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Pokemon Silver Skies part 4
Aug. 26th, 2024 01:55 amBattling one of the most infamously difficult Gym Leaders in the series today! And EVOLUTIONS!
( Danger lurks in the night! )
( Danger lurks in the night! )
Pokemon Silver Skies part 3
Aug. 25th, 2024 08:37 pmTwo new members of the team, and the most exhilarating battle so far. And of course a little theorycrafting and lore :)
( Would you like to buy a Slowpoke Tail? )
( Would you like to buy a Slowpoke Tail? )
Pokemon Silver Skies part 1
Aug. 24th, 2024 01:48 pmSo I started my Flying-types-only run of Pokemon Silver last night! The rules are posted here. Basically only flying types with experience being limited to trainer battles.
Gonna try to pay attention to the story/lore this time around and see all there is to see with my winged buddies. I mean, I was paying attention when I went through Gold but I'm gonna try to be extra particular this time. I'm not gonna try to preserve every little spoiler, so I'll talk about Silver before we know his name, and mention the Cinnabar Volcano, etc.
( To Violet City! )
Gonna try to pay attention to the story/lore this time around and see all there is to see with my winged buddies. I mean, I was paying attention when I went through Gold but I'm gonna try to be extra particular this time. I'm not gonna try to preserve every little spoiler, so I'll talk about Silver before we know his name, and mention the Cinnabar Volcano, etc.
( To Violet City! )
Pokemon Silver Skies rules & masterpost
Aug. 23rd, 2024 10:51 pmSo I'm going to call my Pokemon Silver mono-flying challenge "Pokemon Silver Skies" because flying in the sky geddit???????!
Here's the basic rules:
The experience gained from trainer battles thing is a better challenge and more manageable than "don't level up n levels past the next gym's Pokemon," especially because of the balance issues with this game and the fact that gyms can be done in various order.
If I get frustratingly stuck to where I'm no longer having fun and don't see a way to advance, I will abolish rule #4.
And with that, I'll set off! I'll be blogging this and trying to pay attention to the lore, so enjoy the diary :) This will become the masterpost once I get one or two entries in.
Part 1 - New Bark, Route 29, Cherrygrove, Route 30, Route 31
Part 2 - Violet, Sprout Tower, Ruins of Alph, VS Falkner
Part 3 - Route 32, Union Cave, Route 33, Azalea, Slowpoke Well, VS Bugsy, Ilex Forest
Part 4 - Route 34, Goldenrod City, Route 35, National Park, VS Whitney
Here's the basic rules:
- Only Flying-type Pokemon may participate in battles.
- Only one Pokemon of a single species may be in the party at once.
- Pokemon that are not Flying-type may be used if their final evolution is Flying-type.
- Experience may only be gained from trainer battles.
- Game must be restarted from last save upon white out.
- Trainer battle rematches are not allowed.
- No trading with another game cartridge/ROM.
- Pokemon left at the Daycare may no longer participate in battle.
- The challenge and rules officially start once the 'starter' Pokemon reaches level 5. No trainers may be fought before then.
The experience gained from trainer battles thing is a better challenge and more manageable than "don't level up n levels past the next gym's Pokemon," especially because of the balance issues with this game and the fact that gyms can be done in various order.
If I get frustratingly stuck to where I'm no longer having fun and don't see a way to advance, I will abolish rule #4.
And with that, I'll set off! I'll be blogging this and trying to pay attention to the lore, so enjoy the diary :) This will become the masterpost once I get one or two entries in.
Part 1 - New Bark, Route 29, Cherrygrove, Route 30, Route 31
Part 2 - Violet, Sprout Tower, Ruins of Alph, VS Falkner
Part 3 - Route 32, Union Cave, Route 33, Azalea, Slowpoke Well, VS Bugsy, Ilex Forest
Part 4 - Route 34, Goldenrod City, Route 35, National Park, VS Whitney
So, I think this is my first time ever beating Red on the original GBC Gold and Silver. I don't even know if I finished Kanto back in the day. I did defeat Red in HeartGold, though -- and with an all-bugs team!
So some thoughts on Gen 2 before diving into my Silver run (which I WILL blog about) while my phone charges...
Unless Crystal REALLY improves on these things (my memory of it says it doesn't, though), then GSC are the second worst Pokemon games (with ScarVio being the worst). I used to say GSC were #3 worst (with Sun & Moon being the 2nd worst) but I can forgive the minigame things instead of gyms more than I can forgive the horribly unbalanced slog that is GSC.
Excited to use the all-new Dark and Steel types? Well, fuck you, because they're all post-game only (except, I think, Sneasel, which is INCREDIBLY late-game).
OK, well, there's a big post-game, right? So I can use them there!! Well, everything is like super low levels. Wild Pokemon are level 3 to 16. When your Pokemon are like level 40-50 coming in. And the trainers are like low 30s. Even the gym leaders barely reach 40. So if you want to level up those new Dark and Steel types, you'll be struggling to find decent experience for them. And why bother? You can just steamroll the rest of the content with what you already have, and they're not even that good against the Kanto gyms anyway. Maybe a Dark Pokemon would help with Sabrina...? But chances are something else in your team is already more than good enough. So unless you're doing some kind of self-imposed challenge, the entire post game is a boring joke of difficulty. Self-imposed challenges being REQUIRED to make the game fun is a sign of very bad design.
OK so we can't use the new types until beating the actually interesting part of the game. Fine. But we have 100 new Pokemon to use, right? Well, a bunch of those are also locked behind post game, and the ones you get access to? Weaker (and arguably uglier) than the Gen 1 Pokemon. And you're going to be discouraged from using them, because all the superior statistically Gen 1 Pokemon are RIGHT THERE.
And Kanto being this whole extra exciting area? Well, it's a very watered-down Kanto from what we got in Gen 1. Sprawling dungeons filled with excitement, trainers, puzzles, and rare Pokemon... are now boiled down to a few tiny rooms, or even worse, completely non-existent. Say complete bye-bye to the power plant, the burned research facility, and Seafoam Islands. And remember your first major dungeon-crawling challenge of Mt. Moon? It's like two tiny rooms with stairs now that leads right to the exit, repurposed into some kind of tourist trap place.
Oh and remember all those powerful moves from gen 1, even basic ones like Flamethrower, Thunderbolt, and Giga Drain? Well, those are all locked behind post-game, too. And like I said, once you GET to post game, the game is an unbalanced, boring stomp through a pathetic attempt at reviving Kanto.
The day/night cycle is cool in theory -- but it basically just boils down to moves like Synthesis not working well half the time, and having to play the game at like 8AM to catch certain Pokemon. Neither of these types of things make the game any more fun, they just add a bit of... diversity? To the gameplay. But the actually make the game more frustrating when you're playing at the "wrong" time of day. Or even worse in some cases when you want the Blackbelt, but it's Thursday. (You'll have to wait an entire week until next Wednesday to get it!) I get it, these "features" were novel and exciting when you were like, 8 (or to me who was in high school *hobbles on cane* 9_9), but the thing is they're NOT actually good design and serve to make the game annoying most of the time.
It's not all bad. The graphcis are greatly improved from Gen 1 (and in Crystal, we even get ANIMATED sprites for the first time!), they introduced the breeding mechanic, shiny Pokemon are now a thing, and we get a friendship system complete with haircut function lol (though this is also usually more annoying than fun). Oh, and there's a big variety of music.
As for the lore and story, most of it is pretty cool, and there's a lot of flavor. But the near non-existence of an 'evil team' feels off, and Team Rocket's revival falls flat. Overall, the lore and aesthetic is one of the stronger points, though.
I just don't think the novelty of two regions and 16 badges is really that great when 90% of it is just fighting level 15-30 Pokemon when your own team has already surpassed that because they couldn't balance it. Now, I would not like level scaling to your own level, but maybe a system where each gym leader used a different team based on how many badges you've collected. So if you only have 8 or 9, they'll use their 'beginner' team, but if you have like 10-12, they'll use an intermediate team... stuff like that. Something ScarVio would really have benefitted from, too.
So yeah, most of the new and novel stuff about this game is actually horrible and unbalanced game design, making for a pretty boring and frustrating playthrough overall. No wonder I never finished it when it was new (compared to dumping hundreds of hours into Gen 3 in my college days).
Did I enjoy my replay of Gold? Yes. Did I enjoy HeartGold and SoulSilver? Also yes! Am I going to keep playing GSC? More yes, yes, yes. Pokemon games are great, and I love them all. But there has to be best and worst, and this is one of the worst. If the cluster-Muk that is Scarlet and Violet didn't exist, these would easily be the worst mainline games. Sun and Moon are quite a bit better as an overall experience, in my opinion. Though I do need to play them again to see how they hold up. And everything else besides SV and SM blow GSC out of the water for me.
Sorry, Gen 2. But you're definitely a nostalgia goggles thing. I still love ya, though. (And you did give us the sexiest Pokemon, Ariados, as well as my favorite tank, Shuckle!)
So some thoughts on Gen 2 before diving into my Silver run (which I WILL blog about) while my phone charges...
Unless Crystal REALLY improves on these things (my memory of it says it doesn't, though), then GSC are the second worst Pokemon games (with ScarVio being the worst). I used to say GSC were #3 worst (with Sun & Moon being the 2nd worst) but I can forgive the minigame things instead of gyms more than I can forgive the horribly unbalanced slog that is GSC.
Excited to use the all-new Dark and Steel types? Well, fuck you, because they're all post-game only (except, I think, Sneasel, which is INCREDIBLY late-game).
OK, well, there's a big post-game, right? So I can use them there!! Well, everything is like super low levels. Wild Pokemon are level 3 to 16. When your Pokemon are like level 40-50 coming in. And the trainers are like low 30s. Even the gym leaders barely reach 40. So if you want to level up those new Dark and Steel types, you'll be struggling to find decent experience for them. And why bother? You can just steamroll the rest of the content with what you already have, and they're not even that good against the Kanto gyms anyway. Maybe a Dark Pokemon would help with Sabrina...? But chances are something else in your team is already more than good enough. So unless you're doing some kind of self-imposed challenge, the entire post game is a boring joke of difficulty. Self-imposed challenges being REQUIRED to make the game fun is a sign of very bad design.
OK so we can't use the new types until beating the actually interesting part of the game. Fine. But we have 100 new Pokemon to use, right? Well, a bunch of those are also locked behind post game, and the ones you get access to? Weaker (and arguably uglier) than the Gen 1 Pokemon. And you're going to be discouraged from using them, because all the superior statistically Gen 1 Pokemon are RIGHT THERE.
And Kanto being this whole extra exciting area? Well, it's a very watered-down Kanto from what we got in Gen 1. Sprawling dungeons filled with excitement, trainers, puzzles, and rare Pokemon... are now boiled down to a few tiny rooms, or even worse, completely non-existent. Say complete bye-bye to the power plant, the burned research facility, and Seafoam Islands. And remember your first major dungeon-crawling challenge of Mt. Moon? It's like two tiny rooms with stairs now that leads right to the exit, repurposed into some kind of tourist trap place.
Oh and remember all those powerful moves from gen 1, even basic ones like Flamethrower, Thunderbolt, and Giga Drain? Well, those are all locked behind post-game, too. And like I said, once you GET to post game, the game is an unbalanced, boring stomp through a pathetic attempt at reviving Kanto.
The day/night cycle is cool in theory -- but it basically just boils down to moves like Synthesis not working well half the time, and having to play the game at like 8AM to catch certain Pokemon. Neither of these types of things make the game any more fun, they just add a bit of... diversity? To the gameplay. But the actually make the game more frustrating when you're playing at the "wrong" time of day. Or even worse in some cases when you want the Blackbelt, but it's Thursday. (You'll have to wait an entire week until next Wednesday to get it!) I get it, these "features" were novel and exciting when you were like, 8 (or to me who was in high school *hobbles on cane* 9_9), but the thing is they're NOT actually good design and serve to make the game annoying most of the time.
It's not all bad. The graphcis are greatly improved from Gen 1 (and in Crystal, we even get ANIMATED sprites for the first time!), they introduced the breeding mechanic, shiny Pokemon are now a thing, and we get a friendship system complete with haircut function lol (though this is also usually more annoying than fun). Oh, and there's a big variety of music.
As for the lore and story, most of it is pretty cool, and there's a lot of flavor. But the near non-existence of an 'evil team' feels off, and Team Rocket's revival falls flat. Overall, the lore and aesthetic is one of the stronger points, though.
I just don't think the novelty of two regions and 16 badges is really that great when 90% of it is just fighting level 15-30 Pokemon when your own team has already surpassed that because they couldn't balance it. Now, I would not like level scaling to your own level, but maybe a system where each gym leader used a different team based on how many badges you've collected. So if you only have 8 or 9, they'll use their 'beginner' team, but if you have like 10-12, they'll use an intermediate team... stuff like that. Something ScarVio would really have benefitted from, too.
So yeah, most of the new and novel stuff about this game is actually horrible and unbalanced game design, making for a pretty boring and frustrating playthrough overall. No wonder I never finished it when it was new (compared to dumping hundreds of hours into Gen 3 in my college days).
Did I enjoy my replay of Gold? Yes. Did I enjoy HeartGold and SoulSilver? Also yes! Am I going to keep playing GSC? More yes, yes, yes. Pokemon games are great, and I love them all. But there has to be best and worst, and this is one of the worst. If the cluster-Muk that is Scarlet and Violet didn't exist, these would easily be the worst mainline games. Sun and Moon are quite a bit better as an overall experience, in my opinion. Though I do need to play them again to see how they hold up. And everything else besides SV and SM blow GSC out of the water for me.
Sorry, Gen 2. But you're definitely a nostalgia goggles thing. I still love ya, though. (And you did give us the sexiest Pokemon, Ariados, as well as my favorite tank, Shuckle!)
Pokemon Silver monotype?
Aug. 23rd, 2024 10:06 amSo, I've been playing Pokemon Gold (I'm in Kanto already!) and I'm basically soloing the entire game with Gengar. So I'm wondering what a cool monotype challenge would be to play in Silver. May as well think about it here while my phone recharges, eh?
Looking at what we can get right away without having to fight any trainers we have:
Fire, Grass, Water, Normal, Flying, Rock, Ground, Bug, Poison
Fire would be boring because I don't think there's even another Fire type in the entire game until post-game?!
Grass could be interesting, but you'd be sorely lacking in variety of moves. You'd have access to some interesting strategy with Chikorita's heals and Hoppip's status ailments and high speed at least...? But I feel like it would just come down to using Razor Leaf and Headbutt/Cut/Strength for 99% of the game. We would get access to Exeggcute pretty early, which would give us some Psychic moves, though. But another big problem is like half our team (Sunkern, Bellsprout, Exeggcute) would need stones to evolve, which we wouldn't get til postgame. I think Picnicker Gina has a chance to offer you a Leaf Stone as a gift, but that's rare and up to RNG, and we'd need two.
Water at least gives you access to a bunch of Pokemon, including the powerful Gyarados and Seadra (I don't think Kingdra is possible until post-game), but water Pokemon sorely lack in variety of moves for the most part. But I guess we can squeeze out some usefulness from them -- we've got Pysduck and Slowpoke for Psychic-type moves, Tentacool for Giga Drain, Totodile for Bite, Chinchou for Electric, Wooper for Ground... that might actually be a pretty fun one.
Normal gives a wide variety of abilities, and we can start off with Jigglypuff, Hoothoot, Pidgey, and Sentret, then make changes as we go. Normal type Pokemon can learn a wide variety of skills, and Jigglypuff would be able to learn the elemental punches. The biggest hurdle to overcome would be that Jigglypuff is weak until it can evolve, and we'd be waiting quite some time for Mom to buy us a Moon Stone. We'd also get to play around with Dunsparce, Girafarig, and Stantler, though I don't know if they'd bring THAT much to the team. Oh, and we'd be able to use the iconic Togepi as well.
Flying is a type a like a lot, since I love the birbs, and we'd have access to Hoothoot and Pidgey right away. Sadly, we wouldn't get Butterfree as it's a Gold exclusive, so we'd be dealing with the two normal birds for a while. Later we could replace Pidgey with Spearow. Zubat would make a powerful ally, and we'd have access to some tricky strats with Hoppip, and then we'd eventually be able to replace Hoothoot with Natu, as well. Eventually, we'd even get Mantine! This could definitely be a fun one, probably a little more challenging than water.
Rock... definitely a weak type in general, but we'd at least be able to get past the first couple of gyms easily as they're both weak to rock. Our starter would be Geodude, and our only other allies throughout the game would be Sudowoodo, Corsola, and the almighty SHUCKLE. But we'd basically be relying on JUST those four for the entire game. Four Pokemon is not a bad team, and Shuckle is one of my all-time favorites. This one would definitely be a challenge, and Shuckle would give us some strategy to work with... dunno how FUN it would be, but of all the ones I've listed so far, it would definitely be the biggest challenge. And I don't mind maining Shuckle for sure. Though a big problem with Shuckle is that we won't get his useful abilities until too late, now that I think about it. Toxic doesn't come until late into Kanto, and Sandstorm you get at the very end. We'd be relying on a weird Bide + Wrap strategy, which would be incredibly frustrating and probably boring.
Ground starts us with Geodude as well, but we get a surprisingly different set of allies. There's the Nidorans which is nice (though I'm not sure how early you can get them), though with the lack of Moon Stone availability, we'd only be able to take one of those. We'll get Wooper, and late-game we'll get access to Swinub. Nidoking could help carry once we finally get the Moon Stone from Mom, but for a long time we'd just be going with Geodude and Wooper.
Bug... I do bug all the time, and did it in HeartGold, so I don't think I'm going to go for it this time, but we would get Shuckle again. Ledyba is not even worth trying to use, even for something like this, so our starter would be Weedle. Would be quite the struggle in the early-game, especially getting past the first gym, since Beedrill is not going to be that amazing. Tanking with Shuckle and Pineco is always fun, though.
And lastly, we have Poison, my second favorite type after Bug. We'll start with Weedle and Zubat, and we'll get access to Bellsprout soon enough. We'll get Nidoran and Tentacool as powerful allies later, as well. Sounds like a decent little team. Psychic moves would be quite terrifying, but we could try to outspeed with Zubat or power through with Nidoran. Would be obnoxious waiting on that Moon Stone, though. I could use Gastly again, but that would ruin the fun of the challenge. I guess Nidoran would end up just being a bargain-bin Gastly after all. So maybe Flying or Water would mix it up enough.
Water, Flying, and Poison are the most appealing to me, I think. Rock was sounding cool until I thought about Shuckle being useless for the first arc. Poison is a lot of fun in theory, but I think boiling down to elemental punches for another run would be a little boring. So I think I'm choosing between Water and Flying.
Let's look at what our final teams would be like:
WATER: Feraligatr, Seadra, Gyarados, Lanturn, Tentacruel, Mantine, Quagsire
We'd actually have to choose one to bench! Mantine and Gyarados are both Water/Flying. Mantine gets access to Wing Attack, which is really cool.
FLYING: Xatu, Fearow, Jumpluff, Mantine, Crobat, Togetic
Togetic would come in more useful post-game with weird stuff like Fire Blast and Zap Cannon. And part of the challenge is to use weird stuff we normally wouldn't use, right?
Both sound pretty interesting. Water is a little more variety which is fun, while Flying might be a slightly harder challenge.
I'll have to think about it as I finish up Gold with Gengar.
Looking at what we can get right away without having to fight any trainers we have:
Fire, Grass, Water, Normal, Flying, Rock, Ground, Bug, Poison
Fire would be boring because I don't think there's even another Fire type in the entire game until post-game?!
Grass could be interesting, but you'd be sorely lacking in variety of moves. You'd have access to some interesting strategy with Chikorita's heals and Hoppip's status ailments and high speed at least...? But I feel like it would just come down to using Razor Leaf and Headbutt/Cut/Strength for 99% of the game. We would get access to Exeggcute pretty early, which would give us some Psychic moves, though. But another big problem is like half our team (Sunkern, Bellsprout, Exeggcute) would need stones to evolve, which we wouldn't get til postgame. I think Picnicker Gina has a chance to offer you a Leaf Stone as a gift, but that's rare and up to RNG, and we'd need two.
Water at least gives you access to a bunch of Pokemon, including the powerful Gyarados and Seadra (I don't think Kingdra is possible until post-game), but water Pokemon sorely lack in variety of moves for the most part. But I guess we can squeeze out some usefulness from them -- we've got Pysduck and Slowpoke for Psychic-type moves, Tentacool for Giga Drain, Totodile for Bite, Chinchou for Electric, Wooper for Ground... that might actually be a pretty fun one.
Normal gives a wide variety of abilities, and we can start off with Jigglypuff, Hoothoot, Pidgey, and Sentret, then make changes as we go. Normal type Pokemon can learn a wide variety of skills, and Jigglypuff would be able to learn the elemental punches. The biggest hurdle to overcome would be that Jigglypuff is weak until it can evolve, and we'd be waiting quite some time for Mom to buy us a Moon Stone. We'd also get to play around with Dunsparce, Girafarig, and Stantler, though I don't know if they'd bring THAT much to the team. Oh, and we'd be able to use the iconic Togepi as well.
Flying is a type a like a lot, since I love the birbs, and we'd have access to Hoothoot and Pidgey right away. Sadly, we wouldn't get Butterfree as it's a Gold exclusive, so we'd be dealing with the two normal birds for a while. Later we could replace Pidgey with Spearow. Zubat would make a powerful ally, and we'd have access to some tricky strats with Hoppip, and then we'd eventually be able to replace Hoothoot with Natu, as well. Eventually, we'd even get Mantine! This could definitely be a fun one, probably a little more challenging than water.
Rock... definitely a weak type in general, but we'd at least be able to get past the first couple of gyms easily as they're both weak to rock. Our starter would be Geodude, and our only other allies throughout the game would be Sudowoodo, Corsola, and the almighty SHUCKLE. But we'd basically be relying on JUST those four for the entire game. Four Pokemon is not a bad team, and Shuckle is one of my all-time favorites. This one would definitely be a challenge, and Shuckle would give us some strategy to work with... dunno how FUN it would be, but of all the ones I've listed so far, it would definitely be the biggest challenge. And I don't mind maining Shuckle for sure. Though a big problem with Shuckle is that we won't get his useful abilities until too late, now that I think about it. Toxic doesn't come until late into Kanto, and Sandstorm you get at the very end. We'd be relying on a weird Bide + Wrap strategy, which would be incredibly frustrating and probably boring.
Ground starts us with Geodude as well, but we get a surprisingly different set of allies. There's the Nidorans which is nice (though I'm not sure how early you can get them), though with the lack of Moon Stone availability, we'd only be able to take one of those. We'll get Wooper, and late-game we'll get access to Swinub. Nidoking could help carry once we finally get the Moon Stone from Mom, but for a long time we'd just be going with Geodude and Wooper.
Bug... I do bug all the time, and did it in HeartGold, so I don't think I'm going to go for it this time, but we would get Shuckle again. Ledyba is not even worth trying to use, even for something like this, so our starter would be Weedle. Would be quite the struggle in the early-game, especially getting past the first gym, since Beedrill is not going to be that amazing. Tanking with Shuckle and Pineco is always fun, though.
And lastly, we have Poison, my second favorite type after Bug. We'll start with Weedle and Zubat, and we'll get access to Bellsprout soon enough. We'll get Nidoran and Tentacool as powerful allies later, as well. Sounds like a decent little team. Psychic moves would be quite terrifying, but we could try to outspeed with Zubat or power through with Nidoran. Would be obnoxious waiting on that Moon Stone, though. I could use Gastly again, but that would ruin the fun of the challenge. I guess Nidoran would end up just being a bargain-bin Gastly after all. So maybe Flying or Water would mix it up enough.
Water, Flying, and Poison are the most appealing to me, I think. Rock was sounding cool until I thought about Shuckle being useless for the first arc. Poison is a lot of fun in theory, but I think boiling down to elemental punches for another run would be a little boring. So I think I'm choosing between Water and Flying.
Let's look at what our final teams would be like:
WATER: Feraligatr, Seadra, Gyarados, Lanturn, Tentacruel, Mantine, Quagsire
We'd actually have to choose one to bench! Mantine and Gyarados are both Water/Flying. Mantine gets access to Wing Attack, which is really cool.
FLYING: Xatu, Fearow, Jumpluff, Mantine, Crobat, Togetic
Togetic would come in more useful post-game with weird stuff like Fire Blast and Zap Cannon. And part of the challenge is to use weird stuff we normally wouldn't use, right?
Both sound pretty interesting. Water is a little more variety which is fun, while Flying might be a slightly harder challenge.
I'll have to think about it as I finish up Gold with Gengar.
OK, so I played up to Bugsy's fight and didn't realize that my emulator wasn't saving and loading battery data, so when I reset the game to load my save, there was just... nothing. So I had to load from my last save state which was, like, right at the beginning of my play session. So I lost like 2 hours of gameplay...
But I was able to recover fairly quickly (I ALMOST gave up on this run after this hahaha) by fast-forwarding through the battles and not really talking to all the people in town and stuff like that. Only took me like 10-15 minutes to catch back up to where I was.
( So let's get to it! )
But I was able to recover fairly quickly (I ALMOST gave up on this run after this hahaha) by fast-forwarding through the battles and not really talking to all the people in town and stuff like that. Only took me like 10-15 minutes to catch back up to where I was.
( So let's get to it! )
Soooo I decided I didn't feel like sitting up to play Gold anymore, as I usually want to play it when I'm taking a break from other things, so I swapped over to playing on my phone emulator. I wasn't able to transfer the save file, so I instead had to start all over from the beginning, after having played like another hour or so on the PC, but it was nbd as I was able to rush through to where I left off and more in about an hour.
I also started using a shader on the emulator and it looks so nice:
Left is before, right is after. Look at the "Z" in ZUBAT as well as the wings on the Zubat itself. At the cost of having everything look a tiny bit blurry, everything looks so smooth and cool. So I think I'm going to play the whole game like this.
I'm also going to be doing far fewer screencaps because getting the screencaps from phone and editing them is a pain.
( But let's get to it! )
I also started using a shader on the emulator and it looks so nice:
Left is before, right is after. Look at the "Z" in ZUBAT as well as the wings on the Zubat itself. At the cost of having everything look a tiny bit blurry, everything looks so smooth and cool. So I think I'm going to play the whole game like this.
I'm also going to be doing far fewer screencaps because getting the screencaps from phone and editing them is a pain.
( But let's get to it! )
So, I've been wanting to play Pokemon but I don't want to work on the Yellow Dexrun because it's a lot of effort and I'm just not feeling it after playing 1st gen games so many times XD So I'm going to play through Pokemon Gold. I have plans for a Crystal Revenge, which I'll get to, but it'll be nice to see the differences between the 'original' gen2 games and the 'final' one.
I used to think that Gen 2 was a lazy tack-on to Gen 1, using rejected Pokemon designs and such. But since then I've kind of changed my mind, especially after seeing what all was planned to go into Gen 1. Gen 2 is more like the realization of the game they weren't able to make with Gen 1, giving us more stuff all the way around. So Gen 2 may end up becoming one of my favorite generations...? Right now it's one of the lowest (probably 3rd lowest). I've also come around to the roster -- I used to think Gen 2 was a bunch of ugly reject mons, but then someone had me look through them and see which ones I did and didn't like and I realized I actually like most of them, and even some of my all-time favorites like Ariados and Forretress come from there.
So I'm really looking forward to this :)
Sadly I haven't been playing proper games or watching anime because I got addicted to mobile gaming again X_X My Pokemon kick made me want to try out all the Pokemon mobile games again, and I restarted Pokemon Masters EX and got addicted. I may or may not have already blown like $60 on it, too >_>; It's funny because I was going to buy Pokemon Sword (since I only have Shield) but decided I didn't really want to spend the money on it... then go and blow money on this like it's nothing T_T Mobile game addiction is a real thing. I've been struggling to pull myself away from the game, but spent like 2 days doing NOTHING but playing the game.
So playing Pokemon Gold was a refreshing change of pace.
Anyway, let's get started! Not much happened in my first play session (~30 minutes) but I did learn some neat things.
( Read more... )
I used to think that Gen 2 was a lazy tack-on to Gen 1, using rejected Pokemon designs and such. But since then I've kind of changed my mind, especially after seeing what all was planned to go into Gen 1. Gen 2 is more like the realization of the game they weren't able to make with Gen 1, giving us more stuff all the way around. So Gen 2 may end up becoming one of my favorite generations...? Right now it's one of the lowest (probably 3rd lowest). I've also come around to the roster -- I used to think Gen 2 was a bunch of ugly reject mons, but then someone had me look through them and see which ones I did and didn't like and I realized I actually like most of them, and even some of my all-time favorites like Ariados and Forretress come from there.
So I'm really looking forward to this :)
Sadly I haven't been playing proper games or watching anime because I got addicted to mobile gaming again X_X My Pokemon kick made me want to try out all the Pokemon mobile games again, and I restarted Pokemon Masters EX and got addicted. I may or may not have already blown like $60 on it, too >_>; It's funny because I was going to buy Pokemon Sword (since I only have Shield) but decided I didn't really want to spend the money on it... then go and blow money on this like it's nothing T_T Mobile game addiction is a real thing. I've been struggling to pull myself away from the game, but spent like 2 days doing NOTHING but playing the game.
So playing Pokemon Gold was a refreshing change of pace.
Anyway, let's get started! Not much happened in my first play session (~30 minutes) but I did learn some neat things.
( Read more... )
So, I'm not going to actually DO a Crystal Revenge run right now (I still want to finish the Yellow Dex Run) but I need something to do for a little bit before I watch the next episode partly to avoid burnout but mostly to wait for Dens to go to sleep so I don't get interrupted.
So I just wanted to look at the mons that would be potential candidates for the 'perfect team' of Pokemon Crystal.
The biggest problem with this, though, is that... it almost ends up being the same team as before. So I'll make a rule that we can only use Pokemon new to Generation 2!
( A LOT OF RAMBLING AND RETHINKING )
So I just wanted to look at the mons that would be potential candidates for the 'perfect team' of Pokemon Crystal.
The biggest problem with this, though, is that... it almost ends up being the same team as before. So I'll make a rule that we can only use Pokemon new to Generation 2!
( A LOT OF RAMBLING AND RETHINKING )
A little pokey update
Feb. 23rd, 2019 06:36 pmHaven't been playing too much since I've mostly been focused on game dev stuff, but a few important things have happened. Also, gonna talk about RICKMAN's strat.
So, this little guy is super weak except for his massive defenses (even at this level, his speed is still single-digit LOL) so you have to use a kind of special strategy to fight with him.
The problem is a lot of the good moves for this fella are post-game. So we have to deal with what we have now...
We got the TM for Attract from Whitney, so we taught him that. Now all the lady pokes want this endolith's... d? Does it have a d? Well, they are just wild about those limbs whatever they are.
Basically, the entire "strat" right now is to wear the opponent out with Wrap. Wrap deals damage when you use it, and with this guy's attack, that's almost always 1HP damage. But then between every turn, it deals additional "wrap damage" similar to poison damage, which is percentage-based. While waiting for wrap to slowly drain the life away from the enemy, RICKMAN uses Withdraw to boost defense (not that he needs it) or Attract to make the enemy even less likely to attack. He also has Encore right now, which can get the enemy stuck into using only a single move over and over.
This works better if you can also poison the opponent, because then they'll be taking both wrap and poison damage. But we won't have that option 'til post-game, so it's not a thing for us. Instead, we're relying on the tag-team option with BARON poisoning the enemy first, then swapping out to RICKMAN to Wrap.
This sounds like a huge PITA, and it pretty much is, but it's a strat we've already had to apply a couple times to get through some tough spots. With Shuckle's huge defenses, RICKMAN takes very little damage from anything, so as long as the enemy can't heal itself (which is rare anyway), and doesn't have any of its own tricks to take out RICKMAN, as long as we can stay alive, we're guaranteed a win.
There's lots of stuff to counter it; using Disable on Wrap, having great attack to counter the great defense (since they just have to outpower the damage of Wrap, it's not that hard lol), poisoning or burning RICKMAN himself, etc. But when faced with a threat that can one-shot or two-shot most of the party, hanging on with this tank may be the only option.
So far the most damage I've seen RICKMAN take is 3HP damage at once, from a supereffective Water Gun attack. Other than that, every attack has dealt a whopping 1HP damage to him. With that kind of defense, even a critical hit will only do 2 damage.
BARON and DONNELLY have both evolved, too. They coincidentally both evolve at level 22.
BARON doesn't get much of a boost as Ariados is still not that amazing of a mon and this poor guy's strongest attack is still the early-game Poison Sting. DONNELLY gets a pretty big boost, because Zubat's stats are horribly pathetic, while Golbat's are at least decent. With Bite and Confuse Ray we at least have a little bit on the offensive as well. We gotta keep getting those haircuts because DONNELLY will only evolve to his final stage if we can max out his affection for us.
I kinda miss the gen 1 Golbat sprites with the giant tongue sticking out. Much cuter than this one with just a big gaping mouth only. I wonder why they did away with the tongue?
But most importantly, we got to Olivine City where we were able to get the Good Rod! Which means we're finally able to go capture our final team member...
BAKULA the Chinchou!
This was another... big stretch for the theme. I do think Chinchou is cute, as well as Lantern. But it's certainly not that SUPER ADORABLE status like Clefable. But honestly nothing is like that in this generation. So I just had to go with ... something cute in general. I also was really desperate to get Surf, Waterfall, and Whirlpool on the team. and Lantern happens to be able to learn all three. I tried... so many other combinations. But honestly I couldn't find much that I'd even consider cuter than Lantern anyway.
And with that, though everyone hasn't fully evolved yet, the gang is finally all here~
So, this little guy is super weak except for his massive defenses (even at this level, his speed is still single-digit LOL) so you have to use a kind of special strategy to fight with him.
The problem is a lot of the good moves for this fella are post-game. So we have to deal with what we have now...
We got the TM for Attract from Whitney, so we taught him that. Now all the lady pokes want this endolith's... d? Does it have a d? Well, they are just wild about those limbs whatever they are.
Basically, the entire "strat" right now is to wear the opponent out with Wrap. Wrap deals damage when you use it, and with this guy's attack, that's almost always 1HP damage. But then between every turn, it deals additional "wrap damage" similar to poison damage, which is percentage-based. While waiting for wrap to slowly drain the life away from the enemy, RICKMAN uses Withdraw to boost defense (not that he needs it) or Attract to make the enemy even less likely to attack. He also has Encore right now, which can get the enemy stuck into using only a single move over and over.
This works better if you can also poison the opponent, because then they'll be taking both wrap and poison damage. But we won't have that option 'til post-game, so it's not a thing for us. Instead, we're relying on the tag-team option with BARON poisoning the enemy first, then swapping out to RICKMAN to Wrap.
This sounds like a huge PITA, and it pretty much is, but it's a strat we've already had to apply a couple times to get through some tough spots. With Shuckle's huge defenses, RICKMAN takes very little damage from anything, so as long as the enemy can't heal itself (which is rare anyway), and doesn't have any of its own tricks to take out RICKMAN, as long as we can stay alive, we're guaranteed a win.
There's lots of stuff to counter it; using Disable on Wrap, having great attack to counter the great defense (since they just have to outpower the damage of Wrap, it's not that hard lol), poisoning or burning RICKMAN himself, etc. But when faced with a threat that can one-shot or two-shot most of the party, hanging on with this tank may be the only option.
So far the most damage I've seen RICKMAN take is 3HP damage at once, from a supereffective Water Gun attack. Other than that, every attack has dealt a whopping 1HP damage to him. With that kind of defense, even a critical hit will only do 2 damage.
BARON and DONNELLY have both evolved, too. They coincidentally both evolve at level 22.
BARON doesn't get much of a boost as Ariados is still not that amazing of a mon and this poor guy's strongest attack is still the early-game Poison Sting. DONNELLY gets a pretty big boost, because Zubat's stats are horribly pathetic, while Golbat's are at least decent. With Bite and Confuse Ray we at least have a little bit on the offensive as well. We gotta keep getting those haircuts because DONNELLY will only evolve to his final stage if we can max out his affection for us.
I kinda miss the gen 1 Golbat sprites with the giant tongue sticking out. Much cuter than this one with just a big gaping mouth only. I wonder why they did away with the tongue?
But most importantly, we got to Olivine City where we were able to get the Good Rod! Which means we're finally able to go capture our final team member...
BAKULA the Chinchou!
This was another... big stretch for the theme. I do think Chinchou is cute, as well as Lantern. But it's certainly not that SUPER ADORABLE status like Clefable. But honestly nothing is like that in this generation. So I just had to go with ... something cute in general. I also was really desperate to get Surf, Waterfall, and Whirlpool on the team. and Lantern happens to be able to learn all three. I tried... so many other combinations. But honestly I couldn't find much that I'd even consider cuter than Lantern anyway.
And with that, though everyone hasn't fully evolved yet, the gang is finally all here~
VS Whitney
Feb. 16th, 2019 11:43 amSo, it's Saturday, which means a Bug Catching Contest is being held today! Woo!
A few days a week, you can go to National Park and participate in this contest. You get 20 Park Balls and can take only one of your Pokemon with you into the park. Only Bug-Type Pokemon appear in the grass (including a lot of ones that don't normally appear here). You get to bring one catch to the end of the contest, where it will be "judged" with points, and the highest-judged bug wins.
Basically, stronger Pokemon are worth more points. The Pokemon's stats, Max HP, current HP (so catching at higher HP is worth more), etc. all add to your point total. There's also a random factor which is super obnoxious, though generally if you catch one of the rarest bugs like Pinsir or Scyther, you will win whether or not you get any of the random points.
The opponents have set points and bugs that they will have, so the opponents' scores are not fully random. Though which opponents participate in the contest are random, but the top score will always be a little over 300 points.
We caught a Pinsir, which won the contest by about 10 points. The grand prize for winning the contest is a Sun Stone, which can only be obtained this way.
And that's critical to moving forward, because when you give a Sunkern a Sun Stone...
It evolves into Sunflora! What was the weakest Pokémon in our team suddenly just became the strongest. Even at a lower level, KOBAYASHI's Special Attack is several points higher than MAILLET's Attack, which is already pretty high!
And with that we're off to fight Whitney in Goldenrod Gym. And yeah, this was a really tough fight. I tried a couple things, dying until I finally came up with a strat that worked out.
She has a Clefairy and a Miltank, but the Clefairy is pretty inconsequential. It's all about the terrifying Miltank. She has Stomp, which can easily one- or two-shot everything in the party. There's also Rollout, which gets more powerful with each successful hit in a row, which after a few hits will one-shot anything in the party as well. It has huge defenses, making it take tons of hits to take it out, and to make that even worse, it has a move called Milk Drink that restores its HP by 50% of max. Lastly, she has Attract, which inflicts infatuation on the opponent if they're the opposite gender. Since we're going all-male this time, that means all four members are susceptible. Infatuation makes you skip your turn 50% of the time in the name of love.
The most important thing was to have MAILLET come out first against Miltank and get off as many Mud Slaps as possible. We relied completely on the lowered accuracy in this fight, especially since it helped make Rollout less likely to power up. I think the AI may have even realized this (or there was some astronomical luck with the RNG, in Whitney's favor) because after a couple Mud Slaps, she never tried Rollout again. Which is bad because Stomp was now the biggest threat, anyway.
You can at least tell the AI isn't completely random, because Miltank would always use Milk Drink once it dropped below 50% max HP, and never any other time.
After getting six Mud Slaps in (the most you can reduce the accuracy with), it was BARON's turn. The entire point of BARON was just to spam Poison Sting and hope one inflicted poison. Miltank immediately infatuated him, and basically Miltank kept missing (thanks, Mud Slap?) and BARON kept swooning and nothing got done until eventually Miltank landed a Stomp to KO BARON after like 6 failed attempts at doing Poison Sting. And by that I mean we didn't even get the attack off, not just that the poison didn't hit.
With that out of the way, we have DONNELLY and KOBAYASHI left to use. Either is a viable option at this point, but we go with DONNELLY first, in the case that if we have to switch out to KOBAYASHI quickly, we'll also have the advantage of Miltank being confused.
DONNELLY has learned Confuse Ray, which has 100% success rate compared to Supersonic's 60%, so we can easily confuse the opponent now. And despite a pretty weak attack, DONNELLY has good speed and is carrying the Quick Claw item (which allows him to attack first randomly even if he is the slower poke), so he can get Bite in at the beginning of turns. The hope here is to constnatly land the flinch on the Bite and have Miltank hurt itself in confusion enough that it falls without getting a Milk Drink in.
This didn't happen. If the poison would have landed with BARON, it would have been a higher chance of success, but in the end, Miltank just kept drinking milk and stomping on the poor little bat.
So, lastly it's KOBAYASHI's turn. This is our other KO option besides DONNELLY, and thankfully this one worked. Still pretty much untrained, KOBAYASHI just has the same three moves we caught him with -- Growl, Growth, and Mega Drain. Thanks to his massive Special Attack, the mediocre power of Mega Drain is still enough to do decent damage, and the attack heals, as well!
But the problem is Miltank's Special Defense and HP are still high enough that Mega Drain does like, maybe 1/6 of its max HP in damage at the most, maybe a little less. So all those Milk Drinks keep coming in.
Milk Drink isn't affected by the accuracy reduction of Mud Slap, so as soon as she gets to below 50% HP, she heals herself almost to full again.
So the hope here is to use Growth six times in a row while Miltank continues to miss thanks to Mud Slap or tries to Attract but happens to fail. I think Attract is also affected by the accuracy reduction, so that's nice. Basically, we just need to avoid damage enough to keep using Growth, which raises the user's Special Attack. What's great about stat buffs and debuffs in Pokemon is that they raise the stat by a percentage, so a Pokemon with a high stat gets an even bigger boost than one with a low stat. So KOBAYASHI was able to raise his Special Attack a lot.
After six Growths, Mega Drain did like 90% damage to Miltank. Even after a Milk Drink (KOBAYASHI's speed is miserably slow, but it's fine because its other stats are fantastic), Mega Drain was able to KO Miltank.
And with that, we finally defeated Whitney of Goldenrod Gym. This was probably the biggest hurdle we'll have to overcome in quite a while in the game. There's some more hard stuff later, though, if I remember correctly.
After that, we're able to get the squirt bottle from the flower lady and go spray it on Sudowoodo to open up a few paths for us. This also lets us get back to Violet City easily, which is super nice because we need to go back that way now anyway. On the way there, this guy is impressed with our ability to use a squirt bottle, and he gives us TM08, Rock Smash.
While not a Hidden Machine, Rock Smash gives us a special map ability (there are actually a few other examples of this we've seen already: Headbutt, which can knock Pokemon out of small trees, and Sweet Scent, which attracts wild Pokemon and increases the encounter rate). Where there are small boulders, we can now bust them, opening up new areas, and sometimes encountering Pokemon.
This is important, because there's a certain Pokemon we can only encounter by busting rocks, and that's the next member of our team.
We head back to Dark Cave, where we can bust through rocks and get to another exit to Route 42. At this exit, there is a smashable rock just a couple steps away from the door. About 15 minutes of running in and out and smashing the rock, we encounter who we were looking for:
RICKMAN the Shuckle! The RICKMAN namesake is basically just "design I think is cool," so I have a feeling we will be getting a lot of Bug-Type Pokemon this way. Anyway, Shuckle secretes liquid from its limbs which pierces through the rock that it lives in. This liquid also dissolves berries. Shuckle stores berries in its shell until they turn into a fermented juice, which it drinks for its sustinance. It's based on the real-life phenomena that are endoliths.
Super cool design, and to go along with our current party theme, this thing is... pathetically weak! In fact, it has the lowest Attack, Special Attack, and Speed of any final-evolution Pokemon in the entire franchise. This is made up for by having the highest defenses and peculiar learnable moves, though it really becomes more useful in later games. We're going to try our best to get use out of our solid rock little buddy, though.
A few days a week, you can go to National Park and participate in this contest. You get 20 Park Balls and can take only one of your Pokemon with you into the park. Only Bug-Type Pokemon appear in the grass (including a lot of ones that don't normally appear here). You get to bring one catch to the end of the contest, where it will be "judged" with points, and the highest-judged bug wins.
Basically, stronger Pokemon are worth more points. The Pokemon's stats, Max HP, current HP (so catching at higher HP is worth more), etc. all add to your point total. There's also a random factor which is super obnoxious, though generally if you catch one of the rarest bugs like Pinsir or Scyther, you will win whether or not you get any of the random points.
The opponents have set points and bugs that they will have, so the opponents' scores are not fully random. Though which opponents participate in the contest are random, but the top score will always be a little over 300 points.
We caught a Pinsir, which won the contest by about 10 points. The grand prize for winning the contest is a Sun Stone, which can only be obtained this way.
And that's critical to moving forward, because when you give a Sunkern a Sun Stone...
It evolves into Sunflora! What was the weakest Pokémon in our team suddenly just became the strongest. Even at a lower level, KOBAYASHI's Special Attack is several points higher than MAILLET's Attack, which is already pretty high!
And with that we're off to fight Whitney in Goldenrod Gym. And yeah, this was a really tough fight. I tried a couple things, dying until I finally came up with a strat that worked out.
She has a Clefairy and a Miltank, but the Clefairy is pretty inconsequential. It's all about the terrifying Miltank. She has Stomp, which can easily one- or two-shot everything in the party. There's also Rollout, which gets more powerful with each successful hit in a row, which after a few hits will one-shot anything in the party as well. It has huge defenses, making it take tons of hits to take it out, and to make that even worse, it has a move called Milk Drink that restores its HP by 50% of max. Lastly, she has Attract, which inflicts infatuation on the opponent if they're the opposite gender. Since we're going all-male this time, that means all four members are susceptible. Infatuation makes you skip your turn 50% of the time in the name of love.
The most important thing was to have MAILLET come out first against Miltank and get off as many Mud Slaps as possible. We relied completely on the lowered accuracy in this fight, especially since it helped make Rollout less likely to power up. I think the AI may have even realized this (or there was some astronomical luck with the RNG, in Whitney's favor) because after a couple Mud Slaps, she never tried Rollout again. Which is bad because Stomp was now the biggest threat, anyway.
You can at least tell the AI isn't completely random, because Miltank would always use Milk Drink once it dropped below 50% max HP, and never any other time.
After getting six Mud Slaps in (the most you can reduce the accuracy with), it was BARON's turn. The entire point of BARON was just to spam Poison Sting and hope one inflicted poison. Miltank immediately infatuated him, and basically Miltank kept missing (thanks, Mud Slap?) and BARON kept swooning and nothing got done until eventually Miltank landed a Stomp to KO BARON after like 6 failed attempts at doing Poison Sting. And by that I mean we didn't even get the attack off, not just that the poison didn't hit.
With that out of the way, we have DONNELLY and KOBAYASHI left to use. Either is a viable option at this point, but we go with DONNELLY first, in the case that if we have to switch out to KOBAYASHI quickly, we'll also have the advantage of Miltank being confused.
DONNELLY has learned Confuse Ray, which has 100% success rate compared to Supersonic's 60%, so we can easily confuse the opponent now. And despite a pretty weak attack, DONNELLY has good speed and is carrying the Quick Claw item (which allows him to attack first randomly even if he is the slower poke), so he can get Bite in at the beginning of turns. The hope here is to constnatly land the flinch on the Bite and have Miltank hurt itself in confusion enough that it falls without getting a Milk Drink in.
This didn't happen. If the poison would have landed with BARON, it would have been a higher chance of success, but in the end, Miltank just kept drinking milk and stomping on the poor little bat.
So, lastly it's KOBAYASHI's turn. This is our other KO option besides DONNELLY, and thankfully this one worked. Still pretty much untrained, KOBAYASHI just has the same three moves we caught him with -- Growl, Growth, and Mega Drain. Thanks to his massive Special Attack, the mediocre power of Mega Drain is still enough to do decent damage, and the attack heals, as well!
But the problem is Miltank's Special Defense and HP are still high enough that Mega Drain does like, maybe 1/6 of its max HP in damage at the most, maybe a little less. So all those Milk Drinks keep coming in.
Milk Drink isn't affected by the accuracy reduction of Mud Slap, so as soon as she gets to below 50% HP, she heals herself almost to full again.
So the hope here is to use Growth six times in a row while Miltank continues to miss thanks to Mud Slap or tries to Attract but happens to fail. I think Attract is also affected by the accuracy reduction, so that's nice. Basically, we just need to avoid damage enough to keep using Growth, which raises the user's Special Attack. What's great about stat buffs and debuffs in Pokemon is that they raise the stat by a percentage, so a Pokemon with a high stat gets an even bigger boost than one with a low stat. So KOBAYASHI was able to raise his Special Attack a lot.
After six Growths, Mega Drain did like 90% damage to Miltank. Even after a Milk Drink (KOBAYASHI's speed is miserably slow, but it's fine because its other stats are fantastic), Mega Drain was able to KO Miltank.
And with that, we finally defeated Whitney of Goldenrod Gym. This was probably the biggest hurdle we'll have to overcome in quite a while in the game. There's some more hard stuff later, though, if I remember correctly.
After that, we're able to get the squirt bottle from the flower lady and go spray it on Sudowoodo to open up a few paths for us. This also lets us get back to Violet City easily, which is super nice because we need to go back that way now anyway. On the way there, this guy is impressed with our ability to use a squirt bottle, and he gives us TM08, Rock Smash.
While not a Hidden Machine, Rock Smash gives us a special map ability (there are actually a few other examples of this we've seen already: Headbutt, which can knock Pokemon out of small trees, and Sweet Scent, which attracts wild Pokemon and increases the encounter rate). Where there are small boulders, we can now bust them, opening up new areas, and sometimes encountering Pokemon.
This is important, because there's a certain Pokemon we can only encounter by busting rocks, and that's the next member of our team.
We head back to Dark Cave, where we can bust through rocks and get to another exit to Route 42. At this exit, there is a smashable rock just a couple steps away from the door. About 15 minutes of running in and out and smashing the rock, we encounter who we were looking for:
RICKMAN the Shuckle! The RICKMAN namesake is basically just "design I think is cool," so I have a feeling we will be getting a lot of Bug-Type Pokemon this way. Anyway, Shuckle secretes liquid from its limbs which pierces through the rock that it lives in. This liquid also dissolves berries. Shuckle stores berries in its shell until they turn into a fermented juice, which it drinks for its sustinance. It's based on the real-life phenomena that are endoliths.
Super cool design, and to go along with our current party theme, this thing is... pathetically weak! In fact, it has the lowest Attack, Special Attack, and Speed of any final-evolution Pokemon in the entire franchise. This is made up for by having the highest defenses and peculiar learnable moves, though it really becomes more useful in later games. We're going to try our best to get use out of our solid rock little buddy, though.
New Member
Feb. 15th, 2019 02:11 pmOK I forgot to update on finishing the Azalea Gym, whose leader is Bugsy, and he literally uses Metapod and Kakuna so there's not much to say about it anyway.
We went through the Ilex Forest and onto Goldenrod, where there's a LOT of talking to be done, which consumed a lot of time. But we also got a bicycle! And we were able to take DONNELLY to get his hair cut (lol) which is going to be helpful for him later.
There's a Gym in Goldenrod, but it belongs to Whitney, who is often noted as one of the most difficult Gym Leaders in the series. You'd think random 3rd Gym would not be too troublesome, but she has a Miltank that once it starts using Rollout can sweep your whole party pretty easily, and it takes a bit of effort to defeat it since it's pretty bulky. So we're skipping the Gym for now and heading north to National Park.
The Bug Contest is on Saturday, so I'm gonna wait to do much else until then, because part of the success of the party I planned relies on winning the Bug Contest. I could just change the date on my PC again but it made all my Microsoft services like Outlook, OneDrive, etc. log out so I had to re-login to all of them last time so I'm just going to wait this time.
On the way to National Part, on route... 35? I think? We fought this Firebringer who really decimated the team. We managed to scrape by with just DONNELLY alive with very little HP.
And then this bastard spotted us and initiated a battle before we could do anything else, meaning we headed into that battle with only DONNELLY barely hanging on to his consciousness...
Thankfully his first Pokemon was a Lv2 Voltorb (wtf) so I could easily get a couple potions in without taking much damage at all. And then we bit through his four Voltorbs (the last one being Lv14) and made it out safely. It's important that DONNELLY doesn't faint in battle, because his affection will decrease, and we need it as high as it can get.
There was also some trainer with a Vulpix that knew Roar, which switches out your current Pokemon with a random one on your team. It made Togepi come out and absorb some of the experience, so in my anger I stuffed that little fucker in the PC Box immediately after that battle.
National Park is nice-looking, again, this game is a HUGE step up from the first game graphically, and there's so much more atmosphere to the locations. National Park feels like a park and not just another route with grass on it.
And here, we're finally able to get our fourth member of the party:
KOBAYASHI the Sunkern. The entire reason I chose this is because of those dancing sunflower bobblehead things are one of my first thoughts when I think of sunflowers, especially the ones with sunglasses on, so Sunflora is kinda like... that. Without sunglasses. I TOLD YOU IT WAS HARD TO CHOOSE THINGS FOR THIS GENERATION.
(There's also those dancing sunflowers from Plants vs Zombies~)
But Sunflora is also tall and lanky like his namesake, so that's cool, too.
And we add yet another weakling to our crew. Sunkern's Pokedex entry even talks about how incredibly weak it is. Yay.
We went through the Ilex Forest and onto Goldenrod, where there's a LOT of talking to be done, which consumed a lot of time. But we also got a bicycle! And we were able to take DONNELLY to get his hair cut (lol) which is going to be helpful for him later.
There's a Gym in Goldenrod, but it belongs to Whitney, who is often noted as one of the most difficult Gym Leaders in the series. You'd think random 3rd Gym would not be too troublesome, but she has a Miltank that once it starts using Rollout can sweep your whole party pretty easily, and it takes a bit of effort to defeat it since it's pretty bulky. So we're skipping the Gym for now and heading north to National Park.
The Bug Contest is on Saturday, so I'm gonna wait to do much else until then, because part of the success of the party I planned relies on winning the Bug Contest. I could just change the date on my PC again but it made all my Microsoft services like Outlook, OneDrive, etc. log out so I had to re-login to all of them last time so I'm just going to wait this time.
On the way to National Part, on route... 35? I think? We fought this Firebringer who really decimated the team. We managed to scrape by with just DONNELLY alive with very little HP.
And then this bastard spotted us and initiated a battle before we could do anything else, meaning we headed into that battle with only DONNELLY barely hanging on to his consciousness...
Thankfully his first Pokemon was a Lv2 Voltorb (wtf) so I could easily get a couple potions in without taking much damage at all. And then we bit through his four Voltorbs (the last one being Lv14) and made it out safely. It's important that DONNELLY doesn't faint in battle, because his affection will decrease, and we need it as high as it can get.
There was also some trainer with a Vulpix that knew Roar, which switches out your current Pokemon with a random one on your team. It made Togepi come out and absorb some of the experience, so in my anger I stuffed that little fucker in the PC Box immediately after that battle.
National Park is nice-looking, again, this game is a HUGE step up from the first game graphically, and there's so much more atmosphere to the locations. National Park feels like a park and not just another route with grass on it.
And here, we're finally able to get our fourth member of the party:
KOBAYASHI the Sunkern. The entire reason I chose this is because of those dancing sunflower bobblehead things are one of my first thoughts when I think of sunflowers, especially the ones with sunglasses on, so Sunflora is kinda like... that. Without sunglasses. I TOLD YOU IT WAS HARD TO CHOOSE THINGS FOR THIS GENERATION.
(There's also those dancing sunflowers from Plants vs Zombies~)
But Sunflora is also tall and lanky like his namesake, so that's cool, too.
And we add yet another weakling to our crew. Sunkern's Pokedex entry even talks about how incredibly weak it is. Yay.
So our adventures in Pokémon Crystal continue. I'm not too far but there are so many reminders of what is great about this game and very little about what is bad about it. So I think unless it takes a bad turn, I'm going to end up enjoying this run a lot lot.
First up, the team is getting SLIGHTLY stronger. By defeating Falkner, we got the TM for Mud Slap, which gave a different type of move to MAILLET. Though his Scratch attack is ridiculously powerful for this point in the game. I checked and when he was at Lv10, he had 24 Attack, while DONNELLY had 19 at Lv12, and BARON had like 20 at Lv11. That's... a lot of Attack to have ahead of everyone else. It also helps that he gets STAB from Scratch, too, since he's Normal-Type.
I also kept DONNELLY in the front of the party a lot to get him up to Lv12 quickly so he'd learn Bite, which is a huge step up from Leech Life. And then in that tunnel, we got the TM for Swift, which I gave to DONNELLY as well.
BARON is still getting by with Poison Sting and it's pretty awful, so any battles with him usually rely on the opposing Pokémon getting poisoned or being significantly weaker than him. He has Flash now from the HM we got in Sprout Tower, so that can help him try to avoid damage while waiting for poison to take its toll at least...
In Azalea Town we freed the Slowpokes, and then when heading over to Ilex Forest, this jerk appeared. And uh, this was pretty hard. I died and had to restart! That didn't happen once in Pokémon Blue. But here we are dying already. Granted, this is probably the hardest part of the game when we still have this very underdeveloped party, but still...
His first Pokémon is Ghastly. The first time I fought him, it used Hypnosis and immediately put MAILLET to sleep. So I switched out to DONNELLY (whose Bite is Super-Effective, too), but he got put to sleep right away as well. I just kept Biting until finally he woke up and was able to take him out.
Then comes Zubat. It basically was just a battle of the Zubats. But DONNELLY eventually fainted and we swapped out to MAILLET again and waited for him to wake up. The Zubat was no match for the amazing power of STAB Scratch with 24 Attack. Actually it was higher Attack now because we leveled up a couple times since I last checked it.
Then Croconaw comes out. Hoo boy. This thing has massive HP and defenses compared to what our party is able to dish out. I think some of what I was doing was doing literally 1 damage.
I sent out BARON first, not expecting him to be able to do much. My goal was to get as many Flashes in as I could to lower his accuracy as much as possible. After he died, the current "powerhouse" (if you can even call him that) of the team, MAILLET, came out to try to actually deal some damage. I started out with a Mud Slap to lower the accuracy a little more and then went straight into spamming Lick. The goal was to hope to land the paralysis so that with 4x reduced accuracy and paralysis I might be able to just Scratch my way to a slow victory while Croconaw missed over and over.
But it only took a couple Water Guns and we died.
The second time through, we got a lot luckier on Ghastly; Hypnosis didn't work and we were able to take him out with like 4 Mud Slaps. Not starting the battle with two Pokemon asleep was very helpful.
Zubat went better, too -- I let DONNELLY fight Zubat-to-Zubat since I wanted to conserve MAILLET and BARON for the final battle. Had to use a couple Potions, but it was fine.
Six Potions and one Berry left. Croconaw comes.
I start out with DONNELLY still in the battle, hoping to land a Supersonic before he faints. I manage to get it off, and then Croconaw hurts himself in confusion twice (!) doing minor damage to himself. All dat HP yo. DONNELLY's Bite does almost no damage, and he's slower than Croconaw (who is way higher in Level) so I can't hope for the flinch. Swift is equally weak, and Leech Life would deal literally 1 damage.
(Also, fun note: the way the game handles critical hit damage, it's possible for a critical hit to deal 1 damage, even though it's supposed to do double damage. This is because the damage calculation, including the double, is done before checking if the number is between 0 and 1 and then rounding to 1 if it is. I actually had a Zubat deal 1 damage with a critical on me when fighting some Rockets.)
I'd rather get to the other Pokes anyway while the confusion was still in effect, so I just spammed Swift until DONNELLY died (which was after like, a single Water Gun once Croconaw didn't hurt himself in confusion). We switched out to MAILLET to go for some Mud Slaps again. Scratch does a little more damage, but we need that accuracy lowering effect. Used a couple potions to keep him alive, but eventually he fell to the Water Guns anyway. Sadly another unlucky crit meant we only got out like 3 Mud Slaps out in the end.
Our last hope was BARON, who was now coming in with full health. We spam Poison Sting and manage to land the poison effect on the second try. Croconaw uses Leer for the very first time, which lowers Defense. Pointless since he's using Water Gun, which is a Special move, right? Well, I guess the computer got smarter for this game, because once our defense was lowered, he started spamming Scratch or some other physical attack, which dealt more than 50% of BARON's max HP in damage. We had eight of our Potions left, though, and I just kept using them every turn (fortunately our HP is so low that a single Potion restores BARON completely) waiting for poison to slowly kill the brute. Whenever he'd miss (thank you Mud Slap!) we could avoid using a potion and throw another Poison Sting out to deal an extra 1 damage lol.
With using up quite a few Potions, we finally defeated Nico. This was a nerve-wracking battle but a ton of fun. I feel like I'm really having to strategize to get past the harder parts of this game. I don't know if the whole game with be like this combining our team of mostly weaker Pokémon with the EXP cap, or if it will get really easy once we get a full team and some decent levels, a lot like the first game did.
BARON Lv13
DONNELLY Lv13
MAILLET Lv13
TOGEPI Lv5 <-- this little buddy is here because of that egg that's part of the story lol. Still gotta take him back to Elm.
First up, the team is getting SLIGHTLY stronger. By defeating Falkner, we got the TM for Mud Slap, which gave a different type of move to MAILLET. Though his Scratch attack is ridiculously powerful for this point in the game. I checked and when he was at Lv10, he had 24 Attack, while DONNELLY had 19 at Lv12, and BARON had like 20 at Lv11. That's... a lot of Attack to have ahead of everyone else. It also helps that he gets STAB from Scratch, too, since he's Normal-Type.
I also kept DONNELLY in the front of the party a lot to get him up to Lv12 quickly so he'd learn Bite, which is a huge step up from Leech Life. And then in that tunnel, we got the TM for Swift, which I gave to DONNELLY as well.
BARON is still getting by with Poison Sting and it's pretty awful, so any battles with him usually rely on the opposing Pokémon getting poisoned or being significantly weaker than him. He has Flash now from the HM we got in Sprout Tower, so that can help him try to avoid damage while waiting for poison to take its toll at least...
In Azalea Town we freed the Slowpokes, and then when heading over to Ilex Forest, this jerk appeared. And uh, this was pretty hard. I died and had to restart! That didn't happen once in Pokémon Blue. But here we are dying already. Granted, this is probably the hardest part of the game when we still have this very underdeveloped party, but still...
His first Pokémon is Ghastly. The first time I fought him, it used Hypnosis and immediately put MAILLET to sleep. So I switched out to DONNELLY (whose Bite is Super-Effective, too), but he got put to sleep right away as well. I just kept Biting until finally he woke up and was able to take him out.
Then comes Zubat. It basically was just a battle of the Zubats. But DONNELLY eventually fainted and we swapped out to MAILLET again and waited for him to wake up. The Zubat was no match for the amazing power of STAB Scratch with 24 Attack. Actually it was higher Attack now because we leveled up a couple times since I last checked it.
Then Croconaw comes out. Hoo boy. This thing has massive HP and defenses compared to what our party is able to dish out. I think some of what I was doing was doing literally 1 damage.
I sent out BARON first, not expecting him to be able to do much. My goal was to get as many Flashes in as I could to lower his accuracy as much as possible. After he died, the current "powerhouse" (if you can even call him that) of the team, MAILLET, came out to try to actually deal some damage. I started out with a Mud Slap to lower the accuracy a little more and then went straight into spamming Lick. The goal was to hope to land the paralysis so that with 4x reduced accuracy and paralysis I might be able to just Scratch my way to a slow victory while Croconaw missed over and over.
But it only took a couple Water Guns and we died.
The second time through, we got a lot luckier on Ghastly; Hypnosis didn't work and we were able to take him out with like 4 Mud Slaps. Not starting the battle with two Pokemon asleep was very helpful.
Zubat went better, too -- I let DONNELLY fight Zubat-to-Zubat since I wanted to conserve MAILLET and BARON for the final battle. Had to use a couple Potions, but it was fine.
Six Potions and one Berry left. Croconaw comes.
I start out with DONNELLY still in the battle, hoping to land a Supersonic before he faints. I manage to get it off, and then Croconaw hurts himself in confusion twice (!) doing minor damage to himself. All dat HP yo. DONNELLY's Bite does almost no damage, and he's slower than Croconaw (who is way higher in Level) so I can't hope for the flinch. Swift is equally weak, and Leech Life would deal literally 1 damage.
(Also, fun note: the way the game handles critical hit damage, it's possible for a critical hit to deal 1 damage, even though it's supposed to do double damage. This is because the damage calculation, including the double, is done before checking if the number is between 0 and 1 and then rounding to 1 if it is. I actually had a Zubat deal 1 damage with a critical on me when fighting some Rockets.)
I'd rather get to the other Pokes anyway while the confusion was still in effect, so I just spammed Swift until DONNELLY died (which was after like, a single Water Gun once Croconaw didn't hurt himself in confusion). We switched out to MAILLET to go for some Mud Slaps again. Scratch does a little more damage, but we need that accuracy lowering effect. Used a couple potions to keep him alive, but eventually he fell to the Water Guns anyway. Sadly another unlucky crit meant we only got out like 3 Mud Slaps out in the end.
Our last hope was BARON, who was now coming in with full health. We spam Poison Sting and manage to land the poison effect on the second try. Croconaw uses Leer for the very first time, which lowers Defense. Pointless since he's using Water Gun, which is a Special move, right? Well, I guess the computer got smarter for this game, because once our defense was lowered, he started spamming Scratch or some other physical attack, which dealt more than 50% of BARON's max HP in damage. We had eight of our Potions left, though, and I just kept using them every turn (fortunately our HP is so low that a single Potion restores BARON completely) waiting for poison to slowly kill the brute. Whenever he'd miss (thank you Mud Slap!) we could avoid using a potion and throw another Poison Sting out to deal an extra 1 damage lol.
With using up quite a few Potions, we finally defeated Nico. This was a nerve-wracking battle but a ton of fun. I feel like I'm really having to strategize to get past the harder parts of this game. I don't know if the whole game with be like this combining our team of mostly weaker Pokémon with the EXP cap, or if it will get really easy once we get a full team and some decent levels, a lot like the first game did.
BARON Lv13
DONNELLY Lv13
MAILLET Lv13
TOGEPI Lv5 <-- this little buddy is here because of that egg that's part of the story lol. Still gotta take him back to Elm.
VS Falkner!
Feb. 9th, 2019 05:21 pmOK, so I'm really enjoying Pokémon Crystal already.
With our team of little weaklings, we trudged forward toward Violet City where the first gym awaited. Having our only decent offense being Poison Sting on a little bug, trainer battles are pretty harsh. Fighting a Weedle was so annoying because it was just a big train of "It's not very effective..." back and forth until someone finally one.
Violet City is a kind of traditional little town with a big tower in the back. What I really love is how the town has so much personality for a place with like... three buildings. There's a little schoolhouse in one corner, a couple residences, and the tower, and of course the gym, center, and shop (yes I know that's many more than three lmao).
But look at this! The houses are more than just the bare minimum furniture like the first game where every single building had the same table, bed, and bookcase you've seen since the beginning of the game. This place looks totally different from our hometown. The homes are floored with tatami. There's even a genkan with little shoes in it!
The Sprout Tower is said to have been first created because there was a giant Bellsprout that was like 100ft. tall or something and people built a tower around it. Either it's folklore or there really was a giant Bellsprout at one time that like got petrified over time or something... either way, that tiny bit of lore adds so much more personality to this little village. We didn't really see stuff like this in the first game.
This kind of personality to the different towns is exactly why I love the Sinnoh Region -- I feel it really did well with the lore and worldbuilding, making the world you explore seem like an interesting, living place, and not just a path from the beginning to the end of the game.
It's even been a while since HeartGold, so I hope the Johto Region is as diverse as I'm thinking it is.
It makes me wonder "why do I hate this generation so much?" and I think it's more that I've let my distaste for the 100 new monster designs (which I still can't really stand, heh) sour my opinion of the entire game over time.
Sprout Tower is basically just fighting like 14 Bellsprouts in a row (the first dude in here was named "SAGE NICO" heh) with a HootHoot thrown in there for no reason, and learning already that our rival NICO is cruel to his Pokemon and doesn't care how they feel because only strength is important. We also get the HM05, Flash!
We head to the gym next, having scooped up as much EXP from the Sprouts as we could. I made the mistake of trying to train everyone kinda evenly at first, when I realized I should be dumping all the EXP into either MAILLET or DONNELLY, so I'd have one thing to reasonably fight in the first gym with. Alas, DONNELLY only got to like level 7.
Falkner's Gym is pretty rough when your primary attacker is a bug, because that bug is going to die in a couple hits. Well, not against Pidgey who only knows Tackle at this point. So against the Pidgeys we were able to send BARON out and try to Poison them while whittling away their HP.
The others -- Spearow and Pidgeotto -- needed a different approach. DONNELLY was the only one who could even stand up to them, but his Leech Life attack dead a measly ONE damage. So instead, he would use Supersonic to confuse them, and then try to hold on by eating his Berry and taking Potions until they eventually hurt themselves to death. Meanshilwe, I was Leech Lifing every chance I could to make up for the lost HP and whittle away at the enemy, hoping the combined damage would make it take one less hurt-themself to win.
I only ended up consuming 4 Potions the whole time, which was pretty nice. Pidgeotto hurt itself three times in a row at the beginning of battle, making things go a lot more smoothly.
The fact that this strat was even an option at this point is already making this game a lot more exciting. This was a lot more fun than VS Brock which was basically "keep hitting until he's the one that dies first."
So from that Gym Battle, depite the rocky and slow start (almost at 4 hours just to walk a couple routes and fight one gym), I'm really enjoying the game and excited about moving forward.
BARON Lv10
DONNELLY Lv10
MAILLET Lv4
With our team of little weaklings, we trudged forward toward Violet City where the first gym awaited. Having our only decent offense being Poison Sting on a little bug, trainer battles are pretty harsh. Fighting a Weedle was so annoying because it was just a big train of "It's not very effective..." back and forth until someone finally one.
Violet City is a kind of traditional little town with a big tower in the back. What I really love is how the town has so much personality for a place with like... three buildings. There's a little schoolhouse in one corner, a couple residences, and the tower, and of course the gym, center, and shop (yes I know that's many more than three lmao).
But look at this! The houses are more than just the bare minimum furniture like the first game where every single building had the same table, bed, and bookcase you've seen since the beginning of the game. This place looks totally different from our hometown. The homes are floored with tatami. There's even a genkan with little shoes in it!
The Sprout Tower is said to have been first created because there was a giant Bellsprout that was like 100ft. tall or something and people built a tower around it. Either it's folklore or there really was a giant Bellsprout at one time that like got petrified over time or something... either way, that tiny bit of lore adds so much more personality to this little village. We didn't really see stuff like this in the first game.
This kind of personality to the different towns is exactly why I love the Sinnoh Region -- I feel it really did well with the lore and worldbuilding, making the world you explore seem like an interesting, living place, and not just a path from the beginning to the end of the game.
It's even been a while since HeartGold, so I hope the Johto Region is as diverse as I'm thinking it is.
It makes me wonder "why do I hate this generation so much?" and I think it's more that I've let my distaste for the 100 new monster designs (which I still can't really stand, heh) sour my opinion of the entire game over time.
Sprout Tower is basically just fighting like 14 Bellsprouts in a row (the first dude in here was named "SAGE NICO" heh) with a HootHoot thrown in there for no reason, and learning already that our rival NICO is cruel to his Pokemon and doesn't care how they feel because only strength is important. We also get the HM05, Flash!
We head to the gym next, having scooped up as much EXP from the Sprouts as we could. I made the mistake of trying to train everyone kinda evenly at first, when I realized I should be dumping all the EXP into either MAILLET or DONNELLY, so I'd have one thing to reasonably fight in the first gym with. Alas, DONNELLY only got to like level 7.
Falkner's Gym is pretty rough when your primary attacker is a bug, because that bug is going to die in a couple hits. Well, not against Pidgey who only knows Tackle at this point. So against the Pidgeys we were able to send BARON out and try to Poison them while whittling away their HP.
The others -- Spearow and Pidgeotto -- needed a different approach. DONNELLY was the only one who could even stand up to them, but his Leech Life attack dead a measly ONE damage. So instead, he would use Supersonic to confuse them, and then try to hold on by eating his Berry and taking Potions until they eventually hurt themselves to death. Meanshilwe, I was Leech Lifing every chance I could to make up for the lost HP and whittle away at the enemy, hoping the combined damage would make it take one less hurt-themself to win.
I only ended up consuming 4 Potions the whole time, which was pretty nice. Pidgeotto hurt itself three times in a row at the beginning of battle, making things go a lot more smoothly.
The fact that this strat was even an option at this point is already making this game a lot more exciting. This was a lot more fun than VS Brock which was basically "keep hitting until he's the one that dies first."
So from that Gym Battle, depite the rocky and slow start (almost at 4 hours just to walk a couple routes and fight one gym), I'm really enjoying the game and excited about moving forward.
BARON Lv10
DONNELLY Lv10
MAILLET Lv4
no subject
Feb. 9th, 2019 10:44 amRandom thoughts while playing Pokémon Crystal:
OK, so just before running around in Dark Cave, I double-checked to make sure that's where you get Teddiursa. And indeed, it was, and I was in the right spot of the cave, too.
So after like an hour of running in circles (the same 10 squares on the map lol) I finally triple-checked and... the time has to be "Morning" time. Which... I was going to talk about how it's cool that they added the day and time stuff to the game. But now I'm kinda mad at it, hahahaha.
OK, so let's talk about this day/night system. Pokémon 2 introduced the time system into the franchise, where the game's battery would keep track of the day of the week and the current time. This was pretty awesome, as the game would cycle through day and night, and different things would occur at different times and on different days. This also meant some Pokémon were only available at certain times. I started my journey late last night, which allowed me to catch the nocturnal BARON right away.
Gold, Silver, and Crystal stay mostly "DAY" during the day, then turn to "NITE" during the evening, and stay that way until 4AM when it becomes "MORN" for a few short hours. There are only these three distinct time periods, and MORN for some reason lasts almost no time at all. I guess it's supposed to represent the crack of dawn; people who are sleeping stay asleep during this time, and there are very few Pokemon who are exclusive to this time period.
One of those, however, is Teddiursa. Whom I was trying to catch.
After spending like an hour walking around the little 2x5 rectangle in the front of Dark Cave, I realized I needed to be playing in MORN. Now, I'm fortunately using an emulator that is for the most part good about the time sync. It will update the virtual battery to the proper time as long as time has passed since the last time you opened the emulator. This also means you can alter your computer's clock to manipulate the in-game clock, but only by moving the time forward, not backward.
So I moved the time forward to Sunday morning, then went about searching for Teddiursa. Normally I would not abuse stuff like clock manipulation, but I want to actually play the game today and can't move on til I catch this thing, so I'm OK with it. Then I encountered one, hit it once... and it fled. Yeah, these things will RUN AWAY apparently. And their catch rate is kinda shitty so after taking another like 20 minutes to encounter a few and have them all run away and eventually run out of balls... I decided that I'm OK with save-scumming this part for the sake of just getting on with the game. I didn't save scum at all in the previous runthrough, and basically I'm just doing it here for the sake of saving time (if I were to not, I'd just have to buy more balls, and if those ran out, start the entire game over from the beginning to get more money to buy more lol) and not for allowing myself to overcome any kind of challenge through luck manipulation.
Then I learned you have to set the clock FORWARD, so I set the clock backward to like Jan 27th at 5AM to get the clock synced with the right day of the week and in-game time without moving the clock forward, then changed the computer clock back to real time and finally after closing and opening the emulator and changing the clock a bunch of times, I FINALLY HAVE A STUPID TEDDIURSA.
<-- SO WELCOME THIS ASSHOLE TO THE TEAM.
What's worse is that I don't even like Teddiursa. I had very few options for "hulking things," and my other two were pretty much Feraligatr and Tyrannitar. I wanted to keep the tradition I started of not using the normal three starter Pokemon, and then Tyrannitar is only available after you've completed nearly everything in the entire game, including the second challenge to the League after earning 16 Badges. So that's not an option at all.
So the only other thing even remotely hulking and monstrous was this big bear, Ursaring. I've always kinda hated it for being "plain" and "uninteresting." Because it's literally just a bear. There's nothing special about it, no interesting design or quirk or anything, just... a bear.
So maybe this playthrough will help me appreciate the big bear a bit better. But this rocky start is not helping.
The Pokedex entry for Teddiursa says it eats so much honey that its paw is like permanently flavored like honey, and when it appears its animation is sucking on its paw. That's kinda cute, I guess. But also kinda gross and I want to kick the stupid thing.
Seriously this consumed like my entire morning and I am mad LOL. I'm about to have lunch and this was my entire progress today. Catching MAILLET.
Oh, wait, we did catch one other little guy, who got kind of ignored because of all that crap... also welcome this other little buddy:
DONNELLY, the Zubat. Like mentioned before, he gets a pass because he's going to evolve into an all-new Johto Pokemon in the end, so it's okay that this unevolved version is a repeat from last game.
This was another hard decision. There was almost NOTHING sinister available in the game. At first, I wanted to use one of the game's new types, Dark Type, since it's defined by being sinister and underhanded. But there are almost no Dark-types in the game. We have Murkrow, which is a little cutie. And then there's Houndoom that doesn't even show up until post-game. And I think that was it? So I started looking for other solutions. I considered Octillery, because it's weapon-themed, and war is sinister and governments push wars and yeah it was really stretching. I also really needed something to use some of the water-based HMs.
In the end, I went with Crobat. Like Tentacruel, it's a pretty sinister-looking monster on its own, and bats, despite being adorable fuzzballs in real life, have a reputation of being associated with spooky shit like vampires and stuff.
So here we go. Thanks Dark Cave for our two new teammates, both at a whopping Level 2. Now we have to split up the experience between those and our Level 7 bug. Nobody has any decent moves. I'm already scared of moving forward.
Also I reached this Pokeball in the dark. It took a while, and all it contained in the end was a potion. So, uh, yeah, I'm like 90% angry with this game at the moment lol. But at least we have three team members.
- Caterpie's animation is so weird.
- Dark Cave is accessible quite a bit earlier than I remembered.
- Geodude makes a jack-off motion every time you encounter one and it's so funny XD
- I really love that when you enter a new route/area the name of the place is displayed on screen. Like I REALLY love that.
- There are so many Geodudes in here lmao
- I ran into Dunsparce before Teddiursa this game hates me
- I wonder how much it would hurt to get a handy from Geodude
- OK, I'm gonna listen to a podcast while I do this...
- Listened to an entire episode of Planetary Radio (47 minutes) and still no Teddiursa
- SKLGJLKSDJGLKSDJGLKDSJGLKDSJGLKSDGJ
OK, so just before running around in Dark Cave, I double-checked to make sure that's where you get Teddiursa. And indeed, it was, and I was in the right spot of the cave, too.
So after like an hour of running in circles (the same 10 squares on the map lol) I finally triple-checked and... the time has to be "Morning" time. Which... I was going to talk about how it's cool that they added the day and time stuff to the game. But now I'm kinda mad at it, hahahaha.
OK, so let's talk about this day/night system. Pokémon 2 introduced the time system into the franchise, where the game's battery would keep track of the day of the week and the current time. This was pretty awesome, as the game would cycle through day and night, and different things would occur at different times and on different days. This also meant some Pokémon were only available at certain times. I started my journey late last night, which allowed me to catch the nocturnal BARON right away.
Gold, Silver, and Crystal stay mostly "DAY" during the day, then turn to "NITE" during the evening, and stay that way until 4AM when it becomes "MORN" for a few short hours. There are only these three distinct time periods, and MORN for some reason lasts almost no time at all. I guess it's supposed to represent the crack of dawn; people who are sleeping stay asleep during this time, and there are very few Pokemon who are exclusive to this time period.
One of those, however, is Teddiursa. Whom I was trying to catch.
After spending like an hour walking around the little 2x5 rectangle in the front of Dark Cave, I realized I needed to be playing in MORN. Now, I'm fortunately using an emulator that is for the most part good about the time sync. It will update the virtual battery to the proper time as long as time has passed since the last time you opened the emulator. This also means you can alter your computer's clock to manipulate the in-game clock, but only by moving the time forward, not backward.
So I moved the time forward to Sunday morning, then went about searching for Teddiursa. Normally I would not abuse stuff like clock manipulation, but I want to actually play the game today and can't move on til I catch this thing, so I'm OK with it. Then I encountered one, hit it once... and it fled. Yeah, these things will RUN AWAY apparently. And their catch rate is kinda shitty so after taking another like 20 minutes to encounter a few and have them all run away and eventually run out of balls... I decided that I'm OK with save-scumming this part for the sake of just getting on with the game. I didn't save scum at all in the previous runthrough, and basically I'm just doing it here for the sake of saving time (if I were to not, I'd just have to buy more balls, and if those ran out, start the entire game over from the beginning to get more money to buy more lol) and not for allowing myself to overcome any kind of challenge through luck manipulation.
Then I learned you have to set the clock FORWARD, so I set the clock backward to like Jan 27th at 5AM to get the clock synced with the right day of the week and in-game time without moving the clock forward, then changed the computer clock back to real time and finally after closing and opening the emulator and changing the clock a bunch of times, I FINALLY HAVE A STUPID TEDDIURSA.
<-- SO WELCOME THIS ASSHOLE TO THE TEAM.What's worse is that I don't even like Teddiursa. I had very few options for "hulking things," and my other two were pretty much Feraligatr and Tyrannitar. I wanted to keep the tradition I started of not using the normal three starter Pokemon, and then Tyrannitar is only available after you've completed nearly everything in the entire game, including the second challenge to the League after earning 16 Badges. So that's not an option at all.
So the only other thing even remotely hulking and monstrous was this big bear, Ursaring. I've always kinda hated it for being "plain" and "uninteresting." Because it's literally just a bear. There's nothing special about it, no interesting design or quirk or anything, just... a bear.
So maybe this playthrough will help me appreciate the big bear a bit better. But this rocky start is not helping.
The Pokedex entry for Teddiursa says it eats so much honey that its paw is like permanently flavored like honey, and when it appears its animation is sucking on its paw. That's kinda cute, I guess. But also kinda gross and I want to kick the stupid thing.
Seriously this consumed like my entire morning and I am mad LOL. I'm about to have lunch and this was my entire progress today. Catching MAILLET.
Oh, wait, we did catch one other little guy, who got kind of ignored because of all that crap... also welcome this other little buddy:
DONNELLY, the Zubat. Like mentioned before, he gets a pass because he's going to evolve into an all-new Johto Pokemon in the end, so it's okay that this unevolved version is a repeat from last game.
This was another hard decision. There was almost NOTHING sinister available in the game. At first, I wanted to use one of the game's new types, Dark Type, since it's defined by being sinister and underhanded. But there are almost no Dark-types in the game. We have Murkrow, which is a little cutie. And then there's Houndoom that doesn't even show up until post-game. And I think that was it? So I started looking for other solutions. I considered Octillery, because it's weapon-themed, and war is sinister and governments push wars and yeah it was really stretching. I also really needed something to use some of the water-based HMs.
In the end, I went with Crobat. Like Tentacruel, it's a pretty sinister-looking monster on its own, and bats, despite being adorable fuzzballs in real life, have a reputation of being associated with spooky shit like vampires and stuff.
So here we go. Thanks Dark Cave for our two new teammates, both at a whopping Level 2. Now we have to split up the experience between those and our Level 7 bug. Nobody has any decent moves. I'm already scared of moving forward.
Also I reached this Pokeball in the dark. It took a while, and all it contained in the end was a potion. So, uh, yeah, I'm like 90% angry with this game at the moment lol. But at least we have three team members.
Wow 2nd gen
Feb. 9th, 2019 09:21 amOK so I remember why I give so much flak to 2nd gen, and I think it's largely because the new Pokémon suck so bad. I guess it makes sense, since in a rush to create a sequel after the overwhelming popularity of the first game, they used a bunch of the rejected ideas from the first game and threw them together in a second game, instead of coming up with all-new designs.
Coming up with a team for this set has been gruelingly difficult. The themes are not even that strict:
Bakula - The adorable one
Maillet - The hulking one
Kobayashi - The dancing one
Donnelly - The sinister one
Rickman - The cool one
Baron - The sexy one
That's it. That's the entire criteria. Now, I'm trying to make a team using only newly-introduced Pokeys to the game, so all the old Pokes making a reappearance are out, unless they have a new evolution for this game and I'm using that as their final form.
We have ONE HUNDRED new Pokémon to choose from... and it was a HUGE struggle to come up with six things to fit into those loose categories. I finally decided on something after hours of stressing over it. And the team is going to be pretty horrible because most of the new Pokémon are terrible statistically anyway, being completely overshadowed by the first game's monsters. There's a few gems hidden in there, but even with those a lot of them favor competitive play and not the main campaign.
The even bigger struggle comes from the fact that there are now seven Hidden Machines, and we have to fit all of those moves on the team. This ended up meaning one Pokémon was chosen just because it could house three of these moves and barely fit the theme, something I'm sad about, but literally could find no other way to make this work. It's actually a Pokémon I've always wanted to try using, but it will be sad that it will just amount to an HM Slave and I won't be able to use it to its full potential...
And uh, even now I'm still not entirely sold on who I want to use for the RICKMAN namesake. I have two ideas. I think I'm actually going to go with the one I didn't think of first, because I've never actually used that Pokémon in a main campaign; only in competitive battles. Whereas when I last did a bug-only run in HeartGold, I used the first idea, so it would basically be using the same Pokémon I used then in the same type of environment.
Oh, and there are some Pokémon I wanted to use that are only available post-game. So that was even more annoying. This team REALLY is just thrown together crap and I'm really not that happy with it but this was really the best I could do.
So, with complaining aside, I did start the game enough to catch my "new starter" and level him up to L6 with the wild battles (so he's on the same level the original starter would have been) and now I can start the game. So let's talk about what I do like about this game, just from the first few minutes.
First of all, the graphics are greatly improved. Having not played the games back-to-back in a long time, I always thought the 2nd gen graphics were just reused assets from the first games with color thrown on them since they're on GBC now. This is not the case, however. While they still look super dated compared to new games, the graphics in Crystal Version are fantastic compared to the first game. There's so much more detail on even simple things like beds and dressers in the houses, even if they didn't have color. The Pokémon also look really nice, and having them in color is great, too. There's also a lot more animation and fluidity with the graphics overall, which is great.
Secondly, THE POKEGEAR. This has always been one of my favorite things about this game. It has a little phone and radio and stuff and is just overall really cute and a great idea. It's a real shame they didn't keep this idea for the rest of the series. The Pokémon Company has said before that the reason they remove distinct features like this from each game is because they want each game to feel very unique compared to the others when the core of the game is staying the same. So you can remember GSC as "the one with Pokegear" and other things like that. Anyway, I love the Pokegear idea, and that alone added a LOT to the game coming off the first one.
I'm already noticing so many little things that have been added to make the game more robust and interesting. We have trees that grow berries, Pokémon are able to hold items that affect them in battle, Pokémon have genders and can breed now... really cool stuff that really set the stage for the rest of the series. Even if the main game ends up being a slog, I'll have to admit that this generation was greatly important in the development of the series as a whole. Oh, and this is the first time you can play as a girl character!
So, our adventure has begun... welcome our first Pokémon to the team, our underpowered new starter...
BARON the Spinarak! This thing is FACKING WEAKSAUCE but should be a fun introductory challenge. This was the only Pokémon I didn't have trouble choosing for the theme, because gotdam that Ariados is hotttttt. Among all the garbage designs from this generation, Ariados really stands out, and is actually one of my all-time favorite Pokémon and admittedly the top of my 'sexy pokes' list. Because yeah I want to bang bugs because my brain is broken... (alliteration?!)
Anyway, thankfully Spinarak can be acquired right off the bat without having to battle any trainers, so I didn't even have to try to force an early-game Pokémon into the group, since this one was set in stone before we even got here.
I think we're actually going to be able to pick up one or two members VERY soon, so we'll have a nice little team built. Though everyone is going to be weak for a long time.
FUN FACT TIME: Crystal was the "special edition" game of the 2nd generation, succeeding Gold and Silver with more features and stuff. In the original Gold and Silver, Spinaraks were purple. In Crystal, they decided to change their color to green. They're one of a few Pokémon who have had their colors changed over the course of the series. Personally I like them either color. I also like the shiny version which is silver with purple highlights.
Also, a quick little note about gender: all our Pokémon are going to be male this time. Later, I will not care about gender, but this game is going to be rough enough with this weird-ass party I threw together, so we need all the help we can get. So why male? In this first game to introduce gender to the series, they decided to make female Pokémon weaker than male Pokémon. YUP.
Now, it's possible to get a female Pokémon with better stats than a male, but overall, females have limited potential. Similar to the IV system in later games, this game has a similar "base stat" system that is referred to as DV (to differentiate them from IV) where Pokémon have a modifier for each stat that ranges between 0 and 15. Male Pokémon, no matter what, will get to roll 0 to 15 for every stat. But female Pokémon, on the other hand, only get to roll like... between 0 and 6 and stuff (it's different depending on the Pokémon species; species that are primarily female get slightly higher caps, but still not the same full-15 cap as the males.)
So basically, male Pokémon are much more likely to be stronger unless you get really bad rolls, as female Pokémon are forced into bad rolls. And there's no way to tell what your DVs are, so we're going to go with all-male teams to ensure we at least have the best potential rolls we can have.
Also, let's talk about WORDS :D Talking about the word "potential" reminded be of the differences in fan names and official names. In the games, IVs are referred to as "Potential." So instead of saying your Pokémon has a Speed IV of 19, you'd say your Pokémon has 19 Potential in Speed. But you'll never hear of anyone saying "Potential" outside of the in-game characters because the system was fan-named back when it was not actually mentioned in the games.
But that makes me think of another term that was coined by the fanbase in this game: "Shiny." Now that the games are in color, there's a very rare chance you might find a Pokémon that is colored differently than normal. When this happens, the Pokémon will sparkle for a second when it appears to make sure you realize it's different and special, hence fans referring to them as "shiny" Pokémon. A similar Japanese fan term also brewed up meaning "sparkling" Pokémon.
This type of Pokémon was officially referred to as "Alt. Color" in the games for a few generations. But the overwhelming use of the fan terms led to later games actually adopting those terms -- in current games, shiny Pokémon are explicitly referred to as Shiny Pokémon, such as in the item Shiny Charm whose description reads that it increases the chance to find Shiny Pokémon.
So yeah, that's a lot of blathering about a game I played, like, 20 minutes of so far. But I hope to have a lot more commentary on this game as I'm going to be experiencing it from the beginning to end for the first time since it was new pretty much, and I'm experiencing it immediately after playing the first game. And this is a game I hold strong negative opinions toward, and I always like having those kinds of opinions shattered so I can learn to appreciate more things.
Quick note: the player character is again named THAAO and the psychopathic violent rival is again NICO. At least next two games' NICOs will be cool, friendly characters to balance out these screwed up NICOs from the first games lol. If I get that far. But I really enjoyed the first playthrough and am pretty hyped about this one, so maybe I'll keep it up~~
ETA: While I talked about how much I want to stick my dick in Ariados, I want to also mention that I do really, really love Spinarak, too. Look at this adorable little baby spidey:
Coming up with a team for this set has been gruelingly difficult. The themes are not even that strict:
Bakula - The adorable one
Maillet - The hulking one
Kobayashi - The dancing one
Donnelly - The sinister one
Rickman - The cool one
Baron - The sexy one
That's it. That's the entire criteria. Now, I'm trying to make a team using only newly-introduced Pokeys to the game, so all the old Pokes making a reappearance are out, unless they have a new evolution for this game and I'm using that as their final form.
We have ONE HUNDRED new Pokémon to choose from... and it was a HUGE struggle to come up with six things to fit into those loose categories. I finally decided on something after hours of stressing over it. And the team is going to be pretty horrible because most of the new Pokémon are terrible statistically anyway, being completely overshadowed by the first game's monsters. There's a few gems hidden in there, but even with those a lot of them favor competitive play and not the main campaign.
The even bigger struggle comes from the fact that there are now seven Hidden Machines, and we have to fit all of those moves on the team. This ended up meaning one Pokémon was chosen just because it could house three of these moves and barely fit the theme, something I'm sad about, but literally could find no other way to make this work. It's actually a Pokémon I've always wanted to try using, but it will be sad that it will just amount to an HM Slave and I won't be able to use it to its full potential...
And uh, even now I'm still not entirely sold on who I want to use for the RICKMAN namesake. I have two ideas. I think I'm actually going to go with the one I didn't think of first, because I've never actually used that Pokémon in a main campaign; only in competitive battles. Whereas when I last did a bug-only run in HeartGold, I used the first idea, so it would basically be using the same Pokémon I used then in the same type of environment.
Oh, and there are some Pokémon I wanted to use that are only available post-game. So that was even more annoying. This team REALLY is just thrown together crap and I'm really not that happy with it but this was really the best I could do.
So, with complaining aside, I did start the game enough to catch my "new starter" and level him up to L6 with the wild battles (so he's on the same level the original starter would have been) and now I can start the game. So let's talk about what I do like about this game, just from the first few minutes.
First of all, the graphics are greatly improved. Having not played the games back-to-back in a long time, I always thought the 2nd gen graphics were just reused assets from the first games with color thrown on them since they're on GBC now. This is not the case, however. While they still look super dated compared to new games, the graphics in Crystal Version are fantastic compared to the first game. There's so much more detail on even simple things like beds and dressers in the houses, even if they didn't have color. The Pokémon also look really nice, and having them in color is great, too. There's also a lot more animation and fluidity with the graphics overall, which is great.
Secondly, THE POKEGEAR. This has always been one of my favorite things about this game. It has a little phone and radio and stuff and is just overall really cute and a great idea. It's a real shame they didn't keep this idea for the rest of the series. The Pokémon Company has said before that the reason they remove distinct features like this from each game is because they want each game to feel very unique compared to the others when the core of the game is staying the same. So you can remember GSC as "the one with Pokegear" and other things like that. Anyway, I love the Pokegear idea, and that alone added a LOT to the game coming off the first one.
I'm already noticing so many little things that have been added to make the game more robust and interesting. We have trees that grow berries, Pokémon are able to hold items that affect them in battle, Pokémon have genders and can breed now... really cool stuff that really set the stage for the rest of the series. Even if the main game ends up being a slog, I'll have to admit that this generation was greatly important in the development of the series as a whole. Oh, and this is the first time you can play as a girl character!
So, our adventure has begun... welcome our first Pokémon to the team, our underpowered new starter...
BARON the Spinarak! This thing is FACKING WEAKSAUCE but should be a fun introductory challenge. This was the only Pokémon I didn't have trouble choosing for the theme, because gotdam that Ariados is hotttttt. Among all the garbage designs from this generation, Ariados really stands out, and is actually one of my all-time favorite Pokémon and admittedly the top of my 'sexy pokes' list. Because yeah I want to bang bugs because my brain is broken... (alliteration?!)
Anyway, thankfully Spinarak can be acquired right off the bat without having to battle any trainers, so I didn't even have to try to force an early-game Pokémon into the group, since this one was set in stone before we even got here.
I think we're actually going to be able to pick up one or two members VERY soon, so we'll have a nice little team built. Though everyone is going to be weak for a long time.
FUN FACT TIME: Crystal was the "special edition" game of the 2nd generation, succeeding Gold and Silver with more features and stuff. In the original Gold and Silver, Spinaraks were purple. In Crystal, they decided to change their color to green. They're one of a few Pokémon who have had their colors changed over the course of the series. Personally I like them either color. I also like the shiny version which is silver with purple highlights.
Also, a quick little note about gender: all our Pokémon are going to be male this time. Later, I will not care about gender, but this game is going to be rough enough with this weird-ass party I threw together, so we need all the help we can get. So why male? In this first game to introduce gender to the series, they decided to make female Pokémon weaker than male Pokémon. YUP.
Now, it's possible to get a female Pokémon with better stats than a male, but overall, females have limited potential. Similar to the IV system in later games, this game has a similar "base stat" system that is referred to as DV (to differentiate them from IV) where Pokémon have a modifier for each stat that ranges between 0 and 15. Male Pokémon, no matter what, will get to roll 0 to 15 for every stat. But female Pokémon, on the other hand, only get to roll like... between 0 and 6 and stuff (it's different depending on the Pokémon species; species that are primarily female get slightly higher caps, but still not the same full-15 cap as the males.)
So basically, male Pokémon are much more likely to be stronger unless you get really bad rolls, as female Pokémon are forced into bad rolls. And there's no way to tell what your DVs are, so we're going to go with all-male teams to ensure we at least have the best potential rolls we can have.
Also, let's talk about WORDS :D Talking about the word "potential" reminded be of the differences in fan names and official names. In the games, IVs are referred to as "Potential." So instead of saying your Pokémon has a Speed IV of 19, you'd say your Pokémon has 19 Potential in Speed. But you'll never hear of anyone saying "Potential" outside of the in-game characters because the system was fan-named back when it was not actually mentioned in the games.
But that makes me think of another term that was coined by the fanbase in this game: "Shiny." Now that the games are in color, there's a very rare chance you might find a Pokémon that is colored differently than normal. When this happens, the Pokémon will sparkle for a second when it appears to make sure you realize it's different and special, hence fans referring to them as "shiny" Pokémon. A similar Japanese fan term also brewed up meaning "sparkling" Pokémon.
This type of Pokémon was officially referred to as "Alt. Color" in the games for a few generations. But the overwhelming use of the fan terms led to later games actually adopting those terms -- in current games, shiny Pokémon are explicitly referred to as Shiny Pokémon, such as in the item Shiny Charm whose description reads that it increases the chance to find Shiny Pokémon.
So yeah, that's a lot of blathering about a game I played, like, 20 minutes of so far. But I hope to have a lot more commentary on this game as I'm going to be experiencing it from the beginning to end for the first time since it was new pretty much, and I'm experiencing it immediately after playing the first game. And this is a game I hold strong negative opinions toward, and I always like having those kinds of opinions shattered so I can learn to appreciate more things.
Quick note: the player character is again named THAAO and the psychopathic violent rival is again NICO. At least next two games' NICOs will be cool, friendly characters to balance out these screwed up NICOs from the first games lol. If I get that far. But I really enjoyed the first playthrough and am pretty hyped about this one, so maybe I'll keep it up~~
ETA: While I talked about how much I want to stick my dick in Ariados, I want to also mention that I do really, really love Spinarak, too. Look at this adorable little baby spidey:
