Pokémon Red & Green vs Red & Blue

The pair of games that launched the Pokémon phenomenon in Japan in 1996 were Pocket Monsters Red and Pocket Monsters Green, fronted by Charizard and Venusaur respectively. Green — not Blue — was the counterpart to Red, and it carried the same version-exclusive Pokémon and structure that Western players would later associate with Blue. The Blue name did exist in Japan, but it belonged to a later, separately released revision rather than one of the original pair. This is why the Japanese and Western version histories do not line up, and why "Pokémon Green" remains an object of curiosity for players who grew up with Red and Blue and never encountered it.

The reason Green never travelled is that its artwork was, by broad consensus, bad. The Pokémon sprites in the original Japanese Red and Green were drawn without the benefit of Ken Sugimori's official artwork as reference, and under the harsh constraints of the Game Boy's display, producing creature sprites that are notoriously misshapen — worse even than the somewhat awkward sprites Western players know from Red and Blue. Poor sprite quality was one of the principal criticisms levelled at the games in Japan, and it was significant enough that the developers went back and redrew them. Those unique original sprites exist in no English copy of the game, making them a curiosity that Western players only encounter through emulation or import.

Japanese Pocket Monsters Blue was the fixed version: the same game with substantially improved sprites, a revised script, and refined graphics. When Nintendo prepared Pokémon for its 1998 Western launch, it wisely built Red and Blue on the foundation of Japanese Blue rather than the flawed originals. The graphics, script, and sprite designs that hundreds of millions of players around the world associate with the first generation of Pokémon are therefore borrowed from that Japanese revision. The result is a peculiar regional inversion: the Western versions carry the Red and Blue names of the originals but the polished content of the do-over, so the games that conquered the world were, in a real sense, the second draft.