marchionessofmustache | Feb. 7th, 2019

So the next order of business was to get the final party member, but there's a bunch of crap in the way.

So we had to head to Celdaon's Game Corner and beat up all the Rockets there. And do the infamous slidey floor puzzle thing. It's actually pretty easy, but kid me got confused by it easily.

At the end of this whole thing, we get to fight my OG Pokémon boyfriend Giovanni. Kinda forgot he was in here. We nab the Silph Scope and head to Lavender town to use it to identify Marowak and "save" Mr Fuji to get the Poke Flute. With the flute, we wake up Snorlax and open the routes to get to Fuschia City. In Fuschia, we play the Safari Game to find the Secret House and be rewarded with the HM for the move Surf.

Finally, we have Surf! We can use this to obtain our final member! But... said final member is the one I wanted to teach Surf to...

Oh well, now MAILLET has Surf.

And we can't use it... lol you need the badge from the Fuschia Gym... It's a poison-type gym but most of the lackeys in here use Psychic-types (???) so our only real choice is to use BARON most of the time. And he's getting more and more overleveled...

But with Koga out of the way, we're finally able to go for a swim on MAILLET and find our final member:

DONNELLY the Tentacool, named after former US Senator Joe Donnelly. Since he's a politician, I wanted to choose a sinister or evil-looking Pokemon, so Tentacruel was a great choice. It also can Surf. Even though we don't really NEED that at this point...

But Tentacruel will be fun to play with. Its speed stat is super high, and its Special is ever higher! It will make a fantstic Special tank, plus that will put the power of his Surf attack off the charts. The high speed and access to Wrap also means we can make use of the previously-mentioned balance oversight. But what's more fun is that we can do it in "style" -- instead of just waiting around for Wrap to take out the enemy, we'll be able to utilize Screech to harshly lower the opponent's defenses, making Wrap do more damage, and use Toxic (which we just got from Koga's gym) to make them lose damage to poison constantly, too. Basically weaken them, poison them, and then bind them while they slowly die. Very sinister.

I skipped a BUNCH of trainers on the way here so we could fill in the final space in the party before absorbing all that EXP. You can also catch Tentacool at a variety of levels (as low as 5 and as high as 40), but a wild Tentacool at level 33 or higher will not know Wrap and will never get access to it again. So I couldn't just go straight for a Lv40 to be thrifty with my EXP since I want to abuse Wrap. So I had to go with Lv30. I don't know if they'll appear at Lv31 or Lv32, but after finding a bunch of Lv10s, I took this one happily. Also, Tenta evolves at Lv30, so we just have to level up once and we'll already be evolving! We'll also have immediate access to Wrap, Surf, and Toxic. We'll just have to wait for Lv43 to get Screech.

Now there's quite a few things we can do. I think the first thing I'm going to try to do is get through the Silph Co. building as quickly as possible, because that's where we'll get the TM for Earthquake, which will give MAILLET a much-needed powerful move. Everyone has something really great but him at this point. He does have Horn Drill, but that's a 30% chance of OHKO, not something you can just use regularly.

I also blew our entire savings on vitamins. Vitamins are kind of weird in the first two games. In the 3rd generation and onward there is a refined "Effort" system that allows you to essentially modify your base stats. In the first two generations, however, you gain hidden "Stat EXP" in every stat, just extremely slowly, and you can just keep gaining it until you have godlike stats. Basically this system was there so that a Pokémon you train over the course of the game will have slightly higher stats all-around than one just caught in the wild, which has obtained no Stat EXP.

You can also gain Stat EXP by using Vitamins, which will give you a ton of Stat EXP in a single stat all at once. Once you've reached a certain limit (the equivalent of feeding 10 of the same vitamin), you will not be able to gain more Stat EXP through that type of vitamin. You can still gain stat EXP in battle like normal, though.

I bought 10 Calciums and fed them all to BAKULA. He was able to eat 9 of them, and only the last one would he not eat, meaning he reached the cap for vitamin-enabled Special boost. This means that despite being in the party for almost the entire game so far and being a key player on the team, he didn't even acquire enough Stat EXP to equal one entire Calcium's worth.

Compare this to the way the Effort system works in 3rd generation and later -- all Pokémon on the team (except not KOBAYASHI who is new) would have well maxed out their Effort Points by this point and wouldn't be able to earn any, as in not even through battle, much less through vitamins.

So Vitamins are MUCH more useful in the main game in older generations, whereas in newer games they're pretty much useless outside of training competitive Pokémon more quickly.

Vitamins are EXPENSIVE though, so I only used it to soft-max BAKULA's Special Stat EXP, and the rest of the money went toward a few Irons to boost RICKMAN'S Defense, essentially boosting the usefulness of Mega Drain. As we find vitamins throughout the game, I'm distributing to the team based on who can use them the best. Since a Pokémon poor in a stat will pretty much always be poor in a stat, I'm not trying to boost up Pokémon that are already bad at stuff, but rather even more raising up Pokémon in the strengths they already have.

With all the money saved up over the course of the whole game (we haven't been buying Potions or Balls or anything, and selling all the TMs and stuff we aren't using) we were only able to buy 12 vitamins total lol. That's how expensive these things are. And income is essentially capped in this game -- you can only gain money through selling items and battling trainers. The only other way to get money is to use Pay Day with a Meowth which gives you almost nothing anyway. You can fight the E4 over and over, but that's not going to help us since we're not trying to do post-game stuff. We need as much as we can get before that point.