Gotta catch 'em all! This game is great - one of my favourites
The story is basic. You're a kid who you get to name, who sets off on a journey to challenge the Pokemon League and complete the PokeDex for Professor Oak. On your journey you will encounter Team Rocket, who use their Pokemon for evil deeds and would like to try and get you to join them.
Within the first two minutes you get to pick your first Pokemon, either Bulbasaur, Charmander or Squirtle. The main aim of the game is to try and complete the Pokemon league. You can have up to 6 pokemon in your partly at a time, they can be caught in the wild by weakening them and throwing Poke Balls at them. You can store a large amount of Pokemon in boxes at Pokemon Centres.
There are 8 gyms, each specializes in a differant type of Pokemon. for example Misty's gym in Cerulean City specializes in water type Pokemon and Lt Surge's gym in Veridian City focuses on electric type Pokemon. On your way from town to town a lot of other pokemon trainers will challenge you to battles, and you will have to cross forests, caves and rivers, whilst collecting as many Pokemon as you can.
In battle you start out with simple techniques such as Scratch and growl, but as the game progresses your Pokemon will become ultimate fighters with skills such as Thunder Bolt, Hydro Pump, Fly ect. Pokemon learn new moves through leveling up of using TMs (technical machines) on them. HMs (hidden machines) can also be used to teach pokemon attacks, but the attacks granted through HMs compulsory for travelling through the game. For example you will need to learn Surf from a HM to cross rivers. you can only have four attacks per Pokemon so it is a good idea to research what moves a Pokemon can learn from sites such as Serebii or Bulbapedia and plan what moves should be learnt. I learnt the hard way on my first play through as my team didn't have the best attack combinations.
one thing I want to nit pick about is that you will have to go out of your way to level up your pokemon at certain stages in the game. Which is tedious. However battles are over reasonably quickly and unlike Diamond and Pearl it doesn't feel as much like a chore. (Because the battles go on forever in those games - not saying I dislike them though)
Something you probably won't care about but I'll bring it up anyway. This and blue are actually remakes of the original Japanese Red and Green versions. The graohics have been updated and the catch rates of Pokemon have been highered and the secret dungeon has been redesigned.
If you play this on the GameBoy Colour the whole game will feature a mostly red/brown colour scheme with some objects being green to stand out on the reddish brown background. The back sprites of some of the Pokemon look messy and are hard to make out. But with a game so good, who cares about the graphics?
The music is quite catchy, both the town and battle themes. Just shows 8-bit music can be amazing too.
Red, blue or Yellow - they're all pretty much the same. Except SOME of the pokemon you get are different. For example in Red you can get Growlith, but in Blue he was replaced with Vulpix. In yellow you start off with a Pikachu, (who can't be evolved) Jessie, James and Meowth form the amine also appear in places as boss battles. Yellow also enables you to obtain all three of the starter Pokemon and the gyms, especially in the second half of the game, have been made considerably harder. Unfortunatly to get 100% you have to trade with other people who own the other versions of the game. Who still owns a GameBoy? I do! But do my friends, well some of them, but they don't really play Pokemon any more. Anyway, I tend to lean towards the red version over the blue and yellow versions, since that was the one I played and completed first, but at the end of the day, they're all the same game.
This game is awesome and I recommend it to any one who hasn't played it. It's a lengthy game and took me a good 50 hours on my first run through. It is alot of fun to play. And when you habe done the main story collecting the pokemon you missed and raising them is alot of fun too.
Milesprower2k9 original reviews