If you’ve ever read any of my articles about Pokemon, you’ll probably already know my opinion on Gen 2, the single strongest generation in the series. While I think Gen 3’s Pokemon Emerald is the best individual game, Gold, Silver, and Crystal – and Gen 4’s HeartGold and SoulSilver remakes – are so perfectly designed that critiquing them in any meaningful way is almost impossible.
As it turns out, this is for a very simple reason – unless you commit an outlandish number of consecutive, immensely niche mistakes, there is no possible way for you to break a Gen 2 Pokemon game.
I’ve watched countless videos about the design of Gen 2, from ditched ideas that never made it into the final cut to breakdowns about how difficult it is to lock yourself into a state of no progression. We’ve all probably played dozens of games where our only course of action after hitting a severe roadblock was to reload an old save. Pokemon, however, traditionally only has a single save file. If you get stuck on an island and have no Pokemon who can learn Surf, you need to start a new game. Accidentally ran out of items and money and have no possible way of re-battling trainers? On the off chance that you have no HM users to get you out of a self-contained, technique-gated area, you’re absolutely done in here, too.
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It’s not easy to find yourself in these situations, especially in newer games designed to be as unbreakable as possible, but it can happen. Last night, I watched yet another video about why Gen 2’s brilliance is still so unparalleled. As it turns out, apart from a few select scenarios so ridiculous that almost nobody on Earth could ever accidentally find themselves in them, there’s only one true way to break the game via soft-lock, and it’s so absolutely off the wall that I doubt most people could do it even if they consciously tried.
As I mentioned above, I watch a lot of Pokemon content on YouTube. My favourite Pokemon YouTuber by a long shot is Pikasprey, who has two separate channels – Pikasprey Blue is for walkthroughs, while Pikasprey Yellow is for one-shot, usually obscure experiments or deep dives. A couple of years ago, a video about soft-locking Gen 2 was published to Pikasprey Yellow, and to this day, it’s one of the most extraordinary looks at Pokemon design I’ve ever seen. You can check it out for yourself below.
The full video is absolutely worth watching – I’ve seen it multiple times, and the only reason I’m writing about it now is because I rewatched it last night and want to draw attention to it. In a nutshell, if you want to break Pokemon Crystal, you need to:
- Play the Japanese version of Crystal, because the English version prevents this soft-lock from working due to the presence of an internal, password-protected clock.
- Beat the Pokemon League and then go back to it, but not via Viridian City, which almost every single player in their right mind would do automatically.
- Release all of your Pokemon except for a level three Caterpie (which cannot be caught in the correct location in Silver, therefore rendering the soft-lock null and void there).
- Spend all of your money and get rid of every single item in your bag.
- Go through the whole game without getting any Fishing Rods.
- Heal your Pokemon at the Pokemon League Pokemon Centre and save the game.
There are more steps to take, but they’re so stupidly niche that I don’t think anybody could ever do all of them by accident. Anyway, once you’ve done all of the above, the game still isn’t technically broken. Essentially, your Caterpie cannot fight the Elite Four, nor can it get you back through Victory Road. You can’t catch any Pokemon, nor can you train against any wild ones. Having a Fishing Rod would have allowed you to train against Magikarp, but that’s impossible now too. Because Caterpie can’t learn Fly, you are effectively stuck here forever.
And yet, there are two ways you can still get out of this rut. The first is to manually save every time you take a step in Victory Road. This means that if you get into a battle, can’t escape, and faint, you can reset to the previous square and take a step again, giving you a new opportunity to either not get a wild encounter or successfully run away. I honestly don’t want to know how long this would take, but I would imagine you’d need to commit several days to just getting halfway.
The second option is to pick the one single Ice Berry in the vicinity of the Pokemon League. You can sell these for $5 each, although because there’s only one and berries reset daily, it would take a whopping 240 days to save up the $1,200 necessary for buying a single Ultra Ball. 240 days to potentially catch a Rhyhorn, or Machoke, or something else that could possibly – but not necessarily easily – get you back through Victory Road unscatched. Ouch.
The entire situation is wild. I’d recommend watching the whole video if I were you, because it’s fantastic. I’d also consider subbing to Pikasprey’s channel, as he regularly puts out excellent and exceptionally niche videos on a number of beloved games – as per his channel name, Pokemon is probably the series he focuses on most prominently.
But yeah, Gen 2 is unbreakable. Even when you do break it, you can fix it if you’re willing to wait, like, eight months, and play once a day for every single day just to pick and sell a berry. In an era where tons of games talk about how bugs are features and we often find ourselves encountering game-breaking obstacles that set us back hours and hours of progress, it’s wild to see that Pokemon Gen 2 put out a game that not a single person of the eight billion people on Earth could ever break by accident. In terms of pure design, nothing else even comes close to matching its brilliance.
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