posted: 2024-12-12
by: me
edited by: my partner
read by: you
author's request: as you come across videos in this piece, please watch them to completion before progressing. thank you.
FireRed Hasn't Aged a Day
THEN
There’s something so miraculous about returning to a place that has not changed in 16 years, especially if your first visit was as a child. Spaces that are both welcoming enough for a child, and compelling for an adult are magical and hardly found just anywhere. I’m of course talking about video games, real life places are hardly static. I’m sorry, your hometown is going to change during your four years at college and you just gotta live with that. But if you take an extended absence from any non live-service, mainly offline, video game, when you eventually return to it, the game will be in the exact same state you left it (unless you’ve got a haunted video game cartridge, or annoying younger siblings). For better or for worse, video game worlds do not change. It’s us who do. Our bones get longer, our brains shrink, our bodies make weird growths on our chests that we didn’t ask for and cost 3,000 dollars to remove (or maybe that’s just me) 1. We get older, and with that age comes perspective 2 3. We gain the ability to travel back in time with our minds, to reassess what it meant to be “us” in a given place and time.
I was exactly 67 days old when Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue arrived on store shelves in the United States. I was far too young to experience the magnitude-10 influence the whole concept of Pokémon had on the general public. The late ’90s Pokémania had come and gone by the time I got my sticky mitts on a Gameboy Advance and a copy of Pokémon FireRed. Of course, I still found myself breathing in the nostalgia-flavored haze from the initial hype inferno Pokémon had left behind 4.
In first grade (which would’ve been late 2004) I made my first long-term childhood friend because he had brought in the Nintendo Power Guidebook for FireRed and LeafGreen. It was near the start of the school year, the weather was still warm and inviting, though fading. It was in an after-school care classroom, a makeshift repurposing of an old teacher’s lounge from the days when the current elementary school building was a high school. We had just come in from second recess, he put the book on a small table, and we started reading. I was enchanted by the map on the opening pages that acted as the table of contents. I was obsessed with mazes as a kid, and this compressed little world map looked like a giant maze of a world. This was the first time I was truly conscious of Pokémon, through the FireRed and LeafGreen guidebook. I was the next generation of children Nintendo, Game Freak and Creatures Inc. hoped to capture in their own little Pokéballs (god that sounds creepy). I was hooked on video games thanks to a book. Its literal Table of Contents, even.
But the truth is, I didn’t even play either FireRed or LeafGreen (or any Pokémon game for that matter) for another three years. My first experience with a long-term save file on FireRed was during the summer of 2007 when my cousin lent me his copy to play during the break from school (we traded our Gameboy Advance games all the time which I suppose now is a bit of an antiquated statement, man). But at the end of summer when the goldenrod began to bloom, he asked me for his game back. I of course complied. It hurt to give him his game back, my file saved right before the Elite Four, but I’d get another shot at everything again soon. Later at Christmas he gave me a copy of Pokémon LeafGreen so that I could have another go at Kanto, now without any ownership strings attached. I first entered the Hall of Fame at the Indigo League before my tenth birthday.
[TEAM NOT PICTURED]
(You'll just have to trust me on this one.)
NOW
I most recently entered the Indigo League Hall of Fame just after my twenty-sixth birthday, here in the summer of 2024, just before FireRed and LeafGreen themselves turned twenty.
As I sit here writing this not-a-video-script-anymore body of writing, I must admit to myself and everyone else: despite never having asked for a change to my body and mind, I am not the same person I was when I was nine years old 5. For one, I make thousands and thousands of dollars a month, so I can play whatever video games I want, whenever I want. For my twenty-sixth birthday, I literally bought a field-programmable gate array build, which is literally a Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, NEO GEO, and hundreds of arcade machines ALL IN ONE. For my ninth birthday, I asked for a Gameboy Advance and DIDN’T GET ONE. Yet, despite being capable of playing a countably infinite amount of games, something nine-year-old me couldn’t fathom ever being possible, this summer I opted to play Pokémon FireRed again. Again, I am not the person I was when I was nine but that person is still a part of me. And they were pulling me by the arm towards the countryside of my youth: the Generation 3 Kanto Region.
I played through FireRed as close to how I did at age 9: playing the base game on a handheld console. That means, for one, I did NOT speed up an emulator to 16x times speed to make the in-game processes go faster. I’ve done it, you’ve done it, it is THE way to play retro Pokémon games in the 2020s 6. But I wanted to approach this playthrough like someone playing the game out of the box for the first time would, so no fast-forwards or save states, no manipulating the save for trade evolutions, no hacking in 999 Rare Candies or maintaining infinite TMs, no using a randomizer to change the encounter tables nor the base game mechanics, and CERTAINLY no hacking in a Ralts to use as my starter. I effectively played a used copy 7. That also means, no I did not Nuzlocke the game 8. I met the game’s offer and faced its raw challenges with only the tools provided to me, no more, no less.
And then I opted to play on Switch Mode, because that’s how I played when I was 9, sue me.
If you’ll allow me, I’m now going to commit a great sin: I’m going to credit a thing for its ability to evoke nostalgia. But come on, for as basic as they can be at times, there’s something so warm and inviting about the Generation 3 Pokémon games. Is it their over-saturated colors to compensate for the lack of Gameboy Advance backlight? Is it the crunchy remixes of all the original Gameboy tunes coming from a flimsy Gameboy Advance speaker? Is it the way the spaces can feel so populated and authentic while also being simple little pixel mosaics that are clear abstractions of modern life? Or could it be the fact that it’s all been screen-burned into my brain for almost two whole decades of existence since first answering the question: “What the heck is a Poliwhirl?”
Generation 3 Pokémon is always going to have a special place in my heart because of its continued, unchanging presence. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to share a few things I came to understand from this most recent replay about the game, and myself. As I played this summer, I was brought back to a period where time moved much slower, adults were much larger, and the most complicated thing in my world was figuring out how to smuggle my Gameboy Advance to bed without my parents noticing.
I feel like a Disney Adult admitting this: I am out here, having just removed myself from a pool, drinking a stiff rum and coke out of an Owala water bottle and having dropped my swim-trunk-clad ass onto a cushioned wicker patio couch here in rural Texas where it is a broiling 94 degrees Fahrenheit, and I am about to have the best fucking time of my life playing a video game I’ve already beaten more times than I can count in this overheated underhydrated alcohol-induced stupor.
Why?
BECAUSE THE GAME IS COMFORTABLE AND FAMILIAR, THAT’S WHY.
So maybe it’s also obvious, I definitely did not try to recreate the entire experience of playing a game like Pokémon FireRed “as a kid would”. For one I did not appreciate the value of gaming outdoors until well into my third decade of life, I would’ve been miserable out here at age 9. There are wasps, EVERYWHERE.
But here I am, at age 26, having one of the best weekends of my life. I would choose to exist in this spot ANY femtosecond of my existence over playing Pokémon LeafGreen in the backseat of dad’s Jeep-brand icebox, its heater not working, rendering my mittened fingers USELESS against a Gameboy Advance SP’s miniscule D-Pad and face buttons. There is nothing like playing a game like this on summer vacation, that’s for sure. And no, I don’t feel bad indulging in a game from my youth as I drink alcohol through a straw. I’m an adult, I can do what I want.
sometimes you gotta go full lizard mode and fry by a pool you'll never return to
THE JOY OF GENERATION 3
That’s the magic of Generation 3 - there are still so many ways to enjoy a given playthrough under such different circumstances. This flexibility primarily stems from the selection of Pokémon at your disposal. I know this sounds hard to believe in the year 2024, when there are well over 1000 Pokémon at this point, but a selection of under 150 Pokémon is a friendly quantity to encourage exploration and experimentation without feeling overwhelming. Haters will call me a genwunner, but I’m literally speaking the praises of Generation 3, I don’t want to hear it 9. There are enough Pokémon to keep things interesting, even when what’s available in the “Story Mode” of FireRed and LeafGreen is a little over a third of the contemporary total Pokémon in existence.
You can choose to use your exclusive starting dude to cruise through
each puny boss duel with a bruising attitude, or you can pick a
pre-planned party of six Pokémon precisely promoted to present a
predisposed personal pattern. You can do what I did at age 9, and
destroy Erika with your overleveled Charizard’s Flamethrower while in the car
after leaving the Maquoketa Community Pool, having recently learned that
you can evacuate water from your ear by shaking your head up and down
while jumping (which also makes you look like an idiot, but who cares
your ears WILL feel better and you’ll be able to live the human
experience without the fears of being judged by others). There are a
reasonable amount of Pokémon to choose from in Kanto, enough to obtain a
sense of familiarity while still hiding a few Pokémon behind low
encounter rates in hard to reach places. It’s easy to pivot from Pokémon
who are effective early game but fall off in the later stages, to a
Pokémon found in the last third of the game. These games encourage you
to be flexible, to find your new favorite Pokémon. So STOP MAKING
YOUR TEAMS FULL OF EARLY GAME MONS LIKE BUTTERFREE.
Also maybe a hot take: I think that, with the power of hindsight, FireRed and LeafGreen’s lack of a Physical-Special split 10 gives it a lot of character. Yes, for all intents and purposes it completely stymies a fraction of the fully-evolved Pokémon available; I opted to NOT use Gyarados in this playthrough simply because of the lack of the Physical-Special split. Without a Physical-Special split, Fire, Water, Electric, Grass, Ice, Dark, Psychic, and Dragon-type moves all target a Pokémon’s Special Defense (are “special”), while the remaining types target a Pokémon’s Defense (hey I didn’t name these stats, I’m just the messenger, okay?). This is something unique to these Generation 3 games which makes them all the more interesting to consider in a vacuum. It’s like an added challenge, and not the Radical-Red-hardcore Nuzlocke whip-out-your-damage-calculator-and-pray kind! If I WANTED a version of Generation 3 Kanto with this physical-special split fix (along with one that might introduce significantly more Pokémon diversity to the region), I could’ve just found a romhack patch, Lord knows they’re out there. While it’s not something I intend to discuss here, emulating Pokémon is always going to be the best way to play any kind of Retro Pokémon game these days. It’s a fact so nice, I will say it twice.
I bring up all of these aspects about Generation 3 Kanto because Pokémon's recent outings have almost all been guided tours rather than solo camping trips. So many of coarse mechanical edges have been sanded away over time to give Pokémon fans old and new a gaming experience that is, for better or for worse, impossible to mess up when it comes to making a team. That's not to say FireRed and LeafGreen contain spots where it's possible to lose all your progress just because your team sucks. Even the most annoying nine year old you've ever met will eventually find a way to over-level his starter Pokémon so as to scrape past both Misty and his rival in Cerulean City. Rather, I want to express as a preamble: I like the fact that almost half of the fully evolved Pokemon kind stink. I like that there aren't more than seventy fully evolved Pokemon to choose from. This game has some actual texture! I have to make real decisions! This is the reason why I often grow weary of all the Sinnoh praise at times. "Dude, check out my team!" and it's just Infernape, Staraptor, Luxray, Floatzel, Roserade and Garchomp. Gimme a break. At least in Kanto I have to choose between which bird I'm using.
Hi, okay, I don't have a great place for this aside, so I'm putting it here: I LOVE that a talking Clefairy says "I'm not joshing you pal.". It's Bill transmogrified into a Clefairy, sure, but the absurdity of this moment never fails to get a laugh out of me. Who would say that? It's such a rare moment of localization slang that comes out of nowhere. Sure, the "joshing" term was present in the original games, but the actual line "I'm not joshing you, pal" is entirely oiriginal to this FireRed and LeafGreen. Only in Generation 3. It's so stupid. I love it.
Okay, thanks for letting me share that. Back to business.
THE KANTO REGION
Another aspect related to the selection of Pokémon available has to do with the Kanto region itself. Yes, there is a designated order to the Gyms as defined by the badge order on your trainer card, but it’s only a suggestion. If I were a hacking man, or a man with any friends also playing Gen 3 Kanto on a handheld console, I could’ve very easily given one of my Pokémon Cut, bypassed the S.S. Anne and Vermillion City, gone directly to Rock Tunnel and Lavender Town, handled the Rocket situation at the Pokémon Tower, beat the Celadon Gym, biked down the Cycling Road, found Surf and the Warden’s Teeth in the Safari Zone, beat the Fuchsia City Gym, grabbed Strength, and then made my way ALLLLLLL the way the docks at Vermillion City just to see if that rumor I heard on the playground about the secret Truck and how if you used Strength on it it would move aside and you could find Mew underneath, was true or not. I didn’t do that here, I went through the Gyms in the “expected order”, but I could have if I wanted to!
This flexibility exists in the Johto games, yes, but even by Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald the order of gyms is pretty rigidly defined. This isn’t the case with Generation 3 Kanto, it’s one of the reasons why I was smitten with the games as a kid. I found it so cool that I could take on Sabrina before Koga; I thought this was the canon order because of how the anime played out, sorry I watched the anime before playing the games! And despite some specifically vocal individuals, Koga and Sabrina are designed to be about the same in terms of levels! No, Sabrina does NOT have Pokémon at Level 50, stop lying!
Giovanni’s second Rhyhorn is definitely supposed to be a Rhydon, right?
Let's have a look...
What a disappointing oversight.
For better or for worse, Pokémon fans have a deep and storied familiarity with the Kanto region. To some old heads, it remains their only exposure to the world of Pokémon. To newer players, Kanto is the “boring” metropolitan region with minimal interesting natural setpieces. When we stop and consider it, the Kanto Region is the closest thing to “real life in 90s Japan” in the Pokémon Universe, after all. But because of this analogous familiar vibe, the Kanto Region is a space that kind of feels like a parallel world a child might be able to escape to, and then map onto their own life. The familiarity is especially appreciable when you hear about how Lt. Surge, “the Lightning American”, fought in “the war” from an NPC in his gym, or when a Silph Co. employee complains about how miserable he is about how he was sent to “the TIKSI branch” of the company (yes like the Tiksi, Russia). [Read in DYKG cadence]: Did you know Mew was discovered in Guyana, South America? These allusions to real life allow players to draw subtle connections between the Kanto Region and the real world, which in turn makes the region itself feel more “real” (despite the nonsensically-hyper fixated citizens of the world). It’s a place you can go to, if you really believe hard enough.
And Kanto's got a bit of an edge to it! We all know about the old man outside the Celadon City Gym who proudly proclaims to himself, and unintentionally to a ten year old child "Heheh! This GYM is great! It's full of women!", and how his admiration was eventually changed to "strong trainers" in future visits, but that's only scratching the surface. We've got organized crime that ISN'T based in mythology! We've got real hardcore gambling! We've got guys who puke! Kanto's got girls who dump their boyfriends because he sucks at Pokémon!
Now this is Pokémon.
Shout outs to having Psychic power.
The fact that FireRed and LeafGreen lean on the fourth wall as often as they do, however, is something I only now appreciate as an adult. I spent a lot of time on this playthrough taking the time to listen to the NPCs of the world and breathe in the flavor of each interaction. In doing so my gaze turned towards some of the game design choices present in FireRed and LeafGreen.
This was a new experience for me- I was a very impatient child when it came to playing Pokémon. I would usually start a new file, play for about an hour and half, up through (about) Pewter City, and then the parental figures in my life would enforce an “hour off” which would kill any momentum I had developed over the play session. I would usually return to the save file, carry it through to Cerulean City where I’d be met with a bipartite roadblock of my Rival and the Cerulean gym.
A Generational "Noob Bridge" if there ever were one.
These two boss encounters forced me to grind, which in turn bored me. I would soft-reset any time I lost to my rival, rather than accept a defeat and the experience points that came with it. As a result, I would essentially filter myself, grow bored with the game and let it sit for an extended period of time. And when I thought to myself “hey I want to play FireRed” two months later I would see my current save, bristle at the idea of picking up an abandoned journey, and opt for a fresh run. I have played the first two hours of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen about as many times as Tim Rogers has finished Final Fantasy 7 11.
Oh shit i got on a tangent, I’m sorry folks, i cannot be left alone with a pencil, pen, keyboard, wordpad, etc. I’m probably going to kill this darling, alas. RIP 12
In all seriousness, through this recent playthrough I found myself considering the game design implications of Pokémon. I took a good hard look at this game thinking about what it would be like, as hazel put it, "[to peer] into the alternate universe where Pokémon is just some Gameboy RPG” rather than just ‘what it is’ .
ANIMAL COLLECTING
Perhaps it is best to start with the raison d’etre: “gotta catch ’em all” (never mind that they removed this slogan from the boxart around this time in the franchise). Truly, this was the call to arms for Pokémon, and what sticks in the craw of any uncaring parents from the 90s. Pokémon is an animal collecting turn based role-playing game. You have to strive to “catch ’em all” before you can even think about beating the Elite Four. This goal is just as important as actually fighting trainers and becoming the champion of the region. Before you know about fighting Gym Leaders, you’re tasked with filling the Pokédex. In that sense, beating the Gym Leaders, Elite Four and Champion are a means to an end. You can’t “catch ’em all” if you aren’t the champion 13. But then again, the credits roll when you beat your Rival at the Indigo Plateau, not when you catch Mewtwo.
I took the “animal collecting” aspect of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen for granted as a kid, though I have really come to appreciate it over this past year. Recent favorites of mine like Linda Cube Again and Dragon Quest V both have animal collecting mechanics that I found incredibly fun, especially when considering how I was expected to go about finding animals in them. I was encouraged to explore the world, and investigate every little nook and cranny. It’s possible that a single room had some lurking beast that I'd never seen, and it’s actually really good and cool and also required for 100% completion so I had better grab it 14.
I approached FireRed with a similar mindset this go-around, I was going to make sure that I had at least 60 registered Pokémon in my Pokedex by the time I took on the Elite Four. In order to get the National Dex and open up the remainder of the post-game you have to have registered 60 Pokémon in your Pokedex, and as a kid, this was a daunting task. I was so focused on raising my main guy that I didn’t bother trying to catch and raise other guys. But it’s not actually hard at all to clear this requirement. I had 60 Pokémon registered in the Pokedex well-before even reaching Fuchsia City, which was a little over halfway through the game. I took care to try to find every Pokémon in every area before moving on, and let myself be surprised by the ways in which Pokémon evolved.
I must confide in you, dear reader, that this was some of the most fun I’ve had playing Pokémon in a VERY long time. The thrill of catching an Abra before it Teleported away, the excitement of remembering that a Moon Stone worked on Clefairy, the revelation there were super strong Pokémon in optional, hidden dungeons- these small, yet frequent moments accumulated as I continued along, and it was so satisfying to look at every Pokémon I had obtained by the end of the journey.
Even the Safari Zone, a portion of the game that is almost entirely dependent on randomness, was fun! I remember the first time I found a Chansey while laying in a prone position on a scratchy carpet in my aunt and uncle’s duplex in South Minneapolis. It was a Sunday afternoon in summer, the windows were open, the PGA tour was on the TV and my uncle was sound asleep. I had to do everything in my power to stifle a yelp when that egg creature appeared on my little Gameboy screen.
Later that evening we celebrated birthdays.
The Safari Zone is lovely for what it keeps from you. As I lured Pokémon to nibble at the bait I threw at its feet, so too did FireRed offer an entire sub-zone entirely for hunting down the elusive egg character. I am so happy to report that I finally got to release that primordeal, joyous cry upon once again finding a Chansey in this playthrough.
I also found this lovely lady. I could do the math on the rarity of her, but I think her name speaks for itself
I feel like we modern Pokémon fans fail to appreciate the animal searching and collecting mechanics present across the entire franchise, especially with the Legendary Pokémon. Of course you can find Zapdos at the Power Plant. Of course Articuno is in the deepest part of the Seafoam Islands. Why else would these places exist at all? The monolith of Pokémon doesn’t let you forget that these legendary birds exist, but what if you could forget? What if you could wipe your mind of all knowledge of these birds? Imagine the rush of even just discovering the Power Plant in the first place, let alone that there’s a giant fucking electric bird just hanging out there. To have your curiosity be rewarded with these optional boss fights is really excellent; feeling rewarded from exploring the world remains one of my favorite parts of the Pokémon franchise. These moments are sorely lacking in Generation 6-8 and it’s why I found Generation 9 so compelling despite Scarlet and Violet’s… well… you know… 15 I can only lament that I knew about these Legendary Pokémon well before I even played the games as a kid. Finding Articuno in the Seafoam Islands would have been a core memory if I hadn’t already known about it beforehand. Alas. Go play Linda Cube Again you’ll understand what I mean by this entire section here.
It's like finding those turtle eggs...
As I alluded to before, one of the most common ways of spicing up a journey through Kanto is to alter the encounter tables through ROM hacking. This naturally gives the player options in team composition, and therefore more flexibility in the battling side of the game. But this invalidates the entire other half of FireRed's design, the fascinating chances of finding that one new Pokémon. I'm going to invoke a variation on the Sonic meme: "On routes, I want fewer Pokémon with worse stats and higher encounter percentages, and I'm NOT kidding." Pokémon FireRed is a better animal collecting game BECAUSE there are fewer Pokemon available considering each location has at least one new Pokémon family to find. It makes the 10% encounter with a rare Pokemon feel special when the other 90% are dominated by two easy fodder. Do you know how miserable it is playing Pokémon Y, and having the single new Generation 6 Pokémon be a 10% encounter rate in a specific patch of flowers surrounded by seven other "older generation" Pokémon? It's like playing the most uninteresting slot machine where you're only paying with your time. I just want to find a stupid little Spritzee, is that so wrong???? But in FireRed... mmmm... 10% Magneton encounters and 5% Electabuzz encounters in the Power Plant... Every single random encounter has the potential to be a pleasant surprise!
Okay, you got me, let's talk about Zubat.
LACK OF BALANCE
In the process of going about catching them all, however, you have to spend some time fighting some Pokémon too. You’re not catching literally every monster, rather only the wild ones. Yes, there are also other trainers you must fight over the course of playing Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen. In doing so, you begin to understand a horrifying truth: Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen are not balanced. Or rather, have not been re-balanced since their worlds and dungeons were first designed in Pokémon Red and Blue.
FireRed and LeafGreen have level-design from Generation 1, but are saddled with all of the extra mechanics of Generation 3. What do I mean by this? Well, let’s take one example as gospel: the omnipresent matter of pseudorandomness. It’s hard to not notice the copious instances of random number generator jank popping up throughout this game. Status conditions that impede your progress in lurk in each random encounter. It’s those Zubats with their Confuse Rays; I swear to God one of the most frustrating sentences I’ve had the displeasure of reading more than 30 times on this playthrough was “It hurt itself in confusion!”. I know this is a staple of other classic JRPGs, but boy oh boy is it tedious here, where there’s only one usable party member on screen for 99% of all combat encounters.
FUCK, I wanted to throw my precious gaming peripheral every time Starmie’s Water Pulse confused my Charmeleon. I wanted to take a sledgehammer to my precious gaming peripheral when, after becoming confused, Charmeleon then “hurt itself in confusion”.
THIS FUCKING SUCKS SO MUCH DUDE
The Poison status condition is arguably worse, what with the number of Poison types LITTERED through Kanto. Every Poison Sting seems to Poison your Pokémon, and if it doesn’t the Poison Point ability does it anyway. I literally held my breath every single time I fought a Weedle or Kakuna, and let it out with a sigh when I saw the iconic purple glow wash over my shuddering Pokémon. Sure, in Generation 1, Poison Sting exists and it’s something you have to consider, but new to Generation 3 are abilities, an intrinsic feature unique to each Pokémon line that gives them a little extra something special in the game in some way. In Generation 3, Weedle has the ability Poison Point, which can Poison your Pokémon if it uses a contact move against the little buggoid. I emphasize this because Kanto was designed with the first generation of Pokémon’s level design in mind, and so the game doesn’t necessarily take into account the fact that you’re more prone to being Poisoned off of sheer happenstance.
Okay readers, brace yourselves, I’m about to talk some MATH.
[math alarm starts sounding]
In Generation 1, Poison Sting’s got a 20% chance (probability of 0.2) of Poisoning you, which is fine, sure, 1 in 5, whatever. It’s pretty straightforward stuff, made especially so because of the five required interactions with Pokemon that can Poison your Pokemon in Viridian Forest. If we use a binomial model, the expected value of being Poisoned here E[X] = np is actually being poisoned just once:
E[X] = (5 encounters) × (20% of Poison) = 1!
In Generation 3 it’s got a 30% chance (probability of 0.3) of Poisoning you, WHICH IS NOT A NEGLIGIBLE CHANGE. Let's address the absolute floor: if you chose Charmander as your starter, (much like I did) and you’re only using Ember against the 4 Weedles and 1 Kakuna you face, assuming they all use Poison Sting you are going to get Poisoned on average 1.5 times.
E[X] = (5 encounters) × (30% of Poison) = 1.5
Now I know what you’re thinking “getting Poisoned is getting poisoned, you can’t say you got ‘half-poisoned’”, well TJ “Henry” Yoshi, hear me out. You get one antidote if you speak with an NPC in the entrance to Viridian Forest. In Pokémon Red, that’s on average, going to be more than enough to get you through the dungeon. You’ll learn about the Poison status condition and you’ll be able to practice healing from it, and continue on your merry way. You’ll likely be able to get through Viridian Forest on your first go at it. In Pokémon FireRed, you’re going to be poisoned more than once on roughly half your attempts if you’re playing optimally.
And if you happen to use Scratch, or maybe you didn’t even pick Charmander? Then you have to consider the fact that Weedle has the ability Poison Point. Poison Point has a 1 in 3 chance of occurring (probability of approximately 0.33) if you attack the Weedle with a contact move. If we consider the conditional probabilities, that is the probability of being poisoned at all from independent events (Poison Point only happens when you attack, Poison Sting is from the Weedle attacking, these are independent probabilities), this probability is roughly 16/30 (0.533) when we sum all the probabilities of the cases together.
Here's my math, by the way:
And when we use this found probability, 53.3% (or 0.533 if you'd like to be pedantic about my terminology here), as our p term, we find something truly disgusting.
E[X] = (5 encounters) × (53.3% of Poison) = 2.67
This means that, on average, you will be poisoned 2.67 times in Viridian Forest from these Weedle. Literally twice as much AT A MINIMUM. This means that you’re more than likely going to have to retreat from the forest, return to Viridian City and spend your shortage of funds on Antidotes, or power though with a depleted roster. Any way you spin it, this single Antidote is not enough to get you through Viridian Forest in a single run without carrying at least one Poisoned Pokémon and it makes for a pretty awful tutorial dungeon. I understand that there are two other Antidotes hidden in Viridian Forest, but this only increases your potential encouter rate and even then that 2.67 figure is, again, a FLOOR in FireRed. Even if you seek out the extra antidotes, it's still very possible you're going to need to use all of them on your singular traversal (assuming you don't have any Pokémon faint from Poison). It's just a very strange, unfriendly, and clearly unintentional change to a tutorial dungeon. And I was the cautious type of gamer as a kid! I liked having a fully-healed party as often as possible! Is it any wonder that I was so worn out from playing the game by the time I got to Pewter City?
I’m not an expert in game design by any stretch, but I DO have a collegiate degree in Applied Mathematics, and it’s not hard to observe that, in the process of trying to keep the remade Kanto region as authentic to itself as possible, the level design is thrown entirely out of whack by the addition of these status-inducing abilities. Game Freak did NOT balance FireRed and LeafGreen for abilities (a new addition to Generation 3) and it’s visible from the first dungeon in the game. This is why sections of the game like Mt. Moon and Nugget Bridge and Route 25 can feel like such slogs at times! You’re expected to fight every single trainer in the game, the level curve is based around the player seemingly owning the mantra “I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was” from the jump, but the game’s status conditions are not properly balanced in these areas at all. I think this is why I had so much trouble playing this as a kid; those stupid birds swirling around my Pokémon’s head, and the dread-inducing purple quiver were enough to make an impatient kid like me feel like I had to take a break. If it’s any consolation, it’s nice to be able to come to this kind of conclusion after all these years and conditional probability courses later. It’s why I write these things, and let myself explore my old data with my new research techniques. I get answers about myself.
BECOMING STRONG
I want to return to the point that I brought up earlier: that these games are centered around the expectation that the player would fight every trainer. It’s nothing I really paid any attention to as a “my over-levelled starter is good enough to take on every single fight” little kid, but it’s something clear as day as an adult. As I traveled through Viridian Forest, I fought literally everything in my path, wild Pokémon and trainers alike. By doing so, my Charmander had reached level 13 and learned Metal Claw, a move given to it IN THIS GAME to make the fight against Brock easier. Fighting every single trainer between Cerulean City and Vermillion City, and taking on each trainer in the S.S. Anne brought the three primary Pokémon I used on my party up to the mid 20s, which was well-enough strength to take on any nearby boss fight. Routes 12 through 15 literally exist as optional trainer gauntlets entirely for grinding, sure, but the game absolutely expects you to be taking on these routes with near a full team of six so that you can have an evenly leveled party by the time you take on Koga. Silph Co. is a dungeon they throw at you under the guise of a “Story” when in reality, it’s just more trainers for you to beat up so that Sabrina’s Alakazam doesn’t shatter you into millions of tiny little pieces.
This might seem obvious with a capital-O from even the most basic viewpoint, but I think it is critical to consider the decision to balance the game around fighting every trainer here, especially in the context of your rival. How do you become the best in the world of Pokémon? You prove your strength against everyone. You put in the time and the effort to prove that you’re capable of being “the strongest trainer in the entire world!”, or at least that’s how your rival goes about it. Your rival approaches their journey under the vision of being “better than you”, and bragging about it all the while, despite losing to you at every encounter. They don’t understand how it’s possible that someone could possibly beat him despite all the work he has put in. We can all roll our eyes with the cynicism of the times when Professor Oak tells our rival “You have forgotten to treat your Pokémon with love and trust.”, but he has a point. Our rival has always been so focused on the actions of others that he has never stopped and considered what it really means to be strong for himself. Strength is something that you can develop if you push yourself “just a liiiiiiiiiittle bit harder” out of bitterness and spite, but the strongest trainers are those who are able to find a sense of intrinsic motivation and joy in the process of achieving their goals. Strength is a side effect of focused passion.
For a very long time, I felt like FireRed’s rival character in my real life. I was so focused on being better than others, I failed to understand why I got started in the first place. As a youth, I was so focused on not being seen as lowly, weak, unskilled, and I was constantly comparing myself against my peers. I literally pushed myself so hard while running the mile in first hour gym class, trying to keep pace with the fastest kid that I threw up halfway through the first lap. As everyone else ran past me evacuating my guts onto the grass in the cold October morning air, I thought I would never recover socially. I was doomed to be “the kid who threw up running the mile”. Just like the rival, I wanted to be seen as “strong” more than I wanted to be “strong”. To be seen as anything other than that was the worst feeling in the world.
On this go through Kanto, the reason I fought every trainer in front of me was because I was having fun as I went about it. I wanted to fight each trainer, not because I was worried about being strong enough to handle the gym leaders or the upcoming rival fights, but because I was having fun playing the game. I was enjoying the opportunities to try out new party members and watch my team grow while still facing some challenges along the way. I wasn’t concerned about some mega douche neighbor (save for one particular match up, which I'll discuss momentarily), I was focused on my own party of six and their internal growth. In that way I learned to love raising my party and exploring the world, which is the absolute point of the game in the grand scheme of things.
And now, I’d like to ramble about my party for a bit :]
Winnie is our cat, by the way
Speak for yourself, Buster. The name game's nothing to me.
Time to return to that point I made while talking about Rhydon: TMs also feel like rewards in this game. I’m so used to loading up my dudes with all of these special technical machine moves for competitive play, that I often forget just how valuable they really are 16. Everyone always complains of Gens 3 and 4, “oh man, there’s a limited use on TMs, and that stinks man” and they’re right like 90% of the time. If you engage in ANY kind of post-game activities like competitive play, the fact that TMs are a limited resource is bunk hogwash. But in this single-player, JRPG-mechanic focused exploration, I saw TMs in a different light: they now acted as those cool special and powerful moves that you often have to work for in other JRPGs. I was weighing the risks and rewards of using a consumable item, which was a far cry to how I had played before. Fifteen years ago, a single-use item was far too valuable to ever use (Hell in fifteen years that might be true too). Luckily, today, I’m better than that. I think having the limited use of TMs forced me to consider what I would want on my Pokémon, and thus forced me to consider my team building in a much more intricate way. Again, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE having all the cool flashy moves available whenever I want and I think having reusable TMs is ALWAYS going to be better in a game where you’re constantly shuffling around moves for competitive play. But I wasn’t trying to compete with anyone here, I was only competing against the game itself.
I wouldn’t call my usage of TMs liberal by any means, but I approached this playthrough with an open-mind. I knew which moves I was going to have later, and I understood that TMs were meant to be short-term solutions at times. I taught Clefairy Water Pulse to have a better way to deal with the multitude of cave dungeons before I had a Gloom, only to later forget the move for Metronome. Sure, I could’ve taught my eventual Vaporeon Water Pulse, but Surf was only a few towns away, and then Water Pulse would become immediately outclassed, which felt more wasteful to me. And waste not, want not, as they say17 .
Through this recent playthrough I have come to appreciate FireRed and LeafGreen in many different ways. As a standalone animal collecting turn-based role-playing game, FireRed and LeafGreen are simple yet engaging experiences which have legs beyond their franchise. They feel like compelling video games with little magical worlds that feel wonderful to explore with fascinating game mechanics that create a unique game experience you cannot get in any other Pokémon game, and even any other JRPG. It’s no wonder it was able to hook me at such a young age.
But it’s hard to separate my recent experiences with FireRed and LeafGreen, hell with Pokémon as a whole, from my history with FireRed and LeafGreen. No matter how hard I hit myself over the head with a freakishly large cartoon hammer (or an equivalent blunt object), in an attempt to forget something, I cannot have a second first-time experience with this game ever again.
But I don’t mind that.
If anything I welcome it.
LABOR DAY
Through playing FireRed over the summer, I was able to return to an approximate state of being I hadn’t felt since my youth.
As I traversed Kanto, I returned to the memories of real-world spaces.
I remembered the painful feeling of water getting stuck in my ear at the community pool after the last day of summer swimming lessons in my cousin’s hometown, and how, after I learned how to jump and shake my head to evacuate the water from my ear, I got in the car and destroyed Erika with my Charizard’s Flamethrower. The pool was permanently closed the next summer, in 2008 18. I will never be able to go back to that swimming pool 19.
I remembered the feeling of a scruffy carpet and how it made my arms itch from the wild encounters with dust that lurked in its strands while at a birthday celebration at my aunt and uncle’s old Victorian duplex in South Minneapolis. I rested on the carpeted floor, leaning on my elbows and kicking my feet in the air as I found that Chansey in the Safari Zone, the sounds of my uncle snoring and the TV softly playing the sounds of the current PGA Tour in the background. On the last few days of August this year, we helped move them out of their duplex. That was the last time I will ever be inside that house.
It is a cherishable event when we can rest under the shade of trees of memories, having sowed the seeds ourselves.
On Labor Day, the day I once knew to be the “last day of summer” I went on a run through my hometown and ended up at my old school building, the place where I had first learned about Pokémon. The building that once housed both my former elementary and middle schools appeared to have hardly changed in the decade and a half since I had left it. I ran past my youth, past the front entrance of my school, the steps not as tall, the hill not as steep, the parking lot not as big as I once remembered it.
The courtyard I once gazed upon from my Kindergarten, Fourth Grade, Middle School Orchestra and 8th Grade Earth Science Classes (all in the same two rooms) was still shadowed and lush with ankle-high grass.
The backdoor blacktop had chips and cracks I recognized from when I was dropped off for school every morning. The lower parking lot, which had access to the doors to the big gymnasium and access to the cafeteria stairs, was as dusty as I remembered it being from when I sat in line to go inside from recess, and later, gym class. From every exterior direction accessible by a single 26-year old man in running gear at 10:30 AM on a clear summer’s morning, the place was the same as it had been when I left it.
The room where my after school-care took place had its blinds drawn. I couldn’t see inside, only the outline of myself from the outside. I looked all scraggly and weird.
For nine years I spent every Labor Day, my last day of summer, anxious to return to this singular building. I’m sure the children of District 281 probably still feel this way this year too. The breezy warmth felt exactly as it had almost twenty years ago, the quiet rustle of the leaves in the trees and the wild grass around the nearby fields all sounded just like I remembered them. I ran along the same path I did where I had thrown up while running the mile in gym class in sixth grade. I blamed it on “rancid cantaloupe” I had eaten for breakfast, but in reality I just didn’t want to be the slowest kid running the mile. Now here I was, alone, taking strides towards my fifth mile of the run that morning. I paused there, and looked at the grass and the goldenrod growing amongst the chain link fences. I hadn’t seen that view in so long. It had been almost half my life since I last stood in that exact spot. I saw the window of the very classroom where I had my first, impactful encounter with the Pokémon franchise. I couldn’t see inside, I only saw my reflection. I missed being on the other side.
What a happy, strange miracle that a place like this exists for me- A place I can indulge in such a powerful feeling in the span of no more than 180 seconds. I didn’t even have to go inside. I don’t know what would’ve happened if I had gone inside. If nostalgia was a drug, this was one hell of a bender.
And I then kept running. What was the point of lingering there, a Middle School with classes starting literally the next day, in a stupor of nostalgia-induced intoxication? That would be strange in both a metaphorical AND literal sense. We love these places in the same way we love flowers and snow and finding Chansey in the Safari Zone. Each moment is fleeting, never stays, and is only defined for what feels like a femtosecond. But to cling to these ideas will never allow us to embrace another like it.
Living in the past will always be a tempting offer, but I have to be honest with myself: my best days were not spent between the ages of five and thirteen in this building. I’m sure they’ve yet to come. I know they won’t be spent here.
Nostalgia can ferment even the sourest memories if we wait long enough. While it is important to not imbibe so much that we drink ourselves sick, partaking in a taste of nostalgia with a palette refined by life can provide a lovely little time. And you know what, I feel really good about having gone back for only that moment. I got what I needed to feel out of the experience, and I don’t think I need to go back to that building again for a very long time, if ever. There are some places I cannot return to -A swimming pool that’s been filled in for more than a decade and a half, a house I’ve recently moved out of, a school I’ve outgrown- but this is the reality of life. The places we can return to are small, happy miracles each unique for us all.
I’ve spent so much of my adult life so far trying to understand what it means to have had a childhood, and how that has shaped ME. It’s a life I lived, it’s a place I was, it’s a thing I did, it’s a person I met, it’s a friend I made, it’s a feeling I felt. It’s mine and will always be mine. But it is not my whole, and cannot be my whole. I am someone more than who I was back then, just as tomorrow I will be more than I was today. My whole self cannot exist without the moments I remember from my childhood, but it also cannot be completed until I breathe my last breath and close my eyes for the final time. There are so many more pieces of me yet to discover and explore, pieces that I’m excited to find and align with myself. And I have to continue on this journey ahead along the railroad tracks of life with the same joyful and uncaring-of-what-others-think energy that I had when I first departed the station. But whether I want it to or not, time moves forward and I am only moving further along the tracks. I’m far enough away from these memories to simultaneously know that I can’t go back, nor do I need to.
Yes, really, playing Pokémon FireRed kicked off my quarter life crisis. FireRed hasn't aged a day. But I have.
I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m satisfied with exploring the Kanto Region. I have no plans to revisit the space, or Pokémon FireRed or LeafGreen for that matter, for a very long time. These are places I grew up exploring, and have since returned to appreciate as an adult, and now it is time to move on. It is time to face a new journey with a sense of joy and excitement. I don’t plan to forget the moments in these spaces that chiseled my marble block. Pokémon FireRed is a deeply important game to me, and I hope that, one day in some small miracle, I’ll be able to share these same feelings with someone new.
Kanto will always be there for us to explore, whenever we decide it’s time for us to return. I hope that if and when that day comes again, I can once again go on a journey that men long before me have only dreamed of. The goldenrod is in bloom. Summer is over. We cannot linger here any longer, but that’s for the best. The rest of the world is out there for us to explore.
Thank you for reading.
Those Wacky Footnotes
Thank gosh for health insurance, I guess (there's a whole story here too about how they opened me up, say that it wasn't what they thought it was and then closed me back up. I went to a Mass of Fermenting Dregs Concert that night and was in excruciating pain, but it was worth it (had to avoid the moshpit though, that would've been awkward to have to explain)).↩︎lol 26-year old, you’re not that old↩︎
but you know what, I’m older than I was before, and I am acknowledging that fact, so eat shit, I’ll speak my truth.↩︎
not like kids today with their razzle berry sorbet vapes or some shit. dude, what the hell is “flavored air” and how did we reach a post-post-nicotine era???? god, I really am getting old with this “kids today talk”.↩︎
And thank God for that.↩︎
And there’s nothing wrong with that! But, that said, I do take umbrage at those who fast forward the game and then don’t acknowledge so when they do some half-baked analysis, etc.↩︎
I’m dancing around the fact that I played on a Steam Deck with an emulator, but that leaves room for save editing shenanigans. I mean to say I played it entirely vanilla and I really want to define what that means here.↩︎
What do I mean by "physical-special split"? Find out here.↩︎
“Wow, that’s a lot of times!”↩︎
[video editting note: record myself doing strikethrough of the entire previous paragraph]↩︎
Show that one guy blocking the entrance to Cerulean Cave↩︎
go play Linda Cube Again right fucking now.↩︎
As an aside, I’m trying to be better about using these limited SUPER GOOD items in general in JRPGs. I understand that, yeah a max revive is a rare and super valuable item, but at some point you WILL need to use it when the time is right, and knowing when the time is right is a crucial skill to have when formulating a strategy. I’ll probably cut this out later, but like, USE YOUR VALUABLE CONSUMABLE ITEMS, THEY’RE IN THE GAME FOR A REASON. PLAY YOUR HIDDEN IMMUNITY IDOL Q I SWEAR TO G-.↩︎
Source Link to Article. I actually recognize someone in the photo they have on hand, fun fact.↩︎
As an aside, in my research I found that one of the reasons that the pool was closed was because there were a number of expensive repairs that needed to be made in light of then-recent pool safety standards updates. “One of the major issues cited was the pool drain. In 2007, a federal law required a change in pool drains after a youngster was injured in a Minnesota pool.” (source (use your favorite paywall dodger)). I know this incident VERY well because it happened quite close to where I grew up, specifically in a suburb I also frequented all through my first eighteen or so years. A young, six-year old girl had a fatal accident involving a pool drain which I won’t elaborate on here, that was then incredibly distastefully adapted in the movie Final Destination 4. In case you were curious. Weird full circle moment for me.↩︎
