#i will name every butterfly pokemon after cassie from animorphs until the day i die

[hatingfromacrackedscreen]

got myself repro carts of pokemon crystal and pokemon leafgreen for my birthday, ive been playing leafgreen and i love it so much!! playing leafgreen after playing red and then a slew of other ds/gameboy pkmn games has given me a lot of thoughts on its game design, and kanto vs the rest of the regions.

im remembering why i loved playing red so much. the game design for kanto i think is incredibly impressive. later regions add more biomes and stuff, but kanto i think makes you put in the most work in traversing the region. in kanto youre blocked by snorlaxes, guards and cuttable trees between cities, in such a way that has you traversing the map in unexpected ways & doubling back to find new routes.

Ultimately kanto feels much less linear than the other regions in the series. i’m only at celadon city, the 4th gym, and the game has had me go all over the map bouncing between caves and cities and doubling back on new routes to do it.

i’m 32 hours in and still only have 3 badges, there’s just so much to do beyond the gyms with the caves, team rocket hideouts, lavender town, etc.

i’m still before the part where the whole map opened up and you can challenge the middle gyms in any order, and already the game feels so less linear than emerald/bw/platinum/hgss/XY/SuMo. the only handheld era games i’ve yet to play are b2w2 & gen2, & i doubt either is going to be less linear than kanto based on how hgss & bw went.

it’s so interesting to me that the first entry/region in the series remains the least linear the more complicated pokemon got

lastly let me share my team 🥰 currently have a vulpix, wartortle, pikachu, clefairy, butterfree, and pideotto!! i specifically got leafgreen over firered to get vulpix, which is a version exclusive, so im very happy about her :))