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To start this entry out I wanted to mention that like other titles in the list, this was part of the 2019 Games List and also like others, got updates. Most of this was written in 2019 and the writing has been preserved to represent that (with a few touch-ups). The title listed in the Index is titled as "Pokémon Gold (Gen II)" with that indicating that this also covers the other "Generation II" games, Pokémon Silver and Pokémon Crystal. The 2019 review uses "Pokémon Gold and Silver", "GS", and "GSC", those all refer to them as a group. One other delay from this was I had in mind a big sub-site, freed from the shackles of Bulbapedia et. al. but considering that Nintendo had to publish basically TWO books to cover everything between the two games I'm not sure if that's especially practical. There's not much I can say about these that aren't covered better elsewhere.

I wrote parts of this a while back, but figured it was high time to cover this game since I bought it for the 3DS in the spring of 2018 (it was easier than trying to replace the battery on the cartridge, and it just feels weird playing it on the computer) and eventually completed it a year later.

To really start out, we need to go all the way back to the year 2000, before Pokémon Gold and Silver was even released in the U.S. when my brother (who was in high school at the time) procured a ROM of Pokémon Gold that was supposed to be translated to English. Well, not really. There was a professor named UTSUGI, and other romanized names of towns (like Violet City being Kikyou City, or Blackthorn City being Fusube City), but most of the text was basically garbled trash (at least Kikyou gave me the opportunity to tackle my older brother, proclaiming "I got to Kick You!"). It was a weird game, with the original Pokémon you could fantasize that YOU were the Pokémon trainer going from town to town but the world Pokémon Gold & Silver was heavily inspired by Japanese culture with the first "dungeon" being this large tower with a shifting brown thing in the center that looked a bit like a brown-colored Game Boy.

It was a testament to how really basic the Pokémon games were, that despite the text there wasn't much reading to be involved (can't imagine the hand-holding the later games do). With a more complicated like EarthBound, which I had just finished prior to writing the bulk of this review (fitting since EarthBound was developed by Ape, which was later dissolved and re-structured into Creatures), reading is required since you would have no idea what to do otherwise. Like with most other games, GSC holds up a lot better in my memory than actually playing it (especially from following up from EarthBound). How many of us named the rival (canonically Silver) "???" because that's who he said he was? It is also less balanced than it should be. In the first game, Brock, the first gym leader, was a real challenge that could destroy you if you just went straight for him after Viridian Forest. The gym leader of Violet City, however, is a complete pushover who uses notoriously weak Bird Pokémon, and catching a Mareep south of town (despite being a sheep it grows up to the powerful Electric-type Pokémon Ampharos) will easily take him out.

On the surface GS and the new world of Johto looked like a full-color version of Red, Blue, and Yellow with lush colors that weren't really seen in a lot of mainstream Game Boy games those days (the "Oracle" series of The Legend of Zelda would come in the next year, and those games looked fantastic compared to the garish color palette of Link's Awakening DX), but that wasn't everything. They added a way to actually see the experience level of your Pokémon shoot upwards when defeating other Pokémon, but the one of the biggest "cool features" of Gen II was the 24 hour clock. This would turn out to be a bit disappointing later when the internal battery would run down and die faster than other games of its ilk, but being able to walk around in the game world and suddenly it turn all dark because of hitting 6pm (must be winter in Johto) was mind-blowing at the time (morning was a bit less subtle and rarely seen due to the schedule of a kid, except Saturdays).

While the main eight badges of Johto was a bit shorter than what Red, Blue, and Yellow had with significantly easier dungeons (no real equivalent to Mt. Moon, Rock Tunnel, or Pokémon Tower), in the original Pokémon games, there wasn't much to do after the Elite Four besides gain access to the Unknown Dungeon and add Mewtwo to your party, a real game-breaker in some aspects that would've been handy to have fairly early on. But in GSC you get access to Kanto, the retconned name of the original "world", which was set up from the beginning (why would you start on Route 26, otherwise?) Kanto allows you to beat eight more gym leaders in any order though it's a bit broken in that it's a game where all the challenges have been completely neutered and everything has been removed. Viridian Forest has been "cut down" to just shrubbery, Rock Tunnel and Mt. Moon are drastically simplified passageways, the Safari Zone is gone (the owner had "retired"), the Pewter City Museum is "closed for renovations", Seafoam Islands are just a room for Blaine to camp out now that Cinnabar Island has been destroyed, the east-west passageway below Saffron City are closed (which is understandable seeing that there's no story reason anymore to have them), Silph Co. blocks access beyond the (much smaller) lobby, and Pokémon Tower has been turned into a radio tower. An expanded Kanto similar to what it was in the game may have been in initial plans but it was dramatically cut back. There's definitely evidence of it, with the maps for the museum and the Safari Zone still being in the ROM. Still, it's kind of nice to wander through the former world, listen to remixed music, and bring back memories of the "old world". No other sequel had really done that before, and none had done it since. In retrospect, it seemed odd to have nostalgia for a game released that recently, but when you were a kid, a few years ago was a world away. Just thinking about how 1996-2006 vs. 2006-2016 were the same number of decades but felt years apart still blows my mind. Finally, after getting eight more badges, you get to face one more dungeon and face the true boss, Red, the hero of the first game! He silently challenges you to a battle, and he has three of the evolved RBGY starters, a Pikachu, a Snorlax, and an Espeon, the Psychic evolution of Eevee (it balances his team to have a Psychic without the obvious choice of Mewtwo, and probably a "screw you" to players who wanted to recreate the team in the old games). Some of the cut features, unbalanced gameplay, and content were fleshed out in HeartGold and SoulSilver released for the 3DS, but many core problems still exist. As far as HGSS goes, you want to play with the original canonical hero Gold, not the remake hero Ethan, who, in compared to Gold, is a massive dork (caution: strong language). Even the female hero gets it pretty bad, original "Kris" is replaced with Lyra who has an enormous (and enormously stupid) hat.

Despite liking GSC runs into accusations of being a "genwunner", it always holds up better in memory than actually playing it. There are bugs that mean that the Apricorn balls don't work properly, if it all, and other things. It also denies you the same satisfaction of beating your rival that Generation I did. In Gen I, Blue aka Gary was an asshole who constantly taunted you and had the most truly epic battle music to ever come out of the Game Boy, and Professor Oak reprimands him later on not treating his Poké with care and respect. But here despite being an outright thief, your rival learns maybe mid-game that he's not quite as good of a trainer as he thought and just disappears without much an apology or final pounding.

I did play Pokémon Crystal at least once all the way through but the improvements are somewhat of a mixed bag and not all that worth it in the long run. So going down the list...

• One of the big features was the option of a female trainer, which was a non-issue since I'm a dude and typically don't play with female characters.
• The intro is changed and not for better.
• Suicune is the "featured" Pokémon instead of just being one of the Legendary Dogs (like Gen I had the Legendary Birds) with its own sub-plot featuring some obsessive fop who you have to battle once or twice.
• The name of a new town or city appearing at the bottom when you entered was a good feature but I liked it better from just the music changing, even if you were on a bicycle.
• The Burned Tower actually looked like a burned building instead of just a shorter, stubbier one, which was one of the good features but only an aesthetic bonus, same as the redesigned Ice Path and a few other aesthetic features, like flowers outside of the flower shop in Goldenrod City.
• Pokémon would have a short sprite animation when they were introduced; fun but it slowed the game down.
• The trainers who would call you on your cell phone would occasionally give you items and had personalities.
• You would get a Dratini with ExtremeSpeed in an extended event for the 8th badge.
• Mareep was removed. It's definitely a minus, as Gold & Silver already had major issues with Pokémon variety during most of Johto. Even if you wanted to argue that an electric-type Pokémon was too overpowered early game in addition to your starter, Pokémon Red & Blue let you catch a Pikachu even before the first dungeon.
• A "Battle Tower" has been added near Route 40 and a "Poké Seer" was added in Cianwood City to tell you where you caught your Pokémon, provided you caught them in-game.

The biggest change was supposed to be the addition of the Pokémon Communications Center. This was used in the Japanese release. Before the servers were shut down a number of years ago, there was a special cable that could connect the Game Boy Color up to a early 2000s-cellular phone and you could battle trainers miles away and have a shot at winning the GS Ball, a key item that was discussed in the anime. Everyone who watched the anime at the time thought it would be a big deal but it became a massive plot hole when it was delivered to Kurt and never talked about again, allegedly because it was a set-up for a movie involving Celebi but the actual Celebi went with a different plot. Another notorious dropped element from around the same time that has no real explanation was Brock's massive shame when bringing up Professor Ivy, demanding never to hear that name again. (There's a whole lot of theories for the last one, a popular one being that Ivy was, well, short an X chromosome, and that adequately explains why it would never be explained and why Brock was so ashamed of his time there.) Well, the GS Ball would never be mentioned in Crystal, either, since due to the relative lack of cell phones among children in America at the time, the entire "PokéCom Center" was dummied out.

My main memories of actually playing GS actually come from 2002-ish due to the fact that Gold was my brother's and there was only one save file, which is why it was 2003 when I was talking about the Pokémon Pikachu 2GS in my first Galleria retrospective. Like the less-obsolete PokéWalker, which was around when in high school, the glorified pedometer made me look like a massive dork even if no one said anything, it had a cool feature with Mystery Gift. Mystery Gift was another feature that took advantage of Game Boy Color's (and the original Game Boy Advance's) hardware, a small IR port on the top of the device. You could generate (between games) a free item. Sometimes it was just a decoration for the player's room (you could gain Pokémon dolls and Nintendo systems for your in-game room, and rearrange them as you wish) but sometimes it was something really cool, like elemental stones which were basically once-in-a-game items for GS. For the Pokémon Pikachu, 1000 steps (or "watts") could net you a Rare Candy, which you should probably know raises a level of a Pokémon by one, though before anyone gets an idea about having a team of Elite Four-tier monsters in early game, the internal clock limits transfers to once a day.

Going back to my most recent playthrough when I discovered that the game was not nearly as great as I remembered it, I eventually scraped up a team similar to what I had in the past, with Typhlosion (the starter Cyndaquil), Graveler (from Geodude, picked up in a cave), Lapras (a one-time catch), Ampharos (from Mareep), Ho-Oh (Legendary, and that replaced a Pidgeot raised from a Pidgey), and Eevee (a one-time gift, which takes a long time to raise it to "friendly" levels since there's no Stones in the main campaign), but I realized it's the pacing that is screwed up. It happens early on in the first game, where you breeze through the first two Gym Leaders only to (usually) hit a brick wall with Whitney, then it speeds up again complete with two Team Rocket dungeons in relatively short order. Two whole caverns, Dark Cave and Mt. Mortar, are entirely optional, and the single-type Gym leaders make beating them a cinch, but the Elite Four will thrash your team if they have first-move advantages, with Will and using Psychic or Confuse Ray, with Koga and using poison-type moves, with Bruno and hard, powerful moves, and if you survive all that, Lance's Lv.44+ Pokémon will almost always start with Hyper Beam. It's either you or them, and the answer usually depends how long you were grinding, not player skill (this is probably the case of all Pokémon games). By the time the Elite Four is actually reached, most of the Trainers met in the journey will have already been beaten, their trash-talk long been neutralized, save for the occasional phone calls from Trainers wanting a rematch. Even these rematches never get more than Lv.30. It was a bit interesting to see "Youngster Joey" once having a pathetic Lv.4 Rattata pull out a Lv.29 Raticate later on. But again, no single trainer poses a threat because until the very last trainer in the main campaign, Lance, no one else has six Pokémon (at least no Pokémon that pose a threat, at least), and due to the fact that everything else is exhausted, the grinding will usually take the form of challenging the Elite Four multiple times, and that means hearing their speeches multiple times.

There's a lot more to say about Gold & Silver, including the mysterious Spaceworld Demo, but this review is probably long enough. Playing it in 2018 is of course enough to see all the flaws but in the end, it still brought back the memories of playing it the first time, and deserves nothing less than a GREAT rating.

FINAL RATING:   

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