I never really got into Pokemon. I was too old by the time it came out. Let me see...yeah, I was 17 when Pokemon Red was released. I guess I could have a bought it. I had a Gameboy. But, as I said, I wasn't interested. I don't know if I was buying Gameboy games at that stage in any event.

But I played Pokemon Yellow basically all day yesterday and for a couple of hours today. I think that's it for my Pokemon adventures. It's a pretty boring game, especially playing on an emulator where you can easily save and reload your game.

What you do is go around a little map and you have one on one battles with "wild" Pokemon who appear as random encounters. The battles are really simplistic. You have four attack options (as the most) but all I do is use the attack option that actually attacks (i.e. lowers the other Pokemon's hit points). The other attack options lower their defence or raises your attack or useless shit like this.

There are also mandatory battles with Pokemon "trainers" which are the same as the wild battles but usually there's two or more Pokemon that you have to fight, one after the other.

You can also swap out Pokemon during battle.

Anyway, it's boring as shit. The story is non-existent, as far as I'm aware. Your goal is simply to "catch them all".

So you just walk through, hope to find "rare" Pokemon. There are places where particular Pokemon appear but I don't think there's anyway of knowing that in-game. You just have to randomly walk around and hope that you find one. Hour after hour after hour.

But you'll need those hours anyway because "grinding" is an absolute necessity. The Pokemon you encounter will be of increasingly high levels and the difficulty jumps at certain choke points. So in order to advance, you have to go back and wander around a little area to have random battles with wild Pokemon and level up your Pokemon. The game even gives you a little patch of land next to each area where this grinding is necessary. Leveling up takes ages and is so, so very boring. How many times can I kill that rat Pokemon? Or that bird Pokemon? And you get like 30 experience points for it. You need, say, 300 experience points to advance to the next level (the amount increases as you go up the levels). And you have to do that for each and every one of your Pokemon (at least that's how I was doing it to keep everyone the same level). I had like 20 Pokemon when I quit.

So yeah, I got to this city where I have to beat a level 20 Pokemon in order to leave the area. My Pokemon are all at level 13. There's no way. You're talking about another 12 hours of walking around that little grassy area and leveling up all of my Pokemon. For what? The exact same thing will happen at the next choke point except then I'll have even more Pokemon who I'll have to level up to even higher levels.

And that's the game. Collect Pokemon and make those Pokemon go through hundreds of thousands of tedious, repetative battles to level them up.

How did this thing become so popular? I'm pretty sure adults are playing this. Well, I don't know. Maybe not so many. I think it is largely a children's game. But holy shit is it boring.