I first played Pokemon Blue way back in December 1999, when I was five years old. It was a Christmas present from my Grandad and no one really knew what Pokemon was or even what a Game Boy was at the time. My whole family sat and watched me play Blue for about six hours during the Christmas party and I didn’t say a word to anyone. I remember the sofa I was sitting on, I remember that I drank lots of orange juice, and I remember my first adventure into the Safari Zone. A place of frustration, of wonder, and my first ever experience of feeling pure adrenaline from a video game.
A kid’s imagination is incredibly potent. I hid my Stretch Armstrong underneath my bed because I thought it was gonna suffocate me in my sleep. (It was still there six years later when we moved house, but he’d burst open and cemented himself to the floor with all his weird gooey chemical insides. We couldn’t remove him. Not even with a saw.) The Safari Zone was real to me. Its pixelated grass and bait and rocks were all part of a palpable adventure. Each encounter with a Kangaskhan was like pulling a shiny Pokemon card, finding a Slow Worm in the garden, or being allowed to have an ice cream from the shop. This stuff is pure magic to a kid.
The Safari Zone was frustratingly hard, mind. You could spend an entire hour in it and not run into a single Chansey. Even when you did bump into the happy-looking-egg-fuck it usually ran away after the first rock. My friends told me that if you pressed the A button over and over again while trying to catch a Pokemon it’d work better. If I contract arthritis in the future it won’t be because of typing every day or bad genes, but because I spent years trying to catch a fucking Chansey. I never did. Or at least I think I didn’t. It seems like the sort of memory that would stay with me, you know?
20 years later, Pokemon Legends: Arceus looks like the closest Pokemon has come yet to emulating that breathtaking Safari Zone feeling. I’d give anything to be a kid again, to be able to play Arceus as a first-time experience with all that magic and wonder inside my head, without worrying about the low-poly trees and weird boss fights where you just throw balls at a big, glowing Pokemon over and over again. You creep around, throw bait and rocks, catch Pokemon, and every now and then stumble across some absolute chungus ‘Mon that will blow your mind. I’d pay good money to show five-year-old me Arceus.
Creeping through the grass to throw a ball at an unsuspecting Shinx is exactly the kind of scenario I imagined in my head when all those tiny pixels flashed across my colourless Game Boy screen. The ‘Oh shit’ moment as you creep around a corner and find a Pinsir after forty-five minutes of looking for one, Pinsir, the cool beetle Pokemon with spiky horns on its head because that’s how you think of stuff when your brain is basically like a cooling jelly. A shout of pure, unadulterated joy because you managed to catch a Scyther.
Pokemon’s appeal has waned on me over the years. The last mainline game I played was Pokemon Black - that was, uh, 12 years ago. I didn’t want to read that piece of information today but here we are. Pokemon Black And White were a good place to stop because they were decent games, it turns out. Since then I’ve kept a cursory, distanced interest in the world of Pokemon. I’ve played cards with my little brother, watched him explore whimsical Great Britain in Pokemon Sword, and I am partial to watching a tricky Nuzlocke run every now and then - only watch, I don’t have the patience to try it myself. And yet, for the first time in 12 years, I’m going to buy a Pokemon game.
Pokemon Legends: Arceus might let me down immensely. If I were to put a bet on it I reckon the odds are split 50/50 on whether I will enjoy it or whether it’ll get chucked on that ever-growing pile of games I never finish. Some of it looks really bad. Sorry. Like a prototype of a future masterpiece, a pilot episode before the great decade-spanning epic. But, if it manages to capture even an eighth of that wonder I felt exploring the Safari Zone in every Pokemon game from Blue to Black, then it’ll have done its job. Take me back to 1999.