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So, I played a bit more of the ol' Pokey.
First up we had to go through Mt. Moon. I got super duper lucky and my very first encounter was a Clefairy! I remember as a kid running around in here for hours trying to find one of these. The appearance rate is annoyingly low. And in the meantime, you're fighting Zubat like every 3 steps.
It took quite a bit longer, but there's another rare Pokémon in here: Paras. And with these, we welcome the two newest entries into the team!
First up, we have BAKULA, the Clefairy, named after, of course, Scott Bakula. Being that he's the most adorable cutie of the namesakes, I wanted to choose a Pokémon that was overflowing with cuteness. Clefairy is a great choice because it's actually pretty powerful. It can learn a wide variety of moves from Technical Machines and you can evolve it easily with a Moon Stone, which you can find right away after capturing one. Which I did so, as soon as he learned Double Slap. We also went ahead and taught Mega Punch and Water Gun via TM, making him quickly the strongest Pokémon on the team.
Secondly, we have RICKMAN, the Paras! This one's named after (probably also obviously) Alan Rickman. It was really hard to choose how the Rickman namesake was going to be themed. I decided to do a Pokémon I just think is really cool from a design standpoint. Paras is really interesting because it starts as a bug and evolves into a mushroom. The mushrooms on its back are actually a parasite, and once evolved, the fungus has killed the bug and is using it as a vehicle. That's super creepy cool, and based on a real-life parasite fungus that "explodes" from the heads of bugs and then can control their bodies.
There's this dude in Mt Moon who has this super powerful Raticate. This has ruined other challenge runs of mine before and was quite terrifying, but I managed to basically scrape by without even having lost once to try again. BAKULA was still a little babby Clefairy and couldn't help much at this point, either. And we hadn't even caught RICKMAN yet (who would not have been helpful, either). Other than that, Mt Moon is fairly uneventful albeit long.
With that, we head to Cerulean City. I decided to see how much you could actually do without actually going to Misty's gym. There's actually... quite a bit. You can head to Vermillion City already, get access to the Day Care, head all the way east from there to where Snorlax blocks the road, and even complete the entire S.S. Anne quest and get HM01 from the captain, having the ship leave the harbor.
And because of this, we get to go to that... route with all the gamblers and electricians. I don't really understand the theme to this route, but apparently there are engineers and electricians laying down a bunch of wires here. It's mostly a grassy plains, though. With like super weird roads going in random directions that make no sense. And then... a bunch of gamblers.
The gamblers are pretty hot though. Baldies are always nice, and you won't convince me that they don't have mustaches, even though it's pretty ambiguous from the little sprites. Actually later sprites show they have full beards and are like elderly...? But I don't feel like they look like that here.
Anyway, access to this area means we already get to add another member to the team:
BARON, the Drowzee. Now. This is going to take a bit of explaining. He's named after Horst Baron, one of them pronsmen I like. And because of that namesake, I wanted to pick the hottest Pokemon I could think of from the generation.
However, that hottest Pokemon is not Drowzee. Nor Hypno. Of course, the hottest gen 1 Pokemon is by far the fabulously mustachioed Alakazam. But there's a couple problems there. Mainly, Alakazam is only available if you can trade. Playing on an emulator by myself, this isn't really an option. Actually, I could probably make it work if I tried enough things, but... the next "problem" is that this game is super unbalanced and Alakazam pretty much wrecks the entire game because it's just way too strong. That was super cool when I was a kid but not so cool now. So I chose the less overpowered and unfortunately much less sexy Hypno to fill this position on the team. It's here as a spiritual substitute for Alakazam, though, when it comes to the sexy factor.
With four members in tow, we clear out all these weird electricians, go through all of S.S. Anne, learn Cut (RICKMAN is the only one who could learn it... for some reason I thought MAILLET would be able to, but I guess not... a little sad because I already had a full four moves planned ahead for RICKMAN, but we're stuck with Cut now), and headed back to Cerulean City to get the Cascadebadge.
Surprisingly, despite all the extra work we put in skipping the gym, Misty's Pokemon still held up to mine in level. Starmie was Lv21, which was higher than anything I had. Part of this is that I'm distributing very limited EXP among four party members at this point, though.
Misty was easy to take care of due to the super unbalanced Special stat. In the original game, instead of Pokemon having a Special Attack and Special Defense stat, they just had one thing called Special, which functioned as both an attack and defense stat. Special was way too high on a lot of Pokemon, making them super effective as damage sponges for any attacks that were tagged as Special attacks. And in this game (and a few games to come), all attacks of certain types were Special (while other attacks were Physical). This includes the Water type, making Starmie's Bubblebeam fairly ineffective against Drowzee's nice Special stat. And Pokemon with high Special can not only defend well, but of course that makes their attacks quite powerful, too.
The worst of this actually came from Alakazam, mentioned before, who not only had insanely high Special, but could learn the move Recover, allowing it to restore half of its HP at any time. Alakazam also had crazy Speed, meaning it would strike first and be able to take out almost anything with its powerful Psychic attack, since another part of the horrible balance was that nothing resisted Psychic (and anything that should have had a secondary type that made it weak to Psychic anyway). Basically it can one-shot almost anything in the game and barely takes any damage, except from physical attacks. But it can easily defeat any threat to it before it can even attack anyway. The only real "counter" that could stand up to it was... another Alakazam, which if you faced a friend's Alakazam with yours, you'd spend over 30 minutes just spamming Psychic and Recover at each other, slowly waiting for one of you to run out of PP and start Struggling yourself to death.
But, uh, yeah, even with BARON we were able to tank Starmie pretty well (and if we had come here earlier, we'd be much lower level than Starmie so it would have been more of a challenge, I guess) and get through the battle just fine.
Then we head over to the most obnoxious and poorly-designed puzzles in all of ... anything. You know, it's kind of surprising how much this game was able to stand on concept alone, considering how frustrating and unbalanced it was. As kids we just dealt with all this because COOL PET MONSTERS.
Anyway, there is this like... grid of trash cans, and a button is randomly hidden in one of the cans. When you find it, it randomly creates another button in an adjacent can, and you have to press both buttons in a row or the doors re-lock and the first button is regenerated somewhere else. So you go around inspecting all these cans and going through the "Nothing but trash here!" text with every single one, until you finally find the "right" can, only to have a 75% chance of resetting the entire thing and having to start all over.
Took me like 7 resets, which is ... kinda fast considering you can get even worse unlucky streaks. Either way this probably took like 10 minutes or so which was annoying as all hell.
Once past the locked doors, Surge was pretty easy to defeat. We found the TM for Body Slam earlier, which turned RICKMAN into a force to be reckoned with, and allowed him to easily take damage from Pikachu and Raichu since he resists Electric damage, and dish out some big body slams on the low-defense weaklings.
I also went ahead and grabbed HM05 from the Aide, which was annoying, because you have to have caught 10 Pokemon, and since I'm not focusing on catching Pokemon at all, I only had 7. You're able to Cut back to the beginning areas at this point, though, so I just went and caught a Caterpie, Pidgey, and Rattata real fast.
The party so far:
RICKMAN Lv23
MAILLET Lv24
BARON Lv 23
BAKULA Lv24
First up we had to go through Mt. Moon. I got super duper lucky and my very first encounter was a Clefairy! I remember as a kid running around in here for hours trying to find one of these. The appearance rate is annoyingly low. And in the meantime, you're fighting Zubat like every 3 steps.
It took quite a bit longer, but there's another rare Pokémon in here: Paras. And with these, we welcome the two newest entries into the team!
First up, we have BAKULA, the Clefairy, named after, of course, Scott Bakula. Being that he's the most adorable cutie of the namesakes, I wanted to choose a Pokémon that was overflowing with cuteness. Clefairy is a great choice because it's actually pretty powerful. It can learn a wide variety of moves from Technical Machines and you can evolve it easily with a Moon Stone, which you can find right away after capturing one. Which I did so, as soon as he learned Double Slap. We also went ahead and taught Mega Punch and Water Gun via TM, making him quickly the strongest Pokémon on the team.
Secondly, we have RICKMAN, the Paras! This one's named after (probably also obviously) Alan Rickman. It was really hard to choose how the Rickman namesake was going to be themed. I decided to do a Pokémon I just think is really cool from a design standpoint. Paras is really interesting because it starts as a bug and evolves into a mushroom. The mushrooms on its back are actually a parasite, and once evolved, the fungus has killed the bug and is using it as a vehicle. That's super creepy cool, and based on a real-life parasite fungus that "explodes" from the heads of bugs and then can control their bodies.
There's this dude in Mt Moon who has this super powerful Raticate. This has ruined other challenge runs of mine before and was quite terrifying, but I managed to basically scrape by without even having lost once to try again. BAKULA was still a little babby Clefairy and couldn't help much at this point, either. And we hadn't even caught RICKMAN yet (who would not have been helpful, either). Other than that, Mt Moon is fairly uneventful albeit long.
With that, we head to Cerulean City. I decided to see how much you could actually do without actually going to Misty's gym. There's actually... quite a bit. You can head to Vermillion City already, get access to the Day Care, head all the way east from there to where Snorlax blocks the road, and even complete the entire S.S. Anne quest and get HM01 from the captain, having the ship leave the harbor.
And because of this, we get to go to that... route with all the gamblers and electricians. I don't really understand the theme to this route, but apparently there are engineers and electricians laying down a bunch of wires here. It's mostly a grassy plains, though. With like super weird roads going in random directions that make no sense. And then... a bunch of gamblers.
The gamblers are pretty hot though. Baldies are always nice, and you won't convince me that they don't have mustaches, even though it's pretty ambiguous from the little sprites. Actually later sprites show they have full beards and are like elderly...? But I don't feel like they look like that here.
Anyway, access to this area means we already get to add another member to the team:
BARON, the Drowzee. Now. This is going to take a bit of explaining. He's named after Horst Baron, one of them pronsmen I like. And because of that namesake, I wanted to pick the hottest Pokemon I could think of from the generation.
However, that hottest Pokemon is not Drowzee. Nor Hypno. Of course, the hottest gen 1 Pokemon is by far the fabulously mustachioed Alakazam. But there's a couple problems there. Mainly, Alakazam is only available if you can trade. Playing on an emulator by myself, this isn't really an option. Actually, I could probably make it work if I tried enough things, but... the next "problem" is that this game is super unbalanced and Alakazam pretty much wrecks the entire game because it's just way too strong. That was super cool when I was a kid but not so cool now. So I chose the less overpowered and unfortunately much less sexy Hypno to fill this position on the team. It's here as a spiritual substitute for Alakazam, though, when it comes to the sexy factor.
With four members in tow, we clear out all these weird electricians, go through all of S.S. Anne, learn Cut (RICKMAN is the only one who could learn it... for some reason I thought MAILLET would be able to, but I guess not... a little sad because I already had a full four moves planned ahead for RICKMAN, but we're stuck with Cut now), and headed back to Cerulean City to get the Cascadebadge.
Surprisingly, despite all the extra work we put in skipping the gym, Misty's Pokemon still held up to mine in level. Starmie was Lv21, which was higher than anything I had. Part of this is that I'm distributing very limited EXP among four party members at this point, though.
Misty was easy to take care of due to the super unbalanced Special stat. In the original game, instead of Pokemon having a Special Attack and Special Defense stat, they just had one thing called Special, which functioned as both an attack and defense stat. Special was way too high on a lot of Pokemon, making them super effective as damage sponges for any attacks that were tagged as Special attacks. And in this game (and a few games to come), all attacks of certain types were Special (while other attacks were Physical). This includes the Water type, making Starmie's Bubblebeam fairly ineffective against Drowzee's nice Special stat. And Pokemon with high Special can not only defend well, but of course that makes their attacks quite powerful, too.
The worst of this actually came from Alakazam, mentioned before, who not only had insanely high Special, but could learn the move Recover, allowing it to restore half of its HP at any time. Alakazam also had crazy Speed, meaning it would strike first and be able to take out almost anything with its powerful Psychic attack, since another part of the horrible balance was that nothing resisted Psychic (and anything that should have had a secondary type that made it weak to Psychic anyway). Basically it can one-shot almost anything in the game and barely takes any damage, except from physical attacks. But it can easily defeat any threat to it before it can even attack anyway. The only real "counter" that could stand up to it was... another Alakazam, which if you faced a friend's Alakazam with yours, you'd spend over 30 minutes just spamming Psychic and Recover at each other, slowly waiting for one of you to run out of PP and start Struggling yourself to death.
But, uh, yeah, even with BARON we were able to tank Starmie pretty well (and if we had come here earlier, we'd be much lower level than Starmie so it would have been more of a challenge, I guess) and get through the battle just fine.
Then we head over to the most obnoxious and poorly-designed puzzles in all of ... anything. You know, it's kind of surprising how much this game was able to stand on concept alone, considering how frustrating and unbalanced it was. As kids we just dealt with all this because COOL PET MONSTERS.
Anyway, there is this like... grid of trash cans, and a button is randomly hidden in one of the cans. When you find it, it randomly creates another button in an adjacent can, and you have to press both buttons in a row or the doors re-lock and the first button is regenerated somewhere else. So you go around inspecting all these cans and going through the "Nothing but trash here!" text with every single one, until you finally find the "right" can, only to have a 75% chance of resetting the entire thing and having to start all over.
Took me like 7 resets, which is ... kinda fast considering you can get even worse unlucky streaks. Either way this probably took like 10 minutes or so which was annoying as all hell.
Once past the locked doors, Surge was pretty easy to defeat. We found the TM for Body Slam earlier, which turned RICKMAN into a force to be reckoned with, and allowed him to easily take damage from Pikachu and Raichu since he resists Electric damage, and dish out some big body slams on the low-defense weaklings.
I also went ahead and grabbed HM05 from the Aide, which was annoying, because you have to have caught 10 Pokemon, and since I'm not focusing on catching Pokemon at all, I only had 7. You're able to Cut back to the beginning areas at this point, though, so I just went and caught a Caterpie, Pidgey, and Rattata real fast.
The party so far:
RICKMAN Lv23
MAILLET Lv24
BARON Lv 23
BAKULA Lv24