/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9457647
Incoming mountain of text.

I never said it was a replacement, Gen 1 is the one I had as a kid when it was new. Me and my brother actually emulated it before we got physical carts for Christmas, and we both knew damn well we wanted it portable and able to trade with others, even if we didn't have Game Boy Colors or a Super Game Boy. Both of us got Blue for some reason (maybe Red was out), but that was a minor disappointment and the game was still great.
I still like it a lot, it was a big hit for a good reason, a really solid entrylevel JRPG with a good premise and fun exploration, which was also paired with a great tie-in cartoon along with effective merchandising and marketing. The playground exchange and mythbuilding was also special, and something later generations of kids will likely never have (at least in the same way). It has flaws, there's things which don't work like intended, but it's still very playable, and most kids wouldn't notice them or know where to look for the more egregious ones. The little rough edges aren't a big deal.

The greatest strength I think is the setting, taking place in a contemporary world, rather than many RPGs being some form of medieval fantasy or a mixture of it. The setting is still pretty fantastical, even sci-fi at times, but it's overall a more relatable setting than most RPGs I had seen, and the anime really helped spur my imagination of how the world would look like past the functional abstraction of the game. There weren't any streets or sidewalks in the game itself, no highways with cars, with towns only being a few houses, but your fantasy fills in those gaps.
The progression of the worldmap is smart, there's crossing paths, dungeons you have to move through to get to the other side, paths initially closed off which you return to later, optional paths or even complete optional dungeons, etc, and different locations have different Pokémon to fight and catch. This design is executed extremely well as a whole.