Hello, intrepid explorers, and thank you once again for joining me on my journey through Kanto. Today, we take our first steps into Vermilion City, the Port of Exquisite Sunsets itself. If you're a newcomer on this journey, allow me to catch you up. I've been exploring Pokemon Blue for around three months now, taking in each setting at a slower pace in order to absorb its stories. Less interested in the battles and the gym badges, I'm here to explore Pokemon Blue as a tourist to figure out why Kanto itself is so compelling. This week, after a fortnight's stay in Cerulean, we head through the Underground Path and onwards to Vermilion. The exquisite sunsets don't really sell themselves on the Game Boy Color, but hopefully there's a lot more to drink in.
I have a ticket for the S.S. Anne burning through my pocket, but I don't intend to go running through the streets crashing into everyone a la Leo in Titanic. The S.S. Anne can wait until next week, so right now we'll be looking at the city itself. I've played through Kanto several times, across Pokemons Blue, Yellow, Gold, FireRed, HeartGold, and Let's Go, but I have always held the washed-out, technologically limited version presented in Pokemon Blue as the definitive one, even as other games offered more depth and detail. The rich burnt orange of Vermilion City is the best example yet of exactly why this aesthetic has resonated so deeply.
Despite this, it also feels like the one which loses out the most in the limitations of the Game Boy. All of the other locations have felt like places to simply pass through. Oddly for a port city, Vermilion feels like a destination. It has a homely, settled quality to it. I live in a seaside town now, and grew up by a shipyard, so there is a sense of the familiar to all of this. It's a shame that the later games, especially Let's Go, were so loyal to Blue's framework, as this feels like a place that should be teeming with Pokemon - swimming in the water, lazing around the pier, dipping their paws in the water in fascination of another realm of life completely separate from their own. Vermilion City feels like a home.
Vermilion City sees me grab a fishing rod for the first time, and while it's just an Old Rod - and therefore will only snag low levelled Magikarp, the training of which would go against the essence of this playthrough - it still offers a blissful time staring out to sea, imagining Goldeen frolicking beneath me, sleeping Growlithe curled up by some old sea-faring rope, my starter Pokemon nuzzling at my chin.
Mostly, Vermilion City feels like a town that loves Pokemon, best exemplified by the Pokemon Fan Club. You can wander inside and meet the various Pokemon fans who have travelled from all around the world to talk about Pokemon. Yeah it's geeky and the room likely has a stale, damp smell to it, but it's endearingly pure. It's like those TikToks of nerds getting excitable about Magic: the Gathering cards where there is a natural, cynical instinct to point and laugh but the people are just too wholesome to elicit anything other than joy. It's just a bunch of people standing around saying 'my pet's nice' and others saying 'mine too' but goddamn do you want to give everyone in that building a big (damp, stale) hug. In reality, we button mash through an old man’s boring wittering, take his bike voucher, and then never visit again. Call your grandparents, kids.
Even the in-game trade is inescapably sweet. I give you a Spearow, a Pokemon you can't walk more than five yards without tripping over, and you give me a Farfetch'd, one of the rarest Pokemon in the region? Aye sure, here you go, take good care of this absolute fodder I caught six weeks ago and have forgotten about since. It's very ‘your Mickey Mantle 1958 for my picture of Homer on the couch’. Perhaps Elyssa is related to Mindy, and perhaps we all deserve her Haunter shaped revenge. We head to this town of love and joy and end up robbing a poor kid - and this is just after we stole some fossils. Hang on, are we the baddies?
There's also a strange guy making his Machop kick the ground so he can build a house! That's weird as fuck so I'm not going to talk about it anymore!
Finally, Vermillion also gives us our first real gym test. Not the battle itself, but just figuring out how it works. To this day I just randomly look in bins until buttons appear and I can make my pets fight in a bloodsport to earn me a shiny piece of enamel that grants me permission to enter more violent bloodsports... other than that though Vermilion is a city of peace, love, and unity. Why can't all Pokemon towns be this nice? Unfortunately, it’s probably because of us.