For the first five hours or so, it feels like you’re walking down a series of drab hallways fighting one boring battle after another. Worse still, the early portion of the game is restrictive, with little room for exploration. There’s little in the way of strategy: apply brute force, and repeat. Early on, none of the creatures you can use have any particularly strong or unique abilities, so the battles are mostly just exchanging blows until one pokemon faints. And the battles are really boring at first. After the thrill of picking your starter - Squirtle, of course - the first few hours are a bit of a slog, with a surprising amount of grinding. That said, Red gets off to a very slow start. Everything works the way you’d expect it to, from capturing and battling pokemon to traveling the world and collecting gym badges. With all of this background, playing Pokemon Red (I chose it over Blue solely for Growlithe) is strangely familiar in 2016. After all, it wasn’t until Pokemon Black and White - in 2011! - that the series embraced 3D graphics.

Sequels often only change the experience in seemingly minor ways, and the basic structure remains largely intact from one entry to the next. The Pokemon games are somewhat infamous for making only tiny, incremental improvements.

I fell hard, and have played every game in the series since. It wasn't until I was in university, spending a long commute playing games on the Nintendo DS, that I finally gave the series a shot with Pokemon Pearl. The initial wave of Pokemon madness is one of the things I ended up missing out on. Growing up I had a Sega Game Gear, a bright, flashy, and colorful alternative to the Game Boy that was more powerful but had a much less interesting lineup of games. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge So, how are the original Pokemon games in the eyes of a first timer? It turns out that, 20 years later, they’re still amazing. I have no childhood memories clouding my visions. Last weekend Nintendo rereleased the original trilogy of Pokemon games - Red, Blue, and Yellow - on the 3DS, and I was able to experience them for the very first time. That’s why a modern remake of a game like Final Fantasy VII is such a huge undertaking it’s not just the visuals that need updating, it’s the entire feel of the game. More so than any other form of entertainment, games change at a rapid pace, and new innovations can make older titles feel downright archaic, to the point they’re no fun to play.

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