Thursday 11 October, 2012

These past few days I have returned to a great childhood pastime: Pokemon. I never played any of the games before when I was younger since for some reason it never really interested me. I’ll be honest, all of my friends were getting Black and White 2 and I felt extremely left out. So I pulled out my classic top view strategy game, Pokemon Yellow. I’m a bit confused as to why I didn’t fall in love with these games before. A lot of it probably had to do with the fact that this was a top view game, where you look down at the player from up above (see Zelda). This style of gameplay has always felt awkward to me so I steered away from it. However, as I throw down hours upon hours of Pokemon, this top view style is really starting to grow on me.
Game Freak, the developers of Pokemon Yellow, also implemented a leveling/difficulty system that made the game flow very smoothly. You start off battling low level Pokemon, often bug types, considering they are generally the weakest Pokemon (come on, Caterpie is a joke). As your Pokemon level up and as you progress through the story, the difficulty of the Pokemon that you encounter also increases. It is a system that works. It is safe to say that no one would ever want to battle a level 100 Zapdos with a level 1 Pikachu.
As far as the battle system goes, it is pretty straight forward. It is a turn based battle with the player choosing an attack which is then followed by the CPU attacking and then the player or vice versa. I’ve never really been a fan of this style either, but again, like the top view camera, I’m slowly being brought over to the other side.

Play any of the final fantasy games, a bit harder than pokemon lol, but if given a chance this turn based game will really grow on ya, any of em, x is the easiest says the bird.