I thought that was added in the patch! My bad, well, I should have done that the first time! It’s pretty annoying that you can’t leave if you say yes, but I guess you could always just reset back to the last save. Well, score 1 for Fire Red, then. I still think the way it railroads you after cinnebar is really poor pacing.
2 Likes
I love the Sevii islands and wanted them to be larger and expanded. I don’t really care about gyms or the training but I like exploring new routes. I remember there being cool pokemon there but it was mostly a trainer gauntlet
2 Likes
It’s not very often I find something like this that I haven’t seen since I had it in the 90’s. This is a wallet I had in the first grade:
(BIG MAN BLASTOISE)
I never had anny money to put in it, or if I ever did it was quickly spent on pokemon cards-- so I put pokemon cards in it. I remember I had it in my backpack on the day they banned pokemon at my school in 1998, and I remember wistfully gazing at my jungle set exeggcute card that was in my wallet, thinking “I’m not allowed to have this anymore”.
Anyways, I love the design here. This was back when they were actually creative with assets. This isn’t the generic adobe rasterized assets that were all too common on US merch in the 90’s, this is some weird, early graphic (also rasterized, but not the same!!) I love the prominence given to the polygon graph, those are still dope as hell, and reflective of the RPG values this series used to have.
It even has a loop for the wallet chain. Everything about this was bad ass. I also gazed at this for what seemed like hours. It wasn’t until revisiting it how much these slightly off-model characters were permanently ingrained in my personal canon. Before internet, when these images were mainly on paper, this was something indestructible I could always stare at for Pokemon Dopeamine.
I also had a legit pokemon hang session with major 00’s sleepover energy, with my buddy in town who I met because he wears a snorlax cap to work at safeway every day, and his little brother who is sixteen and really getting into pokemon, in his dirty ass bedroom with legos all over the floor. He just got an N64 so I came by and forwarded him a 14" magnavox CRT that @exodus gave me last month.
(sorry for the ping in a pokemon post @exodus but I figure you’d wanna hear the story of where one of those CRTs went-- that is to say it went to a good home)
Just took some pics of my very legit shinies in all their 3D glory:
Blue Nidoran
Blue Charizard:
Blue ditto, which transformed into an orange raikou:
13 Likes
@Hunter was right. I’m here to admit that the Sevii Islands are actually super chill. I think I made the huge mistake on my first playthrough of tackling the island right out of cinnebar, the way the game railroads you to go, but then fully exploring each island, because I’m thorough like that, and didn’t know what to do, wanted to progress naturally without looking anything up. My second playthrough is way more fun, because I can chill on the islands, not rushing to get my earthquake TM or beat the game.
I have criticisms, like the star-wars-ism of adding backstory for characters that didn’t need it and were cooler the less we knew imo.
However I highly recommend using this patch to add in the “GB Sounds”. This adds the original chiptunes back into the game. Sounds way better, and makes the sevii islands feel more canon in my brain.
That patch is actually several different patches. For an authentic experience, I wouldn’t recommend altering the Pokemon locations or anything like that, just using the GB sounds patch, and the extras patch is safe. Also the fashion, but it doesn’t really improve on much, that’s for my next post, where I have a complaint that requires more effort and images.
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/1981/
Here’s what I really don’t like about Fire Red.
This is the Trainer in the original game.
Timeless. Ready for adventure. 90’s fashion with those straight leg jeans that never go out of style.
Here’s Fire Red Trainer. He looks cool, but there’s mainly one thing they changed that is very 2004.
Those jeans. Slim at the top and baggy at the bottom? Those may have been cool looking at the time, but, mainly, you’re not going to trudge through tall grass in those. Those are sittin’ pants, not adventuring pants. Those pants look like he’s ready for a long day at the Activision office in 2009, not camping, hiking, backpacking, spelunking, etc. I hate them so much.
So Fire Red Throwback fixes this with their fashion improvement patch, right? No, they changed literally everything besides the jeans.
The fact that the original game went as far as to pixel in the loose, flimsy lines on his jeans… Such an intentional choice to make this trainer look weak IMHO.
Another edit to avoid multi posting!
I’m also using Pokémon Box Ruby & Sapphire. This is a recently patched version to remove some annoying limitations!
3 Likes