Pokemon Silver Version

"Holy crap! This game gets the honor of being my 25th review! And its a good one, despite the lack of reviews for this game."

You all know the story of Pokemon unless you have just been defrosted from the year 1980 or something. Pokemon is the (former) smash hit that stormed America by force thanks to Nintendo's latest game back in 1998. You used to not be able to go anywhere without seeing some kid with a Gameboy Classic, Pocket, or Color on the sides of the street or the store or something without busting this game out. There was even tons of merchandising and whatnot that made Pokemon get a bad rap seeing how parents were getting into fistfights around Christmas time to grab the last Giant Pikachu doll from the shelves of Toys 'R Us. Thank God those days are over! Now all that remains are about 10 classic games, some good, and some bad.

Pokemon Silver was the sequel to the smash hit of 1998. Along with Gold, these two games hit the shelves in the middle of October of 2000. I sure do remember when they hit the shelves, because I ran to the store the day I found a nice advertisement in the paper and got Gold for 20 bucks. So why the heck didn't I choose Silver first? That's to find out in this review!

Story
The classic storyline of the Pokemon series, you are a young boy who lives in a small town known as New Bark Town with about two or three other families. Your neighbor is a Pokemon researcher by the name of Professor Elm. One day, Professor Elm calls you over to his place to ask you to run an errand for him since he's either too busy or too lazy to go and do it himself. Seeing how you want a tip to do this, he offers you one of three Pokemon instead of cash. You don't care either way, so you take the Pokemon of your choice to go see what his buddy wants. And without realizing it, your long journey in the new region of Johto begins!

The story for this game is about the same as the one in Red and Blue, but Silver at least makes it so that you get swept up into Pokemon Training without even realizing it. This is so much better than just trying to run away from home one day only getting stopped by an old professor who wants you to complete his Pokedex for him.

Gameplay
The gameplay for Pokemon Silver is the same as the other Pokemon games, except there are so many changes that it makes you wonder how Nintendo could have gotten so much done within only two years worth of time. You still have the task of collecting all of the Pokemon in the game, as well as defeating all eight of the gym leaders to be able to finish the game officially. However, since there are more Pokemon than ever before, your Pokedex challenge has gone from collecting only 150 Pokemon to a whopping 250 Pokemon instead. Along with new Pokemon come two new Pokemon types to fix the imbalance that Psychic Pokemon had over the other types: Steel and Dark. These two new types don't have a lot of Pokemon that fall into them, but the ones that are there and the moves that they learn are all worthwhile.

Some of the other noteworthy changes in this game are quite noteworthy. Trading is still around, and you can even trade back with the classic Red and Blue if you meet certain requirements, like not knowing new moves or having Pokemon that didn't exist in Red and Blue. Too bad you can't battle with them as well. Another awesome deal in this game is that somewhere in the game there is a place to delete those annoying HM moves. This is REALLY HANDY, incase you accidentally taught one to your main Pokemon and want to learn some better moves in its place.

One of the best features of this game is your Backpack. Remember back in Red and Blue when you could only hold 20 items at a time, and had to ditch whatever else you found? NOT ANYMORE!! Now, along with the normal 20 item storage space, you now have SEPARATE POCKETS! Now you can hold ALL of your TMs and HMs in one pocket, ALL of your Pokeballs in another, and every one of your Key Items in the last spot! This cuts down on most of your visits to the Pokemon Center's PC! Speaking of the PC, you now have two more boxes to store Pokemon! As an added bonus, you can now move Pokemon MUCH EASIER than you ever could before with the new Move Pokemon W/O Mail choice! This makes it way easy to move Pokemon to the box that YOU want to place them in. As well as that, you can now label your boxes!

Another new feature is now your Pokemon can hold an item! If you're running out of space, you can shove a single item onto your Pokemon to hold until you make it to the PC. Don't need the extra space? No problem! There are special items your Pokemon can hold that range from healing themselves in battle, to adding extra status effects onto your attacks! This can lead to many extra strategies to figure out what exactly you would like on your Pokemon at all times.

Yet another nifty feature is the introduction of PokeGear. The PokeGear takes care of several awesome features that you may or may not need. PokeGear initially comes equipped with your watch and your phone. The watch you will program at the beginning of the game, which will allow you to know what time it is, as well as let you know when you can start catching the Daytime Pokemon or Vice Versa. The Phone allows you to make phone calls to people whose numbers you obtain. Sure this seems good in thought, but the phone calls are quite pointless. This feature would have been better if YOU could have set up rematches with other trainers, but it's so random you may never be able to get a rematch with another trainer, although it is possible. Two other features that you have to get yourself are the Map and the Radio. The map is self explanatory, and you will get it really early in the game. The radio is a nifty feature that can either help you find out where certain Pokemon are at, find out if you won the lottery of ID numbers, or even attract/repel wild Pokemon. The radio was a nice feature overall, and should be in future Pokemon games.

Probably the best feature of this game is the new Daycare center. You can now drop off not one but TWO Pokemon at the center! This might not seem like a big deal until you figure out that you can now BREED your Pokemon in this way. After you leave your two Pokemon in the Daycare, you can come back later to find that you now have a Pokemon Egg! And when the Egg hatches, you will now have a level 5 Pokemon! The type of Pokemon that hatches depends on its mother, so experiment a while and you'll build up a new team in no time! This feature is great, since you can now borrow a Pokemon from a friend, breed it in your center, get an egg, then trade the Pokemon back to its owner! Then you BOTH can have your own version of that Pokemon, and the best thing is that YOU will be in full control over your new hatchling!!

Graphics
Believe it or not, but the Graphics in Silver are entirely different than the ones used in Gold! With this in mind, there now is something that can set apart the two versions besides what Pokemon appear in which version. Although there are slight variations with the Pokemon designs, the graphics are generally the same, so it won't matter too much in the long run. Either way, the graphics are WAY BETTER than the originals, and even Yellow where the Pokemon looked remotely similar. The graphics look REALLY colorful when played on a Gameboy Color, instead of just one or two like in Yellow, so the Pokemon are now officially completely looking like the original artists WANTED them to look like. Hooray!

Music and Sound
If you ever played Pokemon Blue, Red, or Yellow, then you will know that the tunes were pretty good, but had some room for improvement. Pokemon Silver responds to the call by giving us some pseudo SNES quality music that is way better than the classic Pokemon games EVER gave us. The music is now way better than ever before, AND we are even treated to a few remixes of the original tunes from the first game! SCORE! The sound effects have changed in a few ways, mostly due to the new cries of the new Pokemon and the new moves that were added. Otherwise, the sounds are exactly the same as before which isn't a bad thing since the sounds still get their job done.

Replay?
With 250 Pokemon to capture, over 1000 team possibilities give or take, and the ability to challenge your own friends to a Pokemon battle, this game should never get old unless its the only game you own or if you don't have friends with a Gameboy. After you beat the game for the first time, you can trade your old Pokemon over to your friend's game, then trade back and breed them to start over with a new team of level 5's with awesome moves!

And for only 15 bucks, Pokemon Silver is able to keep you entertained for such a low price! This game is definitely worth getting, even if you have never played a Pokemon game before, this is a good intro to the series!

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 12/07/04