Out There – A Pokémon Crystal Story
I.
I never felt the need to go trek through the woods on my own, usually getting enough hiking time alongside a neighborhood comrade. Today, though, I'm feeling bored and uncommonly adventurous. The sun is out in full force, the sixty-five-degrees-Fahrenheit afternoon beckons. The rays shining through the bedroom window cover me like a freshly dried bedsheet.
The route straight through side yard thickets takes me along an outer pathway behind several other nearby backyards, all the way down to a thin creek that acts as the cutoff line between civilization and the wild beyond. The water level sits lower than I remember, allowing for an effortless expedition along the embankment toward a larger wooded area.
By this point, I've ventured through every acre of woods adjacent to my family home. All of the kids in my neighborhood gang colonized these lands years ago, divided up between each member based on lengthy negotiations and ironclad agreements.
No, this time I'm determined to push the envelope past the typical adventures, I'm off to sneak a peek at what exists beyond the usual stomping grounds. I've previously surrounded myself with trees, shrubs, bushes, vines, every assortment of mother nature's greenest undergrowth while making it back to the house with little more than a few scratches. What could possibly go wrong?
II.
Thinking back, I didn't exactly need a copy of Pokémon Crystal in whichever conceivable way an eight year old child needs a video game. I had eschewed the catch-em-all mantra in favor of a caught-as-many-as-I-needed philosophy in Pokémon Silver, swapping version exclusive monsters with a select few schoolyard pals who carried the complementary Gold version in tow.
Nevertheless, there went my mother, my younger sister and I pulling up to the Toys “R” Us drive through window, seated in the silver Honda Accord LX wagon during our usual Saturday morning errands. By this point in the day, my father had already left for a weekend shift in his silver Toyota 4Runner. We were a “silver” family through and through.
Persuading either parent to purchase a new game was no small feat, I wasn't allowed to have very many of them for as long as I could remember. My exposure to electronic games well into my elementary school years included educational CD-ROMs as well as brief glimpses into what I'd been missing out on at the occasional sleepover. I only managed to obtain a Game Boy Color, my first proper game system, at a rest stop on the way home from a family float trip.
This time, though, my dog and pony show was convincing enough to go get the latest game, reasoning that my sister should have the opportunity to play something on the Game Boy for a change. A notable selling point for Pokémon Crystal was the introduction of a female player-character, an enduring aspect of the franchise that would continue to exist in every generation that followed. If you can believe it, many contemporaries speculated the year 2000 had brought about the last Pokémon game that would ever be released.
The general cultural attitude toward Pokémon around this time could be most charitably described as satiated. Pokémania was a palpable force in the wider youth culture before the turn of the millennium, and many fans had begun to crash from the sugar high during this uncertain juncture. If those colorful Game Paks were getting long in the tooth, the handheld systems they were played on already had dentures.
I must have been living under a rock, as my interest in the franchise was nearing a fever pitch. In addition to the games, I collected the trading cards and watched new episodes of the cartoon on Saturday mornings. My friends and I would get together to fiddle with the ever-so-fragile link cable modes, come up with our own Pokémon lore and speculate on increasingly absurd in-game glitches that were yet to be discovered. I was fully indoctrinated, zealous as could be.
My sister, on the other hand, didn’t know what to think about it. Her interest in consumer products up to that point lied more with dolls of the Barbie and American Girl variety, none of her peers were pressuring her to play video games. I had it in my head that a game with a female protagonist could be an avenue for us to find more common ground, but that transparent, light blue cartridge with a sparkle pattern imprinted on the plastic would later end up in my hands after an extended period of disuse.
Though my sister would go on to enjoy certain games, the hobby never seemed to click in the same way it did for me. Perhaps she correctly evaluated that gaming was more of a mindless distraction than a fulfilling pursuit. Or, maybe she genuinely had fun playing Pokémon Crystal, but real life simply got in the way. While we didn't always see eye-to-eye on everything, she did end up graduating from medical school, so she must have done something right along the way.
III.
As I take a lengthy first step up to higher ground after zigzagging through the creek bed for several minutes, I scan the area ahead. All manner of trees tower over me even from this new height, mixing with the leaf-covered forest floor to paint a green-brown canvas of life in every direction.
Where to, first? Euphoria takes hold as the allure of uncharted land is too much to handle. I turn around and glance at a seemingly abandoned tennis court behind one of the more upscale homes in the nearby cul-de-sac. This neglected feature from a bygone era will act as my landmark. Be back later.
I've snapped back to reality after operating on autopilot for who-knows-how-long, quickly coming to the realization that I've bitten off more than I can chew. The tennis court is nowhere in sight, nor is any other house or familiar frame of reference that I can draw from. Just me, and the trees.
I sit down on a nearby stump to catch my breath and attempt to find my bearings. My cheap-as-dirt-pay-as-you-go-flip-phone equipped with a Fall Out Boy ringtone I paid a dollar to obtain displays no signal bars. I'm starting to get hungry. The trees are taller than they were before. The sun is beginning to set. It would seem that my only option is to pick a direction and go.
IV.
It brings me no joy to report that the experience of playing through Pokémon Crystal the way it was intended in the year 2000 is not as fun as you remember. Between the slow-as-molasses walking speed and the nearly unskippable mash-A-to-win battles, the gameplay elements on offer aren't likely to convert any would-be fans in the current year, backlit screen or not.
A considerable amount of digital ink has been spilled about Pokémon Crystal, what it meant to young enthusiasts of the time and how it influenced the next chapters of the series. Everyone remembers the roaming legendary beasts, the Battle Tower, the epic final clash with the silent protagonist from the original generation.
The part that stuck out to me for so many years, the part that aged like wine, is the outdoor environment spanning from the opening Johto region to the returning lands of Kanto. The sheer amount of navigable terrain stuffed into this Game Boy Color cartridge is nothing short of remarkable. It wasn't uncommon for me to come home after a long afternoon of exploring the woods, lie down in bed and explore between the endless sixteen-by-thirty-two trees inside this tiny handheld landscape. If you can forgive low resolution pixel graphics and allow a modicum of child-like imagination to take hold, there's an entire continent full of wonders to experience.
An aspect of the Pokémon world that seems to go underappreciated is how effortlessly natural areas flow into urbanity. They exist in concert with each other, each is made better by the other's existence. Some of the iconic areas from Johto such as the National Park and Tin Tower are man-made structures comfortably nestled inside forested areas. The human beings that occupy these lands see nature as a cherished place worth putting in the effort to explore, preserve and beautify as opposed to a recipient of avaricious exploitation.
The Johto region stands out to me partly because of its vast cave network that acts as a hidden map on its own. While the caves in Kanto typically led to the next logical destination required by the story or contained some exclusive legendary monster, Johto's caves are decidedly more plain, interchangeable and mysterious. You can expect to find several dead ends, redundant item pickups and rambling loners doing who-knows-what in a dark corner.
Nearly every cave in the game shares a visual design of drab brown surfaces mixed with Prussian blue pools of water. The serpentine paths replete with one-sided ledge jumps, stony obstacles and waterways create this murky mixture of unknowable depths that only the most skilled trainers can traverse. While the Johto landmass is full of memorable landmarks, the cavernous underworld is just as full of the unfamiliar.
In the original generation of Pokémon, the only dark cave present in Kanto left the player with a faint visual approximation of its boundaries. You were still able to eke out a general sense of direction without using the “Flash” field move, a Hidden Machine-exclusive technique that illuminates a dark area. Walking into an unlit cave in Johto is like walking into an endless void. Your only sense of direction is the ability to take a step forward without bonking into the side of a hard surface.
By the time caves are a viable area to explore in Pokémon Crystal, access to HM05 (Flash) is a given. You've already cleared the gym challenge required to use the move, many easily obtainable Pokémon can make use of it. Additionally, Escape Ropes (a quick escape item) are a cinch to find out in the wild, costing a measly 550 PokéDollars each at the shopping mart when your supply runs out. The only excuse you have for getting stuck in the middle of a darkened room while trying to feel your way toward that shiny item ball just within view is your lack of preparedness.
V.
When you live near a populous area of a certain size, the shroud of night is not as pitch-black as, say, the inside of a cave. Faint beams originating from far off street lamps, commercial buildings and open-curtained living rooms shimmer across the night sky like a soft chorus of electric sopranos. The distant glow does little to comfort a certain disoriented forest wanderer who can't even fulfill the base requirements of Maslow's hierarchy. The surroundings are about as visible as two-dimensional sprites on an unmodified Game Boy Color screen.
Throughout my childhood, the video game world largely presented nature exploration in a playfully unrealistic manner. In real life, you shouldn't just waltz into a forest or a cave in the same way you'd pass through a doorway. Real explorers anticipate the potential dangers of such an expedition, lest they end up like Floyd Collins. It's possible to make it back to camp in one piece, but all you did was make it harder on yourself than it needed to be.
I'm currently learning this lesson in the aforementioned hard way; part of me knew this escapade was a bad idea, but adolescent confidence had managed to override any sense of logic. My friends and I built makeshift structures on our side of the civilization borders, always making it back for a home-cooked meal inside the more modern, first world concept of shelter. Tonight, I don't have makeshift shelter, I don't have a friendly voice to guide me, I don't have the Bear Grylls drink-your-own-piss survival skills, all I have is my two feet propelling me forward.
As the moon begins to peek over the treetops, a realization hits me like a decaying trunk slamming against the ground. I've been here before. This barely visible pattern of leaves and sticks is familiar, I know my mind isn't just playing tricks. Instinctively, I attempt to retrace the same steps I remember taking around this area. I suddenly don't feel so hungry, weighed down, hopeless.
There it is. That dingy, unkempt tennis court. I'm going to make it.
(Originally published in On Computer Games Monthly #2: https://archive.org/details/on-computer-games-monthly-december-2000-magazine/2OnComputerGamesMonthlyDecember2000)