It's funny how public opinion changes over the years. When Buster Keaton released The General, critics panned it; today, it's celebrated as his greatest work. Rolling Stone magazine named Weezer's Pinkerton the 3rd-worst album of 1996, then called it the 16th-greatest album of all time a mere six years later. Herman Melville's Moby Dick was torn apart by contemporary readers, and hailed as one of the greatest American novels within a century.
The first generation of Pokémon games (released in 1996 in Japan, 1998 in America) have had an interesting variation. The games have always been divisive among gamers, today as in the 90s. The only difference is that these critics and supporters have switched positions.
Modern fans of the first generation of Pokémon games (Pokémon Red, Pokémon Blue, and Pokémon Yellow), often known as Genwunners, are infamously snobby. For these people, no Pokémon game after the first gen is worth playing. There are only 151 (or 152) Pokémon. "New Pokémon are based off of ice cream cones instead of whack-a-mole machines. Q.E.D.," You'd have better luck convincing the Catholic Church to canonize The Life of Brian than getting a Genwunner to acknowledge that Lucario or Blaziken are legitimate.
For modern gamers, Genwunners are a popular stock-villain, like mustachioed men who tie women to railroad tracks, except more fun to hiss at. This is because, like many retro-gamers, Genwunners are often self-righteous fanatics.
Needless to say, being a self-righteous fanatic--or even being remotely unpleasant--doesn't seem to be an official part of the definition anymore. Hating all the Pokémon games is perfectly acceptable, as is liking all of them, or even only liking the newer ones. Anything else is frowned upon.
In other words, Genwunners have ruined it for the Gen 1ers.
When you see a Genwunner coming at you in a dark alley, frothing at the mouth and brandishing a picture of a Charizard, the best way to freeze 'em in their tracks is to turn the tables and insult the first generation. I understand that, for most Pokémon fans, this is hard--it's the sort of thing the Jigsaw Killer always made people do. Earliest instalments of any franchise generally get some reverence, however better the later ones may be. But with time it gets easier. A lot easier, in fact; for some people, Pokémon Red and Blue have become almost as loathed as the Genwunners themselves. Fans of the newer games have been known to denounce the earliest instalments with ferocity to match even the angriest Genwunner. As far as these people are concerned, there's no reason for anyone to play the first generation at all since it was remade with the third gen's engine in 2004.
Fighting monsters and gazing into voids and all that, I guess.
I'm not going to say that Pokémon Red and Blue were beyond criticism. There were lots of very noticeable problems with design in general and balance in particular, as well as a fairly impressive troupe of glitches. The legendary Missingno. is the least embarrassing of them. The best way to sum up everything wrong with the first generation is to simply look at how psychic-types were handled. In theory, psychic-type Pokémon had two weaknesses: bug- and ghost-types. In practice, they didn't have any; all the bug-type attacks were too weak to actually help, and a glitch in the game's programming made psychic-types immune to ghost-type attacks. And a lot of newer Pokémon fans love to point these problems out. As much fun as I had playing these games, I don't think that it compares to the fun the more militant Ruby/Sapphire fans have tearing them apart and watching the Genwunners' smiles melt.
All long-running video game franchises have their nostalgic cynics. Many Legend of Zelda fans insist that A Link to the Past is the best game in the series, and that the newer Zelda games are unfailingly unremarkable. Final Fantasy VI sits on a similar pedestal compared to VII onward. Yet Genwunners are widely considered the worst of the lot. This sort of elitism may be perfectly acceptable for fans of literature, film, or music, but gamers are not willing to tolerate it and Pokémon fans less willing than most. Red and Blue, being popular and influential games with more problems than Jay-Z, reflect everything modern gamers hate about retro-gaming. (What future gamers will think of today's "modern" games is an interesting question, but off-topic.)
I think the Genwunners' biggest mistake is that they picked the wrong Rapidash to back. Retro-gaming elitism typically starts at the second or third entry in a series, because the first usually has the most rough edges. If Donkey Kong fans went around trashing every new Mario game since Super Mario Brothers, declaring that the Mushroom Kingdom is not canon, and complaining that all the new characters are just turtles or mushrooms, we'd all be be complaining about "Deekayers" now.
Fortunately, and despite the Genwunners' best efforts, Pokémon (even Red and Blue) is now recognized as a classic gaming franchise, alongside Doom, King's Quest, and Sonic. This is why it can be so hard to remember that, in the 90s, Pokémon was basically the Justin Bieber of nerd culture.
The problem then was essentially the same as it is now: old versus new. Pokémon became extremely popular extremely quickly, especially with younger people, so fans of older video game franchises dismissed it as a fad that would die out in a few years. Sure, people had all sorts of complaints against the franchise--some legitimate and some stupid--but the word "fad" was always on the lips. The stuff that mature gamers of 13 and 14 grew up with--like Super Mario or Metroid--would always be classics, but Pokémon, it was predicted, would be gone soon. Fans of Pokémon Red and Blue were mocked for being silly fad-chasers, and assured that if they even remembered those games ten years later, it would be with embarrassment.
In other words, the people who were attacked back then for playing a faddish new game instead of the classics are now being attacked for playing that now-classic game instead of newer titles.
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