Pokemon crystal(emulator)- Yeah so it's a bit of an interesting story this one, as a child the only pokemon game I played was pokemon yellow but even then I didnt finnish the game because as I stated before I really disliked JRPGs and their grinding, even something as simple as pokemon, I did get pretty far though I remember being unable to beat the Elite four because all my party was around level 40 and they were all 50 and above and I didnt wanna grind, I did love the pokemon anime and card games in my childhood but yellow was the only actual game I played for a long time.
Fast Foward a bunch of years and I had played and loved Persona 3 which made me wanna go back to other JRPGs and pokemon was on the list so I played through yellow all the way through and the remakes of gen 1 FireRed and Leaf green, and they sort of became comfort games that I often come back to but I never played any of the other games post gen 1, I did try the remakes for silver and gold a little but there was a bunch of problems with the emulation and I couldnt get very far, serves me right I supposed, but I did get the pokemon ich this past week and decided to blast through the original crystal for the first time(literally because fast- foward is a blessing in these emulators and makes grinding a non-issue)and I was really impressed.
I mean alot of the improvements and features I thought only came with gen 3 were actually in the sequel straight away, also it's really interesting how much more fleshed out the pokemon world you could say is in this game and there's even a semblance of a story and a narrative theme going on in the game, gameplaywise is a bit more handholdy at the beginning but the game gives you a freedom of exploration that you really didnt get in the previous game, I mean once you get to goldenrod city the game gets very open and you can go whenever unlike in the first game where you pretty much have to tackle the gyms in a select order, if a I have one criticism is that hms are worse here then they were before, they were annoying before but in crystal you have 3 water hms meaning that your water pokemon only has 1 free move for you to choose or you have to have 2 water types to teach these moves and that can be really annoying especially since there are tms now that are important as well like headbutt and rock smash. Another issue I have is that while it's pretty cool that you get to revisit the area from the first game and battle all the gyms there isnt really much to do in Kanto, I mean there's very few trainers, very little story to speak of and all pokemon you can get there are at such a low level they arent even worth grinding, the ultimate pay-off is pretty cool though it's not often that you get to face the previous protagonist in a sequel.
So yeah Im pretty impressed and I enjoyed the game alot more then I thought I would it's not on my top 10 rpgs or anything but I certainlly get why so many people revere this gen as the best one, I can also see why Kojima took direct inspiration from this game when he made Peace Walker and Phantom Pain which always puzzled me, for me I think gen 1 will always be the best, if anything because you have squirtle as your starter which leads to the best pokemon of them all which is Blastoise
so there is really no contest, but if I were to look at both objectivelly crystal is a better game, it's everything a sequel should be and more and Im glad I finnally got to play it.
