I've been having a blast playing a new to me self imposed game mode i'm calling "anniversary limited professor oak mode" (this name is terrible, help me make a better one). This is mostly tailored to gen 1 at this point but it can definitely apply to any generation.
Here are the main ideas:
- Play the game with the limitations as if you went back in time to the release date. I started my Red/Green playthroughs on the 30th anniversary on Feb 27 2026.
- As time passes on, more things are "unlocked" such as the Mystery Mew event in April, or Pokemon Blue in October, but i'm still limited by the time elapsed since the 30 year anniversary.
- Every pokemon species gets to be apart of the playthrough
- Every pokemon species gets to their "full potential" within the bounds of the 2 simultaneous playthroughs
- Limited to the 2 playthroughs of TMs/HMs, at least until more versions are released.
- All obtainable pokemon must be caught and leveled to a cap before each gym (including tradables) for one of the playthroughs. The other playthrough is just to support exclusives and additional TMs, but limited to one other playthrough.
- No stone evolutions until a pokemon learns its final move (some exceptions like Eevee)
- Final challenge where every pokemon species must complete the elite 4, and each can only complete the elite 4 once.
| Gym Leader | Level Cap |
|---|---|
| Brock | 12 |
| Misty | 18 |
| Lt. Surge | 21 |
| Erika | 25 |
| Koga | 30 |
| Sabrina | 35 |
| Blaine | 40 |
| Geovanni | 45 |
| Elite 4 | 50 |
Currently at Erika and really enjoying playing through and getting to know pokemon and movesets i never thought about. Even with the level caps the gyms are really easy but the real challenge will be getting every pokemon through the elite 4. I'm also not sure about the level 50 cap there since a lot of pokemon are missing some of their signature final moves still. So i might just ignore since this is more of using every pokemon as the designers might have instead of trying to make the gen 1 elite 4 an actual challenge. but the idea to is to at least get every pokemon to level 50 period.
This is meant to be a fun game mode, and i'm also using it to learn a lot of Japanese since this are original japanese carts i'm playing on. I was also originally looking to limit myself to the hardware they had back then, but i don't have an original SNES and playing with my super game boy on my super NT on my 4k TV feels not quite the spirit of what they had back then LOL but it would at least have been the "best" way to play since it was the only way to have any color at all on these games when they first released.
Let me know what you think, how you would play a game mode like this, what you would do different?