2) Pokemon HeartGold & SoulSilver
Following on from the much-loved Gen 1 remakes Fire Red and Leaf Green, Game Freak decided, back in 2010, to take another crack at rejuvenating an oldie from yesteryear. This time in the form of what many consider to be not just the most innovative pair of games in the series to date, but arguably the best.
Launched for the DS during the lull between Diamond/Pearl and Black/White‘s release, HeartGold and SoulSilver, besides introducing a whole new generation of Trainers to the fictional world of Johto, served as a reminder of just how ambitious the original Game Boy Color versions were. One could certainly argue that, outside of the obvious visual and mechanical improvements evident in more recent releases (X&Y, Sun and Moon, etc.), the original Gold and Silver still represent the biggest shake-up of the Pokeformula to date.
Breeding, held items, new types and a real-time night and day system; it’s genuinely hard to believe that all of those features, which are now standard in every new iteration of games, never originally existed in Kanto, a problem that Game Freak remedied by doing the unthinkable and including both it and its sister region, Johto, in the sequels, essentially making Gold and Silver two games in one. No small achievement, considering the laughably small storage capacity of a Game Boy cartridge.
Outside of a few oddities here and there, HeartGold and SoulSilver did very little to further the formula, which it received mild criticism for, but that’s missing the point. All Game Freak needed to do with the remakes was bring the visual quality up to scratch with modern standards, and it passed with flying colors. After all, what point is there in attempting to shoehorn new features into a classic? Leave that to the fully fledged sequels.
