3 ms·
Not sure when Nintendo started implementing this more but I fondly remember buying Pokemon Silver (for gameboy) in my teenage years LONG before it was released
by Melatonic 4y ago
Not sure when Nintendo started implementing this more but I fondly remember buying Pokemon Silver (for gameboy) in my teenage years LONG before it was released in the US. I was too young to get a credit card or an eBay account but my friend and I realized we could buy a one time use Visa gift card with cash from a local store. Each of us saved up for god knows how long and then I bought Silver while he bought Gold. All in (including shipping) I think we paid close to 70$ each which seemed like a HUGE amount of money at the time (almost 123$ today!). I don't think either of us even considered that the Japanese cartridge might not play in our US gameboys.
What we did not realize was that there of course was no way to switch the game to English as it had not been translated yet. Playing the game entirely in Japanese was for sure a challenge but I think I still vaguely remember the symbols for Poke Ball and the Health restore items. This was of course still fairly early internet days so there was not a ton of online help and translators were much less accurate.
- tacker2000 4y agoBack in the day, I received a copy of Pokemon Gold from a japanese friend of my parents, months before the euro release. I was extremely excited but then i saw that it was completely in japanese! It ended up collecting dust, since I didnt understand a word and never played it. Maybe I should have powered through anyway like you though!
- ryanmcbride 4y agoI had a similar experience with one of my friends, except instead of buying physical carts we just downloaded the rom and used a gameboy emulator. This was just a little while before gold/silver came out in the US and we brute forced our way through as much as we could, ultimately getting stuck on the Sudowoodo blocking a path. We tried everything we could think of but without knowing japanese we just couldn't figure out that we needed that squirt bottle or whatever it was.
- Melatonic 4y agoIt helped a ton to have a friend playing through it at the same time. Honestly our main strategy was just to go through and talk to every person in the game and then blaze through the menu items as fast as you can. Then you went up to every useable item / environment piece and did the same thing. Rinse repeat. Worked better than you would think!
- ChickeNES 4y agoI actually got a copy for around the same price at a local independent game store back then. Weirdly enough, I went to Waldenbooks immediately afterward, and was very surprised, and also quite pleased, to find a player's guide specifically for Americans playing the Japanese imports.
- Melatonic 4y agoThats wild - was this before they released gold/silver abroad? From what I remember it was a solid 1-2 years before the english release.