Pokémon Gold / Silver / Crystal

There are games that define a series, and then there's the second generation of Pokémon, which many players still consider the absolute peak of the whole brand. Gold, Silver, and Crystal arrived in Japan in 1999 (in the West a year later) and took everything that worked in the first generation and pushed it up a level — literally and figuratively.

The biggest novelty was the internal clock. The cartridge knew what time it was and what day of the week, and the world responded: some Pokémon appeared only at night, others by day, and certain events were tied to specific days. For the first time the game lived by its own rhythm independent of you. Add to that breeding in the Daycare, where a pair of Pokémon hatched an egg, two new types (Dark and Steel), and a whole range of refinements that gave the series unexpected depth.

But then came the moment everyone who experienced it back then remembers. After completing the main region of Johto, the game didn't act like it was ending — instead, the entire original region of Kanto from the first generation opened up. Two games in one cartridge. In the era of eight-bit handhelds it was an almost unthinkable luxury and a technical miracle; fitting such a volume of data relied on ingenious compression, on which Satoru Iwata, later president of Nintendo, also worked.

Crystal then polished off the whole package. It added Pokémon animations when entering battle, expanded content, and — for the very first time in the series — the option to choose a female character at the start. For a generation of players it was a seemingly small but symbolically important change that later became the standard.

The result was a game that not only built on the phenomenon of the first generation but in many respects surpassed it in every way that could be measured. The battle system, the world structure, the amount of content, and that unforgettable feeling when, after the „ending“, you discover another adventure just as large awaits you. No wonder that even today many people name the second generation when you ask them about the best Pokémon of all time.

Why play: Two games in one cartridge, a day-and-night cycle, and the Kanto region as a bonus after completing the story — for many fans simply the unsurpassed peak of the whole series.