The rhythmic process of collecting, training and learning about the Pokemon is irresistibly absorbing 15 minutes of exploration quickly turns into an hour of battling, or tinkering with your team, or hunting for an elusive catch. You rise from nothing to conquer the world by virtue of your own hard graft, through investing inordinate time and effort into a team of creatures that quickly come to feel like an extension of yourself. Its spirit of adventure and richness of imagination are evident from the second your young trainer sets off into a detailed and vivid world, kept turning by a touchingly symbiotic relationship between the people and the many different creatures that inhabit it.Įssentially, it's about hard work and empowerment. Pokemon's innate appeal, certainly, is timeless. The question is not so much whether HeartGold and SoulSilver are good games - they're excellent, always were - but whether they're good enough to merit buying again, or to draw in a new, nostalgia-immune audience. HeartGold and SoulSilver are artfully designed to draw us back in with familiar Pokemon in a familiar world, wrapped up in updated graphics and gameplay systems and packaged with a new gadget, the Pokewalker. A lot of us have probably failed to keep up with the series in the intervening years and find its ever-expanding menagerie of increasingly weird-looking monsters intimidating. We're in our twenties, now, the kids who were playing Red and Blue 15 years ago and taking Pikachu lunch boxes to school. I'm probably a sizeable portion of HeartGold and SoulSilver's audience.

Reaching the stage at which your own childhood classics start getting remade to delight a new generation is a sobering milestone in one's gaming life. I first played them when I was twelve years old, which, distressingly, was nearly a decade ago. Like FireRed and LeafGreen on the GBA, Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver are updated remakes of older Pokemon games - in this instance, the original Pokemon sequels, which first arrived in Europe in 2001 on the Game Boy Color.

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