What’s this? We’re back? Not raptured? Oh well. Maybe next time, eh?

Anyways, I’m here to tell you that Pokemon Gold/Silver is brilliant. And this is why:

You beat the game by beating the Elite Four. Typical Pokemon game, right? You beat the game, the credits roll, and you get the Game Over screen.

…that’s not the end of the game. In fact, you’re only about halfway through the content at that point.

“Now hold on a minute, Pike,” I can hear you saying. “I’ve played [insert game here] and there’s plenty of content after you beat the game. It’s got all sorts of replay value.”

You know what? You’re right. There’s a lot of games out there like that. But none that I have played so far have come close to pulling it off the Way Pokemon Gold/Silver did it.

See, let’s go back in time a little. You’ve played the original Pokemon Red/Blue a million times. The sequel comes out, and you can’t contain your excitement. You load up the game, hoping for an adventure just like the first, but bigger and better. You’re greeted with a different world and different Pokemon, which feels just a little off to you somehow, but you play anyway and soon you love this new game as much as the last.

…but something still feels ever so very “off”. Namely, that initial desire you had to revisit the friends and places from the Pokemon games hasn’t quite faded away. You’re just a bit homesick.

Then you beat Pokemon Gold/Silver and guess what?

You actually get to go back to the world of the first game.

Your mind is blown to pieces by this revelation, and those pieces are blown into further pieces when you realize that you can go through and re-challenge all the gym leaders from the first game. You’re older and wiser now, and so are better prepared, and so are your rivals. You’re absolutely giddy at this notion and carefully go through and battle all of your old opponents.

But even that’s not the end, because then you go through a dungeon very similar to the ones you carefully crawled through back in the day and then you fight… yourself.

That’s right.

The climactic fight of this game is to battle the protagonist of the original, probably using a bunch of the Pokemon you, yourself, used back then. Oh, and they’re all, like, level 80.

I don’t think anything I type here can fully express the way you feel when you first stumble across this battle, so I’ll just leave these pictures right here:

I think it’s this whole second half of the game that cemented it as my firm favorite of the Pokemon generations and that still continues to blow my mind a decade later. I can’t think of another game that has done “post-credits content” so very well. If you can think of one that has, please direct me to it, because I must play it immediately.