Pokémon Trading Card Game

September 20th, 2023

Out of sheer boredom and a desire to spend every waking moment of my life talking about video games, I used this randomizer to pick a random retro game to write a blog post about. This is what happened next...

A screenshot of the title screen of the game Pokémon Trading Card Game.

A screenshot of the Download window in Firefox. It shows that a file called "Nintendo - Game Boy Color.zip" is currently downloading, and the download is over halfway done, with 6 minutes left.

Isn't it fucked up how the entirety of the Game Boy Color's library is under a gigabyte?

The world's most popular TCG, the Pokémon Trading Card Game (source: dude trust me), has had surprisingly few video game adaptations. Apart from the Game Boy Color duology, the only other way to officially play the game virtually was through Pokémon TCG Online, which shut down recently and was replaced by Pokémon TCG Live. In the first Game Boy Color adaptation of the card game, you play as Silent Pokémon Protagonist #2, a young boy who dreams of one day acquiring the four Legendary Pokémon Cards... but to do that, he'll have to get through each of the eight Club Masters to earn their Master Medals. Once all 8 medals have been acquired, you can challenge the Grand Masters for their legendary cards. Standard Pokémon fare, pretty much, just swap badges for medals

I'm gonna be real, when this came up on the randomizer I thought to myself: what am I even gonna say? It's literally just a digital version of the Pokémon TCG. I played it for about an hour and I still don't know what to say about it, because once I finished the tutorial I headed straight for the Water Club and got my ass handed to me on a silver platter by Amanda twice in a row X3

The first time I lost, Amanda played a Scyther which sweeped every pokemon I had. Then, with only 1 prize card left, I accidentally used a card that switched my active Pokémon to Caterpie, which... it's fucking Caterpie, how do you think that went

The second time I lost, I got screwed over by the RNG and did not draw a single Grass-type energy card when most of the Pokemon in the starter deck I chose need Grass energy to attack. Yeah. Amanda isn't even the Master of the Water Club btw

A screenshot of the game Pokémon Trading Card Game. In the screenshot, a character named Dr. Mason is talking to the player character. He says: "Oh! Why the rush, DICK? What?"

There is no swear filter when naming your character. Have fun

I can't really blame the game for either of my losses, though. It's a faithful adaptation of the early sets of the Pokémon TCG, so you're just as likely to get screwed over by bad luck in real life as you are in the video game. Also, in case you don't watch too many YouTube videos about the history of card games that you don't play like me, Scyther was pretty busted IRL too. In that sense, the game does a pretty good job at what it sets out to do— accurately recreate the physical card game. Sounds like it should be obvious, but the Yu-Gi-Oh! games of the time weren't the most accurate to the rules of their card game. I think that's because those games were made before the rules of Yu-Gi-Oh! were actually established, but I could be wrong

All that being said, the most notable thing about this game by far is its glorious soundtrack. The spirit of Mr. Gunpei Yokoi himself must have reached down from the heavens and possesed Ichirō Shimakura while he was composing these songs, because good lord just listen to them!!!

Even the pause menu theme is good!!!

I don't have much else to say, so this concludes my first impressions of Pokémon Trading Card Game for the Game Boy Color. It's a pretty neat little game