Revisiting Kanto: Why Pallet Town Is The Perfect Start To A Pokemon Adventure

thegamer.com:

Welcome to the very first steps on my journey back to my childhood as I go exploring through Kanto, my favourite place in the gaming world. Not the real Kanto, ew. That’s outside and it has people there. Pokemon’s Kanto. Last week, I wrote about why Kanto was such a special place to me, and so many of us. It’s not just the nostalgia - plenty of games from my childhood have not held up so well - but is instead the simplicity and craft that goes into every step along the journey. Today, I take those first steps once more, and you take them with me, and I go back to where it all started. Back to Pallet Town.

Pallet Town is a quiet, unassuming town with just two houses and a laboratory. There’s what appears to be a lake at the bottom, but if you follow the flow of the water (which you can’t do until much later in the game) you’ll find it leads out into a vast ocean. From humble beginnings come great things. As I explore through Kanto, I’ll find much more exciting locales, but I doubt many will hit as hard as Pallet Town. While it’s not just nostalgia that makes Kanto so special, there is a lot of nostalgia wrapped up in Pallet Town’s appeal. This, after all, is the one part of the journey we all share.

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Pokemon is not a choice-based game, but it is very much what we make of it. It’s in Pallet Town that we choose our starter, and from there start to shape our playthrough. After that, we catch the rest of our team. They’re the same at first, scooping up Route 1 fodder, but as we develop bonds with our favourites, have stories written on the battlefield, and tailor our line-up, our playthroughs diverge. In this journey I’ll speak as little as possible about my own Pokemon,