Where it all begun!
Pokemon is a round based RPG.
The story:
You play as a young boy who is a Pokemon trainer. He goal is becoming the champion of the Pokemon League. Before being able to enter the League, he has to travel across the land and collect eight badges by winning against eight Pokemon Gym leaders.
The gameplay:
The main character is not really the one who fights. You will send your Pokemon into battle. And the Pokemon are the ones who will level up by gaining experience.
With reaching higher levels the Pokemon become stronger and will be able to learn new moves. A Pokemon can learn up to four moves. You can make them forget old moves and you can also teach Pokemon new moves by using so called TM's and HM's. You can find these items scattered around the world or you will get them as prizes.
HM's can also be used outside battles. The 5 HM's are Cut (allows you to cut down bushes standing in your way), Fly (allows you to fly directly to cities you already visited), Surf (allows you to surf across water). Strength (allows you to move stones) and Flash (allows you to light up dark caves).
Moves can be attacking or defensive moves.
Some of them will have status changes as a result. Your Pokemon can get paralyzed, fall asleep, get poisoned, be burning or be frozen. You can heal them buy using items.
You can carry up to six Pokemon with you. That's your team.
Now the big question is, how to catch Pokemon. That's actually simple. When you start the game you can choose one out of three Pokemon as your starter Pokemon. When you walk around in certain areas like high grass you will meet wild Pokemon. You have to weaken them in battle by getting their hit points low (the lower the better) and then you are able to catch them by throwing Pokeballs. When they have a negative status effect the chance to catch them is even higher. Furthermore which kind of Pokeball you throw, will also have influence on the chance of catching the Pokemon. You can find or buy these Pokeballs and the better the ball the harder to get or the more money you will have to pay for it.
Some Pokemon are able to evolve. This can happen when you level them up, give them certain items or trade them with someone else.
And there are 15 different types of Pokemon (Normal, Grass, Fighting, Flying, Rock, Fire, Water, Ice, Electric, Poison, Psychic, Ground, Bug, Ghost and Dragon). Each type is weak or strong against another type. It's like the rock-paper-scissors system. So if you play it tactically you can beat a higher level Pokemon with a low level Pokemon by choosing the right type of your Pokemon and your Pokemon's move.
The game will take you around 25 hours to complete it.
If you are a perfectionist, if you like to get every item in a game, max out levels, stats and optimize things then you can spend some hundred hours with the game. After all there are 150 Pokemon to collect and their max level is 100.
To play and complete Pokemon is quite easy to master it is very hard!
Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue are basically the same games with some minor differences. For example each version has it's exclusive Pokemon which you can only find there.
If you want to become a Pokemon master and collect every 150 Pokemon, you need to buy both games or find someone who has the other version and trade the Pokemon you need via a link cable.
This game is compatible with Pokemon Red (for GameBoy), Pokemon Yellow, Pokemon Silver, Pokemon Gold, Pokemon Crystal (for GameBoy Color) and Pokemon Stadium, Pokemon Stadium 2 (for the Nintendo 64).
Some people may consider the Pokemon games as childish and if you've only seen the TV series you might think so too.
But it is a very solid round based RPG, a lot of fun and quite addictive.
Give it a try, play at least one of the games and you'll see yourself!