Pokemon LeafGreen Version

"This game is what happens when the developers value money over quality."

Pokemon Leaf Green, the fourth installation in the Pokemon series, is by far the worst one. Leaf Green compared to Red/Blue is like Rocky IV compared to Rocky. It's stretched too far, bloated, and full of Russians. Speaking of Russians, this game borrows from one of the worst ideas in Russian history - the Potemkin village. Like the villages of old, this game is just a hollow shell of pretty graphics slapped onto the older game's core.

For those of you who have been living under a rock in Tibet for the past four years, Pokemon is the worst craze to come out of Japan in recent times. The game itself is a spin-off on most console RPG games. Instead of recruiting characters throughout the game, you capture a variety of creatures by beating them half to death and then throwing a ball at them. As you go through the game, your Pokemon learn more attacks, and you get better items to capture them with. You also fight other people with Pokemon, and go to Gyms located in each town and fight the Gym Leaders (essentially a boss).

The first Pokemon games were no more than described above. As more and more of the games came out, new features were added. You could play as a female character, your Pokemon had genders, and you could equip your Pokemon with items. As you can probably guess, these features were total crap, and only served as bloat. Since Pokemon Leaf Green is supposed to be an improvement on Pokemon Red/Blue, you'd think that the developers, with their high-priced Japanese education that's SO much better than America's would have left these "features" out if they wanted to sell more copies. But apparently, that high-priced Japanese education amounted to nothing.

Pokemon Leaf Green is also much slower-paced than the game it's supposed to be improving upon. Pokemon Red/Blue had nearly no animations, and the ones it did have were very simple and took very little time to display. This is definitely not the case with Pokemon Leaf Green. Apparently, the developers figured that all American children are illiterate and would be amused by repetitive animations. The attack animations in this one are much longer, but aren't really any more than they were in the original. Instead of actual new animations, it's just the old ones, repeated more. Some of the attacks take up to 10 seconds (I timed it), and even at fastest speed, the text is horribly slow. Worst of all, however, is the fact that no one in that game ever says anything useful. It's always flavor text, and poorly worded flavor text at that. And even the one person out of a hundred who actually says something of use has their lines incredibly bloated.

Even worse than the horribly slow game-play are the terrible “new” graphics, which are essentially just copied from Ruby and Sapphire. The new graphics for the Pokemon themselves are alright (albeit not much different than Ruby or Sapphire), but the graphics when using items are horrid. Take, for example, using a healing item outside of battle. The game goes through this 15-second long animation of the portrait image of the Pokemon zooming in (all whilst looking horribly pixellated) and then shiny stuff appears that kills the frame rate. It's even worse if you're using a TM or HM (items for teaching new attacks). The game does the same zoom-in animation, except afterward, a giant CD comes out and glues itself to the Pokemon's head, causing the Pokemon to have a seizure. After seeing this animation once, and just how terrible it is, you'll know why the developers never showed you what a TM or HM looked like in the old games.

Then you have the sound, which is possibly the only thing worse than the animations. Most of the sound came directly from Pokemon Red and Blue, which means it's all just one sound being repeated over and over again in the background. And it's made so you'll notice it. After around 30 seconds of listening to this, you'll want to turn the sound off and pour holy water over your GBA's speakers to ensure they'll never play sound again. It's true that some of the sound was remixed, and some of it added in from Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire. However, the music from Ruby and Sapphire was almost the same as it was in Red and Blue, except with two repetitive noises instead of one.

If you were hoping for better level design in this game, think again. The levels in Leaf Green are all exactly the same as they were in Red or Blue. If you were to have two GBA's running next to each other, one running this game and one running Leaf Green, you'd find that there is literally no difference. My problem with the level design is not so much that it's grid-based, but that you can clearly tell it's grid-based. When you can clearly tell that you're moving on a grid, the game feels much more limiting as to what you can and cannot do.

Another big disappointment is the lack of multiple save files. Now, I know that it's probably very difficult to have more than one save file with such limited cartridge space (considering there's a lot of data you'd have to save), but the developers could have at least included a second file. I must say it's disappointing when you're in the middle of a dungeon, and you want to save, but you can't because you don't want to overwrite your old file and find yourself totally screwed. Oh, and considering that this game is marketed at children, you'd assume they'd put in a second file to begin with so that the kids don't accidentally save over their own data.

The biggest disappointment in this sorry excuse for a remake is the incredibly decreased difficulty. I know the game is marketed at children, but it's still no reason to lower the difficulty as much as it was. In the original games, going up against a gym leader who has Pokemon of the type that your Pokemon are weak to would mean suicide. Even if you power-leveled, you still probably would not beat the gym leader. Therefore, you NEEDED to catch other Pokemon to win. However, this is not the case with Leaf Green. I managed to beat the game with only TWO Pokemon, one of which was my starting one. And, to tell the truth, the game is actually EASIER not catching the Pokemon than it was catching them.

On top of all this lies Nintendo's money grubbing nature. In Pokemon Red/Blue, to obtain all 150 Pokemon, you'd need at least one copy of both versions, as well as two Gameboys and a Link Cable. However, with the releases of Gold, Silver, Ruby and Sapphire, there are a total of 386 Pokemon. Therefore, you need at LEAST one copy of 6 Gameboy/Gameboy Advance games, plus Pokemon Colosseum for GCN, plus two GBA's, plus an E-Reader (well over three hundred dollars, if you didn't own a GCN beforehand). Since chances are next to nil that you're going to meet one person (even a group of people) who have all the Pokemon that you need, and only want Pokemon you don't need, it's much cheaper (and probably takes less time) to find someone with a Game Shark and have them do it for you. Or just buy one yourself. And to make things worse, some of the Pokemon will only evolve (Pokemon change forms at higher levels, in case you didn't know) if you trade them to someone. Oh, and even if you DID go out and buy everything, it would take you over 5 minutes to transfer a single Pokemon from Gold to Fire Red. In essence, it's just not worth it.

If you're still thinking about buying this game, please remember that you can still play Pokemon Red and Blue on the GBA. So really, there's no point spending 40 to 50 dollars for pretty graphics (which aren't even that great). If you find someplace that would rent you all the equipment to get all 386 Pokemon, you could try. However, I can almost guarantee that you won't be able to.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 09/16/04