Pokemon FireRed Version

"You don't choose Pikachu, Pikachu chooses you."

WHA-HAT?! Pokémon is coming again on the Game Boy Advance? The zealots of Nintendo's grace bowed down in front of the great developer's lackey, Game Freak, hoping a beautiful game would come out. The rest of us looked on, waiting for the Pokémon game that would appeal to all of us graduates of that time in our lives. We waited. What came out of that small development team were Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen.

Pokémon games are the water of the Rope-Playing genre. They are simple but sometimes you really need a whole lot, though sometimes it is just way too boring for you. Game Freak has never been known for their amazing production values, and yet, being a gamer sucked into the Pokémon era, I was very disappointed in all the games that were released on the poor GBA. From the high of Gold and Silver, Game Freak destroyed any challenge in the game through Ruby and Sapphire and made it very, very vanilla. FireRed and LeafGreen were no exception, and although the game is a remake of a great classic, there are some real problems with the series in general. It's time they get called out for what they deserve.

Pokémon games are actually simple in concept and are like easy-set RPG's. The battles are one-on-one (sometimes two-on-two), choosing from four commands that the Pokémon might know, and quite possibly finding more of the despicable little creatures. Completests beware, because there are a lot of monsters as we go through the series. There is a lot of fun in training and customizing the pets into a fighting force, and pitting them against others.

If only that all mattered. The biggest flaw in FireRed and LeafGreen is the simplicity and total lack of difficulty. The situations where you are in danger of losing are there, but those are few and far between. The first half of the game entirely is a cakewalk for anybody over the age of ten; in fact, if you can read my review and understand most of my words in this review, Pokémon's single player game will put you to sleep. It's good for people who want to ease into the genre without a startling difficulty jump they aren't ready for, but there's little for RPG fans that have beaten much harder games. You can do almost anything to your prized party of monsters and still win the game, because there is such a low difficulty. There are some late parts that are somewhat difficult, of course, but that's a given.

Being a remake of the original Red and Blue games, the GBA version stays true to the classics for the most part. Most of the text is the same, and the locations are usually identical, if not made bigger to compensate for the GBA's bigger screen. A few of the areas have been added to or modified slightly, but most of it doesn't matter: the best part Nintendo added to the game was the set of seven islands that didn't appear in the original. They give you many more trainers and trails to try, and some of the newer areas are very nice in their uses. There's now a breeding center, for example, and you get to see into the life of one of the Elite Four (a final boss of sorts). It's also the best area of the game mainly because it adds that challenge that Ruby and Sapphire could never have, because all of their areas had an extremely low level cut where the computers went. Eventually your opponents would become worthless to you. Here the pair of games gives a bunch of high level areas without killing the original spirit of the game.

The game is still way too easy, don't get me wrong. Any RPG gamer will see right through the catching gimmicks and overpower the game with one very big Pokémon the entire game, and there's little way around that. Even the multiplayer gets old after one or two times, because the battle system allows so little deviation from the attacking sides. Trading is useful in only getting the ones you can't get in your own game. So in the end the game has serious difficulty issues, did I get it into your head yet? It may be fun at times, but when you look at the perfectly scaling world of Gold and Silver, you wonder why Nintendo won't remake that one. The graphics, too, are very lacing. Most of the supporter's claim that is has a nice SNES quality, but that's the problem. There's nothing here that couldn't be done with 16-bit machines: everything looks very similar, and it doesn't help that animation is next to non-existent. If Nintendo was trying to not take the GBA's full potential on purpose I don't know, but frankly the graphics are very, very poor for the big N's general stuff and leaves a lot to be desired.

Pokémon Crystal had a genius animation concept: when Pokémon arte in battle, have them move. Well, the GBA teams decided to ditch that for an unknown reason, and it's bad. All you see are portraits (that are usually very dotted and hard to see) flashing at each other. Again, a dull development choice that makes this even more disappointing. The other animations on the landscape are also very cheesy, mostly because you can count the frames-per-second. Overall, the lack of quality shows with the uninspired graphics, especially because Pokémon could have been such a stylized game. The ball has been dropped.

The music, too. Oh, God, the music is some of the worst tunes to come out of that speaker. It's not only happy-go-lucky, but it is also very, very bad quality. I refuse to listen to it at times, shut off the sound and throw on a podcast. I'd rather listen to radio babble instead of the boring tones in this game. I'm sorry, Game Freak, but you MUST fire your music composer. Buy some good music software while you're at it, because bleeping tones don't cut it any more.

At least it's moderately long. Although a typical run-through of the game will give you about ten hours, there are plenty of other things to see and do, like catching Pokémon, for example. You can fish. You can destroy computers and players alike. There's quite a bit of game in here, and although at times it may be boring, it will last you a while. The one thing the game got right, although Gold and Sliver had almost twice the gaming fun.

It's time Nintendo got held responsible for Game Freak's lack of presentation and quality. Some of the game is fun; the latter, harder stage group where the game heats up is very entertaining, and the gimmicks are very fun to play with. But the simple-ness of the gameplay affirms one thing: Pokémon will go the way of the baby game if the series doesn't evolve soon. Pearl and Diamond don't look likely to carry out such things. This game is borderline average.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 08/10/07