marchionessofmustache (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
marchionessofmustache) wrote2023-08-08 11:14 pm
marchionessofmustache) wrote2023-08-08 11:14 pm
Entry tags:
Pokemon Red -- THE REVENGE
OK it's time to get revenge on this CORRUPTED SAVE.
So I'm playing Pokemon Red... again! This time I'm playing on my PC emulator... I think the phone emulator does weird things when you leave it in the background or whatever, and I've never had a problem with my PC saves corrupting.
I'm going to just post little notes of things I find interesting as I go. Not an entire play diary per se.
I'm actually trying to talk to everyone to get the 'lore' out of this game, as I haven't done that in a long time. Whenever I replay this game I basically just run straight to where I need/want to be and ignore all the people.
I completely forgot this guy even exists over here. When I get Cut, I go back and do other stuff with it (sometimes I even forget to go get the Old Amber) but I never come all the way back here. I wonder what he gives you...? I haven't talked to him since I was a kid!! It's probably just a TM.
I'm mostly selling TMs as I already have a set movelist I'm aiming for, and I know I don't need them.
There's a hidden Potion on this plant, and I always go around the long way to pick it up. It wasn't until this playthrough that I realized I could just pick it up from the right side as I was passing it. There's literally no point to walking all the way around to the left side.
Caffeine-addicted old man is funny. I don't think I've seen this scene since I was a kid, either. He refuses to let you through, saying that the road is "private property" (though there's no houses around there), but after you deliver Oak's Parcel, he becomes jolly because he's "had his coffee" and "feels great." So then you can talk to him and tell him you have free time, and he teaches you how to catch Pokemon! I think this is the only time you see a trainer's back sprite other than your own!
I got poisoned in Viridian Forest by a trainer's Weedle. I tried to run back to the Pokemon Center, but I fainted just outside of it. Since Charmander was my only Pokemon, I blacked out and lost money :\ Then I learned that if I had just headed a few steps north of the trainer who poisoned me, I would have found an Antidote on the ground. X_X;
One thing I'm trying to do is talk to all the trainers after I defeat them. I usually don't do this -- I don't think I even did it as a kid. Except for the one point in the game where you have to to proceed, there's not much point to this, other than to see some extra little bits of speech with the NPCs. Here this kid says that I'll scare the bugs away. Sadly most characters just give generic game tips. Even "shorts kid" just said something about PC boxes being able to store 20 Pokemon. No funny addition to his shorts comment! Though secondary shorts kid did say that he wears shorts all year round, even in winter.
I found a Pikachu and used Scratch on it and it almost fainted... luckily it didn't, though, and I was able to catch it. The little bugger even took two Poke Balls!
And from there we have our second party member!
If you talk to the kid at the end of Viridian Forest he says he's looking for something he dropped. If you search the ground near him you'll find a Potion! Kinda evil that we don't give it back, but hey, I learned something by talking to them after the battle!
At this point I should have gone back and done the fight with Blue that you can do on Route 22... but I completely forgot about it, even though I thought about it while I was in Viridian City... Once you get the Boulderbadge, the encounter triggers as completed, and you can never see it again :(
There's a girl in Pewter city who says that "CLEFAIRYs" came from the moon. This is like, the first real lore we learn other than "Pokemon live in the wild!" and "People battle Pokemon!" but more importantly, we learn that in the old games, they actually pluralized Pokemon species with an "s!" -- something the cartoon show didn't do, which then became the norm for later games thanks to that.
Another oft-missed thing: if you go to Pewter's museum, you can see these unique fossil sprites of Aerodactyl and Kabutops. No Omastar? I guess it's a mollusk so it wouldn't really have a skeleton like the others, though.
And then there's a unique spaceship sprite you can only see in the "space exhibit" (which is nothing more than this lol). I love how the spaceship is so tiny. I mean, thinking about it now, it's probably a replica, but still XD Cute.
Brock was an easy fight, just spam Ember and wait for the rocks to crumble. Onix can be a pain if it uses Bide right away, but even then Charmeleon can usually survive. It didn't use Bide until well into the fight, though, so it wasn't that big of a deal.
While the main point of this playthrough is to have an OP team that just crushes through the competition, the first gym is a bit of a grind fest. I ran back and forth fighting Kakunas in Viridian Forest until I got Charmander to evolve into Charmeleon. There's not really ANY Pokemon that can take on this gym without much grinding other than Squirtle, but we want to have Charizard, so we couldn't go that route.
I decided to level up Pikachu a little while catching some Pokemon -- there's a point in the game where you need to have caught 10 Pokemon to get an item. I didn't really think about it, but I was going to get an additional 4 dex entries from raising Abra (for its three evolutions, and the Bulbasaur I sent over from Blue version). I ended up catching until I had 9 owned in my dex, getting Pidgey, Rattata, Caterpie, Metapod, Weedle, and Kakuna (the other three being Charmander, Charmeleon, and Pikachu). So I kinda overdid it...
Also, I noticed that in the Pokedex, Weedle is referred to as the "Hairy Bug Pokemon." It doesn't look hairy to me XD
I was mashing the button too mindlessly and accidentally bought the Magikarp from the dude in the Pokemon Center outside Mt. Moon. Well, there's my 10 dex entries!
Terrifying Raticate Man wasn't so bad -- in fact he didn't even deal 50% of my Max HP worth of damage to Charmeleon. Often this fight can go terribly wrong though if it uses Hyper Fang enough. This guy has a level sixteen Raticate. Why?! It's by far the strongest thing you have to face before Cerulean Gym. Even Blue only has a Lv15 Rattata!
With that out of the way, Mt. Moon ended up being pretty uneventful.
I think Bike Shop guy is a unique sprite that's not used anywhere else in the game.
On Nugget Bridge, there are 5 trainers that you have to fight, and four of the five of them say "I did my best, I have no regrets!" (Yeah, comma splice!) when you defeat them. But the fourth girl says "I did my best, so I've no regrets!" Why is hers somewhat different?! Something I never noticed before since I never talk to them after defeating them.
The strategy for catching Abra is just to throw a Poke Ball and hope it works. It has a pretty decent chance of working -- later in the series you can even guarantee your Abra catch by using a Quick Ball or a Dusk Ball, each of which will have a 100% chance to capture it. I remember when I was a kid I would not catch it until I got back here with a very fast Poekmon that could put it to sleep or something, and then try to catch it...?! It was ridiculous. I remember trying to train up a Jigglypuff or Clefairy with Sing so it was faster than the Abra and then HOPING it fell asleep and then HOPING my ball caught it. Just throw the ball, kid!!!
Also, where you catch Abras is also "feat kid." He says "I saw your feat from the grass," because, well, he's in the grass. He's referring to your accomplishment of clearing Nugget Bridge, but so many people think it's a "typo" and he's talking about Red's "feet." (Even the Japanese refers to seeing an accomplishment, so it's properly translated as "feat" lol.)
Here we learn that Pokemon do, indeed, directly attack humans. This dude got bit by a Zubat! The things you learn talking to trainers after you battle them... XD
It didn't even take all of Route 24 to evolve Abra into Kadabra just from putting it in front and swapping it out at the beginning of each trainer battle.
I also want to comment on the Hiker sprite -- is that a neckbeard or some weird kind of shadow? Because that's not really where people typically grow their beards...
After getting back from visiting Bill and getting the S.S. Ticket, the police officer in front of the house in Cerulean moves to the side. This means you can actually advance to Vermilion City without ever defeating Misty, even going onto the S.S. Anne and getting HM01, into Diglett's Cave, and onto Route 11!! You'll need the Casecadebadge to get the ability to use Cut outside of battle, though, which means you can't get into Vermilion Gym yet.
You'll need Fresh Water to get past the guard at the east of Route 11, so you can't continue past there for now, and you'll need Cascadebadge to use Cut to get to Rock Tunnel from Cerulean, so you're kinda "stuck" here, but there's still quite a bit you can do before challenging Misty if you really want to. We're just gonna go ahead and fight Misty now.
(Though I did pop into the house, fight the Rocket in the back yard, and get the TM for Dig. We teach it to Charmeleon as a placeholder for Earthquake. Dig is actually equally as powerful as Earthquake; it just takes two turns and is annoying to use.)
Speaking of weird sprites, Swimmer is funny-looking. Since he swims to you from the water where you can't reach and returns to his unreachable spot after you leave and re-enter, his post-battle speech is actually missable! Well, maybe you can return here with Surf now that I think about it. He just says something about Misty continuing to improve and how she won't lose to the likes of Red.
I first went into Misty's fight forgetting to heal Pikachu, and he got knocked out by Starmie and the other two weren't able to take it down. I reloaded the game (money-grubby!) and gave Pikachu one Potion... that time Starmie went down :) It was still a close fight, though!!
And that's pretty much the "hard" part of the game for this party. After this, we're pretty much going to be one-shotting or face-tanking everything pretty easily.
I forgot about this guy standing in the front of each gym -- he has unique dialogue talking to him before winning each badge... and I forgot to talk to him before (and after) Brock, and before Misty. So I missed a bit of NPC speech... oops. When I go back to Pewter through Diglet's Cave to get the Old Amber I can talk to him then and at least get his post-Brock speech.
In Vermilion, you can find this guy writing a letter to someone in Saffron. I forget the relation to him, but the addressee is named "PIPPI," which is also Clefairy's Japanese name. Is he writing to a Clefairy...? I wonder what the name of the recipient is in Japanese... Surely not Pippi, right? Maybe I'll have to do a Japanese playthrough next lol. It's also interesting that the capitalized the name PIPPI -- I mean, important characters like Brock and Misty have their names capitalized, as are the default names of the player character and rival, but is Pippi really important...? Is it just the case in the Pokemon universe that all people's names are stylized in all caps...?
In his letter, he also notes that Saffron seems to have problems with Team Rocket, while Vermilion is safe.
Oh, and he's getting his Pidgey to carry the letter to Saffron. So it seems Pokemon are capable of mail-carrying!
From a random NPC we also learn that Team Rocket "traffics" rare Pokemon, and there's a guy using his Machop to stamp the ground to prepare it for laying a building. Now, Machop is not the best Pokemon for this job... it's tiny...
But I think this is the first time we witness a Pokemon being used industrially? Well, there's also the letter-carrier. They're both in Vermilion!
Also random but I think there's a guy in every Pokemon center sitting in the couch on the left of the entrance. It's the same sprite, of course, but I don't think the same guy, and I think this is the only "sitting" sprite used in the game. Everyone else just stands in place of a chair. It's also awkward talking to him because of the way the sprites line up.
And that's where I stopped playing for tonight! Actually, I'm probably going to play a little more, but I wanted to take a little break and write this entry. Now I think I'll go grab a snack and then jump back into the game. Next up is tackling the S.S. Anne!
(Oh yeah, I started up a game in Pokemon Blue, grabbed Bulbasaur, and rushed to getting the Pokedex so I could trade Kadabra over and back to get Alakazam. Now we have the strongest Pokemon in the game besides Mewtwo!)
So I'm playing Pokemon Red... again! This time I'm playing on my PC emulator... I think the phone emulator does weird things when you leave it in the background or whatever, and I've never had a problem with my PC saves corrupting.
I'm going to just post little notes of things I find interesting as I go. Not an entire play diary per se.
I'm actually trying to talk to everyone to get the 'lore' out of this game, as I haven't done that in a long time. Whenever I replay this game I basically just run straight to where I need/want to be and ignore all the people.
I completely forgot this guy even exists over here. When I get Cut, I go back and do other stuff with it (sometimes I even forget to go get the Old Amber) but I never come all the way back here. I wonder what he gives you...? I haven't talked to him since I was a kid!! It's probably just a TM.
I'm mostly selling TMs as I already have a set movelist I'm aiming for, and I know I don't need them.
There's a hidden Potion on this plant, and I always go around the long way to pick it up. It wasn't until this playthrough that I realized I could just pick it up from the right side as I was passing it. There's literally no point to walking all the way around to the left side.
Caffeine-addicted old man is funny. I don't think I've seen this scene since I was a kid, either. He refuses to let you through, saying that the road is "private property" (though there's no houses around there), but after you deliver Oak's Parcel, he becomes jolly because he's "had his coffee" and "feels great." So then you can talk to him and tell him you have free time, and he teaches you how to catch Pokemon! I think this is the only time you see a trainer's back sprite other than your own!
I got poisoned in Viridian Forest by a trainer's Weedle. I tried to run back to the Pokemon Center, but I fainted just outside of it. Since Charmander was my only Pokemon, I blacked out and lost money :\ Then I learned that if I had just headed a few steps north of the trainer who poisoned me, I would have found an Antidote on the ground. X_X;
One thing I'm trying to do is talk to all the trainers after I defeat them. I usually don't do this -- I don't think I even did it as a kid. Except for the one point in the game where you have to to proceed, there's not much point to this, other than to see some extra little bits of speech with the NPCs. Here this kid says that I'll scare the bugs away. Sadly most characters just give generic game tips. Even "shorts kid" just said something about PC boxes being able to store 20 Pokemon. No funny addition to his shorts comment! Though secondary shorts kid did say that he wears shorts all year round, even in winter.
I found a Pikachu and used Scratch on it and it almost fainted... luckily it didn't, though, and I was able to catch it. The little bugger even took two Poke Balls!
And from there we have our second party member!
If you talk to the kid at the end of Viridian Forest he says he's looking for something he dropped. If you search the ground near him you'll find a Potion! Kinda evil that we don't give it back, but hey, I learned something by talking to them after the battle!
At this point I should have gone back and done the fight with Blue that you can do on Route 22... but I completely forgot about it, even though I thought about it while I was in Viridian City... Once you get the Boulderbadge, the encounter triggers as completed, and you can never see it again :(
There's a girl in Pewter city who says that "CLEFAIRYs" came from the moon. This is like, the first real lore we learn other than "Pokemon live in the wild!" and "People battle Pokemon!" but more importantly, we learn that in the old games, they actually pluralized Pokemon species with an "s!" -- something the cartoon show didn't do, which then became the norm for later games thanks to that.
Another oft-missed thing: if you go to Pewter's museum, you can see these unique fossil sprites of Aerodactyl and Kabutops. No Omastar? I guess it's a mollusk so it wouldn't really have a skeleton like the others, though.
And then there's a unique spaceship sprite you can only see in the "space exhibit" (which is nothing more than this lol). I love how the spaceship is so tiny. I mean, thinking about it now, it's probably a replica, but still XD Cute.
Brock was an easy fight, just spam Ember and wait for the rocks to crumble. Onix can be a pain if it uses Bide right away, but even then Charmeleon can usually survive. It didn't use Bide until well into the fight, though, so it wasn't that big of a deal.
While the main point of this playthrough is to have an OP team that just crushes through the competition, the first gym is a bit of a grind fest. I ran back and forth fighting Kakunas in Viridian Forest until I got Charmander to evolve into Charmeleon. There's not really ANY Pokemon that can take on this gym without much grinding other than Squirtle, but we want to have Charizard, so we couldn't go that route.
I decided to level up Pikachu a little while catching some Pokemon -- there's a point in the game where you need to have caught 10 Pokemon to get an item. I didn't really think about it, but I was going to get an additional 4 dex entries from raising Abra (for its three evolutions, and the Bulbasaur I sent over from Blue version). I ended up catching until I had 9 owned in my dex, getting Pidgey, Rattata, Caterpie, Metapod, Weedle, and Kakuna (the other three being Charmander, Charmeleon, and Pikachu). So I kinda overdid it...
Also, I noticed that in the Pokedex, Weedle is referred to as the "Hairy Bug Pokemon." It doesn't look hairy to me XD
I was mashing the button too mindlessly and accidentally bought the Magikarp from the dude in the Pokemon Center outside Mt. Moon. Well, there's my 10 dex entries!
Terrifying Raticate Man wasn't so bad -- in fact he didn't even deal 50% of my Max HP worth of damage to Charmeleon. Often this fight can go terribly wrong though if it uses Hyper Fang enough. This guy has a level sixteen Raticate. Why?! It's by far the strongest thing you have to face before Cerulean Gym. Even Blue only has a Lv15 Rattata!
With that out of the way, Mt. Moon ended up being pretty uneventful.
I think Bike Shop guy is a unique sprite that's not used anywhere else in the game.
On Nugget Bridge, there are 5 trainers that you have to fight, and four of the five of them say "I did my best, I have no regrets!" (Yeah, comma splice!) when you defeat them. But the fourth girl says "I did my best, so I've no regrets!" Why is hers somewhat different?! Something I never noticed before since I never talk to them after defeating them.
The strategy for catching Abra is just to throw a Poke Ball and hope it works. It has a pretty decent chance of working -- later in the series you can even guarantee your Abra catch by using a Quick Ball or a Dusk Ball, each of which will have a 100% chance to capture it. I remember when I was a kid I would not catch it until I got back here with a very fast Poekmon that could put it to sleep or something, and then try to catch it...?! It was ridiculous. I remember trying to train up a Jigglypuff or Clefairy with Sing so it was faster than the Abra and then HOPING it fell asleep and then HOPING my ball caught it. Just throw the ball, kid!!!
Also, where you catch Abras is also "feat kid." He says "I saw your feat from the grass," because, well, he's in the grass. He's referring to your accomplishment of clearing Nugget Bridge, but so many people think it's a "typo" and he's talking about Red's "feet." (Even the Japanese refers to seeing an accomplishment, so it's properly translated as "feat" lol.)
Here we learn that Pokemon do, indeed, directly attack humans. This dude got bit by a Zubat! The things you learn talking to trainers after you battle them... XD
It didn't even take all of Route 24 to evolve Abra into Kadabra just from putting it in front and swapping it out at the beginning of each trainer battle.
I also want to comment on the Hiker sprite -- is that a neckbeard or some weird kind of shadow? Because that's not really where people typically grow their beards...
After getting back from visiting Bill and getting the S.S. Ticket, the police officer in front of the house in Cerulean moves to the side. This means you can actually advance to Vermilion City without ever defeating Misty, even going onto the S.S. Anne and getting HM01, into Diglett's Cave, and onto Route 11!! You'll need the Casecadebadge to get the ability to use Cut outside of battle, though, which means you can't get into Vermilion Gym yet.
You'll need Fresh Water to get past the guard at the east of Route 11, so you can't continue past there for now, and you'll need Cascadebadge to use Cut to get to Rock Tunnel from Cerulean, so you're kinda "stuck" here, but there's still quite a bit you can do before challenging Misty if you really want to. We're just gonna go ahead and fight Misty now.
(Though I did pop into the house, fight the Rocket in the back yard, and get the TM for Dig. We teach it to Charmeleon as a placeholder for Earthquake. Dig is actually equally as powerful as Earthquake; it just takes two turns and is annoying to use.)
Speaking of weird sprites, Swimmer is funny-looking. Since he swims to you from the water where you can't reach and returns to his unreachable spot after you leave and re-enter, his post-battle speech is actually missable! Well, maybe you can return here with Surf now that I think about it. He just says something about Misty continuing to improve and how she won't lose to the likes of Red.
I first went into Misty's fight forgetting to heal Pikachu, and he got knocked out by Starmie and the other two weren't able to take it down. I reloaded the game (money-grubby!) and gave Pikachu one Potion... that time Starmie went down :) It was still a close fight, though!!
And that's pretty much the "hard" part of the game for this party. After this, we're pretty much going to be one-shotting or face-tanking everything pretty easily.
I forgot about this guy standing in the front of each gym -- he has unique dialogue talking to him before winning each badge... and I forgot to talk to him before (and after) Brock, and before Misty. So I missed a bit of NPC speech... oops. When I go back to Pewter through Diglet's Cave to get the Old Amber I can talk to him then and at least get his post-Brock speech.
In Vermilion, you can find this guy writing a letter to someone in Saffron. I forget the relation to him, but the addressee is named "PIPPI," which is also Clefairy's Japanese name. Is he writing to a Clefairy...? I wonder what the name of the recipient is in Japanese... Surely not Pippi, right? Maybe I'll have to do a Japanese playthrough next lol. It's also interesting that the capitalized the name PIPPI -- I mean, important characters like Brock and Misty have their names capitalized, as are the default names of the player character and rival, but is Pippi really important...? Is it just the case in the Pokemon universe that all people's names are stylized in all caps...?
In his letter, he also notes that Saffron seems to have problems with Team Rocket, while Vermilion is safe.
Oh, and he's getting his Pidgey to carry the letter to Saffron. So it seems Pokemon are capable of mail-carrying!
From a random NPC we also learn that Team Rocket "traffics" rare Pokemon, and there's a guy using his Machop to stamp the ground to prepare it for laying a building. Now, Machop is not the best Pokemon for this job... it's tiny...
But I think this is the first time we witness a Pokemon being used industrially? Well, there's also the letter-carrier. They're both in Vermilion!
Also random but I think there's a guy in every Pokemon center sitting in the couch on the left of the entrance. It's the same sprite, of course, but I don't think the same guy, and I think this is the only "sitting" sprite used in the game. Everyone else just stands in place of a chair. It's also awkward talking to him because of the way the sprites line up.
And that's where I stopped playing for tonight! Actually, I'm probably going to play a little more, but I wanted to take a little break and write this entry. Now I think I'll go grab a snack and then jump back into the game. Next up is tackling the S.S. Anne!
(Oh yeah, I started up a game in Pokemon Blue, grabbed Bulbasaur, and rushed to getting the Pokedex so I could trade Kadabra over and back to get Alakazam. Now we have the strongest Pokemon in the game besides Mewtwo!)