Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow

Review bywrrrk· 2026-11-06

★★★★★

yea sth i picked up from a rare good game analysis on [ytb](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha3AGv27Aro) is that u can rly see the sheer extent of barbarous exploitation scale up across kanto as u proceed along it (with scale comes the increasing signs of not just urbanization, but also pollutants [generated of the industry this movement necessarily presupposes], and even some of capital's more absurd excesses, eg the party on the ss anne), along with the immanent alignment of this industry's most capitalistic, technocratic, and anti-life factors spreading as far as u can go (e.g., the rocket takeover event in saffron, which makes giovanni's group and silph co. 'scientist' defectors virtually indistinguishable from one another). all finally culminating in the broken-up and decrepit pkm mansion on cinnabar , thus testifying to a real, emergent, and *machinic* effect of desire escaping its own creators will (to exploit, and to reduce the world and creation to a kind of naive, insensitive scientism), a desire which would eventually wish for the destruction of its very own conditions (mewtwo escaping both its hold and the limits supposedly set for it by the industrial and scientific apparatus that produced it). life confronts death. but it's not dour in the slightest! (even a 'white hand on your shoulder' is just a player's hand, hurrying along the strings of fate.) gen one (and two, and three, and five—this list is non-exhaustive—but generation one especially) really tries to *think* through this shit. 13 octobre 2026. sth my friend june/im_singing/windowlight talks abt a lot is the relation of plato's hatred of the sophists to the latter's acceptance of money, and overall plato's anxiety abt the 'deterritorializing' (my word, not hers) fx money would hav ovr institutions like the family, the home, the (city-)state, etc. and u rly see that in a way when u crawl thru the grotto fighting a mix of hopeless pokémaniacs, absurd 'macho' mountaineers , and also schoolchildren...? all variously taken far from home and *into* nature by the deterritorializing and autonomizing fx of money and power (*puissance*), in the form of their particular arrangement of pokémon (thereby their unique but comparable strength as such). u r paid money to win to buy healing items and pokéballs to win even more, yes, but even more so these things serve as expressive vehicles for a child's deterritorialization and exploration of a virtual world (and that's without even thinking of the player's). 14 octobre 2026. smt that rly struck me abt *jaune* is its sheer charm, this intangible sense of an overwhelming force and necessity behind every (overarching) decision, including its moments of silliness. the little ruptures like blue snapping at red on the first floor of pokémon tower, even littler details like this one pokémaniac in the grotto saying "chuis un artiste, pas un violent" ("i'm an artist, not a 'violent'" [forgive the exceedingly literal translation; i guess the nearest equivalent wld b 'fighter'??]). it's all weighty as poetry. even when they'r not 'saying' much. and even the 'dungeons' (as such) also feel so alive and like real points of pressure and problem-solving, especially once a player lets the pace of an older game into their system and they can start flowing alongside it more effectively (ie not trying to jam it into a judgment-apparatus that'd compare it with a modern slickened pacecrept rpg, or even with one that'd take the opposite approach, of encouraging a more encylopedia-dependent engagement with the game). *jaune* is especially good on the 'points of pressure and problem-solving part'; the pacing of trainer fights and the diversity of strategies u could come across, INCLUDING trapping tech and status spreading r so so strong at modeling and encouraging different ways of engaging with the syntax, to powerful ends. in any case, none of this scans like a toothless, or 'ambitionless' major-league product, including the decisions most liable to being read in worse faith like that (eg the version exclusive pokémon, the gift pokémon requiring multiple games to full sate the dex requirements of [kabuto, omanyte, hitmonchan/lee, eevee, etc.])—the unmitigated sense that all these moves r fundamentally exploratory, if inadvertently 'productive' in a capitalistic sense (mostly incidentally, it seems from the available record, at least [given the multiple available testaments to the higher ups' generosity even releasing red and green in the first place]). 14 octobre 2026.