Why Pokémon Crystal will always be the best Pokémon game
Nine-and-a-half: this is the sort of mental age I ascribe to Pokémon. To first playing it, that is, but you could say it probably also fits the mental age of Pokémon themselves, too, in a roundabout way. It's that weird bit of life you occupy right between having an adult brain and a child's - right after you start to pick up a moral compass that goes beyond just doing what you're told, to a sense of duty or justice, but right before you're really sentient enough to start thinking about why that is. Permit me to really overcommit to a point here: as humans, we are probably closest to Pokémon when we're about nine-and-a-half.
For me, that very specific age is tied very specifically to my memories of Pokémon Crystal, a game which, after roughly 17 years of languishing on old, forgotten cartridges, sees its return to the hands of nine-and-a-half-year-olds today, on the 3DS.
Remembering what it's like to be nine-and-a-half, and the weird, golden hour fuzz it glazes everything with, makes it very difficult for me to figure out why Pokémon Crystal is such a special game. I know it definitely is a special game but I also know nine-and-a-half-year-old Chris well enough to realised I'd have loved it even if it wasn't. The more I try to remember playing it for the first time the harder it is to prove it isn't just one of those games, the ones that we all have, that tangle up with your consciousness, and sometimes even your sense of identity, because when you look back on your memories of it you're remembering yourself, at that age and at that time, as much as you're remembering the game.
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