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RR Week II: Pokémon Silver

Started by Double, July 29, 2009, 09:47:56 PM

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Double

As you can see by this thread I am still not dead. While it hasn't exactly been a year I've decided to do another RR Week, this time featuring seven more games. Although one technically isn't one from my childhood I rented it during it so I'm counting it anyways. While I'd give you hints like last time I cannot be bothered.


Intro: Today we begin RR2 Week with an all time low, a sequel to a Pokémon game. Without loss of generality anything said in this review can be applied to the gold version as well.


Gameplay: This is a basic monster catching game or whatever you want to call that genre, you run around with a Pokémon, fight wild ones and catch them. Occasionally you fight dudes who have more Pokémon which are stronger and you can't catch but that's really the fundamental gameplay.

Above that, you progress through the game by beating Gym Leaders to get moves for your Pokémon so you can go to areas you can't go to yet. I dislike this not for forcing the character for a certain area where he or she must grind, but because it limits what the player can do with the teams move set. A full team can have 24 moves; HMs will take up six of those. Why can't you say get a machete instead of cut or a raft instead of surf? Come on a Pokémon Trainer with a fucking machete, riding a raft, wearing a jet pack and holding a flashlight would be awesome you know it. Strength, I can't think of anything for though.

Really though that's the basic gameplay, occasionally you'll have to fight a Pokémon mafia, and there are side quests but really that's it. It's quite primitive, even for its time.

.... wait...

Yeah those first three paragraphs are blatantly copied from the Pokémon Yellow review because it all still holds! The game does have some new features though; most of these are minor such as the ability to record certain trainers' numbers so they can tell you completely pointless shit. Others include the ability to breed certain Pokémon, which while perverse if you stop and think about it greatly adds to what you can do by breeding certain Pokémon for certain moves. Another major feature is the fact Pokémon can now hold certain items to do things during battle, again more important than it sounds. Other changes to the game include a day and night feature which uses an internal clock to keep track of time effecting certain events and Pokémon appearance rates and the addition of a banking system.

It sort of goes without saying the game also has new Pokémon, 100 to be exact. This is the only Pokémon sequel to introduce new types though, see the difficulty section about that. While it doesn't seem like much these few things greatly improved the game.
16 out of 20


Music: In the few years between the game Nintendo got some better sound quality out of the Gameboy. It's not really noticeable for the new stuff but listen to the music in Kanto for instance. The new music isn't as good though it just isn't as memorable, it's not bad though.
13 out of 15


Translation: As far as I know there is nothing wrong.
10 out of 10


Length: If you try and do everything in the game it will take quite a bit of time. If you don't you could probably beat in a couple days...

The game does claim to be longer by having the region from the first game, but it's incredibly watered down, and if you know what you're doing can be cleared in about an hour.
12 out of 15


Rehash Factor: Kanto is blatantly recycled as is all the music associated with it. But most of Kanto isn't there actually and it's more of an afterthought than a feature. Still it's a bit of a steep thing to just ignore. It does have more new content than Yellow did though.
7 out of 15


Plot: So you get a Pokémon from Professor Elm and a Pokedex and then are set out to catalog every Pokémon species, become champion, and take down a Pokémon Mafia... BUT WAIT this time your rival is a complete douchebag and stole one of Elm's Pokemon! OH NOES. Really the Rival character in this game is pretty much made out to be the worst guy ever; it's like a Captain Planet villain level of how much of a Strawman they made him. Sure at the end he becomes good or some shit but still this guy was a dick.

I already went over how much it didn't make sense for Oak to be sending children out to do his job, the only thing this one adds is the fact that kid now goes to a foreign country unsupervised.

Anyways in your quest you fight Team Rocket which has decided to reform JUST as you begin your quest, jeez poor guys have the worst timing. I'll actually give Team Rocket a bit more credit here, there plans to hijack a radio tower and play a sound to make Pokémon go bezerk is more ambitious than taking over Saffron and just chilling, and less absurd than the plans of their successors Team Aqua, Magma and Galactic. The only complaint I want to level at the new Team Rocket is there isn't really a head of the organization just a bunch of similar looking executives.

Anyways you continue on your quest and beat up 8 gym leaders, and you meet Lance from the last game and he helps you beat up Team Rocket. So you do that get your final gym badge and then beat up the Elite Four which has changed to now include Koga from the last game (which was pretty surprising when I first played the game) and Lance is now the champion for some reason... ANYWAYS YOU BEAT HIS SORRY ASS AND ARE TEH CHAMPION.

And then for some inexplicable reason you travel to Kanto to kick the 6 remaining Gym Leaders from the first game's asses and two new Gym Leaders, Koga's daughter and Blue/Gary the rival from the first game who now has Giovanni's old job. After doing all of this you can go catch another legendar Pokémon and can go beat up Red the protagonist from the first game who seemingly resigned his title of Champion to state at a cave wall for ALL ETERNITY.

I'm only giving this a slightly higher score for having continuity with the past games (which the third series would totally IGNORE).
6 out of 10


Difficulty: Remember how in the previous game you could just use Alakazam and have a field day? Well that's a bit harder to do now because they introduced two types specifically to weaken Psychic types, Steel types which are resistant to Psychic attacks and Dark types which are outright immune to them and dark attacks are super effective against Psychic types.

There's a bit of a problem though, there are six steel type and six dark type Pokémon, which renders the likelihood of seeing them outside of battles with the Team Rocket, Gym Leader, Elite Four Member that use them a bit rare. To their credit other types can learn Dark attacks, like Blastoise who can learn Bite.

However, at the end all this really does is the following, both Dark and Steel are weak to Fighting attacks, so it merely means instead of going through the game with just Alakazam, Machamp or another fighting type (but really in second gen Machamp was sort of the king of fighting types) has now joined your party for things Alakazam can't take down himself. So you can still have four Magikarps.

The only hard part of the game is catching Entei, Suicune and the other guy.
7 out of 15


Total: 71/100 = 71 %


This would be the time where I would recommend playing the more recent versions because this game is old. But I won't, as the gist I got from Brawl is the series now sucks balls* and the Pokémon designs now totally suck, so this is the best you'll get!

*Hahaha, multiple entendre.


Positive: It's not one of the later games. Oh yeah I went there.


Negative: This was the last game to feature Team Rocket as antagonists. You might think that's a good thing but since then we've had a pair of eco-terrorist groups and a borderline religious cult bent on world takeover by using legendary Pokemon... I'd take Team Rocket's bumbling any day.


Negative II: As nice a feature the day night system was it caused these carts to eventually lose their ability to save after YEARS of use. I wouldn't know my Silver still works fine.


Negative III: They are now making DS remakes of these two games which will likely fuck everything up with their new crap.


Tomorrow a review of a game of the Donkey Kong series will be posted, that while not the best member of the series still manages to beat the pants off DK64... and then beat it with its own pants.

Jango

Quote from: Double on July 29, 2009, 09:47:56 PMThe only hard part of the game is catching Entei, Suicune and the other guy.
*gasp*

YOU FORGOT RAIKOU'S NAME?! THAT WAS THE BEST ONE

c001357

so are we gonna have a review on platinum or do we just leave it at "i played brawl and hated lucario therefore the new pokemon games suck"
also you never said anything about competitive play which is the real fun of these games!