As the anniversary of Gold and Silver's Japanese release approaches this month, I was thinking that the most major feature from Gen 2 that appeals to modern players today is either the concept of breeding or shinies, and they tie pretty closely together these days. I won't go into these mechanics in much detail, but I find them the best examples of how Gen 2 set a direction for the franchise to follow, making reasons to keep playing and exploring after beating the campaign. Shiny hunting is its own subculture at this point, while breeding has been a core tool for that purpose and also used to be the main way to optimize a competitive species for some generations.
While the concept of breeding wasn't a unique one to games, it was a natural step for Pokemon to take. Letting you spawn more of a rare Pokemon like the starters or Eevee would be an essential way to add more incentive for trades and gaining Pokedex entries, without having to rely on multiple games or giving up your only mon. I would say Gen 2 got the core mechanics of breeding right from the start with having 2 compatible Pokemon make an egg, with future generations just making the process much faster and easier to fine tune what you wanted. While breeding rates were at their slowest to start, they at least had the indicator of the NPC moving from the start, and they had the idea of pairing the same species and Pokemon from other trainers to be more likely to generate eggs, which would later develop into the Masuda method encouraging trading across languages using the GTS.
Something unique about Gen 2 is that its specific DV inheritance mechanics were short-lived and intended to prevent parent/child breeding, but could also end up with generous shiny rates from certain parents which can be chain bred from the Red Gyarados. I will link to
bluemoonfalls's page on DV breeding here for a detailed explanation on how this works, which also has an
interesting point and tool about how you can use Stadium 2 to visually determine if an Egg contains a shiny or not, because the "Egg" is treated as a nickname with a unique hue shift while shinies are never affected by the hue shift.
With breeding also came the advent of giving genders to every Pokemon aside from the Nidorans, and even while the method of sorting by the Attack DV required pretty even divisions, most mons still fall under one of the original Gen 2 gender ratios today. The importance of gender is also demonstrated in practice close to the daycare, with Attract in Whitney's gym being a menace depending on how your party is laid out, and a female Machop trade conveniently in Goldenrod as well. I also think it's neat how they've still managed to fit everything in just the original egg groups introduced back in Gen 2, having the Fairy group before the Fairy type, and giving Ditto a niche that makes it a mon worth having around in each game.
A note from the file 子作り説明VER1.0(エクセル).xls in the leaked Gen 2 source code lists out the names for all the egg groups, as well as most of how breeding mechanics work, which also confirms the intentions of DV inheritance as mentioned above. The main thing of note is that Water 1 (2) is named for aquatic animals, while Water 3 (9) is called crustaceans and Water 2 (12) is fish instead of just being called Water 1/2/3 here which I always found odd.
1 :怪獣 2 :水棲動物 3 :虫 |
4 :鳥 5 :動物 6 :妖精 |
7 :植物 8 :人型 9 :甲殻類 |
10:無機物 11:不定形 12:魚 |
13:メタモン 14:ドラゴン 15:無生殖 |
The topic of breeding also comes to one of the biggest advertising points of Gen 2, the new baby Pokemon and the eggs they come from, and this still applies just from the context of the game. Just from the start of the game exploring in New Bark Town, you find out that Professor Elm has been discovering new Pokemon and the fact that Pikachu is an evolved Pokemon, and is investigating the mysteries of why no one has ever witnessed a Pokemon's birth. The story of the game starts by investigating the new Mystery Egg and eventually hatching the Togepi for yourself. Crystal has the Odd Egg that gives you one of the babies that are normally inaccessible for most of the game, though it's only usable today outside of Japan where it was a Mobile Adapter tie-in event. The process of hatching these eggs also hasn't particularly changed much since Gen 2, still having to walk around and lower egg cycles, and even the egg watch in the summary giving you hints of how close it is to hatching dates back to Gen 2.
The other neat thing about hatching Pokemon from eggs is the concept of egg moves, giving Pokemon access to more options than they normally would have from just natural moves and universal TMs. I don't think GSC really hints at this ingame, but in HGSS they gave Togepi Extrasensory and they've been spreading around more access to egg moves via other means lately, with Gen 9 not even bothering with ensuring validity anymore and just throwing around egg moves that have no valid parents which you need the Mirror Herb to transfer. Another underlooked aspect of egg move inheritance is that you could inherit TM moves from parents before Gen 6 to get more mileage out of them, and also levelup moves if both parents know the same one, which is still relevant today with the case of breeding Spore on Shroomish to keep it in Breloom's relearn pool.
The first time I interacted with egg moves in HGSS, I remember trying to find out what egg moves I could even make, and the only option I had was giving Flame Wheel to Rattata from Quilava. I like that this has specifically been an option since Gen 2, as a reasonable example of sharing coverage from a starter to a common mon that otherwise wouldn't have it.
Reading through the
stages of development that egg group and move distribution went through on tcrf is also pretty interesting. Every mon having a pool of 5 egg moves to start makes it seem like the concept started off as more of a general idea to expand movepools, before deciding what would actually be possible ingame and polishing the selection down afterwards. Highlights include Unown, Magikarp and genderless mons being included in the very first, Sunkern losing its egg group for a time and having no egg moves in the final game, the variety of moves that wouldn't see the light of day like Sacred Fire and Milk Drink, and removed moves that would end up being used in NYPC eggs.
As for shinies, they were a noticeable way to add an innately rare and special trait to Pokemon, and they also got their own iconic plot moment in Gen 2 with the Red Gyarados. Their unique animation lets you tell that the encounter is important even when playing on a Game Boy. All I have to say here is that the idea of shinies was a lasting legacy of its own with how modern games and GO have been shifting towards making these more desirable and accessible, with adding more ways to increase odds or making a spectacle out of them in events.
Shinies were conceptualized since Spaceworld 1997, and even with the limited palettes of the Super Game Boy, each of the 10 base palettes got a shiny equivalent
which you can compare on tcrf. In this iteration, their DV requirement was just to have at least 10 in Attack, Defense, Special, and Speed, which would be pretty intuitive to see if you got a strong mon, but in final they made it much stricter with exactly 10 in Def/Spe/Special and a few ranges for Attack. On a personal note, I don't really agree with the theory that commonly gets brought up that shinies in Gen 2 were automatically generated by an algorithm or palette swap, for reasons like shiny palettes are defined completely separately in the game, and thus you can find mons with the same normal palette but a different shiny palette like Squirtle and Wartortle.
Looking back on it all, I feel like the core ideas behind these features haven't changed that much since their inception. Shinies are still rare random occurrences that can make even the most common of mons special to find, while breeding lets you make more of your current mons and hatch eggs that can have unique inheritances. Even while their mechanics and methods may change over the generations, the processes we interact with still follow the familiar examples that Gen 2 originally set. The roots you can trace back are deep for a sequel that had to fit this all into a pre-existing engine and maintain compatibility with the original games that had none of this in mind.