Pokémon may look its age, but its take on open world design is timeless





“Open world” games have existed since nearly the dawn of the video game medium. Text adventures from the late-seventies like Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork had the feel of an open, interconnected world and gave the player the freedom to explore that world however they saw fit. A decade later, the original Legend of Zelda became a landmark in open world design that, at its core, was trying to accomplish the same thing as those early text adventures. These games were attempts to build worlds from their creators’ imaginations that were fun and compelling to explore.

Pokémon was developed by Game Freak and released in North America in 1998. It carried on the world-building legacy of those early 2D works, despite arriving in a polygon obsessed, post Super Mario 64 world. It can be difficult to convey to a younger generation of gamers just how mind-blowing 3D technology was at the time. In film there is an infamous urban legend about the Lumiére brothers’ short film “L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare de La Ciotat”, that because it was one of the first films ever to be screened and the audience was not accustomed to moving pictures, they fled from the train arriving on-screen in a panic. Although it’s almost certainly an exaggeration, that story is a testament to how ingrained the medium of film has become in society since those early days. Gamers were similarly shocked in the mid-nineties at the freedom of movement and exploration Super Mario 64 presented, and indeed many spent their first hour in the game just running around the courtyard of Peach’s castle, coming to grips with this new paradigm in game design. The world seemed boundless as each new area presented a whole new 3D environment to explore, from a sunken ship to a haunted house, a sprawling desert to a snowy mountain.

Of course much of the seeming enormity of early 3D games could be attributed to simple math. Adding depth to a medium that had always dealt primarily in two dimensions would naturally make the games feel larger, but in retrospect many of those early games are neither as large nor as open as many gamers remember them. Someone who knows the game well can beat Super Mario 64 with the minimum number of stars in around five hours, and can likely obtain all 120 stars in ten. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time gives the player very little of the freedom present in the original Legend of Zelda, with each dungeon necessarily being completed in order and the infamously naggy fairy Navi constantly directing the player where to go next. Even Final Fantasy VII, which is an objectively long and sprawling game, mostly gives the player the illusion of freedom and exploration. The world map often just serves as a “level select” screen, not unlike Super Mario Bros. 3, as the player cannot make progress until they go to the correct location and take the correct actions.

All of these observations may seem like criticisms, but gamers were probably not yet ready for a fully 3D open world in the vein of Grand Theft Auto III or Oblivion. Exploring 3-dimensional environments on a 2-dimensional screen is not a trivial endeavor. Early 3D camera systems had difficulty maintaining effective angles, with a tendency to get caught on or behind level geometry, and judging distances without the benefit of actual depth could make navigating a 3D world frustrating. Baby steps were necessary not only to help gamers grow accustomed to 3D, but for game designers to experiment with the new technology.

And apparently strangle you with her bare hands





Pokémon, on the other hand, relies on decades of 2D game design experience, rather than visual appeal, to draw players into its world. It looks more like a game from 1988 than 1998, with the Game Boy’s monochrome NES-era graphics, and in some ways it plays like one. Pokémon’s mechanics, from the turn-based, one-one-one, menu-driven battles to the overhead perspective used for exploring the overworld, echo the original Dragon Quest and the many Japanese RPGs that followed it. It’s in the way that the game guides the player through its world and gradually gives more and more freedom to explore that Pokémon feels more like a game of its time.

In the beginning Pokémon appears to be a fairly linear, quest-based RPG with the first several tasks necessarily being completed one before the next. The player must obtain their first Pokémon, retrieve the Pokédex from Viridian City, then do battle with Brock at the Pewter City gym. The guided experience at the outset is almost certainly informed by the lack of guidance in early 8-bit games. Games like the aforementioned Zelda and Dragon Quest can feel open and exciting from the beginning, but can also be frustrating and obtuse when the player struggles to figure out where to go and what to do. By guiding the player through the basics of game progression, the game’s designers ensured that players wouldn’t get stuck wandering and give up on the game entirely.

The hand-holding doesn’t last for long, and most players may not even notice when the training wheels come off. The exit to Pewter City is gated, somewhat arbitrarily, by a youth that won’t let the player pass without winning the Boulder Badge from Brock. Despite being slightly inelegant from a narrative perspective, forcing the player to challenge the first gym leader in this way sends an important message that, when there is no where else to go, future gym leaders may hold the key to progress. The next town, Cerulean City, does not require that Misty the gym leader be defeated before leaving, but players are likely to do it anyway given that the first gym was so important.

If the player chooses to skip the battle with Misty, they will eventually find their progress stalled by the inability to use the “Cut” HM (short for Hidden Machine) outside of battle. HM’s can be used over and over again to teach Pokémon abilities like “Cut” that are needed to get past certain obstacles, and they are the player’s primary means of navigating the world. For Pokémon to use these abilities outside of battle, the player must earn badges from certain gym leaders, presumably representative of their progress as a trainer and their ability to better control their creatures. It’s a clever way to make the player’s journey through the world feel more organic and less like a series of levels to be completed.

There are items to be found as well, such as the Silph Scope, Poké Flute, and Bike, that combine with HMs to make the world seem more and more open as the player gets further into the game. This progression is not unlike The Legend of Zelda, where finding certain items opens up new areas of the map where even more new items can be found to gain access to more parts of the world (Related note: Pokémon is not a Metroidvania). As the game continues to open up more and more, it’s possible for different players to reach the end of the game by taking very different routes. After acquiring the Poké Flute, a player could choose to take Routes 13-15 to Fuchsia City, get the Surf HM from the Safari Zone, then fly back to Pallet Town and surf on down to Cinnabar Island. Alternatively, the player could take Cycling Road to Fuchsia City, come up Routes 13-15 to get back to Saffron City, and complete the Silph Co. quest. Even the order in which the eight gym trainers are defeated can vary wildly from game to game. Since the ThunderBadge is only used for the inessential (but incredibly convenient) Fly ability outside of battle, Lt. Surge, who is the third trainer that can be challenged, doesn’t actually need to be defeated until the very end of the game.

Not pictured: a crazed Captain Ahab





Just what exactly constitutes the end game is a bit more open-ended than just defeating the final boss. The stakes in Pokémon are incredibly low, and there is barely even a villain to speak of. Team Rocket is an antagonistic force that drives the plot forward, but their half-baked schemes are too easily foiled by a ten year old child to be considered threatening. The player’s Rival can certainly be classified as an antagonist, and indeed plays the role of final boss, but there is never anything more than pride at stake when doing battle with him. It is fair to say then that the world of Pokémon, and the eponymous creatures in it, are what make the game so compelling. When Time magazine interviewed Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri in 1999, they asked him why the game was still so popular one year after its release. He replied,





“When you’re a kid and get your first bike, you want to go somewhere you’ve never been before. That’s like Pokémon. Everybody shares the same experience, but everybody wants to take it someplace else. And you can do that.”





Defeating the Final Four and the Rival to become the greatest trainer in the world is certainly one way to end the game, but there is much more to be done within the game’s world. There are 150 (or 151, with the exploitation of a glitch) Pokémon to acquire to complete the Pokédex and the ability, through the use of the Game Boy’s link cable, to compete against other players instead of the game’s limited AI. Pokémon’s competitive scene, in particular, is a world unto itself where strategies that worked against the in-game trainers are rendered useless in the more chess-like meta game of player-versus-player combat.

It’s remarkable that Tajiri and his staff at Game Freak were able to create such an expansive and immersive world on the Game Boy’s limited hardware. It must have seemed like an odd decision at the time to use a nearly decade-old, 2D gaming system to capture the hearts and minds of the youth. Yet by putting a strange and compelling world into the palms of gamers’ hands, Pokémon created a social phenomenon that was largely made possible because so many gamers already owned the outdated hardware it was released on. It gave the kids of 1998 a reason to turn off their Playstation or Nintendo 64 (maybe Sega Saturn, but probably not), dust off that old Game Boy, and get lost in the open world of Kanto.





Sources:

TIME Magazine Staff, (1999, November 22). The Ultimate Game Freak. TIME Magazine, volume(154) no(21).