Replaying Fire Red after decades, made me feeling like a kid again

[SirPentious]

I've lost my "legal way" to run my Leaf Green cartridge a long time ago, so when Nintendo released a port of FR/LG on the Switch, I couldn't help myself and decided to buy it (they could have made it a bit less expensive thought...). I went with Fire Red this time, since I played Leaf Green when I was a kid. I played the whole game the entire last week and... oooohhh boy, the joy I felt playing it.

Catching all the Pokemon, building my team for the adventure, battling all the trainers on the road, everything was even better than I remembered. And this time I could even do more as the Switch version has the Ho-Oh, Lugia and Deoxys events unlocked natively, so I could do them for the very first time. Pretty tough captures I must say, but it was really fun.

I concluded the game beating the League Rematch and having 165 Pokemon in the Pokedex (I wanted to get pretty much all the Pokemon obtainable in the game, aside of some evolutions that were too tedious like Dragonite and Tyranitar, and... a couple ones I'm gonna mention right now...), and I really had a blast from the beginning to the end.

There's only one thing that left me frustrated in the game. In one word: CHANSEY. Ooooohhhh boy, that's one of the most infuriating things I've ever seen in a videogame. Why would Game Freak think that it would be fun? I spent like two hours in trying to catch it, even trying strategies I looked online, but it always fled first turn, and I never caught it (and couldn't even get Blissey with it). But that's pretty much the only thing I hated.

Aside that, I really loved my revisit on this game, and it shows more how good Pokemon games used to be. I really hope Emerald receives a port as well, I'm looking forward in re-experience that one as well (and to do Mew's event for the first time).

Anyone else who bought the Switch ports had the same fun with it?

 

[colours]

i'm in the middle of playing leafgreen with a friend of mine who's playing his copy of fire red. he's more enthusiastic about it than me given that these seem to be his favourite remakes, partially because of childhood nostalgia when we used to play them as kids.

unfortunately, the bad news is that these are my least favourite remakes. i'm still slow-going with it because i do want to beat the game with him together, but the teambuilding aspect is kind of miserable (a lot of pokemon have extremely limited movesets, and the phys/special split did a lot of pokemon no favours. kingler, for example, is basically unusuable since it can't use any of its STAB moves), and journeying through the region was boring for me. i do understand how people have a certain kind of fondness of kanto's simplicity, but it's not a region i enjoy.

one could say vanilla gen 1 had its own allure, what with its glitchyness and psychic types being overpowered among other things, but the more i journey through fr/lg, the more i feel like i'd have a lot more fun had nintendo did what they have done in the ds-era and ported r/b/y to the eshop. i feel like that's a much better way to experience gen 1 for newcomers while allowing senior citizen pokemon fans to go crazy with their nostalgia.