Interpretation, Nostalgia and EarthBound: Let's Play Pokémon Blue Part 1

Photo developed March 24th 2000, 3:56 PM.

March 17th, 2000. Until this day, video games were to me some mysterious artifact of the movies, so far removed from my daily life that they took on a magical quality. I had experienced them by proxy in Sabrina the Animated Series, The Simpsons and in Princess Bride, but these were all tangential reflections of what mass culture thought video games were like back then and not accounts that could inform me with any kind of accuracy. So on my seventh birthday, as a reward for reading through a hundred books that year, my grandma sent me a gold and silver edition Game Boy COLOR and a copy of Pokémon Blue Version. To call Blue my first video game is slightly inaccurate; I had brief encounters with Ocarina of Time, Space Invaders 64 and BattleTanx at six years old, when my mother celebrated her Ruby Jubilee by taking my elder sister to Paris for ten days. My father, not wanting me to feel left out, borrowed his work friend's Nintendo 64 and a small stack of game cartridges that kept us occupied for the week.

(I still remember hunting around Fry's Electronics for help with the console's audio cables. We only had one speaker and needed the system to not be playing in stereo.)

Everything with Ocarina and BattleTanx was fleeting and transient. Experiencing a Zelda game for the first time burned a strong impression into me and my modest collection of McDonalds tchotchkes, which became tools to reenact the setpieces of the Kokiri Forest and Great Deku Tree with. But Blue kindled something much more genuine, in part because unlike with Ocarina my dad wasn't sitting there gently edging me in the right directions. I was the only one looking at the screen and had less time limitations, so I could truly play with it. On the day that I first put the two AA batteries into my Game Boy Color and booted up Blue for the first time, I learned at least six new words. (For some time afterward until my mom corrected me, I would read potion as "pot-ee-an.")

I only partially understood what I had been drawn into at the time. Of course I had seen kids on the playground and after school with Game Boys for years, and the only game they ever were playing was Pokémon. (What other video game even had social elements?) One day we had all crowded around Arturo fighting the Elite Four on his pea green original GB. I remember being amazed when he fired off a Hyper Beam that left Lorelei's Cloyster with exactly one hit point, because to everybody else on the playground it looked fainted (in our words "dead") but Arturo just solemnly shook his second-grader head and said "one left." I knew vaguely about the Cable Club, the trading that went on at the playground, and had begged my parents for Pokémon every day of 1999. I wanted to have what my peers had, to trade Pokémon with them, to battle them.

I had no idea I was caught up in an overpowering cultural movement that had already been gaining ground for five years, nor where exactly I was in relation to the whole timeline of Pokémania. The initial peak of the frenzy was still a year off in 2001, but even submerged it would endure onwards until its (retrospectively inevitable) 2011 rebirth. What I came too late to see at the time was the initial cracking of the egg, those first precious moments when something living would emerge out of the hobby shops and electronics stores of 1990s Japan and take flight in the global village.

February 27, 1996. Roughly two hundred thousand Japanese children see a screen like this one in Red & Green. Gengar and Nidorino's battle becomes an iconic part of the franchise, and a year later would be immortalized in animation as the introduction to the anime series. The bombastic orchestral sound of the animated series isn't necessarily how Red, Green and Blue are remembered. In spite of the anime's fame, the commercial jingle quality of the games has both endeared itself to those nostalgic for a pre-9/11 world and found a place in the chiptune music scene.

The color palettes in the first three Pokémon games are flexible. Unlike Yellow Version, these games are not optimized for the Game Boy Color's advanced hardware, and are created with the idea in mind that you will be playing on a screen that displays different shades of green. The default palette is the blue one above, but it's not how I first experienced this game. The Game Boy line was not backlit until 2001, so when I got my hands on Blue rather than the coughdrop red character sprites and indigo backgrounds displayed above, I saw characters colored like Christmas ornaments and an overworld in a vibrant turquoise color struggling not to be washed out by my reflection. Since that effect of color depth can't be reproduced in digital media, I'm going to play around with the palettes a little. My playthrough of Blue will be begin in grayscale, achieved by pressing Left and B at the startup screen.

This Let's Play is dedicated to Lauri, who sold me this on eBay for $20. (It was a good deal! I gave you a 5-star rating.) On the technology end, I'm playing Blue by way of a Game Boy Player plugged into my Game Cube, but doing offscreen grinding and travel on my Game Boy Advance SP on the go.

Music: Routes 24 & 25

OAK: Hello there! Welcome to the world of POKéMON! My name is OAK! People call me the POKéMON PROF! This world is inhabited by creatures called POKéMON! For some people, POKéMON are pets. Others use them for fights. Myself...I study POKéMON as a profession.
Reproducing the sound of the first generation is difficult because of the hardware it was produced on. Digital recordings don't carry the same effect, as when playing Blue live the game generates the sounds in real time. The best description I have of the difference is that no single note sounds exactly the same from a live Game Boy, just like no single note from one instrument will sound the same every time. Recordings don't capture the minor imperfections or difference in environment of the sound, so they have a hollow affect to them.

I will, as with my other silent protagonist LPs, be embracing the role of the player character. The protagonist's canonical name is Red, sadly exiling Blue Version to the Pokémon apocrypha. "Gary" was originally Shigeru, a developer's joke about Shigeru Miyamoto contributing to the game ("Ash" was in turn Satoshi, as in Satoshi Tajiri) but these developer names were localized in English to come in line with the anime series.

OAK: This is my grandson. He's been your rival since you were a baby.

The name options are flipped for every version of the game, so that Red's rival is always Blue, Satoshi's rival is Shigeru and Ash's rival is Gary. Rather than run with one of these preset names, I've elected that our rival character will be Green, a version of the game that never reached American shores.

OAK: That's right! I remember now! His name is GREEN!

OAK: Your very own POKéMON legend is about to unfold! A world of dreams and adventures with POKéMON awaits! Let's go!

Music: Pallet Town - "Shades of your journey await!"

...Okay! It's time to go!
The SNES is a artifact of the time period. Every game in the series dates itself by showing some portion of the material culture of the time it was made in, whether that's the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in Blue, the Game Cube and link cables in Sapphire or the Wii in Black. I suspect when I boot up Alpha Sapphire for the first time, I'll find a Wii U waiting for me in my room. (A note: as a child I came too late onto the scene to know the SNES as anything but an emulated console. My first system was the Nintendo 64, so like the comment about color TV in Pewter city later on, this statement dated Blue Version to me as a less modern setting.)

While much ado has been made about the similarities between Pokémon and EarthBound, one of the significant differences between them is the portrayal of the home. The home in Pokémon is an empty, almost useless place. You have a PC and your mother in place of a Pokémon Center for healing your injured partners, but EarthBound and EB Zero took the idea of a mother-as-location and ran with it, making the home one of two places in which the player could eat their favorite food, find unconditional love and be provided with free healing unattached to services. Because the world of Pokémon has abundant free healing spots in every town, the significance of sleeping on one's own bed to recover is lost in comparison, and the closest the home has to a distinguishing feature is the Super Nintendo.

MOM: Right. All boys leave home some day. It said so on TV. PROF.OAK, next door, is looking for you.
In contrast to Itoi's home, Tajiri's is sparsely decorated and every feature of it is designed to push the player out of the nest. "All boys leave home some day" says the mother, "It's time to go!" says the SNES, "Four boys are walking on railroad tracks. I better go too." says the TV, and with these the player is pushed out the door by the narrative.

A point about the presentation: the player character is always at the center of the screen in Blue. The world rotates around them to give the illusion of movement, hence the screen appears to be of varying size due to the black border encroaching on the visible space. Indoor locales also don't use the entire screen for their presentation, compacting them into a smaller space but still rotating that space around the player character. Hence if you're not standing at the exact center of the room, the entire room won't be visible. This gives indoor locations a claustrophobic feeling, while outdoor environments are the ones with true scrolling and seemingly endless space in all directions. Whether you are inside or outside is always obvious in Blue, and I think that this is a deliberate sense of space created to remind you of the natural environment.

Each town in Pokémon has a distinct image to it. Pallet town is the rural Japan Tajiri knew in his youth, lifted from Machida city circa 1975. Most areas in the first generation Pokémon games preserve the rural landscape, but Pallet (or Masara town in its native language) is especially noted for its lack of major geographic features. Just take a look at the town's spritesheet. It's entirely made up of residences and Professor Oak's laboratory. Compare the real Machida, which while heavily paved over, still has some lingering places where you can see the original landscape peeking out. Machida's urbanization was Tajiri's inspiration for the region-touring nature of Pokémon, so it's only fitting that we begin in Tajiri's hometown as he knew it in his youth, immortalized in pixel form.

NPC: You can now store and recall items and POKéMON as data via PC!
At the same time, Tajiri's society is not made up of raging technophobes and Luddites. Pokémon comes embedded with a message of harmonious technology that benefits the natural world as much as it does humanity. Insofar as we can tell, the Pokémon are not prisoners of humanity, but a piece of nature that humanity has a responsibility and relationship to.

OAK: It's unsafe! Wild POKéMON live in tall grass! You need your own POKéMON for your protection. I know! Here, come with me!
Pokémon has a neat conceit of how to progress. In order to advance the game's storyline, you have to pick up on the cues to fly the coop and leave yourself

It's not until the player displays the agency to leave on her own that the professor comes to her aid.

Music: Oak's Research Lab

GREEN: waiting!
OAK: GREEN? Let me think... Oh, that's right, I told you to come! Just wait! Here, TOUYA! There are 3 POKéMON here! Haha! They are inside the 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!
GREEN: Hey! Gramps! What about me?
OAK: Be patient! GREEN, you can have one too!
Pitchfork once put forth the idea that EarthBound is the story of two boys, one of them the hero of EarthBound/Mother 2 and the other the villain of Mother 3. I maintain something similar about Red & Blue. The first and second generation games are more about Green than they are about the player. From the moment of Green's introduction we see the same kind of Ness-Porky relationship play out, with Green envying the player character and insisting he be put first instead, soon to be followed by attempts to sabotage his neighbor's journey. Note that Oak didn't just forget Green's name in the introduction, he also forgot he invited Green at all. The player is firmly the object of the professor's concerns.

It's at this time that I want to call attention to Green being the rival's canon name in the Japanese text. The international release changed this to Blue to match the versions released, but in the process lost what seems to be an intentional pun--"green with envy." Envy is the rival's primary character trait, which all the haughty arrogance and efforts to prove himself better stem from.

POKéDEX: is said to spout from the tip of its tail.
I think that on a personal level, I'm seeking closure to an era. There are unresolved tensions left over for me over never completing the original Pokédex despite loving the whole process of catching Pokémon, never really setting permanent bonds in place with my Pokémon, and never taking them to the apex of what they could be. As a kid I wanted to believe that I could be really great at the games, and yet never proved myself right or wrong. I want to attain mastery over Pokémon in the course of this playthrough, if at least only in these first games that I left incomplete.

Red & Blue started the tradition of having a Fire, Water and Grass-type Pokémon to start with. Two of the starter Pokémon acquire secondary types as they evolve, with Charmander eventually becoming a Fire/Flying type as Charizard and Bulbasaur becoming Grass/Poison. In the long run none of the starters are especially strong, but whichever one we choose will determine the "difficulty level" of the early game because it'll be the rarest Pokémon in the party with access to one of the core elemental types. Charmander has the hardest time because while he has the decent Scratch, he only gets Ember at level 9 which has no real type advantage against the Ground-type Pokémon of the early game and is at a clear disadvantage against the Water-type Pokémon in the second gym. By the time he has an opportunity to shine, he's outclassed by Vulpix.

POKéDEX: shell. Powerfully sprays foam from its mouth.
Squirtle is much better off. Early game Ground-type Pokémon are extremely vulnerable to her Water-type moves, and while the second gym's Pokémon aren't weak to her, she does make a wash of it and come out neutral. It's once you reach Vermillion city's Electric gym and later that things start to get difficult, but with access to an amazing late game move that also serves as transportation, and a gym that's weak to her type right at the end, Squirtle stays solid pretty much throughout the whole game. I picked her when I started Blue as a kid, but now I've come to prefer Bulbasaur for entirely different reasons.

A quick and dirty way to gauge how much a Pokémon will bring to a team is to look at its base stat total. After that you consider how those stats are distributed. Speed and Special are the most important stats in R&B, because in this generation Special is both an offensive and defensive stat. Defense or Attack are next depending on what types of moves that Pokémon relies on. Charmander, Bulbasaur and Squirtle's fully evolved forms' base stat totals are all 425, while the strongest Pokémon in the game have about 500 points each. The best non-legendary Pokémon has a total of 450, and this is the standard by which we'll be judging our team. We want to get as close to that as possible, but keep in mind that the distribution is more important than the total and that the lowest usable stat total is actually about 375.

POKéDEX: The plant sprouts and grows with this POKéMON.
I don't see any of the starter Pokémon sticking with us to the endgame of this playthrough, so I like Bulbasaur for her utility. She acquires status-modifying moves as she levels up that are useful for catching Pokémon by paralyzing them, putting them to sleep, etc. Bulbasaur has the easiest route with the game progression, because the first two gym leaders use Pokémon weak to Grass-type moves, as does the last leader and several major characters throughout the game.

Choosing a starter is typically one of the most difficult choices for beginning trainers, and even today I find it vexing to make a decision in modern games. For example, in Alpha Sapphire the status move argument doesn't work for Treecko, and Torchic is actually the only one that can modify status with her Burn moves. But Mudkip has early game access to accuracy-modification and turns into a great bulky attacker late game that has a lot of Squirtle's strengths and none of her weaknesses, while Torchic's evolution has the advantage of increasing her own speed every turn until she gets to the point of running laps around the competition. Which one will I choose? I won't really know until I get there. It helps that later generations generally made the starters much better Pokémon overall.

OAK: So! You want the plant POKéMON, BULBASAUR?
>YES
GREEN: I'll take this one, then!
GREEN received a CHARMANDER!
GREEN: My POKéMON looks a lot stronger.
The rival character always chooses the Pokémon with a type advantage over your own. Originally a character trait of Green, this has since become a generic feature of rivals in the Pokémon games.

GREEN: Let's check out our POKéMON! Come on, I'll take you on!

Music: Trainer Battle

Blue is one of those games that teaches you how to play by throwing you into the fray. Unlike Fire Red and Leaf Green in 2003, the "tutorial" for this game is to do everything yourself. Perhaps it's better this way; the learning experience is completely organic, and I certainly had no trouble understanding it intuitively as a seven-year-old. Each filled-in Poké Ball by the trainers represents how many Pokémon they have remaining. We open by each sending out the first one in our roster, and if we have any remaining after it goes down, we choose a different one to send out.

On the surface it looks like Charmander has a distinct advantage going into this. Bulbasaur has lesser Attack (49 to 52), and Charmander's Scratch has a base power of 40 versus Tackle's 35, in additional to a 5% lead in accuracy. Bulbasaur has 49 Defense to Charmander's 43. But because both of their attacks are Normal-type and can't bring their strengths and weaknesses into play, the way the damage formula is calculated, they'll both actually deal ~5 damage except in case of a miss or critical hit. As near as I can tell Green's Charmander always has 20 HP, so this matchup comes down to speed...and Charmander outspeeds Bulbasaur, so he does have one slight advantage. If both Pokémon keep going at it with physical attacks ad nauseum, Charmander will always win assuming no misses or crits. This is where you can tell that the enemy AI in Blue isn't that great. It can't recognize that it's already in a winning position and that there's no incentive to use Growl to improve that position (in fact Growl is how most players beat Green, because he's throwing his turns away trying to lower your Attack) but it will still use the move by sheer random chance. This decreases Bulbasaur's Attack until she's switched out, but since it can't actually become less than 1, all we have to do is commit to a long game of repeatedly Tackling until Charmander goes down. As long as we don't deviate from offense, Charmander will eventually drop. As a failsafe I have a potion I grabbed from the PC at the start of the game (it's a recurring secret in every game that you start with one if you know where to look) which restores 20 HP. The potion is what really wins the battle for us.

GREEN: I picked the wrong POKéMON!
We get 175 yen out of this. More on Pokémon's currency troubles later, but every fight won grants the player prize money. This is never elaborated on meaningfully, but can be seen as a product of JRPG conventions. Ever since Dragon Quest, Japanese Role Playing Games have followed a design rule that the player loses half of their money during a game over, then returns to life at the nearest healing location. In DQ this was always King Lorik's castle, which has become the fundamental basis for all RPG inns. This money-losing process still happens in exactly the same way in Blue, but now can happen to the opponent as well. I doubt the player was intended to think about it too hard, as I've never known anyone that did, but how this is rationalized in-universe is probably equivalent to chess/Go matches with payout. If you really wanted to force the unsavory comparison, you could compare it to gambling over cockfighting.

GREEN: POKéMON fight to toughen it up! TOUYA! Gramps! Smell you later!
With this out of the way, we're finally free to leave Pallet town and get a move on with our adventure.

Music: Route 1

The overworld in Pokémon was almost certainly designed with Tajiri's past criticisms of role-playing games in mind, considering that just a year before development on Blue began he was reviewing RPGs in Game Freak magazine. In particular his scathing criticism of EarthBound Zero can be seen reflected in Red & Blue. Tajiri took issue with the massive scale of rural America in EB Zero, arguing that "a video game is not something that should make its player uncomfortable." To let his words speak for him;

"There’s no doubt that Itoi intended to portray the towns and forests realistically, but it was so spread out that people found it hard to navigate. If there’s a chance it places a meaningless burden on the player, realism needs to be toned down into a caricature. That’s one lie that’s forgiven in video games."

Tajiri addressed these ideas when working on Red & Blue. Kanto is not a realistically portrayed world, but makes the concession that each house you see stands in for several unseen ones, the buildings are compacted so that they're much bigger on the inside than on the outside, and even the trees are only about four times the size of the player character's sprite instead of eight or ten. Tajiri didn't want anybody to feel uncomfortable in Kanto. It's a welcoming environment.

If it seems that I'm addressing EarthBound overmuch, it's because of the unique relationship the games have to Pokémon. The first generation of Pokémon games saw contributions from a staff of about twenty people, with four of them having worked with Creatures Inc. (formerly Ape Inc.) which had previously worked on EarthBound Zero and during the work on Blue was also developing EarthBound in association with HAL Laboratory Inc. Hence Pokémon is riddled with devices lifted from that game. Creatures has never actually been listed as aiding with R&B, although a tradition of attributing them has grown in more hardcore gaming circles, potentially to give the games greater legitimacy or detract from them as derivative.

The total shared staff were Tsunekazu Ishihara (special effects manager for EarthBound, producer on R&B), Hiroyuki Jinnai (coordinator for EarthBound, attributed as assistant scenario writer in the North American credits, game scenario for R&B), Kazuyuki Yamamoto (coordinator for EarthBound, special thanks for R&B) and Shigeru Miyamoto (supervisor for EarthBound, producer for R&B.) Miyamoto also worked on the preceding game EarthBound Zero/Mother along with Takashi Kawaguchi, who served as coordinator for Zero and producer for R&B. Jinnai, Yamamoto and Kawaguchi are the most likely reasons behind Pokémon's similarities to past games. Pokémon began development in 1990, the year after EarthBound Zero was released in Japan, and the first two games were finally published in February 1996 followed by Blue in '98 and the international games in '99. (Flyers with conflicting release dates for December of the previous year, and copyright data from 1995 suggest that the game was completed in late '95.) EarthBound debuted in '94. So at times I will be addressing the games' connections to one another, including some continuous gameplay ideas and criticisms Tajiri made of Itoi's work that he sought to overcome in his own.

(Hirokazu Tanaka has been spuriously attributed with composing the music for Red & Blue in various discussion forums like EarthBound Central and Bulbapedia, but this is false attribution. Tanaka worked on the Pokémon anime series, music and sound effects for Red & Blue were handled entirely by Junichi Masuda.)

Each road in Kanto is classified as a numbered route between locations for ease of navigation, proceeding chronologically from your starting point to each subsequent town. So route 1 is between Pallet town and Viridian city, route 2 is between Viridian city,Viridian forest and Pewter city, route 3 is between Pewter city and Mt. Moon, and so on. Later games would carry on with the route numbering so that the first route of Hoenn is route 101, up until fifth generation Black & White saw fit to start over from scratch with their own route system starting against from 1. Subsequent games followed this trend, and Alpha & Sapphire are the first new games to use the old numbering system since the fourth generation.

Of note is that the melody for Route 1 reoccurs in the first opening theme for the anime series, Mezase Pokémon Master. At the 48 second mark to about 1:04 we hear the chorus of Route 1 (0:15 to 0:23) given life. Tanaka seemed to take a shine to arranging Masuda's music, which was used throughout the anime series but with the benefits of live orchestra attached.

Music: Pokémon Center

NPC: town ahead. They don't charge any money either!
Route 1 funnels you towards Viridian city's Pokémon Center before you get into the city itself, forcing an introduction to it. While many jokes about Kanto's healthcare system has been made at the games' expense over the years, I wonder how much this generation's views on socialized healthcare were reinforced by an experience encountering a Pokémon Center on one of the region's digital frontiers with five Pokémon fainted and one on her last legs. If this were Shin Megami Tensei then cover charges for healing one's demons would be anticipated in advance, but by contrast in Pokémon I think not even the desolate cutthroat American stereotype of Orre could charge you for doctor's bills and not be called a dick. There's a presumption at work that trainers and Pokémon are surely entitled to care.

Beginning in the fifth generation, Poké Marts were integrated into Centers as part of a single system. The early game of Blue is littered with supplies if you know where to look--there's a potion in the house PC, a man who will give you another one on Route 1, and one hidden in a tree at the north end of Viridian city. So the only real incentive to visit Marts in the early game is for Poké Balls.

From Pokémon Master Trainer.

One of the consequences of the deliberately interpretive symbolic sprites and barebones descriptions of the first generation is that players of these first games turned to supplementary materials to illustrate their understanding of the Kanto region. To an extent Nintendo regulated these materials, with the trading card game, anime and licensed manga series serving to provide background on the in-game objects. However, as Pokémania grew in scope and the number of licensed products expanded, Nintendo steadily lost its ability to regulate these depictions, leading to players using products like the Pokémon Master Trainer board game to enhance their experience.

Illust. Keiji Kinebuchi

Compare the Master Trainer potion card above to Keiji Kinebuchi's potion card from the official TCG. The board game equivalent is clearly patterned after the idea of potions being a standard RPG magic potion a la Legend of Zelda or Final Fantasy, while Kinebuchi's was informed by the item's name in the original text キズぐすり kizugusuri "wound medicine" rendered in kanji as 傷薬 "ointment." Kinebuchi's was ultimately the version adopted by the rest of the franchise, in the anime series as well as the later games. Kinebuchi was instrumental in the initial development of the franchise, and it's unfortunate that he's disappeared since 2002 because we really don't know what's become of a key supporting artist. I once wrote an undergrad paper on the influence and style of Kinebuchi's CG artwork as a dedication to him, although it was mostly just something I wrote to get past a class with a professor I didn't like.

Note that the hiragana form of kizugusuri きずぐすり appears on the base of the potion in Kinebuchi's artwork. Unaltered Japanese text is common in the various Pokémon media, and for many Americans like myself the series was their first exposure to foreign text. The effect is rather like seeing Pseudo-Kufic script in Renaissance art, both from the perspective of those the art was created for and now in retrospect from the view of those it was lifted from. The effect of going back to old materials I first familiarized myself with as a child and then being able to read portions of them in a different linguistic context is somewhat disorienting, but also exciting.

CLERK: Hey! You came from PALLET TOWN?

CLERK: His order came in. Will you take it to him?
TOUYA got OAK's PARCEL!
CLERK: Okay! Say hi to PROF.OAK for me!

Music: Viridian City - "The Eternally Green Paradise"

OLD MAN: This is private property!
WOMAN: Oh Grandpa! Don't be so mean! He hasn't had his coffee yet.
Blue is not so far removed from the RPG formulas that it arose out of. Every town has a quest or two to be solved, with most of them taking the form of a gym leader battle. In this case it's an old man that hasn't had his coffee, but the solution (delivering Oak's parcel) is unrelated and the real quest is beyond where he's blocking the road. It's also a pretty well-known instance of censorship in the Pokémon games. The old man was originally passed out drunk, and you couldn't pass until he's sobered up.

Getting back to Professor Oak's is easier than getting to Viridian. This is another design concession made to ease the Pokémon experience. On the way back you can avoid the patches of tall grass that wild Pokémon appear in by proceeding down a series of ledges that can be jumped off. They can't be climbed up though, which I remember vexed me as a child. It was difficult to recognize the ledges as a three-dimensional decline rather than a flat line drawn in the ground. Once that understanding set in, I started to understand the visual depth of Kanto as a locale with different heights and irregular geography.

OAK: How is my old POKéMON? Well, it seems to like you a lot. You must be talented as a POKéMON trainer! What? You have something for me?
TOUYA delivered OAK's PARCEL.
OAK: Ah! This is the custom POKé BALL that I ordered. Thank you!
GREEN: Gramps! What did you call me for?
OAK: Oh right! I have a request of you two. On the desk there is my invention, POKéDEX! It automatically records data on POKéMON you've seen or caught! It's a hi-tech encyclopedia! TOUYA and GREEN! Take these with you!
TOUYA got POKéDEX from OAK!

OAK: To make a complete guide on all the POKéMON in the world...That was my dream! But, I'm too old! I can't do it! So, I want you two to fulfill my dream for me! Get moving, you two! This is a great undertaking in POKéMON history!
GREEN: Alright Gramps! Leave it all to me! TOUYA, I hate to say it, but I don't need you! I know! I'll borrow a TOWN MAP from my sis! I'll tell her not to lend you one, TOUYA! Hahaha!
Said map can be acquired by seeing Green's sister in his house, and will be done so offscreen. We can actually get five free Poké Balls from Oak, but it involves not going out and buying any now that they're available at the Mart, and going to fight a boss without catching other Pokémon. I'm not enough of a resource conservationist to delay catching them all any sooner.

In my more formative years I was in the habit of buying Poké Balls in units of six, one for each Pokémon you're able to carry, but since Ruby and Sapphire I've been conditioned to get them in packs of ten instead. From the third generation onwards you're rewarded with a Premier Ball as an incentive for buying in bulk, and I can't break the habit now. Note that for many Americans, the Poké Mart is their first time handling Japanese money; the currency icon for "Pokédollars" was invented for the American localization, and in Japan the games have always used the yen. But while the name of the currency has changed, the units of value of have not. Hence the real value of a Poké Ball is about $2 because it's listed for 200 yen, antidotes for common in-game poisons are 100 yen, and so on. The Premier Ball is granted for spending the yen equivalent of $20 in later games. Through a virtual medium, millennials have become acquainted with a currency in which the normal number of exchange is 100 rather than 1 and 10000 rather than 100.

Music: Wild Pokémon Battle

To start off my Pokémon catching spree I hop over to route 22, west of Viridian. I know that I'm in the minority when I say that I enjoy filling the Pokédex, but that's because it isn't just another abstract number you build up like in any other RPG. It represents a genuine expansion of tools. Every Pokémon you catch is another way to explore the game, a different batch of moves and divergent abilities that give you new ways to battle. Over time they can even become a partnership of sorts, and with the introduction of dog show-equivalents something more than just a battle tool. In terms of actual Pokédex completion, I can only reach a maximum of 125/151 Pokémon in this playthrough, but one of the advantages of having a physical copy of the game is that I can trade for the remaining 26 Pokémon.

Route 22 has the richest biosphere of the early game areas, comprising both of route 1's possible encounters and then two more species on top of that. Rattata is pretty much defined by his Speed early in the game, which at higher levels helps get off Super Fang, his signature move. Super Fang halves the opponent's HP, and can be put to lethal use in combination with its counterpart Hyper Fang, an 80 base power Normal-type attack that can induce flinching, causing them to miss a turn. Long-term he's not better in any way than the other Pokémon we'll pick up here, but in terms of what you have to work with for the early game fast is better than nothing. Spearow is longer lived, because unlike some Flying-types she actually gets Flying-type moves early on.

The only Pokémon that can't be found on route 22 is route 1 & 2's Pidgey. He can eventually evolve into a decent attacker with access to Rest (two turns of sleep in exchange for restoring all HP) which can make a viable move out of Substitute (reduces her own HP by a quarter to create a shield that can take damage equal to quarter+1) and Toxic (deals poison damage that increases incrementally each turn.) His final evolution Pidgeot is part of a whole line of Pokémon that can sit safely behind their Substitutes, chucking Toxic to stack damage and then Resting out of the HP loss, but there are a couple flaws with him. The first is that he doesn't get access to Horn Drill, the marquee Flying-type attack of the first generation. That's okay, he still has Hyper Beam (move with an incredible base power of 150 that has a turn of recharge afterwards, but if you KO the opponent in generation 1 there's no recharge on it.) The second problem is that Pidgeot just isn't the type of Pokémon we're looking for. Substitute-Toxic is cute, but the primary damage dealing Pokémon in Red & Blue is Tauros, who will mow through Pidgeot while also clipping his wings with paralysis. Every other Normal-type Pokémon in generation 1 has access to Hyper Beam, and there's nothing that really sets Pidgeot apart from his contemporaries Tauros, Chansey and Snorlax. His lack of Flying-type moves also means that it's difficult to eke out a position for himself versus the Pokémon that other Flying-types are normally Super Effective against. Resorting to Toxic is usually symptomatic of a lack of options, because you won't want to choose Toxic over one of the more viable movesets.

This pokes at one of the weaknesses of first generation Pokémon, which is still occasionally true today. Within the confines of a single type, many Pokémon tend to be better versions of one another. Exeggutor is a better Vileplume, who is in turn a better Venusaur, etc. There is a defined hierarchy inside the types so that there is a best Normal-type, best Fire-type, best Water-type and so on. Newer games like Alpha Sapphire defy this by having multiple Pokémon within a single type fill specific niches, or having alternative bests within a type like Mega Aggron to Mega Metagross. You have a fast setup sweeper with expansive type coverage and snowballing offense, versus a versatile defensive wall that is impossible to two-hit knockout, and instantly stalls the game the moment it's in play. Mega Aggron gives time for status effects and weather conditions to play out and offers varied gameplay, all without invalidating Skarmory, its non-mega evolution equivalent that comes with a different type combination, recovery moves and quicker setup. Contrast that to Blue, where I shouldn't even be talking about Pidgey or Spearow because Dodrio is the optimal Normal/Flying type, and likewise Rattata isn't up for consideration because Tauros and Chansey are the best pure Normal-types. In a world without unique abilities and expanded move pools, lesser Pokémon just don't have the raw stats and/or moves to compete with their better versions. Why should they? From a battling perspective, Dodrio may as well be the same Pokémon as every other Normal/Flying-type, just better.

Next are Nidoran♀ and Nidoran♂, the only species of Pokémon in the first generation to display gender differentiation. The two Pokémon are biologically the same species, but have divergent evolutions based on gender, as well as uniquely allocated stats and movepools. Both the Nidoking and Nidoqueen subspecies' evolutions have a base stat total of 415, but Nidoking puts more into Speed and Attack while Nidoqueen focuses on HP and Defense. Both Pokémon have completely identical movepools and type combination (Ground/Poison) with a final set that looks basically identical to Pidgeot's. Substitute, Rest, Toxic, Hyper Beam. The difference being that Pidgeot gets a 1.5x multiplier added to his Hyper Beam for being of the same type as the move (the "same-type attack bonus" or STAB) while Nidoqueen is actually beefy enough to do the Substitute/Rest game. Hyper Beam can be dropped for Body Slam, which has 85 base power instead of 120 but a 30% chance of paralysis and no recharge time, but this is Tauros territory. Ground/Poison is a poor typing; it has a 2x weakness to Ground, Water and Psychic, which means double damage from Earthquake, Surf/Hydro Pump and from what is the optimal type in generation I.

(For several reasons, the game is biased towards Psychic-type Pokémon. Five of the best Pokémon are at least partial Psychic-types, the only banned Pokémon in Red & Blue are Psychic-types, and this is driven by a factor we'll see in this very chapter: there are no good Bug-type Pokémon. Prior to the second generation games Psychic was vulnerable to only Bug and Ghost-types, and with the former effectively a nonentity in these games that put the weight of controlling Psychics on a handful of Ghost-types whose secondary types were all Poison, which made them weak to Psychic. And with the exception of fixed damage moves, Psychics were invulnerable to the only Ghost-type moves available. Effectively there is nothing to control Psychic-type Pokémon in Blue, making them into an ultimate type surpassing all others. Chalk another point up for the EarthBound fans.)

Pokémon data in the first and second generation games is somewhat different from third generation onwards. I'll be using archaic terminology to discuss this so that it agrees with the documentation you'll find on other sites. Every individual Pokémon has deter values (DVs, derived from "determinant;" the modern equivalent is individual values or IVs) which are basic raw stats with a minimum of 0 and maximum of 15. Any Pokémon can have maximum DVs in every one of the five stats, but not all will. Deter values are set in stone the moment a wild Pokémon appears and cannot be increased or decreased. If you catch two Pokémon of the same species like two Rattata, each of them will have different DVs in most cases. Although there are no sexes in the first generation games, the Attack DVs are used to determine it in the second generation game, so we can actually infer a Pokémon's sex based on its Attack DV. I don't have the time to actually pin down what Bulbasaur's Attack DV is, but I can say that it's almost certainly male because female Bulbasaur only occur when their Attack DV is 0 or 1.

DVs are the primary deciding factor in what is and isn't a competitive Pokémon. For every 50 levels, they add an additional point in whatever stat they support. I will eventually be building a competitive Blue team on my cartridge, and it will be absolute hell to do. Unlike in later games, first generation Pokémon has no breeding. Being able to breed Pokémon is crucial to getting perfect deter values because a certain number of DVs are passed down from parent to child, which means that through multiple generations of breeding individual Pokémon with one or more perfect DVs you can eventually create a great-grandchild with five or six perfect DVs. With this whole microgame of breeding not in the picture, that means the only way to get perfect DVs is to catch a Pokémon with them. The probability of this happening is approximately 1/65535, which is dumb and it's the reason why training Pokémon that focus on their Special stat offensively is so much easier than training those that use their Attack stat. Special is both an offensive and defensive stat, so all Pokémon need it to be maxed out, but Attack is only used for physical offense so Pokémon that don't have physical moves won't need to have perfect Attack DVs. That 1/65535 chance is as opposed to breeding probabilities of hatching a perfect DV Pokémon that range between 1/64 and 1/512. Much as I hate running around waiting for eggs to hatch, breeding made some things a lot easier.

The other deciding factor for competitive monsters is stat experience (Stat Exp.; modern equivalent is effort values or EVs) which is gained whenever Pokémon are defeated, adding its base stats to your Pokémon's own. However, stat experience is only applied when your Pokémon levels up or is taken out of storage. Stat experience caps at the common maximum for all 16-bit computer systems, 65535, but the game rounds down to 63002 in calculation, so earning the last two thousand or so points is unnecessary. An example of how it works is that Mew has 100 base stats in every category, so defeating a Mew would add 100 stat exp to every category for the Pokémon that beat it. This is the most wildly different factor between generations, as from Ruby and Sapphire onwards, "effort values" have a combined maximum value of 510 and 255 in each stat. So you could have 255 in Attack and 255 in Defense only if every other stat had an EV of 0. This makes dividing up a Pokémon's EVs a serious obstacle for building Pokémon in later generations, but it's also less grueling than fighting a couple thousand enemies to build stat experience in Blue.

OLD MAN: Ahh, I've had my coffee now and I feel great! Sure you can go through! Are you in a hurry?
>NO
OLD MAN: I see you're using a POKéDEX. When you catch a POKéMON, POKéDEX is automatically updated. What? Don't you know how to catch POKéMON? I'll show you how to then.
This is the tutorial on catching Pokémon, but I'm already more familiar with it than the old man. Sorry old dude!

OLD MAN: First, you need to weaken the target Pokemon.
The Old Man is the only non-player character to get a back sprite in Blue, and is integral to the most infamous glitch in video game history. I will not be attempting it, but may discuss MISSINGNO. and the Old Man in the future, if only for its cultural footprint. The infamy of the glitch is significant enough that the Old Man was taken out in the FireRed & LeafGreen remakes, to prevent anyone from recreating the conditions for the glitch.

While the old man has put us on the subject of the Pokédex, I won't be transcribing all of its entries for this LP, but I think it's interesting how we've come to perceive the Pokédex based on media influence. Japanese kids that only had the original games to play with likely envisioned the Pokemon Zukan as a physical encyclopedia. The device is represented by the sprite of a book, after all. Going back through the old game manuals, I'm surprised that there isn't any artwork of the Pokédex in them. Our only sources for its appearance are the trading card game, the Pokémon Special manga, Dengeki Pikachu and of course the anime series.

I found Dengeki Pikachu's Pokédex as charming as its world, but the latter was probably the biggest influence on how westerners envisioned their Pokédex: a semi-cognizant artificial intelligence that responded to commands to identify specific Pokémon. There's significant nostalgia in the United States for the voice of Eric Stuart, who portrayed the Pokédex in the anime during its first three seasons, and comparable levels of antipathy for Rachael Lillis' feminine portrayal of the "character" in the fourth season. While in the Japanese run of the anime the Pokédex's voice actor has been cycled out with each season, American viewers didn't become so accustomed to change until around 2007. (Personally I've become attached to Unshō Ishizuka's portrayal in Best Wishes.) In light of everyone having "their" voice in mind, the refusal of newer Pokémon games to adapt voice acting is probably for the best.

POKéDEX: enable it to tirelessly climb slopes and walls.
Caterpie's final evolution has a base stat total of 385 which puts him quite a ways behind even the likes of Pidgeot. The most common setup for this line is double powder--running both Sleep Powder and Stun Spore on the same set. The former induces sleep, the latter paralysis, and the reason for this is chiefly because of the sleep clause rule in most competitive Blue tournaments that state you can't put more than one Pokémon to sleep at a time with your own moves. There's no limit to paralysis, so once you have your one sleep off, the rest get hit with paralysis until that one faints. In the video game championships there's no such limitations, so double powder is put into question. (The Stadium 2000 VGC tour did implement both a sleep clause and a freeze clause.) Throw in Mega Drain (Grass-type, 40 base power, takes 50% of the damage dealt and restores that value to the user's hit points) and Psychic (90 BP) and you have reasonable type coverage along with a status inducer that can force the opponent to switch Pokémon or be locked into free turns of damage. Unlike in later games, Pokémon waking up in Blue use up their turn by waking up, so there's no prediction involved with putting a sleeped Pokémon back to sleep once it wakes up. You get at least two free turns of damage off of Sleep Powder, then when they wake up put them back down and resume. If they try to switch out, the sleep clause forces you to use Stun Spore instead, and if there's no sleep clause you just keep throwing Sleep Powder on everything that comes in. It still requires outspeeding them though, and with Butterfree's stats he's not doing that. Bulbasaur's final evolution Venusaur actually has the stats and most of the movepool to do this too, but can't learn Stun Spore in Red & Blue. The optimal version of double powder is Exeggutor with his 520 base, although a lot of trainers prefer to replace Stun Spore with other moves because Explosion is considered an important part of his gameplay.

All of the Pokémon I caught are coming in at different levels varying between 2 and 5, so I have to spend a half hour ferrying them from tall grass to Pokémon Centers and back grinding levels. I want to complete the Pokédex in this playthrough, and keeping everyone current until they reach their final evolutionary stages will be essential to that. Few Pokémon will see use once they're fully evolved; only permanent team members can make the cut, and while we'll have two possible options by the time of the second badge, most possible members won't debut until the halfway point in the game. Once my current party is prepared, I head off to the far western side of route 22.

Music: Rival Appears

GREEN: Hey! TOUYA! You're going to POKéMON LEAGUE? Forget it! You probably don't have any BADGEs! The guard won't let you through! By the way, did your POKéMON get any stronger?
This is an optional battle that could trigger Professor Oak giving us 5 free Poké Balls, if we won it without catching any Pokémon or buying Poké Balls already. I'm taking it on for the challenge.

I use Bulbasaur as my blind lead because he can set up Leech Seed. Even if I switch to another Pokémon, Leech Seed will continue to drain HP from its target and pass it on to my active Pokémon each turn. As a Flying-type, Pidgey has a type advantage over Bulbasaur, but his primary move at this level is Gust, which is a Normal-type move in the first generation instead of Flying-type. This means that it doesn't deal Super Effective damage, and Bulbasaur is free to set up Leech Seed without fearing a reprisal. Pidgey does have Sand-Attack, a nondamaging move that reduces accuracy and can leave winning the battle up to the RNG. In general though Sand-Attack is just delaying the inevitable and potentially setting up Charmander, it's not something to be worried about.

Leech Seed misses on the first turn, so by the time it goes and Bulbasaur's gotten a Tackle in, three Gusts has him at critical HP. I switch him out for Metapod, to capitalize on his heavy Defense. With X Defense and Leech Seed refunding a hit point every turn, Pidgey can only 5 hit KO him barring crits, which gives time to get in Tackles to wear Pidgey down.

But Green briefly turtling on Sand-Attack prevents some of those Tackles from connecting, forcing a switch to Nidoran♀ by the time Pidgey is at half health. Nidoran♀ has Scratch, the better version of Tackle that Charmander comes with, and has similar defensive parameters to Metapod at her level.

An important thing that I forgot to turn off is shift versus set battles. The game defaults to shift, which lets you change Pokémon after getting a hint about what the opponent is going to send out next, while set doesn't give any option to switch. Actual player-versus-player battles default to set, so right now the training wheels are still on. I take advantage of it anyway and send out Bulbasaur as a suicide to set up another Leech Seed, which proves risky because Charmander outspeeds him, but Green opts to use Growl so it all works out. I immediately send out Rattata after that lucky break, who pulls off a Leech Seed-assisted 4 hit KO.

GREEN: Awww! You just lucked out!

Music: Route 22/Pokémon League Front Gate

GREEN: tough trainers! I have to figure out how to get past them! You should quit dawdling and get a move on!

The Pokémon League serves much the same role for Blue Version as Queen Mary's Castle did in EarthBound Zero/Mother. I would attribute this to some combination of Kawaguchi and Miyamoto's experience with that game. The means by which gameplay progression in Pokémon is measured is identical to that of both EarthBound/Mother games, with the eight badges that the player collects corresponding to the eight melodies. In Mother/Zero the player was expected to periodically return to Queen Mary's Castle after collecting each melody to verify it with her and receive hints about where to progress next, while in Blue Version the player is expected to make similar returns to the Pokémon League and use each of their badges to get past the guards at each stage of the League so that the next one will hint at where to go next. In Mother this answered a fundamental question of what the player would take away from the game. Unlike its vapid contemporaries Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, Itoi's game pushed the limits of design by trying to leave the player with something meaningful, a simple song.

Screenshot originally captured by Leavemywife.

It worked beautifully. The eight melodies are one of the most memorable tunes in the medium because of how they are repeated at each juncture of the game, gradually training the player in how to sing them just as a mother might impart a melody on her child. (Mother/EarthBound veterans may question in retrospect just how Queen Mary could forget a tune like the eight melodies.) The eight badges for Blue are a weaker device, because the thing they impart on the player is restricted to in-game benefits. Each badge adds a 9/8th bonus to the player's Pokémon's stats, and the effect is so invisible as to be unnoticable. The boost doesn't have any effect in linked battles, so the player takes very little away from it. At best, the eight badges have been imparted on this generation as a visual idea. Each badge has a distinct appearance with enduring popularity over later games' equivalents. But perhaps what the player truly takes away from Pokémon is her team.

GUARD: Only truly skilled trainers are allowed through. You don't have the BOULDERBADGE yet! The rules are rules. I can't let you pass.
The Pokémon League makes use of three musical themes that each correspond to a different branch of the game. The Boulder Badge's musical space is lifted from the theme used for Viridian forest.

MAN: This POKéMON GYM is always closed. I wonder who the LEADER is?
The real "quest" of Viridian city is to unlock its gym, and that quest will span the majority of the game.

To get on our way to the Boulder Badge, we go north through route 2 to arrive at this resthouse on the threshold of Viridian forest.

GIRL: RATTATA may be small, but its bite is wicked! Did you get one?
WOMAN: Are you going to VIRIDIAN FOREST? Be careful, it's a natural maze!
In terms of game design the layout of the early game routes and how they connect to Viridian invites another EarthBound comparison. This is probably a general idea that can be applied to many of Nintendo's mid to late 90's JRPGs, but the territory is divided up into a definitive beginning area, a compartmentalized rest stop between and then the first dungeon proper. To me that evokes the area maps for Onett, the traveling entertainer's shack and the Giant's Step dungeon. This may not be something unique to these games.

I'll leave off here at the threshold to the forest. This has been a more than substantive start, and next time will see us literally venturing into the woods to confront the wild unknown. See you Tuesday.