pkmngreentree-longplay - Tumblr blog

[pkmngreentree-longplay]

So, this is going to need a bit of explaining. I have no clue if this is the right website to post this sort of stuff, but I feel like this is the best way to archive it.

This blog is going to be an archive of a bootleg Pokémon game I played as a kid. I haven't had the original cartridge from all that time ago (I'll explain later on), but I lucked out and managed to track down a replacement and dumped the ROM data onto my computer so I can emulate it. This specific bootleg has fascinated me ever since I first laid eyes on it as a kid, so I'm very excited to potentially be archiving what might be a piece of lost media. Here's the title screen.

Yeah.

This is going to need a bit of backstory, so let's set the scene. My first interaction with this game was when I received the cartridge on my 13th birthday. My parents were always struggling financially, so they'd often go through bargain bins or leaf through yard sales to find stuff for cheap. I was a big Pokémon fan, so my guess is they thought it was a new game and wanted to surprise me. I don't have a picture of that cartridge, but it was nothing spectacular - a bare Game Boy cartridge with "Pokemon Green Tree" written on it with a sharpie.

I was excited - you'd be excited, too, if you just got your hands on a Pokémon game you didn't even know existed - and started. My memory is pretty vivid, but I don't remember many finer details - I mostly remember what made me stop playing.

I started the game, and it just cold cut to the interior of the player's house. No cutscene, no writing your name, just an abrupt cut to your house. I wandered around the town, found the game's equivalent to Professor Oak's lab, and got my starter. It was the fire one, some kind of large fish with a plume of fire coming out of its forehead. The rest of my playthrough was just me aimlessly wandering around - I remember the maps being really narrow and directionless. I defeated the first gym leader and found myself in some kind of desert. I distinctly remember the music cutting out, which started to freak me out. Finding a cave, I went in, and found this... indescribable thing. Not in a pretentious Lovecraftian way - I literally don't really know how to describe it. It looked like some kind of shapeless form, or blob, covered in long pipes that winded around. If I had to say what it reminded me of, my first guess would be a giant, anatomically incorrect human heart. I remember approaching it, and the screen faded out, before fading in to a panning shot of what looked like a field of crystals, each one with a distorted reflection in it. My description is overselling this experience - there wasn't really anything that would actually seriously upset anyone in there, but the visual of those stretched faces in the reflections was enough to get me to have a full-blown panic attack as a child, and I ended up hiding the cartridge somewhere in my mom's closet. I haven't seen the cartridge since, and chances are she sold the cartridge.

That was my first ever exposure to this bootleg. Nowadays, of course, with the power of the internet and a lack of better things to do, I decided to snoop around. The game, Pokémon Green Tree, is of course, a bootleg, coming from a Japanese company of ambiguous name, as all information about the game's copyright is simply changed to "Pokemon", as you can see on the title screen. This bootleg is, interestingly enough, a surprisingly sophisticated rom-hack of an existing Game Boy game that was never released outside of Japan.

The picture you're looking at is a fan translation of the original game. The name roughly translates to "Circle Beast", and it is commonly referred to by the game's surprisingly large cult following as "Ringbeasts", which is the name I'll be using because it sounds kind of cool. From what I can gather, Pokémon Green Tree is, for the first quarter of the game, unchanged from Ringbeasts outside of the name, the title screen, and a few text boxes changing "beasts" to "Pokemon". Apparently, ontop of that, another release of Green Tree has another change - inexplicably, in a few maps, there's just... crucifixes. No shit.

As far as I could find, this is the only difference between the 'updated' version and the one people are more familiar with, which is the one I'm currently emulating. No changed dialogue, no different designs... just random crosses scattered across the map. According to the people I could contact who've played this updated version, most of the changes were in the manual and box art, which contained many assorted religious anecdotes and references. Who would've figured? Apparently, these games were mostly sold in low-income Christian bookstores to stay under Nintendo and Game Freak's radar, and the updated version was made so the game would appear more fitting where they were sold - something similar to the fate of Menace Beach on the NES. The prospect of this is honestly kind of funny to me, given the amount of hatred the Christian community had towards this franchise around that time period. That, and the idea of there being an updated patch of a bootleg of a bootleg of Pokémon that just has giant crucifix-shaped mountains everywhere. Delightful!

That's all of the information I could gleam from my extensive investigation (IE a few Google searches). Hearing all this talk about the manual and the box art, I wish I actually owned either - the cartridge I got my hands on came loose. Just a blank cartridge. It isn't even green!

Getting back on-topic, Green Tree is unchanged from Ringbeasts outside of a few word and sprite changes, but from what I could gather, the game drastically changes near the middle. Nobody said anything specific - just rambling about how unexpectedly detailed and weird everything got after how cutesy the early game was. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any screenies of the later parts of the game, so I'm going in blind.

I'm really excited to see this game through. Ever since I found out the cartridge went missing, I've been itching to get my hands on it again, just to see what this weird bootleg has to offer. Here's hoping this stupid blog does its part in archiving it, because God damn, information about this thing is scarce.

I'll update the blog after I play for a while. Expect lots of screenshots!