25 years on, Pokemon Crystal is still the blueprint for modern Pokemon

Happy birthday, Celebi. Pokemon Crystal is 25 years old today, and a host of childhood memories have flooded my brain like the lower decks of the SS Anne if it were to hit an unsuspecting Avalugg. It’s a game drenched in nostalgia, a whole generation of kids’ first experience of Johto and the wider Pokemon world. But its impact on the series as a whole goes much deeper than you might think.

Pokemon Crystal iterated on Gold & Silver in many obvious ways. It was the first Pokemon game to implement animated sprites as they jumped into battle, which has since evolved into Pokemon roaming around the open world of Paldea. The day/night cycle was improved, too, offering a bigger variety of encounters depending on the time of day.

While this third game in each generation proved fruitful for decades—Crystal, Emerald, and Platinum are considered the best ways to play Gens 2, 3, and 4, respectively—Crystal had a far bigger impact than just normalising this practice.

I wanna be the very best

Are you a boy? Or are you a girl? Despite this question being ingrained in any good Pokefan’s mind, it doesn’t originate with the first games.

This most basic level of character customisation was introduced in Pokemon Crystal. The unimaginatively-named Kris was a big step for the series, which now offers all manner of clothes and accessories depending on which gender you choose. While it’d be great to see those gendered options be opened up to any trainers in future, it seems unlikely we’d have them at all if it wasn’t for Kris’ inclusion two and a half decades ago.

Legendaries, too, were a big part of Pokemon Crystal. I was shocked at how easy it was to encounter Suicune in this game, let alone catch it. Sure, its catch rate was still abysmally low, but the fact it didn’t immediately flee if you’d failed to prepare with Mean Look or Sleep Powder was extraordinary.

Celebi, the game’s unofficial mascot, was another addition. While event tickets had been in place since Pokemon Red & Blue, Celebi’s distribution through retailers made mythical Pokemon more attainable for the western world.

No longer did you have to hack your game or have an uncle in Japan in order to get the rarest Pokemon. Just head to your local Toys ‘R’ Us and the little onion fella could be yours! Tickets have been distributed through retail partners ever since, and the advent of online connections has only further democratised the process of catching ‘em all.

Nowadays, Legendary Pokemon are given away willy nilly, encountered as many times as you need to before you can catch them and even acting as mini-bosses in repeat-ad-nauseum games-within-the-games such as Dynamax Adventures. Event tickets have evolved into pseudo-live-service events, distributed through Mystery Gifts and battled in Tera Raids, but the promise of powerful Pokemon remains. And, for the western world at least, Pokemon Crystal got the ball rolling.

Towering high

The most important addition to Pokemon Crystal, however, was the Battle Tower.

For the uninitiated, this is a battling challenge unlocked after beating the Elite 4. Pokemon’s first post-game. And while it wasn’t perfect—it was practically impossible even when facing level 10 opponents thanks to Gen 2’s stat levelling mechanicus—it was a taste of things to come. Emerald tweaked the formula (as well as refining EVs), and many games have tried their own versions since, but they all stem from this brutal trial.

If you want to play a Pokemon match that you’ll emerge from feeling like you’ve gone ten rounds of VGC with Wolfe Glick, head west of Olivine and knock yourself out (pun very much intended). But if you don’t fancy opponents with buffed critical hit ratios and AI based on Satoshi Tajiri himself, maybe give Emerald’s offering a go. It’s more forgiving and has far more variety to boot.

Every mainline game since Crystal had some variant of the Battle Tower, until Scarlet & Violet—and that omission was met with outcry from longtime fans. That was rectified in Pokemon Legends Z-A, which boasts the Infinite Z-A Royale, a real-time spin on the PvE postgame experience pioneered in 2001.

Whether you’ve taken a trip on the Battle Subway or clambered up the branches of Alola’s Battle Tree, the scaling difficulty of successive battles is a gauntlet like no other. And those foundations, along with so many others, were laid in Pokemon Crystal.

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