Pokemon Needs To Let Us Choose Our Gym Leader Order Again

thegamer.com:

As committed readers of TheGamer will know, I have been exploring Kanto slowly, week by week, in an attempt to soak up the stories that make the region so special. Today's entry whisks us all away to the peaceful, joyful, Pokemon loving port city of Vermilion, which we promptly destroy with our selfish ways. That's not what I'm here to talk about though - the point is soon, I'm going to make a choice. While there is a 'canon' way to approach Kanto, the gym leaders 4th-7th can be approached in a variable order. There are some caveats to it - certain gyms unlock HMs that grant access to the next in the queue - but for the most part they can be mixed and matched. In future games, this mechanic was removed for linear progression, but perhaps it's time to go back to where it all began, back to Kanto.

I only learned recently that this mechanic was removed from future games, and by recently, I mean yesterday, when the news hit me like a Hyper Beam to the face. While discussing Pokemon games past and present, I mused that next time I dip into HeartGold, I might hunt out an alternative route. I can't, I was swiftly informed. Only Kanto has that system, and it seems to have come about via players finding loopholes as opposed to a deliberate choice. That's no real surprise: Pokemon Red & Blue were essentially held together with sellotape. For example, if you didn't have a Thunderstone but wanted to evolve a Pokemon that needed it, if you switched in Growlithe in battle and won, the game would read Growlithe's code as that of a Thunderstone and the evolution would occur. Onix was the Water Stone, Exeggutor the Moon Stone, Psyduck the Leaf Stone, and, in a double glitch, Missingno was the Fire Stone. Nothing in Pokemon Red & Blue was