Why the Second Generation of Pokemon is the Best

pokemon gold silver
Image source: YouTube

The Pokémon series is fairly ancient by modern standards. It has spanned nearly all of Nintendo’s consoles, and has numerous games, remakes and spin-offs. And out of all of them, I would suggest that the second generation, specifically Pokémon Gold and Silver, were the best of the series.

These games are 14 years old now for those of us in the UK. And I, like many others, found it to be the very first game to build up hype. I was lucky enough to get a North American copy of the game before any of my friends. And the amount of warm-fuzzies that Pokémon Gold, and everything about it gives me beat any other source of childhood nostalgia. But it is not just my own biases that make me believe that the second generation was the best generation. Whilst the first generation of games was obviously the foundation, the second gen built on those concepts, and introduced a lot of things that are staple to the series now.

A lot of these, I knew about at the time, and was hugely excited for. Most obvious were the 100 brand new Pokémon. The first batch of brand new additions to the world. First batch of new starters, new legendaries and everything. For my little 8 year old mind, this was mind-blowing.

The next feature was, of course, the day/night cycle. This created the feeling for me as a child of needing play 24 hours a day, and make sure I did each region of the game twice in case the Pokémon changed between day and night.

Other new features I have certainly taken for granted since have been the poke-gear, with it’s watch and phone etc, something that has been edited and updated each time into a new and different feature, whilst remaining the same. There was also features that truly revolutionised battle. It was only recently that I discovered pre-generation two, Pokémon did not have the ability to hold items. And looking back, I cannot imagine a Pokémon game without holding items, and I did myself play Pokémon Yellow. Not only this, but Pokémon Gold and Silver were the first to split the special stat into special attack and defense. Adding another layer of complexity to the games that has been reformed further, and if I truly honest, I still don’t fully understand.

Pokémon battles are a huge part of the games, as anyone who has ever played a game will know. Other than “catching them all”, training and battling your team is the focal point of the game. Of course, a large part of the battle system is knowing the different Pokémon types and their weaknesses and strengths. Again, Gold and Silver did something revolutionary in adding not just one, but two new types to the game: further adding to the complexity, and leading 8 year old me to have to revise even more type combinations. This is not something that has been altered until the rise of Pokémon X and Y over 12 years later, with the addition of the Fairy type.

Last of the new additions to the game were the ones that took me by surprise whilst playing. First and foremost was the ability to breed Pokémon. This was totally unexpected, as the first two Pokémon I ever managed to breed were, of course, an Ekans and Pikachu. Needless to sya, I was highly disappointed I did not end p with a hybrid of the two. And still disappointed to this day that this is still not a thing.

Secondly was the awe in seeing a red Gyarados for the first time. And thus was the introduction of shiny Pokémon. To this day, I have not seen nor caught a shiny Pokémon for myself. But at the time it was certainly the talk of me and my friends, as only one of us was lucky enough to ever spy one. And a Pidgey he managed to KO no less.

Whilst the games have inevitably improved since Pokémon Gold, it is important to see and enjoy the roots of so many awesome features that are core to the series now. This is something that holds true for a lot of series, and whilst younger generations of gamers have not the nostalgic desire to play these old games, it is worth understanding that they played their role once upon a time.

However, for me and a lot of others, there was one feature that Pokémon Gold and Silver had that no other game has had since, and has been a source of disappointment for 14 years.

This was: after playing through the entirety of the new Johto region of the game, you were able to travel back, and play through the Kanto region of the previous generations. This nearly doubled the length of the game, and was quite possibly my first experience of nostalgia. And we have one man to thank for this. The man behind the technology that compressed the software to fit effectively two games in one, the late Satoru Iwata. His recent death hit harder than a lot of other celebrities, because he had an honest influence on my childhood and growing up. What he did for Pokémon Gold and Silver was just one thing of a long list, but one of the things I am, to this day, most grateful for.

And I still hold hope that one day, a Pokémon game will allow you to travel back to older regions of the games and play through their gyms and Elite Four.

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