Pokemon Blue but I Didn’t Accomplish Anything

Everyone knows what Pokemon is. Like seriously, everyone knows. So after finally completing Shantae, I wanted something easy. A game where I could cheat to my heart’s content. Not so much challenge myself. So I chose Pokemon Blue. Pokemon Blue has many different Game Genie codes that you can use to do all sorts of things. I like finding ways to really mess up a game sometimes, and that’s what I did here. I didn’t feel an actual sense of accomplishment at any point really, but in this case, that wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.

Pokemon Blue (and Red for that matter) has a huge library of Game Genie codes. You can buy any item, catch any Pokemon, catch Pokemon that don’t exist, and generally just do whatever you please. So in summary, there are a lot of codes to try out here.

The thing I liked most about this no-shame run of Pokemon was being able to do whatever I wanted, ignoring all warnings, and throwing caution to the wayside. It’s one of my favorite things about the Everdrive. (what I use to play these games) Since save data isn’t stored on a cartridge battery I don’t have to worry about save corruption.

A fun example of when I pushed the game farther than it should have been pushed was when I was using a code that let me encounter any Pokemon in the wild. The code worked so you could encounter any Pokemon by just changing two digits of the code (depending on which Pokemon you wanted). I learned that those two digits were the same values as what the game used to identify any given Pokemon when recalling it from memory. So I immediately started using values that weren’t assigned to any Pokemon in the game, forcing it to load a mess of data. That was fun, but these things still used pretty standard moves, so I moved on. Then I found out the same hack applied to the item codes, and this is interesting because loading an item that didn’t exist was cool, but it also wouldn’t have any normal properties attached to it.  Because, unlike Pokémon, items don’t have a “moveset” or a list of things that they were supposed to do. I was on Discord when I realized this, so I had people give me random things to input, producing a variety of results from freezing the game to causing monstrous graphical errors. I also ended up encountering two Snorlax’s which I’m fairly certain isn’t supposed to happen (but I caught them both anyway). I ended up accidentally doing certain parts of the game out of order, probably because I got a few important items unconventionally. 

However, there is one thing the Game Genie couldn’t give me: Accomplishment. It’s what you get when you beat a video game. At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen, but that all goes out the window when you haven’t done a single thing as intended. I didn’t actually feel like I accomplished anything after this run, but I still had fun because I wasn’t really looking for that.

I think I will always like breaking games like this. I love trying to understand why something breaks the way it does, what causes which glitches, and how those glitches affect gameplay. I didn’t really play Pokemon Blue this way because I wanted the game to be easier to beat, but more because I wanted to have free reign over a game after beating something extremely difficult.