Pokemon Gen 1 is not The One
Happy new year! Let’s talk talk about pulling off your nostalgia goggles for Pocket Monsters.
So sometime last year I retweeted a meme going around about the first video game you remember playing, and I responded with Pokemon Red Version, citing specifically the fact that I chose Charmander and therefore consigned myself to suffering through hell with the first two gyms without knowing it (at the time).
Subsequent responses that I got reminded me of something very important: most people my age that started with those generations of Pokemon regard it both fondly and with some exasperation, and there are quite a few who overlook that exasperation to maintain that Gen 1 (Pokemon Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow Versions) was the best generation of Pokemon.
Thematically the best? In terms of player story (and not plotline), possibly, and maybe in some ways Pokemon can stand continuing to do what was done with Pokemon Sword and Shield, reducing the pool to force people to adapt to the new Pokemon and the challenges in the new region so that we’re working with a cast of about ~150 or so to start with.
Mechanically the best, and therefore as a whole package, the best overall? Well, that’s what this article is going to unpack.
The short answer? No, it’s not.
To clarify: this article is not meant to be a seething teardown of Pokemon — the series means a lot to me even though I haven’t picked up the Pokemon Sword DLC as of yet, but I’m of the firm belief that it’s healthy to critique everything, even the stuff you like, and game design being iterative, that means you look back on previous versions of a thing and assess them honestly, instead of just uncritically praising it. That’s what this article is about.
If you’re already familiar with a lot of the deep dive stuff on Gen I’s design flaws, then this article isn’t going to give you new information, and I’m deliberately focusing on some of the bigger issues and skipping over others (Wrap/Fire Spin trapping, etc.). However, I will be going over some Pokemon fundamentals for anyone reading this that isn’t familiar with the series.
I also want to reiterate that I’m mostly focusing on the casual/single-player experience as much as I can with some statistical backup for my claims. I know people found ways around most of the stuff I’m bringing up in this article, especially for the competitive battling scene. That’s totally fine, and I respect that the battling meta may have answers for most of the issues I talk about here, but I’m discussing why these things are issues from a general design perspective, not how you get around them.
Most of this information comes from cross-referencing Gen 1 information from Bulbapedia and Smogon (specifically Smogon’s Gen RB section, which has the information for Pokemon as they were in Gen 1). If you go to look yourself, keep in mind that you will need both sites to get a full picture, as so far as I can tell looking up an individual Pokemon on Bulbapedia will give you its current information by default.
Finally: spoilers for Gen 1. Yes, the games are old, but just letting you know what you’re in for.
Right, so, first point.
1) The Special stat was Frickin’ Busted.
Gen 1 of Pokemon displayed 4 major primary stats outside of a Pokemon’s Hit Points (health): Attack, Defense, Special, and Speed. Any given Pokemon you catch is capable of using a maximum of four moves; as Pokemon grow stronger, you can choose to let them learn new moves, but must keep in mind that they’re still only allowed to know and use up to four, and (in Gen 1) moves that are erased for new ones cannot be relearned in most circumstances. Each move can have one of 15 Types, and all Pokemon have up to two innate associations with any of these 15 Types, such as the pure Fire-type Charmander or the Grass/Poison-type Bulbasaur. Some types are meant to have a direct advantage over others, causing double damage if you hit a Pokemon with a move one of its types is weak to and half damage if you hit a Pokemon with a move that one of its types resists. (Classic example: Fire beats Grass, Grass beats Water, and Water beats Fire; similarly, Fire resists Grass, Grass resists Water, and Water resists Fire).
Attack and Defense measured a Pokemon’s attacking and defending ability using Physical moves, represented by these Types: Normal, Fighting, Flying, Ground, Rock, Bug, Ghost, and Poison. Any moves of these types will use the Attack stat of a Pokemon to calculate the final damage, before the defending Pokemon’s Defense stat will be used to reduce that damage.
The Special stat on its own covered Special moves of the remaining Types: Fire, Water, Grass, Ice, Electric, Psychic, and Dragon. Any moves of these types will use the Special stat of a Pokemon to calculate the final damage, before the defending Pokemon’s Special stat will be used to reduce that damage.
Speed determined which Pokemon would go first in a battle.
Simple enough, right? Yes, but after Gen 1, Special was broken into Special Attack and Special Defense, and it’s been that way ever since. Why? Because, as it turns out, letting Special govern damage calculations all on its own instead of Special Attack and Special Defense means that as a Pokemon’s Special stat grew in Gen 1, it simultaneously did more damage when using Special moves and took less damage when Special moves were used on them.
Now, physical damage calculation requiring Attack and Defense means that a Pokemon can have high physical attacking power but still be relatively vulnerable physically, or just be generally not that great as a physical attacker at all (see: Alakazam). However, Alakazam’s Special stat is in the top 5 of the Gen 1 games, so while it may have jack crap on the Physical side, it’s also one of the fastest Pokemon in Gen 1 with a terrifying defense against almost half the type of attacks you could throw at it.
One of the best way to tank hits against a strong Special attacker was to use a Pokemon with a high Special stat…which then meant that unless you had some off-moves prepared to hit at bad Defense stats, you were basically putting two walls face-to-face and fitting them with Duel Disks, and if the attacking Pokemon has a bad Attack stat…well. Make a sandwich I guess.
On the flipside, putting any kind of Physical attacker in front of the likes of Alakazam or Jynx without finding some way to make sure it wouldn’t just outspeed your Pokemon and crack its hands with a slipper is the equivalent of jamming a stick in the spokes of your own bicyclem, and then wondering why you flipped over the handlebars.
Related to this whole Physical and Special thing is the next major point:
2) The association of types with Physical or Special greatly limits the flexibility of certain Pokemon and way overjuices the flexibility of others.
So you remember that I said Fire, Water, Grass, Ice, Electric, Psychic, and Dragon are all types that use Special as their damage determining stat in Gen 1, right? And how the others run off of Attack power? Good. Because here’s where the next weird thing comes in.
Let me tell you a story called The Fable of Hitmonchan.
1) You get a Hitmonchan, a Fighting-type Pokemon.
2) Hitmonchan learns Thunderpunch, an Electric-type move. This means it uses Hitmonchan’s…Not Very Good Special stat to calculate damage.
3) You fight a Starmie, a Pokemon with the types Water and Psychic. It takes take double damage from Thunderpunch because Electric-type attacks are super effective against Pokemon with a Water type, so you tell your Hitmonchan to use Thunderpunch.
4) Hitmonchan’s Thunderpunch does laughable damage because Starmie has a really good Special stat.
5) You blink, and your Hitmonchan gets clapped into Low Poke-earth Orbit because most of the moves that Starmie learns or uses are based in types that use its Special stat for damage. Also it’s really fast, so technically speaking it’s more than likely that before Step 3 even happens that Hitmonchan has already taken a Psychic (the move Psychic, not the type. Yes, it’s confusing) to the face and got knocked the hell out before the second half of Step 3 bears fruit.
The Fable of Hitmonchan up there cuts to the heart of the issue: if a Pokemon learns any moves from the Special types and doesn’t have a matching Special stat to match, then parts of their movepool are effectively wasted. This also means that a really shoddy Special stat puts those Pokemon plumb out of luck for picking up moves for coverage. A more common reason for Hitmonchan to have Thunderpunch or Ice Punch would be to defeat Flying-type Pokemon that can deal double damage to it, but with such a bad Special stat there isn’t much use those moves would be in the first place.
The Fable of Hitmonchan also shows how the issue of “The Special stat was Frickin’ Busted” is exacerbated once other factors come into the mix. With how strong the Special stat of some Pokemon was, and the fact that some of the most devastating moves in Gen 1 were from types that run off of Special attack, there were very few answers to dealing with Special attackers once they were in your face and had the drop on you, especially if they were faster than you.
It wasn’t until Pokemon Diamond and Pearl came out that a move’s type no longer affected what stat its damage was calculated with. On the plus side, this made it so that Hitmonchan’s elemental punches started running off its Attack stat and let it dumpster some of its worse matchups, but on the downside, this meant that a Tauros using Hyper Beam to devastate enemies with bad Defense because it was juicing off of its high Attack stat was no longer a valid strategy. Win some, lose some.
Now, the final point to unify everything:
3) Resistances, movepools, and general Pokemon selections for some types were kinda messed up, making A Specific Type in the game coughPsychic-typescough Hilarously Busted.
So this one is kind of a more subtle thing and requires you to really look at some systems stuff for Gen 1, but it becomes Extremely Noticeable and tends to amplify the effects of points 1 and 2 in the endgame. This is also where we’re going to loop back around to Mewtwo, but we’re saving that particular point for near the end of this section.
Pokemon’s Type system is basically one of the most complex versions of Rock Paper Scissors that you’re going to play unless you decide to pick up a fighting game. As mentioned before, Pokemon can be associated with up to two types of the aforementioned 15 that exist in Gen 1, and some types are strong against others and weak to others. Being dual-typed, where conflicting weaknesses and strengths may come to play on the same Pokemon, wil cause certain damage multipliers to shift accordingly:
- The Water/Rock type Kabutops takes quadruple damage from Grass-type moves: Grass beats Water (2x damage to Water-types), and there is another 2x multiplier to that double damage multiplier since Grass also beats Rock.
- The Normal/Flying type Pidgeot takes only normal damage from Fighting-type moves, as Fighting beats Normal (2x damage) but loses to Flying (0.5x damage). The double damage gets cut in half, leaving a 1x (normal damage) multiplier.
This is a pretty sweet system, as it introduces a lot of thought about team composition and how to cover typing weaknesses (again, see The Fable of Hitmonchan as to why at least in some cases this Only Kind Of Works in Gen 1).
Unfortunately, these composition and typing coverage strategies also rely on a relatively healthy movepool for each type in order to really shine through, as well as Pokemon with the stats to use those moves effectively (see, problems 1 and 2 are still chasing us down!). When that fails, you get Gen 1, a.k.a. Psychics Rule Them All And In The Darkness Bind Them.
Of the types available in Gen 1, Psychic is only resisted by itself and is only weak to Bug-type moves. The Bug-type movepool in Gen 1 is limited to Leech Life, Pin Missile, String Shot, and Twineedle, none of which were especially good on the damage front when other types have moves that hit for anywhere between 3 to 6 times as hard. (Anyone that has played Pokemon within the last few years may look at Leech Life’s 80 attack power in some of the newer games and wonder why I’m talking BS, but back on those rough Kanto streets that bad boy was literally 1/4th of that strength.)
Psychic-type moves do double damage against Poison-type Pokemon, and the Bug-types in the game either have a) really bad stats, meaning that a Psychic-type will wreck their faces on the average, b) a secondary Poison-typing, which opens them up to normal damage instead of a resistance to Psychic-type attacks, or c) both of the above. An Alakazam’s monstrous Special stat driving its attacks as well as its high Speed puts any Bug type in the grave from the word go.
As for Ghost types, there are *multiple* issues they have to deal with. First, Ghost type moves are bugged to have no effect against Psychics in Gen 1 (as opposed to the intended behavior of Ghosts being another weakness for Psychics). Second, there were only 3 Ghost-type moves in Gen 1: Confuse Ray, Night Shade, and Lick. Of those three, only Lick could actually deal double damage if it hit a Psychic-type, as Night Shade always deals fixed damage (and never applies type multipliers) based on the user’s level, and Confuse Ray isn’t a damaging move.
But what’s wrong with Lick, Sean, you may ask?
It’s as strong as Leech Life. 20 attack power. Yeah. “Not ideal”, in the way that water is a little wet.
Ghost-types have a better hand to play than Bug-types do — Gengar, the final form of the only Ghost types in the game, is ludicrously fast with a really good Special stat, so it can handle itself by picking up moves from other Special-affiliated stats. Its major flaw? Gengar has a secondary Poison-type, so it takes double damage from Psychic attacks. And Alakazam is both faster than Gengar and has a stronger Special stat to work with in addition to having the strongest Psychic-type move in its movepool.
What all this boils down to is that Psychic-types are one of the strongest types period in Gen 1 because their Pokemon selection is fairly well statted (including Mewtwo — and yes, gonna get to that one soon), trying to use type advantage on the offense against them is pointless, and their collective movepool is diverse enough that they can cover a variety of bases in the Special-type moves that they can learn, which is only furthered by how goddamn high most of their Special stats are.
By contrast, Bug and Ghost types, on a holistic scale, are both just terrible. All of the ones that are easy to get a hold of will become relatively less helpful over time. Scyther and Pinsir are the standouts of the Bug type in Gen 1, but they’re hard to obtain, neither of them learn any of the available Bug-type moves, and their stats are are no match for an Alakazam, which will just grab them by the face and drag them along the street for a walk. Though Gengar isn’t bad, it can’t really utilize any of the moves from its natural type, and one shot of Psychic from a Psychic-type or Earthquake from a Ground-type will end its whole career.
So, at long last, to finish this out: let’s talk about Mewtwo.
Wildcard) F*CKING MEWTWO LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Mewtwo is the strongest Pokemon legally available in Gen 1 and the strongest Psychic-type Pokemon in Gen 1. You can only battle and attempt to capture it after going through the long slog in the Cerulean Cave after beating the game; it is fundamentally the last challenge in Gen 1 that any player will face. It is also the perfect demonstration of all three of our salient points from earlier and is the godlike genetically engineered cat creature cherry on top of the Gen 1 Busted Cake. To wit:
- Mewtwo’s Special stat is flat out the highest in the game. Period. Trying to kill it with Special moves is like trying to put out a three-alarm fire with a glass of water; meanwhile, it will use Special moves to devastating effect against your team if it gets a chance, and it will get many chances, because it’s faster than Alakazam and is probably the fastest Pokemon in Gen 1 hands down. Mewtwo can also learn and use the move Amnesia, which is basically just a steroid for its Special stat and will turn most opposing Pokemon into a smoking hole in the ground on top of letting it tank even MORE Special attacks thrown its way.
- Unlike other Psychic types, Mewtwo also has a pretty good Attack stat, meaning that it can double-dip into both Physical and Special move types without having to worry about the type / damage association screwing it over.
- Mewtwo is a pure Psychic type, like Alakazam, so all the advantages that Psychics have naturally come to it. Unlike Alakazam, Mewtwo has a broad movepool for both Physical and Special move types, so it can put both Attack and Special stats to good use and can learn a variety of coverage moves. Even other Psychic-types will therefore have a hard time standing up to it if it has something that can either hit a type weakness or press the point on a bad Defense stat, and with no direct hard counters to Psychic types via elemental RPS (at least none that are worth it)…well, as the kids (used to?) say, you’re gonna have a bad time.
Some would say that Mewtwo being deliberately overpowered means it’s not really fair to use it as an example of how Goddamn Busted Psychic-types are. However, as I stated earlier, it’s the culmination of the design flaws that this article’s been focusing on, and even as far as Pokemon like it in later gens go, it was really busted in Gen 1 as a clear demonstration of where the design shortfalls we’ve been talking about converge for some maximum BS.
So, where does this leave us now that we’ve categorically talked about the major design flaws in Gen 1? Do we think the whole damn set is completely irrelevant and shouldn’t be played?
Well, no, I’m not saying that either. Again — this article isn’t about just tearing down Gen 1, but about emphasizing that it was only the *start* of Pokemon.
As I said earlier, game design is an iterative process. You continually examine and build on what came before in order to make something new or make something better. Sometimes, designers don’t know the limits of a system until players test them and push them far beyond what the designers imagined, and from there, the system evolves as the designers reassess things. Sometimes, the constraints of technology just happen to force specific constraints on the design in turn. Pokemon Gen 1, being literally Gen *1*, is the base of the Pokemon franchise, not the peak, when this iterative nature is taken into full account.
Gen 1 started setting expectations around the style and language of the series — and whatever flaws Gen 1 has, it’s undeniable that it captures the spirit of Pokemon unilaterally. But later games refined and honed that spirit to create even more memorable moments and a fairer, smoother experience, a more mature one in the sense of the game’s systems and not necessarily just the story. Things like the Physical/Special split, adding new Pokemon types to further expand strategies, giving Pokemon new pre-and-post evolutionary stages to further their growth, and other changes, are what helped carry Pokemon forward to now.
I don’t blame anyone for thinking fondly of Generation 1. I still do myself, and I always will. Pokemon started me on my journey forward into games, and game design, with this very same set of games. But while Gen 1 started me on the road, every succeeding generation paved the road a little better, smoothed out some of the potholes I fell into so that other, younger generations behind me could have all the wonder I did but without nearly as much BS tripping them up. And at the heart of it all, the games are still about grabbing an animal friend, hitting the open road, and traveling forward — just that the travel is less bumpy.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter for more talk about video games, tokusatsu, anime, and some screenshots of stuff I’m working on. If you’re interested in watching streams where I both wax poetic about old games and pick apart their design decisions, come check me out on Twitch. If you want to try out my work, Final Spike is on sale on itch.io right now.
Thanks for reading!
(edited 3/18/2021 to fix a few incomplete thoughts and some errata regarding the way certain moves work, as well as to update my Twitter handle.)