Pokemon Red Version: Retrospective and Modern Review

     Today, I am going to review Pokemon Red Version.  The game, and its sister game Pokemon Blue Version were both released in late 1998 for the Gameboy handheld entertainment system.  This game is truly unique in its style and mechanics.  The game's premise is that you are a boy named Red who is going about to start his journey along with his rival Blue (who goes by many other more colorful names) to become masters of creatures called Pokemon.  Your Pokemon are your weapons for defeating enemies and they level up through battle and evolve.  You're job is to defeat all eight gym leaders of the region and then travel to the Indigo Plateau to fight the Elite Four. Along the way, you meet the sinister Team Rocket and their leader Giovanni who are basically the Pokemon Mafia.
     Now, this game's review in its time.  In 1998, it was an incredible spin on the traditional RPG game where there were such a wide array of weapons at the player's disposal and even between the same species, gender, level, and move set, they were different.  However, the game had its flaws.  Out of the 152 Pokemon programmed into the game, only 151 had sprites and 150 were obtainable between the two (with Mew and an unknown Pokemon related to Kangaskhan excluded).  The Psychic type is broken as only Bug-type affects it.  The game had game breaking glitches to get infinite items, making it easy to get the three birds with Master Balls or level up all your Pokemon to level 100 and destroy the elite four without even trying.
     Based on today's games, it is severely lacking.  The colors are limited, the front sprites are off and not alike the official artwork.  This is most noticeable on Pikachu and Koffing, where Pikachu is fat and the skull is on top of Koffing instead of under it.  There are no natures in this game, no breeding, no EVs, and many of the pokemon (roughly 400) are not in it.  This would make the game hard to sell.  Plus the HM mechanic makes the water type in your party know surf while you always have two HM slaves.

Rating 9/10.  Nintendo shouldn't try to sell this game on the eShop.  It won't sell.