Pokemon Crystal

2025-09-02
Crystal gets some credit for being the first x.5 editions of a Pokemon game that wasn't just a cash-grab turd that added a Pikachu sprite following you and a shitty surfing mini-game (MAN, I hate Pokemon Yellow). Here we have our first female playable character and an expanded story that focuses on Suicune, a Pokemon no one gives a fuck about that has the same aura as Rick James.

But really the interesting addition is the Battle Tower, a set of battles against absolutely roided out trainers, with fully min-maxed teams. Thus presenting the first difficult encounters in the entire series (minus maybe Red from the end of Silver/Gold). The only problem is they are roided out in the sense that they're actually using performance enhancing drugs. These motherfuckers will throw out a level 10 Blissey that looks like Terry Crews with fully maxed EVs, a feat impossible without the use of Gamesharking/save-editing. Still, the idea of leveraging the raw materials of EVs, IVs, and the huge roster and moveset, to introduce some actual challenging fights is a good one and I support it even if it was kind of busted and low-key terrified me as a kid.

???
Pokemon Crystal was the second in a line of x.5 gen games that came out after the original pair of generation games and added minimal features. Yellow was the first one and was fucking awful because it literally just added Pikachu, a purely cosmetic bullshit addition.

Crystal did mostly the same but gets some credit for adding a little extra story about Suicune, a Pokemon nobody gives a fuck about, and then adding the Battle Tower. The Battle Tower is actually a sick concept where you take in a small team of 3 Pokemon and need to defeat 7 trainers back-to-back and depending on how far you get you get points that you can trade in for really rare stuff. To that end, I'll give this a 6 for adding that.