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What do you think about Generation 1?

Oga-ponn

Oga-ponn

Suguri Sweet
Nidofam
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Generation 1 marked the start of the Pokémon franchise 30 years ago and introduced the first 151 species. It's also the most popular because of the boom that occurred at the time, the high nostalgia factor, and extensive marketing of certain Pokémon there.

What are your thoughts? I'm curious to hear from you.
 
I like a lot of the pokemon from the first gen. However, I find subsequent generations to be more interesting and enjoyable in terms of lore and region exploration. I never owned the original red and blue, but I got to play them eventually and I think they don't hold up very well compared to other games from the time. Like I can play Mario Bros from NES and it is both visually appealing and not as broken in the gameplay. Granted, they are different kind of games, but still. I'm glad that the graphics got better with gen 3 onwards, it makes the games automatically more enjoyable for me.
 
Generation 1 is my favorite. Most of my favorite Pokemon are from generation 1, the only good episodes are from generation 1, and I don't like any of the other episodes afterwards because it just doesn't feel like I'm watching Pokemon anymore.
 
Gen 1 is designed completely different from gen 3 and onward (and even pretty different from gen 2, though they're much closer than any of the later ones) in a way I'd like to write an article on some day--the base mechanics means that even the remakes are very different experiences. Also, I always felt the atmosphere feels subtly darker and more threatening with the more limited colours and weird monster sprites. You could even buy Pokémon (from a criminal organization!), something they'd move away from later on.

They weren't the first monster/enemy recruitment games, but they may have been the first where every single enemy is also a potential party member. The player and the AI mostly run off the same mechanics, but the game uses some tricks to ensure the player's long-term companions will be secretly better than their opponents of the same species. And they were aggressively intended as single player adventures with a collection focus with the multiplayer battles being secondary--it's noteable that Rock actually IS a decent defensive type in-game, for instance, due to the abundance of Normal and Flying attacks. In later games it's often fairly frail because elemental moves from opponents became so abundant and it's hard to see Steel as anything other than "the good Rock-type" in gen 2.

Pokémon showing up at appropriate times doesn't seem to have been a consideration when you look at the odd distributions--Koffing appears regularly as an enemy but you can't get your own until very near the end. The lack of breeding made it even harder to fill your dex since the other player can't easily get another copy of their starter, or Eevee, or the fossil.

It was a simpler game in terms of mechanics, too. Pokémon tended to be bulkier due to the lack of powerful offensive hold items and the stat experience system.

The slow movement speed (which was not uncommon in older RPGs) is actually the main reason I can find them a bit hard to go back to, but I'll always love their creativity and atmosphere.
 
Games-wise I haven't played them (the closest I've played is FRLG) but they don't seem that bad to be honest. The adventure has a clear direction, the world is semi-open, there's a good roster of usable Pokemon and decent difficulty. Without it Pokemon just wouldn't exist and they receive a lot of injust flack, given that they were developed by like 20 people during 5 years.

Pokemon-wise I'd say the same, "imperfect but good enough". As a child I only cared about Pikachu, Squirtle and Bulbasaur, I didn't think much of the others and I preferred the artstyle of Gen 2 & 3, but nowadays I appreciate them more. They are unique and creative, I can see why they coming back in many regional dexes as they have a good balance of cool and easy to understand.
 
They're the first Pokémon games I played, but looking back at them, there's a lot that the game bungled.

Like how Psychic and Dragon were monstrously overpowered due to the lack of good moves that exploited their weaknesses (Dragon had one effective weakness, Ice), the fact that high special attack = high special defense because there was no split.

And of course, the sheer amount of glitches.
 
Having lived through Gen 1 I loved the early vibe of the franchise then and the endless possibilities at the time, though I wasn't necessarily a fan of most Pokemon themselves because many of them looked too basic in my opinion, or had limited movesets in the games. There were also way too many Poison-types, not to mention Water-types. The fact that Dragon and Ghost were so underrepresented back then still annoys me too.
 
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