I first played Pokemon Red the autumn of my Junior year in college.  I was traveling abroad to Japan for a semester, and after growing somewhat enamored of the cartoon (as discussed previously), I decided I should give the game itself a try.  It proved to be a wise investment, as I put far more hours into it than any other GBC game I ever bought.

Pokemon is, on the surface, a pretty simple concept:  Collect Pokemon, battle with them, gain experience, and fight your way to the top. The collection aspect, which has always been the core of the game (as well as the core of its marketing) is, by itself, a pretty powerful motivator for a lot of players.  A player could invest hours upon hours in the game tracking down and either capturing or trading for every single Pokemon they can to fill their Pokedex, and that alone would probably garner enough gameplay hours to rival most modern JRPGs.

In my mind, however, the real genius of Pokemon is only revealed once you scratch the surface a little deeper.  While the charming story and addictive collection aspects are solid on their own, where the game really succeeds is in how it creates layers of depth that are accessible to those players that wish to take the time to explore them.

Again, on it’s most basic level, a player can pick up the game, follow the storyline, collect some Pokemon, and level up a team enough to hit the Elite 4 and ultimate victory.  This could be chalked up as a solid game to most people, and I suspect this is the level that many Pokemon players experience the game at.  But then, for those who are interested, there are side experiences: earning contest ribbons, participating in the Pokemarathon, and other such peripheral activities provide interesting levels of additional content for those who wish to take part in them.

Moving beyond the single player experience, the multiplayer aspects of the game open up whole new realms of competition, with the ability to face opponents far more clever than the game’s computer-controlled foes, and with the advent of the WiFi Network, foes from around the world.

And for those that really have the wherewithal, they can dig even deeper into the guts of the system and start breeding some truly killer Pokemon through the extensive breeding system, focusing on EV development and specific traits to be handed down through the generations. If you start to read up on some of the materials out there explaining how to really get into the training and breeding aspects of the game, you will quickly start to feel like you’ve strayed a long way from the simple kid image the game outwardly projects.

The reason that this all works, though, is that everything I have just mentioned is, ultimately, completely optional.  A player can take part in absolutely no side activities, only catch a handful of Pokemon, and never breed a single thing nor have any idea what an EV is and still beat the game.  They can do this and still have a full game experience, and probably be none the wiser that they’ve missed anything.  If they choose to take the time  to delve deeper into what the game has to offer, they can do so of their own volition.  Doing so brings its own rewards, depending on the activity, but choosing not t0 do so carries no penalty to the player who doesn’t wish to take part.

To be sure, Pokemon is not the only game out there to use such a layered approach, but the sheer number of layers, combined with the ease with which the player can engage them (or ignore them) makes it a standout example of execution.  Layered gameplay, when left to the player’s discretion, can be an amazing tool for expanding and improving a player’s experience, and the Pokemon series has continued to refine the idea with each successive iteration.