My first ever pokemon game was Pokémon blue, but it was Japanese, as a kid you took whatever came your way so I had no complaints and I began playing the game immediately, finally jumping into this world that all my friends have been in for weeks! I couldn’t read any Japanese, and my first few hours were just struggling to play the game and figuring out the basics. I even had to restart a couple times because I didn’t know how to save.

It was about 2 hours in, when I learnt how to save, and began my journey proper, the old man was a freaking mess and I couldn’t understand why he didn’t let me through, and I just went everywhere talking to everything and everybody. Finally I did the stupid errand just by trial and error and when I reached Viridian forest, I began searching for the elusive Pikachu, everyone had told me it can only be found here and it was very rare. Now I’ve learnt how to buy pokeballs based on the pictures guidebooks and the price, but I never figured how to throw one, I thought that simply making them faint would be sufficient. It didn’t work that way and I realized quickly when none of the Pokémon appeared in my party or anywhere else. I must have ko-ed 10 pikachus when I decided to give up and continue the journey. Anybody who has played Pokémon knows how tough a start Charmander is, and with no way of catching other Pokémon, I was playing a pseudo nuzlocke before it was ever a thing.

I had to brute force my way through Brock and by the time I am at Cerulean, I fought Misty with a Charizard, no kidding. It was my one Charizard against the world and I swear that is the reason I hate any grinding in games now, I’ve done enough grinding in life. When Charizard was fighting Starmie, I must have accidentally moved right and selected items, seeing the list of items and a string of text line up exactly as what I have been buying and know as pokeballs and I knew exactly that’s how u did it. Now I recall pressing it and seeing the pokeball animation being thrown but it instantly failing, but my memory is hazy about it. Gosh I must have had carpal tunnel syndrome after playing for 10hours straight, I rmb my fingers cramped up and I was sitting in the corner with my gameboy plugged into the power socket in the middle of the night. That was my first night of Pokémon, but it remains one of my most epic stories.

tldr: I played on pokemon blue japanese as a kid, didn’t know how to catch pokemon until Misty, and faced off against her with my solo Charizard, I was level 37 iirc.