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kjorteoGod help me, I'm actually doing this. Maybe.
I'm beginning a play-through of Pokemon SoulSilver Version, complete with a playblog. I don't want this to turn into situation like we had with my Amon Ra play-through, because God knows I have issues with this, so let's... let's lay some ground rules. I make no promises--repeat, NO PROMISES--that I will even finish this at all, let alone in a timely manner. I am being very upfront about this, okay? I reserve the right to fall off the update schedule for like eight months, because there is no update schedule. I may post three entries in a day or I may post three entries in a year. I'm just... doing these, as they happen. For fun. That's all. Please, please do not expect anything. Expecting anything makes it no longer fun.
Also, a few other notes about this play-through:
1) This is going to be super uneven. This game meant a lot to me growing up, and there will be a lot of elements that send me spiraling into a stream-of-consciousness tangent about long-buried thoughts and feelings. In order to try to get through this without writing an entire novel, I will skim over what parts I can to compensate. I may take an entire entry just to get past the title screen, then sum up an entire hour of plot with "So in this town Team Rocket is harvesting Pokemon tails and that's kind of fucked up but I stop them. ANYWAY LET'S TALK ABOUT THE RADIO FEATURE."
2) It's going to be kind of dirty. One of the themes here is that I'm going back and revisiting old familiar territory after having changed and grown up, and that includes... well, having some more grown-up interests, even at the same time I'm enjoying the nostalgia and reconnecting with my childhood. It's kind of like T.G. Weaver's "Toybox Pals" setting, if you're familiar. If not, I won't link it here because this blog isn't going to be that gratuitously pornographic. However, I'm not going to shy away from lewd wisecracks and such, fair warning.
Anyway, let's begin.
Pokemon Silver Version was a very important game to me in my otherwise miserable high school years. A lot of features we take for granted now were invented either for or by this game, and were revolutionary at the time. Gold/Silver had an in-game clock and world events that reacted to it--Pokemon that could only be caught during the night or day, a lottery with a new number drawn every week, even minor touches like a family of random NPCs who would give you items if you talked to each one on a certain day. No game at the time had anything like this, and it made the world feel... well, alive. Like the World of Pokemon was an actual world. Because I was having a hard time in school and my actual world at the time was not great, I kind of fell into this one instead. I grew up in the Johto region. It carried me through some hard times, and I will always be grateful to it for that.
the original intro and title screen for Silver version are... honestly, not much to look at by modern sensibilities. It looks like a pretty good Game Boy game, but it still looks like a Game Boy game. (And yes, that one delayed note as if the game briefly chokes when loading the next screen, at around 30 second or so mark, bugged the crap out of me even back then.) But... at the time, this was astonishing. I'd already played through the Red/Blue generation, but this intro was the first time I'd seen them take Pokemon, those catchable trainable balls of stats with monster sprites attached, and put them into an actual world. The first shot opens with Shellders on the seabed, panning up to a school of Magikarp swimming above them and then a Lapras on the surface. This alone implies there's some sort of ecosystem here, something that... again, you will just have to take my word for it that this was a really big deal at the time.
I never quite understood why Pikachus randomly hate Jigglypuffs though.
Regardless, by the time it got to the title screen, I was thoroughly hooked by this world. Then the title screen itself has this briefly calm music that segues into a triumphant buildup leading to the Pokemon main theme as the punchline, and... I'll admit it, I kind of teared up a little from that effect. It was epic. The buildup conveyed a sense of "At long last, after everything you've been through in your miserable life, this is Pokemon Silver." It even has a mysterious silhouette of this version's legendary diety Pokemon soaring majestically through the skies. What is that thing? I don't know, but I can't wait to find out!
Now let's talk about the SoulSilver remake's take on it.
The first time I started this version, those low bell notes at the very beginning gave me goosebumps in the best possible way, because it was the same notes. It brought me back. "Oh God, this is it, this is that game that meant so much to me growing up, reimagined and updated in glorious 3D." Then it... changes. Gone is the undersea Shellder/Magikarp/Lapras ecosystem, instead we have a random shot of a cliff with Lugia flying toward the camera. The music is at least mostly the same for that shot, but then it ends and we transition to... okay now we're going somewhere completely new with this.
This is embarrassing to admit, but I have to be honest: The first time I played SoulSilver, I was devastated by this. This... this isn't what I remembered. What happened to what I remembered?? Silver was my life at one point. I wanted to recapture that. I wanted to go back to that, not... whatever this was. This was new and scary and I didn't like it one bit.
About ten hours into my 2009 SoulSilver run, I realized I was not enjoying the remake of the experience that had defined so much of my adolescence in the original. The game itself, title screen changes aside, is actually a fairly faithful recreation, so it wasn't that. It was... I had changed. Once-revolutionary features had become commonplace and even a bit dated. Time-based events became more of an obligation I had to keep up on than a revolutionary feature I wanted to. "This NPC gives you a ribbon if you talk to her on Tuesdays, that is so cool!" became "Oh God, I have to come back on Tuesday? But I'm gonna be at work all day and I'll probably forget anyway. God damn it."
This is why I'm so afraid to give this game another chance. It didn't work out last time. I have no guarantees it will work out this time. The only thing I have this time is... well, let's abruptly end this sidetrack tangent and go back to the SoulSilver intro and title screen, because it's a perfect metaphor for everything and I swear I will eventually reach the point of all this.
So SoulSilver's new intro is a lot more person- and location-focused, cutting to remixes of certain town themes with shots of certain major characters and important Pokemon. It is aimed at fans of the original, clearly, with the underlying message being "Hey, you remember that red-haired rival kid? Check out how scary he looks now with these graphics. Yes it's him, aaaaaa it's him." Rather than being literally just original Silver's intro with DS graphics and sound, this is an all-new way to showcase "Look at what your favorite Johto memories look like now." Which is... actually, yeah, okay, I can see that. And objectively, to someone without the nostalgia-vision who hadn't seen either intro before, I will admit that SoulSilver's is substantially better.
I do still wish even now that the actual title screen portion of SoulSilver had included the calmer part of the opening before the main theme, because the buildup kind of loses something when it doesn't have that passage to be building up from. Still, other than that, even this screen is mostly a good change now that I'm mature enough to admit it. Lugia, of course, is no longer a mystery--we've seen what Lugia looks like countless times by now. Instead of a silhouette, we not only get a full on unobscured view of the 3D model, but it even zooms in for closeups at various angles. LOOK AT THIS LUGIA, it screams. LOOK AT IT. You don't have to scream, game. I'm furry trash and no one has to tell me twice to look at Lugia.
(Unfortunately, all of the closeups hide what are strangely striking feet for a Pokemon that normally isn't depicted with those in a way that catches my attention. I may have softened my purism since 2009, but one thing young and current me are still in 100% perfect agreement on is that it is a goddamn crime that we can't see closeups of that angle. I wonder if someone has the model from this game extracted or something. Hmm.)
*Cough* anyway.
So there you have it. That's why I'm trying this again. It may or may not work out, but this time I am at least aware of why the last time didn't. I grew up in Johto, and in 2009 I thought I could grow up in Johto again. That's not how life works, and so that run didn't work. This time, I'm willing to at least try to treat this run as... you can't go home anymore, except maybe to visit, but you can at least do that. I grew up in Johto, and now I'm back, already grown up but still at least visiting and reconnecting. A lot of parts are the same old town it always was, but you have those subtle signs that the dynamic of how it interacts with you is different--that one particular shop you used to like closed down, your parents put you in the guest bedroom because they'd already converted the bedroom you grew up in into a den/office after you moved out. You're not a kid anymore, and that is hard to accept in a Pokemon game.
But you're home.
I'm beginning a play-through of Pokemon SoulSilver Version, complete with a playblog. I don't want this to turn into situation like we had with my Amon Ra play-through, because God knows I have issues with this, so let's... let's lay some ground rules. I make no promises--repeat, NO PROMISES--that I will even finish this at all, let alone in a timely manner. I am being very upfront about this, okay? I reserve the right to fall off the update schedule for like eight months, because there is no update schedule. I may post three entries in a day or I may post three entries in a year. I'm just... doing these, as they happen. For fun. That's all. Please, please do not expect anything. Expecting anything makes it no longer fun.
Also, a few other notes about this play-through:
1) This is going to be super uneven. This game meant a lot to me growing up, and there will be a lot of elements that send me spiraling into a stream-of-consciousness tangent about long-buried thoughts and feelings. In order to try to get through this without writing an entire novel, I will skim over what parts I can to compensate. I may take an entire entry just to get past the title screen, then sum up an entire hour of plot with "So in this town Team Rocket is harvesting Pokemon tails and that's kind of fucked up but I stop them. ANYWAY LET'S TALK ABOUT THE RADIO FEATURE."
2) It's going to be kind of dirty. One of the themes here is that I'm going back and revisiting old familiar territory after having changed and grown up, and that includes... well, having some more grown-up interests, even at the same time I'm enjoying the nostalgia and reconnecting with my childhood. It's kind of like T.G. Weaver's "Toybox Pals" setting, if you're familiar. If not, I won't link it here because this blog isn't going to be that gratuitously pornographic. However, I'm not going to shy away from lewd wisecracks and such, fair warning.
Anyway, let's begin.
Pokemon Silver Version was a very important game to me in my otherwise miserable high school years. A lot of features we take for granted now were invented either for or by this game, and were revolutionary at the time. Gold/Silver had an in-game clock and world events that reacted to it--Pokemon that could only be caught during the night or day, a lottery with a new number drawn every week, even minor touches like a family of random NPCs who would give you items if you talked to each one on a certain day. No game at the time had anything like this, and it made the world feel... well, alive. Like the World of Pokemon was an actual world. Because I was having a hard time in school and my actual world at the time was not great, I kind of fell into this one instead. I grew up in the Johto region. It carried me through some hard times, and I will always be grateful to it for that.
the original intro and title screen for Silver version are... honestly, not much to look at by modern sensibilities. It looks like a pretty good Game Boy game, but it still looks like a Game Boy game. (And yes, that one delayed note as if the game briefly chokes when loading the next screen, at around 30 second or so mark, bugged the crap out of me even back then.) But... at the time, this was astonishing. I'd already played through the Red/Blue generation, but this intro was the first time I'd seen them take Pokemon, those catchable trainable balls of stats with monster sprites attached, and put them into an actual world. The first shot opens with Shellders on the seabed, panning up to a school of Magikarp swimming above them and then a Lapras on the surface. This alone implies there's some sort of ecosystem here, something that... again, you will just have to take my word for it that this was a really big deal at the time.
I never quite understood why Pikachus randomly hate Jigglypuffs though.
Regardless, by the time it got to the title screen, I was thoroughly hooked by this world. Then the title screen itself has this briefly calm music that segues into a triumphant buildup leading to the Pokemon main theme as the punchline, and... I'll admit it, I kind of teared up a little from that effect. It was epic. The buildup conveyed a sense of "At long last, after everything you've been through in your miserable life, this is Pokemon Silver." It even has a mysterious silhouette of this version's legendary diety Pokemon soaring majestically through the skies. What is that thing? I don't know, but I can't wait to find out!
Now let's talk about the SoulSilver remake's take on it.
The first time I started this version, those low bell notes at the very beginning gave me goosebumps in the best possible way, because it was the same notes. It brought me back. "Oh God, this is it, this is that game that meant so much to me growing up, reimagined and updated in glorious 3D." Then it... changes. Gone is the undersea Shellder/Magikarp/Lapras ecosystem, instead we have a random shot of a cliff with Lugia flying toward the camera. The music is at least mostly the same for that shot, but then it ends and we transition to... okay now we're going somewhere completely new with this.
This is embarrassing to admit, but I have to be honest: The first time I played SoulSilver, I was devastated by this. This... this isn't what I remembered. What happened to what I remembered?? Silver was my life at one point. I wanted to recapture that. I wanted to go back to that, not... whatever this was. This was new and scary and I didn't like it one bit.
About ten hours into my 2009 SoulSilver run, I realized I was not enjoying the remake of the experience that had defined so much of my adolescence in the original. The game itself, title screen changes aside, is actually a fairly faithful recreation, so it wasn't that. It was... I had changed. Once-revolutionary features had become commonplace and even a bit dated. Time-based events became more of an obligation I had to keep up on than a revolutionary feature I wanted to. "This NPC gives you a ribbon if you talk to her on Tuesdays, that is so cool!" became "Oh God, I have to come back on Tuesday? But I'm gonna be at work all day and I'll probably forget anyway. God damn it."
This is why I'm so afraid to give this game another chance. It didn't work out last time. I have no guarantees it will work out this time. The only thing I have this time is... well, let's abruptly end this sidetrack tangent and go back to the SoulSilver intro and title screen, because it's a perfect metaphor for everything and I swear I will eventually reach the point of all this.
So SoulSilver's new intro is a lot more person- and location-focused, cutting to remixes of certain town themes with shots of certain major characters and important Pokemon. It is aimed at fans of the original, clearly, with the underlying message being "Hey, you remember that red-haired rival kid? Check out how scary he looks now with these graphics. Yes it's him, aaaaaa it's him." Rather than being literally just original Silver's intro with DS graphics and sound, this is an all-new way to showcase "Look at what your favorite Johto memories look like now." Which is... actually, yeah, okay, I can see that. And objectively, to someone without the nostalgia-vision who hadn't seen either intro before, I will admit that SoulSilver's is substantially better.
I do still wish even now that the actual title screen portion of SoulSilver had included the calmer part of the opening before the main theme, because the buildup kind of loses something when it doesn't have that passage to be building up from. Still, other than that, even this screen is mostly a good change now that I'm mature enough to admit it. Lugia, of course, is no longer a mystery--we've seen what Lugia looks like countless times by now. Instead of a silhouette, we not only get a full on unobscured view of the 3D model, but it even zooms in for closeups at various angles. LOOK AT THIS LUGIA, it screams. LOOK AT IT. You don't have to scream, game. I'm furry trash and no one has to tell me twice to look at Lugia.
(Unfortunately, all of the closeups hide what are strangely striking feet for a Pokemon that normally isn't depicted with those in a way that catches my attention. I may have softened my purism since 2009, but one thing young and current me are still in 100% perfect agreement on is that it is a goddamn crime that we can't see closeups of that angle. I wonder if someone has the model from this game extracted or something. Hmm.)
*Cough* anyway.
So there you have it. That's why I'm trying this again. It may or may not work out, but this time I am at least aware of why the last time didn't. I grew up in Johto, and in 2009 I thought I could grow up in Johto again. That's not how life works, and so that run didn't work. This time, I'm willing to at least try to treat this run as... you can't go home anymore, except maybe to visit, but you can at least do that. I grew up in Johto, and now I'm back, already grown up but still at least visiting and reconnecting. A lot of parts are the same old town it always was, but you have those subtle signs that the dynamic of how it interacts with you is different--that one particular shop you used to like closed down, your parents put you in the guest bedroom because they'd already converted the bedroom you grew up in into a den/office after you moved out. You're not a kid anymore, and that is hard to accept in a Pokemon game.
But you're home.