]

HGSS, since you don't have a 3DS. Otherwise i would recommend ORAS, the RSE remake coming out on the 21st/28th of this month.

[BryanM]

Some of the changes are much better [since the game ROM isn't completely full like G/S/C's, you now can go to the Safari Zone, Viridian Forest isn't cut down, certain areas are larger, etc.

It's so fanservicey. Always thought there oughta be a version where you can select your starting zone, like in an MMO. Think a few of the Pokemon online fangames support that..

It's an annoying kind of thinking ("This needs to be like this!") because then you have all this other feature creep and then you're daydreaming about creating a "romhack" from a disassembled Pokemon 2 that makes it a true GBC game with every area in every game and every chinpokomon and you just have to shake your head and make the temptation go away. These are awful, awful ideas; the only game that needs less romhacks (and 100% clones, good lord that NES version) than Pokemon is Super Mario World, nobody but sperglords like us even play romhacks, and it would take hundreds of times longer than just making a clone of the damn thing from scratch.

Dragon Warrior: Monsters

Man is the second one so good.

Caravan Hearts..... what were they thinking. One of those times they did us right by not translating it. Saved us from the hurting.

[Despatche]

i don't know what's with this thread... gen 2 is ok, but not that good. the best games in the series are easily gen 3: ruby/sapphire/emerald and firered/leafgreen (remakes of gen 1). they have the best overall design... they completely exceed the earlier games, and none of the later games have dared to even match it

It's an annoying kind of thinking ("This needs to be like this!") because then you have all this other feature creep and then you're daydreaming about creating a "romhack" from a disassembled Pokemon 2 that makes it a true GBC game with every area in every game and every chinpokomon and you just have to shake your head and make the temptation go away. These are awful, awful ideas; the only game that needs less romhacks (and 100% clones, good lord that NES version) than Pokemon is Super Mario World, nobody but sperglords like us even play romhacks, and it would take hundreds of times longer than just making a clone of the damn thing from scratch.

fixing the game's inconsistencies is not "feature creep". smw needs less hacks because it's not nearly as good of a game as smb3 to begin with... besides, the only reason it even has so many hacks is because Some ROM Hacker happened to make a child-friendly level editor for it

[BryanM]

We're all old people here and our flesh resembles that of raisins.

I remember getting tired of having to wait an eternity for them to localize the original games (took them three freaking years) so I played the damn original in Japanese. When you don't know how to read the squiggly letters on the screen, a Charmander with four fire attacks suddenly doesn't seem so bad. I... am possibly not the only person itt to have done that.

It was a terrible time, back then. All we had was Last Bible and SaGa to sustain us. Dark times, indeed..

[cave hermit]

By the way, you should keep in mind that Pokemon games (of all generations including DS and maybe 3DS) are EXTREMELY popular targets for counterfeiting. Unlike most pirate carts that look obviously fake:


Pokemon counterfeit carts look extremely similar to the real things:


The counterfeit carts usually play just like the real carts, but they have a nasty tendency to corrupt save files at random, or if you attempt to link them to another game.

I think I also read that the DS generation of counterfeit carts will show a completely different game as a preview (like for some random licensed spongebob game) on the system menu.

[Strikers1945guy]

Not sure if Im the only one but if you only ever play one I would say Emerald on the GBA.
Ruby / Sapphire / Emerald was by far my favourite series. The town and environment diversity, all the huge water areas and underwater stuff, every little detail in this series was great imo.

[shmuppyLove]

Twitch Plays Pokemon was my favourite.

[professor ganson]

Love Pokemon games. Just started Pokemon: Alpha Sapphire this evening. Mudkip rules!

Interesting to read all the Pokemon Black 2 love above. Some guy at Gamestop convinced me to buy Pokemon Y instead. But I enjoyed what I played of the latter, so all is good. I just found a copy of Black 2 on eBay for a reasonable price, and am looking forward to that.

The one Pokemon game that was a disappointment to me was the recent strategy rpg. The stages were really nicely designed and the gameplay was interesting, but it was way too easy. All they had to do was introduce a few more advanced difficulty levels and the game would've been golden.