Pokemon Red and Blue are almost universally beloved games, in part because they set the tone for the entire Pokemon franchise. There are many Pokemon fans who consider Pokemon Red and Blue to be the best Pokemon games, and think that the franchise has only gone downhill from those earliest games. These “Genwunners” are convinced that the original Pokemon and characters are better than anything else and think later Pokemon are pale imitations of the superior originals.
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But here’s the thing: Pokemon Red and Blue had a ton of flaws, especially in terms of game mechanics. For players who have kept up with the Pokemon franchise, re-playing Pokemon Red and Blue can be tough because so many of the game’s moves and mechanics don’t make a whole lot of sense.
In fact, one Redditor was sick of all of Pokemon Red and Blue‘s praise and compiled a list of all the game’s flaws in one place. You can check out the full list here, and we’ve pulled out some of the biggest complaints down below:
Critical Hits
A lot of the complaints aboutย Pokemon Red and Blueย were directed at the critical hit mechanic, which would occasionally deal out extra damage when attacking. Originally, critical hits were based on speed, which meant that speedy Pokemon had a disproportionately higher chance of getting a critical hit over slower Pokemon. What’s more, the moves “Focus Energy” and “Dire Hit” actually lowered a Pokemon’s chance of getting a critical hit, thanks to a weird bug in the games.ย
If that weren’t bad enough, critical hits didn’t take stat changes into account, so it actually made more sense to stack Sword Dance buffs, since they could ultimately do more damage than a critical hit anyways.ย
Hyper Beam
Hyper Beam was one ofย Pokemon Red and Blue‘s most powerful attacks, but it came with a downside: after using Hyper Beam, Pokemon are supposed to rest for a turn to “recharge.” However, inย Pokemon Red and Blue, there were a lot of scenarios where players could skip the “recharge” part of Hyper Beam, making it a way overpowered attack. For instance, if a Pokemon knocked out their opponent with Hyper Beam, they wouldn’t have to recharge. They could also skip over the recharge turn if they hit a Substitute doll.ย
What’s more, if a Pokemon used Hyper Beam and then dodged a Wrap attack, they would automatically use Hyper Beam again without recharging.ย
Rage
Rage was another attack that’s broken inย Pokemon Red and Blue. In the original games, once a Pokemon used Rage, it could only stop using the attack when it fainted or the battle was over. What’s more, the accuracy of Rage would automatically drop to 0.4% if your Pokemon missed Rage due to their opponent’s evasion going up or your Pokemon’s accuracy going down. Basically, if your Pokemon missed a Rage attack once, it would be stuck missing Rage over and over again until it died.
Luckily,ย Pokemon developers fixed this mistake in later games, turning it into a much more useful attack.
Psychic-Type Pokemon
Psychic-Type Pokemon were the original OP’s of the Pokemon franchise.ย In the original games, Psychic-Type Pokemon were only weak against Bug-Type attacks, which was a problem since there weren’t any good Bug-Type moves. The only potentially good Bug-Type move was Beedrill’sย Twineedle, which was all but useless since Beedrill was weak against Psychic-Types due to being a Poison-Type Pokemon.ย
The only Pokemon that could resist Psychic-Type attacks were other Psychic-Type Pokemon, so you needed to bring an Alakazam or a Hypno into battle against Sabrina if you wanted any chance of beating it. There’s a reason why Mewtwo was the original ultimate Pokemon!
The Pokemon franchise fixed this by adding two new Pokemon types (Dark and Steel) that were either super effective or resistant to Psychic-Type attacks, and by making Ghost-Type Pokemon effective against Psychic-Type Pokemon too.ย
Other Random Glitches
Some of the other wacky glitches inย Pokemon Red and Blue includes the following:ย
- Healing moves didn’t work if a Pokemon was 255 HP or 511 HP under its maximum HP.
- The move Counter was hopelessly broken and could only be used against Normal and Fighting-Type attacks.ย
- AI would pick out attacks AFTER a player switched out their Pokemon, meaning they could always hit a player with a super effective attack.
- Multi-hit moves like Wrap or Fire Spin would always do the same amount of damage on every turn. If you hit a Critical on the first attack, you’d hit a Critical on every subsequent attack too.
- You could make the game freeze by attacking a Pokemon with a Defense of 3 or lower with an attack of 255 or higher. That’s because the game would try to calculate damage by dividing by zero, which was impossible to do.ย
- There were situations in which using a Great Ball was more effective than using an Ultra Ball.
Of course, there’s plenty of other more well-known glitches too, like MissingNo or the Mew glitch. That didn’t stop plenty of people from lovingย Pokemon Red and Blue,ย though, despite its many flaws!ย
