My thoughts on the Pokemon Adventures Red, Green, and Blue chapter

So this is my third time reading through this chapter and now I wanna give my thoughts on it. There will be spoilers so don't read this if you haven't read through it yet.

The first thing I'll go over is the story, the story here is based somewhat loosely on the games. The reason I say loosely is because it still hits most of the beats of the games with the main character Red being an 11 year old kid from Pallet town who got a starter and a pokedex from professor Oak and is out to travel across Kanto to complete the pokedex. And also along the way he battles the gym leaders(well sorta in this case) and encounters team rocket. Now the reason I say loosely is because it does use a lot of those elements from the game to set itself up, but generally it likes to take liberties due to the fact that the games it's based off of has a rather simple plot, and these liberties are what I think makes the story the most interesting.

I've heard some people say that they don't like the art style because every human looks like a chibi, but I didn't mind it too much even though I do prefer the later art style when it comes to drawing the human character. When it comes to drawing the pokemon however I think Mato does a good job, I especially like how she draws Poliwrath with giving him more emphasis on being bigger and more muscular than Poliwhirl making it look less like Poliwrath is just Poliwhirl with angry eyes. Though what I do find interesting is seeing how Kusaka/Mato interprets some of the moves from the games based off what they saw in the in game battles from Gen 1. A little detail I like is the idea of the pokeballs being see through, it kinda serves as the authors own answer as to what is going on inside a pokeball. I also like the creative things they do with the pokemon moves such as; using Golduck's confusion to send images to the pokedex, having a bunch of magneton create a barrier made out of thunder waves, making a Golbat into an image projector, and much, much more. I also like how the battles aren't restricted to the games rules so it's opened up to have more than one(or even more than six) pokemon on the field at once, and also they're not afraid to have the pokemon hit the trainers instead of just hitting the other pokemon. There's also the whole "pokemon don't just faint, they also die" in this manga and I'll say that yes there is one time where a pokemon gets killed and that's when Giovanni kills two Magmars, and that's the only time a death happened on screen, all I have to say about the Arbok is read the next chapter

Team rocket instead of just an evil mob organization that goes around and does bad things, here they do things like do cruel pokemon experimentation in order to create an army of pokemon, try to capture Mew so that they can create Mewtwo, capture the three birds so that they can fuse them using "badge powers......"(I'll get to what I think of that in a bit) But anyway it's not the deepest of plans because it can be summed up as "we wanna take over the world" but it's a little more interesting than just popping up and doing bad things. Another thing is that with making Surge, Koga, and Sabrina into admins of team rocket and Blaine into a scientist until the middle when he breaks away from the team it gives team rocket some actually memorable characters as a part of it instead of just being a bunch of generic grunts and then Giovanni. Speaking of which, not much to say about Giovanni in this chapter he's the leader of team rocket and that's kinda it, he gets more interesting in later chapters imo. Though i do at least like the idea of him being able to predict Red's moves in short amounts of time due to sheer experience.

Though if there's one problem that I think this chapter in particular had overall it's pacing, some parts of the story are just too short and some things I feel like they've been left out. One example being Red's training and second fight with Misty being completely off screened. Another one being the first time we see Giovanni is in a chapter that starts with him and Red exiting Diglett's cave and apparently implying that they met up on screen, I think it's kinda weird to not show the first meeting between our main character and the leader of the group of villains that have served as the main source of conflict throughout the story.

There is kinda an issue with breaking the rules a couple times with ground types being able to get electrocuted even though they can't in the games and a Nidoking getting poisoned.

Another issue I have with this chapter and the next is the whole "badges as plot devices" thing. It feels really weird that apparently these things that the gym leaders just hand out for beating them apparently have have great powers that allow you to control the birds and fuse them into one. Like, I could understand it a little bit more if it were something along the lines of trainers who beat them get these model badges while the gym leaders keep the real ones, but no Red gets the boulder badge and the cascade badge just for beating them. So is Red the first person who ever beat them? However future chapter spoilers

The last thing I want to talk about is the characters; Red is alright he kinda falls under the standard hero archetype. Red isn't the most interesting of protagonists in this series, there are later ones that I like more but I still kinda like him. Something I like is that the protagonists seem to all have a first pokemon before they receive their starter with Red having a poliwhirl(Satoshi Tagiri's favorite pokemon), it makes them feel a little more alive than just a player avatar waiting to receive their starter so that they can leave home. Now where I stand on the whole Green/Blue thing is that I will be calling the rival and the girl by their Japanese names because 1) this chapter was based on the games Red, Green, and Blue and one doesn't exist outside of Japan 2) Firered and Leafgreen and 3) the characters are eventually drawn to have the eye colors to match their names and the rival's eyes are green and the girls eyes are blue. Now anyway with Green I do find it interesting how he contrasts with his game persona being more stoic and serious here as opposed to the games more arrogant persona. Blue is sort of an original character whose based on this image but here she seems to be a con artist and is very skilled at deceiving people. Not much is shown in this chapter about her true motivations in chapter but that's for later. Though I kinda wish they showed her stealing the squirtle earlier in the manga.

Overall I still liked this chapter in spite of its few glaring flaws(mainly in the pacing department) though this is definitely far from my favorite and I feel like a lot of the later chapters are much better. Though this isn't my least favorite either, albeit there isn't one chapter that I've read that I didn't like (I've read up to the heartgold and Soulsilver chapter before this)

Next time I'll be back to talk about the Yellow chapter.