All the Pokemens

[Aura]

Fall City

So, now that we're done with our skim over the world and exploration of, as far as I'm aware, all of the areas we couldn't explore, what else is there to do in the postgame? Well, as it turns out, there's actually a bit of story content in the postgame to explore! I actually almost found myself stuck in this, but I just happened to say "no," to Prof. Hasting's request to spend the night because I kind of just assumed it was just recharging the styler.

Anyway, in order to begin this post-game story, you'll need to find Prof. Hastings in his lab. As previously mentioned, he'll ask for you to spend the night so that we can discuss our journey and where we'll be going from here. You'll need to dismiss all the pokemon you've captured, so it looks like this is goodbye to our new friends.

The next morning, Joel sends for us for a new mission. We report to the Ranger Base where we're told that we're to go with Aria to investigate some strange whirlpools that have begun to appear in Saffra Sea. Aria insists that she would be fine on this mission alone, but that she's been waiting for you because she was ordered to do so. In any case, let's get going.

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Fall City Harbor

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Special Mission: Search the Saffra Sea

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As soon as you arrive at the harbor, you're met by a sailor who explains that heavy storms and whirlpools have been forming in the Saffra Sea, making travel by sea incredibly dangerous. In addition, the lighthouse has gone dark! When they tried to investigate the matter beneath the lighthouse, they were shocked to find a whole swarm of Staryu down there! They request that we help with the Staryu so that perhaps the lighthouse will begin to work again. We take the ladder down to underground area and head over to the place where we captured the Staryu from before. And now...

   

There are four Staryu! As we approach, the four Staryu will immediately attack us at once. This isn't too tough to complete as long as you persist in using that strategy of keeping your short line at the bottom of the screen. You don't get any assists for this, so you'll have to capture them the old fashioned way or with the help of Plusle.

After capturing the four Staryu, the Lighthouse is restored and we should be able to get to investigating the Saffra Sea! That is, until we hear a scream coming from the tour house.

   

As we enter inside, we'll find four Krabby terrorizing the people inside! The receptionists said she tried to calm them down by playing Rock Paper Scissors but they were not having it! The humor of this game is still shining through and I'm here for it. Anyway, we'll obviously have to capture these Krabby just like the Staryu, no Poke-Assists just good ol' fashioned patience.

After releasing the Krabby and emerging from the tour house, we're met with yet another scream! This one is coming from the dock!

   

When we rush to investigate, we find four Carvanha seem to be terrorizing the Lapras Guy's Lapras! Once again, we capture them to calm them down, but we've really got to get to the bottom of what's driving all these sea pokemon so crazy! Well, we'll soon get our answer. A series of whirlpools begin to appear just offshore. Aria suggests that we take Larpas to investigate and so we do just that!

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Saffra Sea

With Lapras, we surf down to the whirlpools in Saffra Sea to investigate. As we approach, one of the whirlpools grows larger and begins sucking us in! We try to get away, but we can't in time and before we know it, we're submerged underwater!

And it's down here where a very familiar silhouette appears in the water--one that was foreshadowed in the credit roll. 

It isn't too long before the Legendary Sea Basin Pokemon: Kyogre! This Kyogre appears to have large bite markings on its back! It must've gotten into a fight that's caused it to rampage and cause so much trouble in the sea! Needless to say, we'll need to capture Kyogre to calm it down and return the sea to normal. But that's probably easier said than done.

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Vs. Kyogre

We've yet to actually be able to get any Friend Pokemon on our team, so we're still just armed with Plusle. That's fine, though, because Plusle's really all we'll need for Kyogre.

Trying to capture Kyogre without an assist is incredibly challenging, though. You'll need to circle him a lot really fast before he'll use his Surf attack and wipe the entire screen. And I mean really fast. You don't get much breathing room at all. So I strongly recommend focusing on building your partner gauge if necessary and then unleashing Discharge to capture Kyogre once the waves from Surf die down.

Once Kyogre is captured, it'll immediately be calmed and return to the wild. We can now resurface. Aria is relieved to see that we're okay, but she insists that, not only was she definitely not crying, but she was also only concerned with you because she was worried about her workload doubling! Regardless, it seems the issue at the sea is resolved, so we'll need to return to the base and report back to Joel.

Joel congratulates us on completing the mission and then we explain about Kyogre and the bite marks on its back. Joel is shocked to hear this news and immediately concludes that Kyogre may have gotten into a battle with Groudon! Perhaps that's why it's come here to Fiore! Groudon is the only pokemon Joel can think of large enough to leave the bite marks we described. I don't think there's any reason to doubt him. Regardless, we get a fade to black and a save point here, so that looks like that for today! There's a little bit more to this plot, so we'll be focusing on this post-game story for the next couple days. Next time, we'll see if we can't look into this fight between Groudon and Kyogre!

[Aura]

Ringtown

Once we've calmed Kyogre and finished our mission to investigate the bizarre happenings at Saffra Sea, we'll return from our patrol to Ringtown and report back to Spenser. He'll be amazed by our story of having captured Kyogre! He then asks if we're tired at all after all the nonstop work we've been doing since we were hired. Then, he tells us that Cameron's arranged a special gift for you: A vacation in Summerland! The rangers everywhere around Fiore are inspired by our heroics, so they're all working extra hard in our place. Meanwhile, we've definitely earned an opportunity to lay low and get some quality time off the clock.

This vacation is being given to Lunick as well. He did help out... kind of in that final face-off against Gordor. Well, more specifically, his Minun helped my Plusle destroy the Power Styler but I supposed he helped in the very video-gamey sense by standing on the sidelines and cheering you on while you do all the hard work.

Not that I have any negative feelings toward Lunick at all, he's a pretty cool guy. Just not a whole lot of personality to attach to, huh?

Anyway, even though it's just for personal use, Spenser does authorize use of the Dragonite Bus for us to travel to Summerland with. So, off we go!

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Summerland

As we arrive in Summerland, we'll find the heat is far more sweltering than usual. And when we report to Cameron, he'll explain the timing for this vacation seems to be absolutely awful. Out of nowhere, a major heat wave struck Summerland. In addition, earthquakes have been plaguing the area as well. After meeting with Kyogre, I think there's only one natural conclusion that will come from these symptoms.

Cameron adds that Lunick has already gone ahead on his own to investigate at the Jungle Relic and hasn't returned, and so, with great reluctance, Cameron has to be the heartless taskmaster and cancel your vacation, instead assigning you a new mission to go and find Lunick as well as help to investigate the cause of the earthquakes.

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Jungle Relic

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Special Mission: Summerland Rescue Duo

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As we leave the Summerland Base, we automatically appear at the Jungle Relic.

   

The Pokemon here are mostly the same as what we've seen before: Numel and Electrike as well as a Tangela and Sceptile in the grotto near the entrance.

The path up north is blocked off by a pool of lava which we'll need three Water icons to clear. Since we were warped straight here, we don't have access to water just yet, so we'll have to leave this here for now.

A Rhydon now appears on the other side of the bridge which is going to be important because the wooden gate that once blocked the path to the small pond with Poliwrath in it is now blocked by a large boulder instead!

Minun is standing outside of this boulder trying to get our attention! It seems as though Lunick must have gotten trapped inside! We use Rhydon's Rock Smash to destroy the boulder and free Lunick. He's grateful to be rescued but feels ashamed for having ruined your vacation since you had to come rescue him. It's not all that bad, though. Being a Pokemon Ranger is kind of fun!

 

Inside, you'll find Poliwrath! You might want to capture both of these guys since you'll need to use one to clear that Lava Pool from earlier.

  

If you continue to explore this side, you'll find Magmar, Manectric, and the two Beldum in the chamber down the stairs.

If we go back, instead, we can now use Poliwrath to clear the lava puddle instead and push deeper in!

We'll start to find Slugma up here as well as another Rydon. More curiously, though...

 

A Go-Rock Grunt!? He introduces himself as the sole member of the Go-Rock Solo Squad and gets angry at you for laughing at him! So, he'll attack you with his two Metang! Not the first time we've delt with these guys. Just capture away and hopefully we'll make that Go-Rock Runt question his career choices for the last time. Meanwhile, we'll continue deeper into the cave!

     

The rest of the dungeon is filled with the same pokemon as before. If you haven't guessed by now, our goal here is to make our way to that strange door we couldn't open before. If you haven't been there yet, you'll probably need to use your second Poliwrath to cool the lava pool here. We've already done that, though, so it's as simple as moving deeper in!

Eventually, we arrive at the door in question and enter to reveal...

The Legendary Continent Pokemon Groudon! Lunick comments that it seems to be in pain and asks for us to calm it down. And so, we're off to capture another legendary!

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Vs. Groudon

The capture of Groudon is fairly simple. But don't get hasty! He'll open up with an Earthquake that covers the entire screen and breaks your line. This might pressure you into drawing circles really fast, but he seems to have a long time between uses of Earthquake, so feel free to take your time. Instead, Groudon's most prominent attack is Hyper Beam. He'll fire it quickly but leave a small window to draw a loop around him before he turns to fire another. He won't necessarily fire them in the same position, though. He might catch you by surprise by turning and firing. He only seems to fire diagonally, so anything in an X-shape around him is a dangerous place to keep your line. Just draw loops around him between his Hyper Beams and you should be good. As always, take your time. It's very simple.

If you have trouble with this, you do have the opportunity to use Poke-Assists this time. It's immune to Plusle's Discharge, but it's vulnerable to Poliwrath's Water assist as well as Sceptile's Grass Assist.

Once groudon is captured, Lunick approaches and notices it's got several bite marks from another large pokemon. He concludes, of course, that it must be bite marks from the legendary Kyogre that we captured before. The evidence seems to line up. Either way, we've helped Groudon to calm down so that's a mission's success! We return to the Summerland Base to report to Cameron about our mission, but apparently the heat wave still hasn't cleared up. That is, until Cameron suggests that perhaps the lingering heat comes from the blooming couple in front of him... It's a funny cute moment where Lunick and the protagonist get a little embarrassed, but if I'm being honest, I don't know if I'd ship these two characters unless Lunick gets some major character development. I'd rather ship myself with Aria who's shown some growth over the course of the story and clearly cares a lot, too! It's odd because I rarely go for the Tsundere type, but Aria is pretty sweet about it and can recognize when she's being rude. I like her!

Anyway, we get another save screen which means that's it for today! If we captured Groudon and Kyogre, perhaps next time we'll find a mission where we have to capture Rayquaza? Only time will tell!

[Aura]

[UPDATE!] Today was Pokemon Day! That means a new Pokemon Presents was broadcasted with many new Pokemon-related announcements! Not a whole lot of stuff announced here affects the scope of this project too much with the exception of one major announcement: The unveiling of the 9th generation of Pokemon with the games Pokemon Scarlett and Violet! It's actually looking very promising to me! While I've had mixed feelings toward recent Pokemon designs, there's usually a handful of designs I really enjoy! Currently, the new starters are the only Gen 9 pokemon officially revealed and I'm currently wanting to use Sprigatito! Anyway, this isn't relevant much to what's going on, I just thought I'd add a blurb here discussing the new announcement and to say that I've updated the scope of the project to include the new games set to be released this year!

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Wintown

Continuing on with our postgame story, we've captured Kyogre and Groudon. Something's telling me there's trouble brewing still. What caused those two to fight? Could it be possible there's a conflict brewing here? Let's be real--of course there is.

The only base we haven't reported to since the start of this little post-game adventure is the Wintown base. Sure enough, if we take the Dragonite Bus to Wintown, we'll find Elita standing outside. If we speak to her, she'll say she has a bad feeling about some strangers she's been seeing going up and down Sekra Range before asking if you're willing to accept a new mission from her.

Agreeing to this mission will meet you with a briefing inside the base. You are to go with Silent Chris to the Fiore Temple to investigate these strange people. And, once again, you're instantly warped to the temple, so no bringing Pokemon in from outside.

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Fiore Temple

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Special Mission: The Temple's Sinister Shadows?

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Once again, our mission begins right away. We'll be met with a creep dressed in a green outfit who seems to be reminiscent of a Pokemon Ranger from Hoenn? The creep can immediately guess that we're here to investigate the suspicious individuals but immediately calls us those suspicious individuals and attacks us with his three Ekans!

  

These Ekans are more or less weaker versions of Arbok. They spit Sludge that covers parts of the ground and they'll dash at your line, but they take fewer loops and are much smaller making them easier to loop as well. Capturing the three of them isn't too challenging.

Upon causing his Ekans to flee, the creep gets angry at us for doing that and calls us villains before letting slip a hint toward his identity with the line: "Don't mess with us go-"

"go..."

"go..."

"Goat's-Milk Cheese is my favorite!" Before dashing off in a panic. Hm... I wonder who these shady characters are? Regardless, it looks like we'll need to be prepared for some classic conflicts here. I was kind of enjoying the brief break we had from these guys but it's looking like we're back to having to deal with them again. Fair enough, I suppose.

    

You'll find many of the same pokemon in the courtyard area: Golem, Donphan, Aerodactyl, Grovyle, and Raichu.

  

In addition, you'll also find Ralts, Kirlia, and Gardevoir scattered around the courtyard! These three will prove important as you make your way to the back and find the gate to the temple proper is sealed off again. This time, the pedestal puzzle is changed, asking for an infant, young, and mature pokemon with psychic power. These are of course referring to Ralts, Kirlia, and Gardevoir respectively.

The three pokemon's specific locations are actually pretty tough to pinpoint due to their tendency to warp around, and they're even tougher to encounter since the area is full of one-way cliffs. It's kind of luck whether or not you can get to them before they warp away and it's admittedly a little frustrating. Just remain persistent and chase them around. Eventually they'll warp to a convenient location.

      

Of course, if you're struggling capturing these guys, you can always head to the underground area where you can find Medicham, Swalot, Gengar, Glalie, Espeon, Umbreon, and Ariados. Gengar, Umbreon, and Ariados will be the most useful assists in this endeavor, but none of the Gardevoir family are particularly tough to capture, so this shouldn't be necessary.

Once you have the three pokemon on the pedestals, the gate will open up revealing another creep! This guy thanks us for opening the door, which he thought was an automatic door! He tells us their plan is running behind schedule because they've been delivering messages back and forth and that the door closing was causing quite an issue. Once again, he nearly lets slip his identity. "Because we're the go-"

"Go..."

"Go..."

"Going my way is what I meant to say!"

Once again, running off in a blind panic. 

Moving onward to the temple proper, we'll find the Eeveelutions are nowhere to be found.

 

Climbing up ahead, we run into another creep. This guy's got a Swellow and Solrock! He, too, stumbles on nearly spilling the beans before finally giving it up. He can't think of anymore puns so he finally decides to drop the act and confess that this is indeed the Go-Rock Squad in disguise! It seems there are still remnants trying to straggle along! They can't be up to any good, so we'll need to make our way up!

The Swellow and Solrock combo are surprisingly annoying. I find it easier to focus on capturing the Swellow first and then focusing on the Solrock after the fact. But Solrock's Flash causes a lot of problems as well. You may want to use Plusle's help here.

  

The next guy has got to have one of the most obnoxious setups in the game: Two Donphan and a Houndoom. I wouldn't even bother trying to do this legit. One Donphan on its own is incredibly obnoxious to deal with, but two of them together make it nearly impossible to capture them both. That's not even factoring in the Houndoom which, on its own isn't too bad, but with its projectile Embers, your line can be destroyed even if it's nowhere near you, cutting short your capture attempts on the Donphan even on the rare opportunity you do get a good setup to capture one or both of the Donphan.

Glalie can help a lot here, especially since Houndoom is treated as a Dark-type. But it's mainly the Donphan that are the problem.

We aren't too far away after sending this Go-Rock Grunt packing from the top of the temple where we'll find three grunts surrounding...

Rayquaza!?

Apparently, these Grunts' plan was to capture Rayquaza and use it to rebuild the Go-Rock Squad, but they couldn't come even close to capturing the legendary pokemon even with their combined efforts! Of course they can't do it! Gordor couldn't even control Entei with a stronger styler than theirs! Though it isn't explicitly said, I think you can conclude that the Go-Rock Squad intentionally baited Groudon and Kyogre into fighting each other in order to lure Rayquaza out so that they could enact this plan? It's an incredibly poorly thought-out plan, but also quite an impressive feat for this band of loose grunts to pull off! Especially considering it's implied that Groudon and Kyogre have traveled all the way here from Hoenn to heal their wounds from their battles.

Regardless, the grunts all flee after failing to capture Rayquaza, leaving us to clean up their mess once again! Chris is stunned by being witness to the legendary Rayquaza who is not known to leave his home in the stratosphere for much. He tries to speak to it to calm it down, but quickly realizes the only solution is to leave it to our elegant capturing technique.

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Vs. Rayquaza

Now I'm gonna be honest, I was really worried about this boss fight after seeing some comments about it in the comment section of one of the OST videos, but it was actually super simple. Not quite as easy as Groudon, but Kyogre was definitely the hardest of the three to capture.

The trickiest part about Rayquaza is that he'll unleash a flurry of Twister if you try to loop him straight-up. Instead, you're going to want to capture Rayquaza between his Dragon Rage attacks. He'll fire them off in a series of bursts and you'll want to draw a quick loop between each shot. The tricky part of this is that he slowly moves with each shot and can eventually end up at the edge of the screen, so be sure to know when to pull back and shorten your line to avoid breaking it. With this, Rayquaza is a fairly simple capture even without any assists.

If you want to make Rayquaza a total joke, though, you can also bring in Glalie! Rayquaza is treated as a Dragon type rather than a Flying-type, so he is especially vulnerable to ice-type assists.

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After capturing Rayquaza, Silent Chris is enamored and can't stop glorifying Rayquaza before its eventual release. He comments about his outburst and asks that you don't tell Elita about his tendency to speak when inspired. He doesn't want his nickname to change to something like "Gabby Chris."

With our mission complete, we return to the base and report our findings to Elita who congratulates us on a job well done. In explaining the details, Silent Chris makes the mistake of speaking up about the Rayquaza encounter. Elita is surprised to hear him speak so much and even decides to call him "Gabby Chris," right on the money. Chris seems to have a good sense of humor about it and begins to burst out laughing! Gotta love this guy.

Anyway, that's another mission down and another save screen! I do believe that's the end of the main-story.. story beats. I think next up I should focus on trying to complete the Ranger Browser! Like I said, I think this is an important thing to try and do in order to give this game's coverage the respect it deserves. There are still a few gaps here and there in our browser and I want to fill it up! So next time, we'll try to look into the missing browser entries and see what we can do about that!

[Aura]

So, last time we've finished all of the postgame content in the main story of Pokemon Ranger. Today, we're going to be focused on the patchwork of capturing all the pokemon that remian in th eoverworld.

Thanks to our patrol around the world earlier, there aren't many pokemon missing in our browser. In fact, I left some space today expecting to have to go out of my way to capture some stragglers that I managed to overlook, but we were actually rather thorough in our patrol! Every pokemon we're missing has a reason to be missing. In case you haven't noticed, there are three areas of the game we haven't really thoroughly addressed. If you recall, I said we'd be returning to the capture challenges in the postgame and now we're finally at that point! Today is going to be focused entirely on covering the capture challenges in detail. And we'll start with the one that only just opened up in Fall City: The Capture Arena!

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Fall City -- Capture Arena

The Capture Arena was still under construction over the course of the main story, but here in the postgame, the arena is fully complete! You'll find it by going around the corner south from the ranger base and then following the road to the west. This will take you to the Capture Arena where you'll meet with the last of the three MC brothers: MC Arena. The focus of this challenge is pretty straight-forward. SImilar to the other capture challenges, you've got a 2 minutes to capture as many pokemon as you can to earn as many points as you can, but there's a few additional layers to it.

For one, you have no control over what pokemon you encounter. For the entire challenge, you'll never leave Capture mode. Instead, wild pokemon will randomly drop in from above to be captured. If you let them pile up, you can capture multiple at a time. The point values of the pokemon will be multiplied by the amount of pokemon you successfully capture at the same time. So, you capture two pokemon, each one's point value will double! Catching three pokemon at once will triple the scores of each, giving you a massive boon to your points! However, since pokemon only drop into the arena one at a time and are pretty spaced out apart, I really don't know if it's all that worth-while to wait for these multipliers. Instead, I think your efforts are better spent focusing on getting bonus time! For every additional time you loop a pokemon, you'll get an extra second added to your time! For pokemon you're confident you can capture easily, you want to go for the maximum +10 seconds in order to get as many points as you can! Struggling to capture two or three pokemon at a time is more likely just to cause more headache than it's worth. It may seem a little overwhelming, but capturing each pokemon one at a time and focusing on getting a lot of bonus time will net you your target score.

The record holder here is none other than Spenser himself, who has a whopping 50,000 points! Initially, when I was trying to play it safe and go for double or triple points occasionally, this seemed like an impossibility. But with time, it's actually proven to be a lot simpler than I was expecting. I had a much more challenging time completing the Sea and Field capture challenges.

When the challenge begins, you'll go through the first round. After capturing 10 pokemon, a tough pokemon will appear -- one of the bosses from the main story! Capturing the tough pokemon will automatically give you an additional 10 seconds and level you up to the next rank where you'll find tougher pokemon that are worth more points!

Your challenge will end if you run out of time or your styler breaks. If you need to charge your Styler, your styler will be charged by capturing a Pichu, Pikachu, or Raichu based on the amount of loops you've drawn around it. As always, Poke Assists are banned, so Plusle can't help you here!

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The pokemon in the first set mostlys eem focused on pokemon available from the first area of the game: Chikorita, Mudkip, Torchic, Pichu, Taillow, and Zigzagoon. They're all pretty easy captures save for Taillow and Zigzagoon who can be a bit sporradic. Try to just capture them quickly without worrying too much about the +10 seconds. The others shouldn't be challenging at all to get +10 seconds with, though, and since these pokemon aren't worth many points, this is a great time to focus on building up time quickly!

The boss of the first round is Rhydon! You'll get +10 seconds just for capturing him at all, but you can increase the amount by drawing additional circles. I don't think it's worth it on these tough pokemon, though, because it's easy to screw up and moving carefully will just waste time.

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Round 2 consists of Bulbasaur, Bellsprout, Combusken, Paras, Poliwag, and Pichu. They're all pretty easy to get +10 with, but Combusken, Poliwag, and Bulbasaur can all annoyingly get in the way a bit.

Machoke is the boss of this round.

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Grimer, Snubbull, Skitty, Meowth, Corphish, and Pichu populate round 3! The pokemon are starting to get trickier. I recommend focusing on getting +10 with Grimer, Snubbull, and Pichu.

And the boss is Muk!

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Round 4 consists of Treecko, Ludicolo, Mankey, Phanpy, Spinarak, and Pichu: The Pokemon of the Jungle!

And the boss of this round is Politoed!

Now, this was where my best run ended, but I'll detail the further runs that I've been able to find documentation on. Sadly, I can't seem to find a comprehensive list of what pokemon you can find here, so I unfortunately won't be able to provide one for you, but all you should need to complete the game are these first four rounds. Completing the entire arena seems to be nearly humanly impossible, so don't stress too much about it.

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Machop, Beedrill, Bagon, Magmar, and Pichu can be found in Round 5. There seems to be consistently at least 6 pokemon in each area. If I had to guess what was missing, I'd probably say either Slugma or Numel. Maybe Graveler or Geodude?

The boss of this area, anyway, is Dragonite!

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Round 6 includes Bulbasaur, Donphan, Larvitar, Bagon, Quilava, Crawdaunt, Poliwag and Pichu! It really seems like all of a sudden they through together a whole bunch of pokemon here. This round seems to consistently be the wall. And since I don't have any sources detialing the pokemon that appear in each round, I can't tell you what the bosses are from here on. Be my guest to buy the game and try yourself! As of writing this post, the game is still available for purchase on the Wii U eShop! 

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Anyway, once we've captured enough pokemon to reach 50,000 points we're done with this place! So, what was the point of all that? Well, aside from Bragging Rights, this challenge, as well as the other capture challenges, do actually play an additional role. I think the effects of beating the records at all three challenges will become apparent if we revisit the previous capture challenges -- Starting with Ringtown!

Kisara Plains -- Grassland Capture Challenge

       

When you first visit the Grassland Capture Challenge, the pokemon you're initially met with are Bulbasaur, Fearow, Tangela, Tauros, Donphan, Torchic, Kirlia, and Spoink.

But, there are some special pokemon that will only appear under certain circumstances.

 

Abra and Kecleon will only appear starting from 2-minutes on the timer. 

  

Combusken, Rapidash, and Gardevoir will only appear if you capture two Torchic, Spoink, or Kirlia respectively.

 

To add some additional layers to this, Slowpoke and Doduo require you to capture 2 Abra and 2 Gardevoir respectively, making them fiarly rare encounters. Slowpoke is a pokemon we've yet to capture as it's exclusive to the Field Capture Challenge! Slowpoke, as its name suggests, is incredibly slow and will use Yawn to create a large floaty cloud that will slowly drift away from him. Slowpoke is very easy to capture, in case it isn't obvious.

  

Finally, we have Fearow, Dodrio, and Skarmory! It seems this is where the ranger leaders met their partner pokemon! These special pokemon are available from the beginning of the challenge, but will only appear once you've reached certain accomplishments. Fearow requires you to beat Spenser's high score (50,000) at the Capture Arena. Dodrio requires you to have beaten Joel's score (5,000) in the Grassland Capture Challenge, and Skarmory simply requires you to have completed the main story and viewed the credit roll.

All three of these pokemon are exclusive to this area. I don't know if there's much to say about them, though. They all behave the way you'd expect them to. Fearow and Skarmory fly around a lot to try and break your line to punish cocky looping. Fearow is far more aggressive, firing gusts around like crazy. Dodrio just runs in and out of view, leaping and all-around being annoying. It's also very fast to flee. These three are collectively worth a whole bunch of points! As in, just capturing the three of them alone beat my high score!

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Safra Sea -- Marine Capture Challenge

The Marine Capture Challenge is the one where I seem to have missed the most. Quite frankly, it makes sense.

        

Once again, we have a slew of pokemon that are available right away: Magikarp, Horsea, Seadra, Goldeen, Starmie, Remoraid, Octillery, Carvanha, and Sharpedo. 

Horsea and Seadra are both new captures. They'll both pop above the water after a little while, wander around, and then dive back underwater. You'll need to capture them before they dive back underwater or your loops will automatically be dropped.

Of course, you have your pokemon that will only appear under special conditions.

A school of Luvdisc can spawn in one minute into the challenge, similar to Abra in the Grassland challenge. Luvdisc are new captures that require you to really be on your toes! They'll briefly leap out of the water and almost immediately return underwater. You've gotta circle them twoice really fast. I'm talking you should already be drawing your loop before it even comes up.

   

Seaking, Starmie, Mantine, and Kingdra can be found after capturing 2 Goldeen, Staryu, Remoraid, and Horsea respectively. (Note: That's HorSEA not SEAdra). Seaking and Starmie are both new captures for me, but again, I'm not sure what to say. They're just tougher counterparts to their weaker forms.

Because he wants to be especially difficult, Gyarados can be found here as well! But it requires 5 Magikarp to encounter it. Gyarados will only appear in the postgame, though. A nasty surprise, I'm sure!

 

Once again, we've got pokemon that like to use layers to complicate the process. Psyduck requires us to capture 2 Starmie, meaning it also requires 2 Staryu by proxy. Meanwhile, Wailmer requires 2 Seaking which also means 2 Goldeen. Expect Psyduck to be your last encounter because it takes a shocking amoung of loops to capture! Thankfully, Psyduck doesn't seem prone to attack, so you can casually. Wailmer is a bit more annoying. He'll surface and use Water Spout. The Water Spout barely even looks like an attack and it honestly took me a while to even register what was breaking my line. I thought it was just a splash effect! Anyway, easy solution as always: Just slow down.

And finally, we have Pelipper. The Partner pokemon of Cameron. In order to get Pelipper to appear, you'll need to beat Cameron's high score (3,500) in the Marine Capture Challenge.

Pelipper himself is rather challenging just to even encounter. It flies overhead so you'll need to wait for it to dive down on its own. If it sees you, it won't dive down and will instead fly away from you. So, you'll need to watch it from afar and ambush it when it finally dives. Needless to say, this whole thing becomes a massive annoyance when you factor in all the Staryu and whatever else that are constantly stalking you.

The actual capture of Pelipper himself isn't too tough, just be patient! Don't underestimate the range of its Water Gun, either. It seems to just be a small projectile but it makes a big splash that can damage your styler.

==================

And after capturing Pelipper, our Ranger Browser is now sitting pretty at 209 pokemon! There's just one pokemon missing, and if we skim through our browser... it's Snorlax!

Sekra Range

If we make our way up north from Wintown to the cavern that housed Snorlax... we'll find it awake for the first time! Yup, the only way to wake up Snorlax is to register all 409 other pokemon into the browser! After accomplishing this, Snorlax will be the last pokemon to capture!

Snorlax is a very easy capture. Just circle it a while and he'll just fall right in line! He will occasionally attack with a Body Slam that will send shockwaves around, breaking your line, but just keep at it and remember to retreat when you think he might blow!

With the capture of Snorlax, our browser is now officially complete with all 210 pokemon that can be found in the Fiore Region! We soon receive a message from the Ranger Union acknowledging our feat, and Spenser invites us back to Ringtown for a congratulations ceremony! We receive a special mark on our profile and each ranger and leader congratulates us on our accomplishment and shoots to try even harder going forward! Everyone is incredibly happy and supportive over us and, I'm gonna be honest, even though I might see these guys again in the special missions, it's a little sad knowing this very well could be the last time we see these characters. I'm going to miss them when they're gone completely!

====================

Anyway, now that our browser is complete, you might think we're done with the game, but nope! There's still Ranger Net to cover and there's a little bit to explore! Next time, we begin the final stretch of the game! See you then!

[Aura]

Upon beating the game, we were prompted with a notification that a new mode called Ranger Net was unlocked! I think it's finally about time we check that mode out!

Ranger Net

Selecting Ranger Net from the title menu will display the Ranger Net menu, where we'll see a really cutely-animated Plusle and Minun running around in the background. You can tap on them to get their attention, but they won't do much. The main draw here are the special missions we can access! These missions all involve a rare pokemon in a familiar area from the main story. These pokemon are not required to complete the Ranger Browser, but they do get added to your browser after being captured! Which means, even though we were given our certificate, our browser isn't quite as complete as it could be.

Now, this mode is a bit strange. From what I'm gathering, in the original Japanese version, these missions had to be downloaded via wireless connection or by using the dual-slot functionality of the DS. I'm not exactly sure how the process worked, but if I had to guess, events would probably be held at stores like the Pokemon Center where employees would plug a special GBA cartridge into your system and the mission could be spread through download play. That's entirely speculative, though, I'm not entirely sure how all of this worked. I didn't live in Japan in 2006, okay! After downloading a mission, Ranger Net would appear on the title screen! You didn't need to beat the game at all!

When the game was localized, it seems this event limitation was removed and all of the missions are now available for everyone to play! With a bit of a catch as we'll discuss a later on, that is. Instead of appearing upon downloading a mission, Ranger Net is now unlocked by simply clearing the game's main story. Along with unlocking Ranger Net, you'll also unlock your first special mission from the Ranger Net!

Selecting a mission will place you into a brief episode that will play out like one of the postgame special missions, with a small catch that the Save Machines are all down for maintenance! You'll need to be extra careful not to break your styler during these special missions. If you do, you're starting the whole thing again from the beginning! Cutscenes and all!

======================

Special Mission: Gain Deoxys's Trust?!

Client: Spenser

An extremely rare Deoxys has been discovered. However, it has turned aggressive for some unknown reason. Capture and becalm it before it harms other Pokémon or people!

-----------------------

Ringtown Ranger Base

This mission begins at the Ringtown Ranger Base where Spenser reports to us about a Deoxys that appeared in Lyrna Forest. He seems rather downtrodden over it, however. He explains that he tried to capture the Deoxys with his styler, but the capture failed! He had to conclude that it must simply be impossible to establish an emotional bond with the mysterious creature. What's more, the Deoxys has started to become aggressive! He assigns us and Lunick with the task to try and find a way to help soothe Deoxys.

He seems especially depressed over this, so Murph offers to try and cheer him up during our mission. At least we don't have to worry about Spenser's sulking, I suppose. But a pokemon that can't be captured? We certainly have to go and investigate!

===============

Lyra Forest

As we leave the ranger base, Lunick and I arrive at the mountainous area outside of Krokka Tunnel.

It's here that Deoxys appears before us! I'll be using Mystery Dungeon sprites for Deoxys' alternate forms because I can't seem to find sprites of it outside of its Normal Forme elsewhere. Anyway, Deoxys is in its Attack Forme here and hastily retreats into Krokka Tunnel. This could be dangerous if a rampaging Deoxys got loose in Fall City! Naturally, Lunick and I chase after it!

=================

Krokka Tunnel

The pokemon here inside Krokka Tunnel haven't changed at all, so there's no real point in me going over them, I don't think. But I will take note of some particular pokemon that might be helpful. Still, the mission is simple enough to be cleared with just Plusle and maybe a bit of healing from Magneton and Magnemite throughout the dungeon.

You'll find a Magneton right away from the entrance, and that's great because you're not far from what is honestly the hardest capture in the entire mission which you're given very little prep time for.

A bit deeper in and you'll run into Attack Forme Deoxys again who won't hesitate to attack you! Spenser warned that capturing Deoxys would be impossible, but we've got to at least try, right? Well, it just so happens that Deoxys's aggression in its Attack Forme makes it a really annoying capture. He won't hesitate to charge straight at the start of your line and attack it. If you're likely to die against any forme of Deoxys, it's probably this one. You can work your way around it with some clever use of the styler to bait him into attacking before reaching the start of your line only to erase the part of the line he's trying to attack and then quickly draw loops around him, but you're honestly better off just focusing on building up your Partner Gauge and unleashing a Discharge from Plusle. Once Deoxys is paralyzed, capture is easy enough. But, just when you think it's done, Deoxys simply drops back into the field.

We exit capture mode and Lunick is completely flabbergasted as to what he just witnessed. Deoxys retreats deeper into the cave. We receive a message from Spenser and Prof. Hastings, claiming that Deoxys can only be captured in its Normal Forme. We'll need to find a way to get it to calm down in order to achieve this, otherwise, we'll never be able to capture it.

As we press forward, we'll start to see some other pokemon that can offer a bit of help. Stangely, even though Deoxys isn't a Flying type, he seems to share some of the Flying-type resistances. I suppose because he's capable of flying? I find it odd because other pokemon like Rayquaza didn't get that same treatment despite being actual Flying-types in the main series. Anyway, not many of the pokemon are capable of offering much assistance. You're mostly just stuck with Poliwag and the healing from Magneton and Magnemite.

A little bit deeper in and we'll find Deoxys once again! This time he'll transform into his Defense Forme before entering Capture Mode once again! Lunick suggests that we should try really hard to communicate our feelings to it as we capture it.

Defense Forme Deoxys is by far the easiest of his three alternate formes. It just requires some patience. Defense Forme Deoxys will through out large Shadow Balls which can be easily evaded as you continue to draw loops around it. It'll also occasionally stop and use Protect which will nullify any loops you draw around it. I recommend taking this opportunity to close your loop as much as possible without actually closing it until he drops his guard so that you can get a free loop on the next go-around. This form is very slow-moving compared to the others and is mostly just minding its own business--easy pickings!

But of course, after you try to capture it, the capture will fail and Deoxys will retreat deeper into the cave.

 

We are soon met with a couple more pokemon that can actually help out with capturing Deoxys: Graveler and Zubat. But again, these assists really aren't all that necessary.

As we continue to push deeper into the cave, we'll find Deoxys again! This time, it transforms into its speed forme. Lunick suggests that we try something like telling it rangers aren't its enemies as we try to capture it! ...I think we should probably just focus on what we've been doing.

This time, Deoxys is incredibly fast! Deoxys will launch projectiles in a wide range as it dashes around the screen -- maintaining even a short line during this flurry of attacks is incredibly difficult. Thankfully, like most fast pokemon, Speed Forme Deoxys only takes a small amount of loops to capture, so you should get a feel for the timing and capture him in the brief moments he stops. If it's too much for you, once again, Poke Assists are an option.

After another failed capture attempt, Deoxys will revert to its normal forme and begin to fly off. Lunick comments about how it was almost like it was saying "catch me if you can!" Is it... having fun with us?

Pressing a bit deeper into the cave will bring us face-to-face with Deoxys Normal Forme, and this is where the true challenge occurs! Lunick warns us not to rush into trying to capture Deoxys since it can only be captured in its Normal Forme, but as I learned the hard way, this is terrible advice!

  

When the battle initiates, Deoxys will transform into one of its three other formes. I want to say the pattern is consistent: Attack, Defense, Speed, Defense, Attack, Defense, etc. but I don't like to make assumptions. Anyway, Lunick's advice genuinely had me thinking I had to wait patiently for Deoxys to transform into its normal forme in order to capture it. I was dead wrong and learned the hard way after breaking my line and having to do the entire mission over from the beginning! You actually have to do the opposite: You have to first try to capture one of these alternate forms before Deoxys transforms into his normal forme.

Normal Forme Deoxys will only remain around for a brief period, so make sure to get in your Poke Assists if you want to make quick work of him! Eventually, you'll have Deoxys captured and calmed down!

We report our adventure back to Spenser who is amazed that we were able to capture the Deoxys! He's relieved to hear his conclusion was wrong and that Deoxys could be bonded with after all. He then confesses that he believes he was the reason Deoxys grew aggressive. He apparently couldn't accept defeat and kept trying to capture Deoxys after failing to capture it once. But, he's learned a valuable lesson from all of this and will go forward with greater respect for the pokemon he captures.

And so concludes the first of our special missions.

Upon completing this one, we unlock another special mission: Rescue Celebi! I'll see you there!

[Aura]

Another day, another Ranger Net Mission! We unlocked this one from completing the mission "Gain Deoxys's Trust?!"

================

Special Mission: Rescue Celebi

Client: Spenser

There have been reports that Go-Rock Squad holdouts are after Celebi, which appeared in Lyra Forest. To protect this rare Pokémon, capture it before the Go-Rock Squad can!

-----------------------

Ringtown Ranger Base

Spenser briefs us about the reports of the Go-Rock Squad up to no good at the Forest Guardian shrine in Lyra Forest. He suspects they're after the mythical pokemon Celebi and requests that we go and capture Celebi before they can to avoid Celebi's power being abused!

Spenser starts off trying to assign you and Lunick on the mission together, but Murph pipes up, complaining that he doesn't ever get to go on important missions like this. Murph is the weakest ranger in the union, so it probably makes sense, but Spenser decides to let him have this one and assigns him to join us on our mission in Lunick's place.

Funnily enough, Murph ends up leaving his partner Slowpoke behind. I'm sure this was just a technical limitation but I thought it was kind of funny to note that he finally gets to go on an important mission and ends up leaving his partner pokemon behind.

==================

Lyra Forest

We arrive at the shrine just outside the Forest Labyrinth after leaving the base.

Celebi seems to already be here! But before we can capture it, a horde of Go-Rock Grunts arrives from the other side and scares it away! The squad informs us that they're going to go on ahead and capture Celebi and requests that we don't do anything. Obviously, that's not how this is gonna work, so we follow after them on the other side!

   

The Pokemon you can capture around here aren't too different. Watch out for Spinarak dropping from above! As you look around the starting area, you'll find there are obstacles in each direction: A fallen log near the entrance requiring 2 Fire icons, iron fences to the south requiring two cut icons, and boulders straight ahead requiring two Rock Smash icons. We can't clear any of these obstacles just yet, so we'll have to take the only available path for us.

  

Up here, we'll find a grunt with three Hoppip! Hoppip are really slow and calm, so it's easy to capture these guys without any problems.

To the west, we can find a Quilava which will give us the Fire power needed to take out that fallen log. It doesn't accomplish much for us, though, aside from clearing a small obstacle out of the way. Instead, we'll want to continue to the east.

  

Over here is a grunt with three Spinarak! Once again, it's pretty easy to capture all three of them, just watch out for their Spider Webs!

  

Heading down south, we'll next come across Ivysaur before Swellow and Machoke! Machoke's Rock Smash gives us the strength to clear the boulders to create another shortcut, or break the rock to the southeast.

Breaking that boulder will lead you to the Wartortle behind it which unfortunately isn't too terribly useful for this mission, but it's there if you want it for anything.

  

Further ahead, we'll find a female grunt with three Beedrill! These guys are a bit tougher to capture than the pokemon the other grunts had, but again, it isn't too tough.

Once the grunts have been cleared out, you'll begin to find Celebi roaming around the area. If you try to approach Celebi carelessly, it'll notice you and fly away. You'll need to carefully approach it from behind in order to properly encounter it. Celebi can fly through the forest walls, so this is the purpose for clearing all those obstacles that have been blocking our ways.

Alongside Celebi, you'll also find Pinsir down here, whose Cut icons are enough to break through the iron fences, giving us free reign to follow Celebi around wherever it goes.

When you do encounter Celebi, it'll use Leech Seed(?) to sprout large vines out of the ground around the screen that'll damage your styler if you touch them. Celebi is also incredibly fast, so capturing it is difficult already, the vines make it harder to keep circling it to boot. Additionally, it's pretty difficult to encounter Celebi on its own without having to deal with some other wild pokemon crashing the party. Celebi's constant fluttering around makes it difficult to capture other pokemon, so I recommend just running until you can get Celebi alone.

From there, Poke Assists are advised. Celebi is a Grass-type, so Swellow's Flying assist and Pinsir or Spinarak's Bug Assist are the best helps. Quilava and Cyndaquil's Fire Assists can also help a bit, too!

Once Celebi is captured, the Go-Rock Squad will retreat and we can safely release Celebi back into the wild! Good to know Celebi is A-OK!

We report our mission's success to Spenser and our job is over!

Naturally, upon clearing this mission, the next mission is unlocked as well! We'll see what that's about next time!

[Aura]

Last time, we unlocked yet another Ranger Net Mission, so it's back to work!

====================

Special Mission: Find Mew, the Mirage!

Client: Prof. Hastings

Mew, the Pokémon said to be a mirage, has been sighted in the Olive Jungle. Capture Mew for Prof. Hastings’s research and for the honor of a ranger.

-------------------------

Summerland Ranger Base

We start our mission at the Summerland Ranger Base this time where we're met by Cameron who explains to us that Percy has claimed to have spotted the mythical pokemon mew while patrolling the Olive Jungle! This report is a huge deal that immediately caught the attention of Prof. Hastings who has issued a mission to us to capture Mew so that he can use Mew's data from our styler for his research!

However, it seems that this once-in-a-lifetime encounter has some adverse side-effects on Percy's confidence. After sharing the news with the people of Summerland, people have been accusing him of lying due to Mew's incredible rarity. To the point where even Percy is doubting that he ever saw Mew in the first place. He suggested that it's probably not a good idea to make a big deal out of it because he was probably mistaken and just saw a Skitty or something. Cameron encourages Percy to have more confidence in himself, to which Percy responds by more adamantly insisting that he was mistaken and that he never saw Mew. Cameron then tells us this mission now has a second purpose: To prove that Percy isn't a liar and that Mew really is in the Olive Jungle! With our mission assigned, we head out!

================

Olive Jungle

 

The pokemon here are mostly unchanged from what you'll normally find. But just a heads up, almost none of them are very useful for reasons you'll find soon enough. You're mainly just going to want to focus on capturing the pokemon that are more intrusive. Again, you'll see what I mean when we get there.

 

In the next area, you'll find a little boy who exclaims that he saw Mew! It seems that a lot of the locals have become curious after hearing Percy's claim and come looking for Mew themselves! They're all very excited to see the rare creature! The main part of the jungle is split into four sections, each of which has another NPC who will have different lines depending on whether or not Mew is in that area. This little boy commenting that he saw Mew means that Mew must be nearby!

   

Going a little ways past the boy, along the path filled with bugs we had to travel in order to find the parts for the Aquamole...

You might spot Mew! Mew is fairly difficult to catch up to. Just like Celebi, Mew can fly through the trees where you can't walk, and it'll flee from you if it sees you coming. This makes it fairly difficult to encounter Mew on its own, and accidental encounters while approaching Mew often cause Mew to show up in them as well. This is extremely unfortunate because Mew doesn't hang around in capture mode for long at all. He flees really quickly! So you'll barely have any time to capture any stragglers to make capturing Mew easier and Mew is not an easy capture. I don't know if I'd say he's as tough as Salamence if only because Salamence was capable of actually attacking your line and you couldn't even use any useful Poke Assists against him. Mew is challenging, however, because even with the Poke-Assists that are immediately available to you, nothing is helpful!

Not only is Mew increadibly quick to flee, it also teleports and jumps around a lot, so it'll break your line very quickly if you try to capture it while it's not immobilized. And if you try to use Discharge to capture it, you'll quickly find that it just doesn't stay paralyzed for long at all, especially considering it needs 15(?) loops. Needless to say, you're going to want some assistance for capturing Mew. But none of the captures we've found so far are helpful! Mew jumps around too much for Venonat's Poison, Phanpy's Ground or Meganium's Grass Assists to be helpful! Naturally, if Meganium's Assist is useless, then Treecko's definitely is. Beautifly's Flying Assist is a little helpful, but it doesn't hold Mew for nearly long enough to capture. Wurmple's super-effective Bug Assist might seem like the way to go, but even that doesn't hold Mew for long enough! It breaks out consistently every time before I can reduce its loop number to 0 and immediately breaks my line with a jump.

The worst part about capturing Mew is that, if it flees or if you flee from it, it'll leave the area and move to the next. For now, let's detail the route of following Mew and what pokemon we'll encounter along the way.

 

Chasing Mew north from Venonat, you'll begin to find Ariados and Silcoon. Ariados is probably the most useful pokemon assist for capturing Mew among the pokemon down here. However, the increased power only increases the duration of the assist and doesn't seem to affect how long Mew remains captured in it. Mew still breaks out too quickly to capture evne with these stronger Bug Assists!

If Mew flees from you in the first area, it'll make its way up north to the cliffside leading up to the small lake where we found the Aquamole parts.

While not exactly part of this area, there's a Bayleef on a ledge that's only accessible from here. But if Meganium's assist is useless, you know Bayleef won't help. There's no reason to capture this Bayleef for this mission as it's a little out of your way, but it's there if you want it.

If Mew flees from you in this area, it'll fly over to the easat and into the area with Bayleef, however you can't actually drop down the ledge from here so you'll need to backtrack all the way around in order to get there.

  

On the way up to that area, we'll find Spinarak and Vigoroth. Ekans will also leap out of the bushes from the sides! I'm not really sure if this happened in the main story or not, but this is the first time I've ever noticed this! Since this is our first time actually encountering Ekans in a usable situation, we've only captured them from the Go-Rock Squad, I suppose I'll briefly explain that he just offers a Poison assist and nothing else.

  

The next area is home to Lotad and Ludicolo! You probably don't need me to tell you that Ludicolo's Water Assist also doesn't help much in capturing Mew. Heracross' Fighting Assist also doesn't help against Mew since it's resisted.

When Mew flees from you in this area, it'll move south to the pathway with the Vigoroth. It is incredibly difficult to encounter Mew here alone becuase of the sheer abundance of pokemon packed into every corner of this small area and Vigoroth's aggression in chasing you around. But, you can trap Mew in the corners of the area without attracting the attention of Vigoroth with a little patience. In general, though, it's probably best to just encounter it real quick and then run so that it flees to an easier place to encounter it alone.

When Mew flees from that area, it'll return to the first area where the cycle starts all over and it seems like we're at a loss now! Mew is just too hard to capture and there's no other types of assists in the jungle to help, right??

Weeelll... okay, I'm actually really not a fan of this design choice, but it seems there actually is a slight variation here. The game doesn't just expect you to blindly chase Mew around, but you really have no reason to believe anything in the jungle has been changed--because nothing has so far!

But if you make your way up to the Jungle Relic...

  

You'll find the usual pokemon you'd expect to see, none of these are helpful either, except...

 

Even though nothing else in the entire jungle seems to have changed up until now, the developers were generous enough to place two Shedinja up here!! Shedinja offers a Ghost Assist and this right here is the secret to capturing Mew.

Once you've captured Shedinja, return to the main area of the jungle and start capturing the more annoying pokemon to get them out of the way. I recommend the Beautifly and Venonat near the entrance of the bug maze, the Vigoroth, and perhaps some of the Lotad in the marsh. Once they're in your squad, you won't need to worry about them respawning and getting in the way of your attempts at capturing Mew. Then, start chasing Mew around until you can encounter it alone. From here, use Shedinja's Ghost Assist to make capturing Mew a total joke!

Alternatively, I've seen reports that if you're really fast, you can capture Mew with just Plusle's Lv. 4 Discharge, and I was able to get really close just once with Ariados' Bug Assist as well, but the Shedinja is definitely the intended solution to this problem here.

==============

After capturing Mew.... that's it! This is arguably the shortest of the special missions as you tchnically only have to capture a single pokemon before you're done. There's no Go-Rock interference or obstacles necessary to clear, it's just chase Mew around and capture it!

On our way out of the jungle, we bump into Prof. Hastings and Percy. Prof. Hastings is amazed to see Mew in person for the first time ever and immediately asks to see the data you recovered with your styler. After confirming, he apologizes to Mew for giving it a scare but promises that the data from the capture will be put to good use for the furthering of his research. He asks us to release Mew and, on retreating, Mew winks at Percy before disappearing. It seems this was all just a game to the little mischief maker!

Well, we report back to the Ranger Base and get thanked by Percy for believing in him and setting the record straight. We've confirmed that Percy was never lying about seeing Mew and have helped Prof. Hastings with his research!

However, it may come as a surprise that we didn't actually unlock a fourth mission for completing this one... odd... Perhaps we'll investigate this mystery a little deeper next time?

[Aura]

The last mission we completed didn't unlock anything extra, but there actually is one last mission for us to cover her in Pokemon Ranger before we move on to our next game. And this mission is the primary reason I recommend trying to play a new physical copy of this game if it's reasonable for you.

So, how do we unlock this mysterious mission? Well, thankfully, it's a lot easier in the international version. Once again, there was an even bigger limited time tag to this mission: It was tied to advanced ticket purchases for the theatrical release of the ninth Pokemon film: Pokemon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea!

This movie was quite famous at the time for revealing lots of brand new never-before-seen Pokemon from the upcoming Diamond and Pearl games including Buizel, Chatot and the movie's main star: The Mythical Pokemon Manaphy! It was also a special tie-in to the Ranger Series, though I don't believe this was the first thanks to Solana's (The female character in this game) appearance in the main series anime.

In the international version, however, the mission is instead unlockable in a much more timeless manner: A secret password! This password was revealed on pokemon.com.

In order to enter the code, you'll need to go to the Ranger Net screen and hold R+X+Left for a little while. Eventually, you'll see a message that mentions that you've unlocked the enter password screen! This will add a new button to the Ranger Net Menu that allows you to do just that: Enter a password!

The specific password you have to enter depends on the version you're playing:

American: P8M2-9D6F-43H7

UK: *Mg35-Cpb8-4FW8

French: *DY4g-k28S-QB9F

German: R3d4-cv2S-WC7W

Spanish: C58f-t3WT-Vn79

Italian: FH38-fwD8-5S2a

Once this passcode is entered, our final mission is unlocked!

=================

Special Mission: Recover the Precious Egg!

Client: Prof. Hastings

Prof. Hastings obtained a Manaphy Egg, but it was stolen by the Go-Rock Squad! Before they can do any harm with the precious Egg, recover it from the criminals!

---------------------

Summerland

This story starts out not with us at a Ranger Base, but with Cameron on the beach of Summerland! As he's strolling along the beach, he discovers a strange blue object washed up on the shore. Unsure of what it is, he finds it to be calming to look at, so he decides it would make a great gift for Prof. Hastings.

-------------------

Fall City

We then cut to Fall City, where Cameron delivers the gift to Prof. Hastings, who is amazed by the discovery! It takes him and his assistant a moment to realize what the item is. He recalls seeing an item like this in research documents from the Sinnoh Region and identifies the item as a Pokemon Egg! No Pokemon Eggs have ever been documented in the Fiore Region, however, so this is a huge discovery indeed!

In interest of finding out what kind of pokemon will hatch from this egg, Prof. Hastings decides to entrust the egg to the care of the Ringtown Ranger Base where he knows from experience the most capable rangers in the Union reside.

--------------------

Lyra Forest

On his way to Ringtown through Lyra Forest, Prof. Hastings is ambushed by a squadron of Go-Rock Grunts! He's appalled by their appearance since the Go-Rock Squad is supposed to be no more! Prof. Hastings asks if they're still calling Gordor their leader, but the head of the squad insists that he's to become the next commander of the Go-Rock Squad, and he'll be using that Pokemon Egg to do it!

Of course, Prof. Hastings isn't done with his questions. He asks how they know about the Pokemon Egg, the only people who should know about it are himself, his assistant, and Cameron! The grunts suggest that perhaps he should be a bit more wary of his assistant who's always conveniently around, implying that... she's a spy for the Go-Rock Squad!? That could be a shocking reveal, but... it doesn't make much sense if you think about it for much.

The grunts surround him and demand he hand over the egg! Prof. Hastings naturally refuses and tries to fight the grunts off on his own, but he's quickly overpowered and the egg is stolen just like the Super Styler in the beginning of the game! The Commander explains that this egg will lead them to the Sea Crown before running off with it.

Prof. Hastings is confused about this "Sea Crown" they spoke of, but for now, he needs to make his way to Ringtown in order to inform us of the emergency!

-------------------------

Ringtown Ranger Base

And now we finally arrive at the Ranger Base! Prof. Hastings fills us in on everything that's happened. That is, in a rather hasty manner. Spenser tries to piece together everything he says, but we're one step ahead! We already know exactly what the egg must be: A Manaphy Egg! Everyone is surprised to hear that the pokemon inside of the egg is Manaphy! Nobody here seems to even really know what a Manaphy looks like, but the name Manaphy seems to jog Prof. Hasting's memory!

Hastings recalls the legend of Manaphy, in reference to the movie, he begins to explain the legend of the Sea Temple and the Sea Crown found within the temple which is said to make its wearer the world's king. It's said that Manaphy is the only being capable of entering the Sea Temple. Prof. Hastings concludes that the Go-Rock Squad must be after Manaphy in order to get the Sea Crown from the temple so that their new commander can become the world's king as the legend speaks of. With this revelation, it becomes a task of utmost importance to recover that egg at all costs! We're assigned our mission to recover the Manaphy Egg alongside Lunick. And with that, we're set off to Lyra Forest. The Go-Rock Squad couldn't have gotten far!

----------------------

Lyra Forest

   

Right away, there are some oddities among the pokemon we can find down here: Chikorita, Mudkip, sure, but also... Pikachu and Politoed!? Well, the reason for Politoed's presence is made clear when we try to head north and find a bunch of boulders blocking our way. There are small boulders that require Rock Smash to break, but we don't have Rock Smash. The larger boulders require two Water icons to deal with, well we've got three Water icons right here!

Using Politoed on one of the three large rocks will cause it to reveal its identity as Graveler! A Go-Rock Grunt arrives on the scene shortly after in a bit of a panic having realized his barricade of Graveler has been exposed!

  

So, he sics all three Graveler on you in an effort to slow you down more!

As we push beyond, we'll find that the new Go-Rock Commander... isn't so good at his job. He's baffled by the fork in the road and demands for his subordinate to tell him what direction to go. Apparently, this subordinate had to leave a trail of mushrooms leading to Fall City. Going forward, this pair of dunces will be relying on the mushrooms to tell them where to go. Sounds like a key weakness if I've ever seen one!

 

 

One of the grunts will stop and try to slow you down by attacking you with a bunch of Rattata! They can be captured almost instantly since they each only take one loop.

As we move forward, the grunts are still relying on the mushrooms even though there's only one path they can actually traverse. I actually thought this was a pretty funny recurring joke.

 

Following these guys leads us to be ambushed by four Zubat! Again, a pretty simple capture. They just need two loops instead of one.

 

In the following area, we'll start to find Torchic as well as Swellow! We wouldn't have a big new pokemon if it wasn't important...

 

Pressing forward, we're stopped by another grunt with some easy captures: Two Rattata and a Meowth! Okay, so this one's slightly more difficult, but they're sill practically non-existant Rattata!

The next mushroom the grunts start to follow we can quickly identify as a Parasect in disguise! It seems the mushroom-planting grunt wasn't paying too much attention to what types of mushrooms he was placing! This one might bite him in the butt, especially when we turn around ourselves and use Swellow's two Gust icons to wake up that Parasect and get it to move to the other path!

Heading up toward Krokka Tunnel, we're stopped by yet another grunt. This one with a Scyther! A much more challenging pokemon than the ones we've been up against until now, but still nothing to really shake a stick at on its own.

Continuing onward, the grunts get stumped by another fork! Even though they're right at the entrance to Krokka Tunnel and there's a sign that tells them exactly what direction goes to Fall City, they insist on following the Mushrooms. And as the grunt is searching for the mushroom, the Parasect gets up and starts moving on its own to the other path before dropping to the ground again and being seen by the grunt! He now takes the commander down the ledges and back to the mushroom at the bottom of the ledges.

We'll need to follow these guys around for a second loop before we can corner them.

 

In the meantime, we've got more grunts with different pokemon! The first one comes at us with a Politoed alongside three Zubat. This one you might actually be tempted to throw a Discharge out or something if only because of Politoed. But, it's not too bad to capture Politoed after quickly capturing the Zubat individually.

  

The next one comes at you with three Rattata and a Torchic... I guess it's tougher than four Rattata? Anyway, easy pickings either way.

When we make our way back to the first junction with a Parasect, now that we've moved it, it sends the grunts down south.

If you haven't moved the Parasect yet, Luncik will comment about how strange the mushroom looks and we'll need to piece two and two together. You'll also have to follow the grunts around for another loop since they end up going the "right" way again.

If you do have to follow the grunts to the north, you'll be stopped by a Grunt with a Pupitar! Again, pretty standard stuff. I think the Scyther is more challenging, personally.

The third time around, you won't have to deal with any grunt ambushes, so just follow the grunts around until they gret back to the Parasect which hopefully you remembered to move with Swellow this time!

This will cause the grunts to go south this time instead of north, after the new commander complains about how long it's taking them to get to Fall City. The subordinate agrees that it's taking a while but that they should almost be there.

If we follow them along this path, we know we'll have them cornered at a dead-end where they'll have no choice but to fight us! But they aren't unarmed! As soon as we tell them to return the Manaphy Egg, they call forward some scary pokemon with their stylers!

===============

 

Vs. Go-Rock Commander

The Commander comes at you with a Venusaur and two Scyther! We'll need to be extra careful about our approach. I recommend using Plusle or Swellow to pick off the two Scyther with ease to make capturing Venusaur much less of a headache. Venusaur is fairly easy to capture on its own.

================

Even after capturing the commander's pokemon, he still refuses to admit defeat and tries to run away with the Manaphy Egg. We give chase only to find back on the main path... Gordor! We might want to brace ourselves for a dangerous encounter, but... no, Gordor has apprehended the Go-Rock Commander, literally twisting his arm to get him to return the Manaphy egg to us.

He explains that he's reflected a lot on his actions and the great shame he felt when compared to your might. Though he still isn't quite planning on joining the Ranger Union, he'll certainly assist in keeping a fool like this no-name grunt from trying to play king-of-the-world. He then laughs at the pathetic little Go-Rock Runts. Thanks to an unlikely ally, we've finally recovered the Manaphy Egg!

=================

Returning to the Ranger Base, we report everything to Spenser and Prof. Hastings. Murph also reveals that, while he was helping Prof. Hasting's assistant research the topic of the legend of Manaphy, they discovered a bug on one of the files which the Go-Rock Squad was using to eaves drop on their conversations. That must be how they knew about the Manaphy Egg! This also resolves the assistant of any suspicion of being a spy for the Go-Rock Squad, not that we ever had any real doubts. 

And now that that's done, the question remains what to do with the Manaphy Egg... after a bit of back and forth, Prof. Hastings suggests an idea. Pokemon Eggs have never successfully hatched in the Fiore Region. As we know from the main series, this is because a Pokemon Egg needs to be carried by a trainer in order to hatch! Prof. Hastings decides to take the egg back to his home and lab and begin searching for a powerful trainer worthy of caring for the egg in the Sinnoh region.

...and that's a wrap!

================

We return to the title screen from here and if we make our way to the Ranger Net Menu, we'll find a new button that allows us to check on the Manaphy Egg under Prof. Hasting's care. We can't do anything with this for now, but soon, very soon, it'll become relevant.

That is, if you're playing a physical copy. Unfortunately, the Wii U virtual console edition of this game can't actually do anything else with this egg, you're just eternally tormented with an option to try and send the data but with no successful connection. Shame...

But, that's it for Pokemon Ranger! It feels like it's been a while since we've fully completed a game! That also means we've set a precedent that we'll be 100% completing Pokemon Ranger games... hopefully I don't come to resent that with future titles. But I am very pleasantly surprised with this game. I went into it honestly expecting to resent the game's central gimmick. I underestimated just how much fun it would be to loop all these different pokemon and to find creative solutions to more difficult captures. It was very rare that something felt particularly unfair, most major challenges usually had an easy way out that you'd just have to explore a bit to find and my personal improvement over the course of the game was very tangible! From what I've heard so far of the sequel, it sounds like I'm really gonna enjoy it, so I can't wait to see what's going on there. This game was an absolute joy to play! I'm sad to see it go, but excited to know that just means I'm one step closer to what seems to be the fan favorite of the series.

Regardless of my feelings toward this particular game, the next game on our list is where things get really interesting. It feels like we've been skirting around this point since as far back as Pokemon Dash which feels like so long ago now! In fact, it was almost exactly a year ago today! March 3rd! Crazy how fast time flies, huh?

Anyway, the spinoff department has been incredibly heavy-handed with all the Gen 4 teasing... what do you say that next time we start to finally dive into the world of Sinnoh and see what adventures lie before us as we enter into a new era of Pokemon? Generation 4 is finally here!

[Aura]

And so it finally begins! We've been teasing this game for over a year across this thread, so I'm excited to finally see it come to fruition!

On September 28, 2006, Pokemon Diamond and Pearl Versions were released in Japan! With the release of this game, the fourth Generation of Pokemon has finally officially arrived! This has got to be the most hyped up Pokemon Game in the thread so far. This is perhaps the era of Pokemon I associate most with my childhood. The anticipation of Diamond and Pearl was huge, I'd argue even larger than the hype for Gold and Silver. Watching the anime, we were introduced to all sorts of new pokemon before the games hit shelves dating all the way back to the seventh pokemon movie: Destiny Deoxys! Gen IV pokemon have been sprinkled in not only in the anime, but in various games across the franchise as well.

Diamond and Pearl are Game Freak's first step into 3D Game development and the start of somewhat of a transitional period from 2D to 3D Pokemon games. It still bears a lot of resemblance to Generation 3 in a lot of ways, and in a lot of ways is commonly regarded as the last Pokemon games to truly feel like an objective improvement over their predecessors. However, I've personally been in the camp that wasn't too fond of the slowness of Diamond and Pearl. Being GF's first 3D games, it seems there are a lot of optimizations they still had to work out. A lot of things are simply slower in this game than in Gen 3, but for these playthroughs I'm going to try and overlook that, instead anticipating a much more relaxed experience. I've been pleasantly surprised by previous generations, so I'm hoping to discover something I really like about this one as well.

As you can probably tell by the way I introduced this game, I am also very highly nostalgic toward Diamond and Pearl, but it was around this era that I think my interest in the Pokemon series started to wain a little bit, so I never got as invested in Diamond and Pearl as I did with other games. I think I've always had a preference for Gen III over Gen IV, but perhaps that will change during these playthroughs?

I will say there is a bit of a sense of irony in me starting Gen IV. At the time of writing this, the latest Pokemon game released was Pokemon Legends: Arceus which came right at the tail end of this game's remake: Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl! There's a lot of space to fill between now and the game's remakes, but I said the same thing about Gen I and its remakes! I imagine we'll be caught up sooner than I expect! Regardless, it hasn't been that long since my personal playthrough of Shining Pearl, so I'm a bit worried I might get a little burned out on these games, but I'm hoping these games will be different enough that I won't have to worry too much about it. After all, a big thing I've noticed over the course of this series are the subtle changes to gameplay between gens that can completely change the way you build a team! 

Gen IV is a massively popular generation, so I'm excited to see if I'll catch on to what it is that people really like about it now that I'm getting a chance to sit down and play it more seriously. There are a lot of huge games to look forward in this generation, so let's not dawdle for too long!

=================

Before we begin our journey, it's important to note that if you have a save file, you're going to have to manually delete it! Starting with Gen IV, this is an odd limitation of Pokemon games where they cannot overwrite save data from a different playthrough. So, if you start a new playthrough without deleting your save data from your previous one, you won't be able to save at all. In previous games, it would simply save over your file no questions asked, so I imagine this probably frustrated a lot of players trying to start a new file.

In order to delete save data, you'll need to press the button combination Up+Select+B. It takes a decent chunk of time to do this. I suppose this is some sort of anti-cheating mechanism to work around parts of the game that would otherwise not be overwritten? I'm not really sure, but regardless, make sure you do this if you want to start a new file!

Now, you might notice throughout this series that I'm going to be using images from Bulbapedia again... sometimes. You see, I really like Bulbapedia as an image source because they are incredibly thorough and high-quality, but I've recently been having issues where images linked directly from Bulbapedia are breaking! I wanted to make sure you guys get the best possible presentation out of this gen because if there's anything I'm excited about with this gen, it's the really clean Pokemon sprites! So, I've decided to take a roundabout route to try and get images off of Bulbapedia without directly linking to them. I'll simply download them from Bulbapedia, reupload them privately to Imgur, and then share them here!

I have sent an email to Bulbapedia asking about their thoughts on people using their images for external use, so technically I don't have direct permission, but I have two points in my defense:

1. They don't seem to care. I don't see any notice anywhere on the bulbagarden or the bulbagarden archives requesting that these images only be used within the scope of Bulbagarden. This doesn't mean they don't care definitively, but images from bulbagarden are used frequently elsewhere without any stink ever being raised, so I don't think they would be upset over me doing this. If they do, I'll go back to trying to find a new source for sprites.

2. I don't think bulbagarden actually has the right to upload these images, either. These are copywritten characters, after all, and I don't think bulbagarden has ever received official permission to maintain their site. It just seems to be one of those things where GameFreak legally doesn't want to acknowledge the site because it's such a positive part of the Pokemon community. Still, I don't want to lean too hard into this argument because I don't want to undermine just how much work Bulbagarden and their collaborators put into cleaning up these sprites and making them as high quality as possible.

We'll see how well this approach turns out.

One caveat I've noticed in doing this might be related to exactly why these images are crashing in the first place. I initially suspected it was a security issue with Bulbagarden. As it turns out, it seems to be related to a strange file format .WEBP, that keeps popping up. I've never seen this before but apparently it's a file format designed for images to be stored on websites that's optimized for faster loading? Sometimes when I download these images, they're downloaded as .webp images rather than .png like they're displayed as. This seems to happen randomly and I imagine is exactly why the images seem to break randomly when linked here. I'm wondering if perhaps using a different browser would work better? For now, anytime I donwload a webp image, I'll have to run it through a converter to get it into a png format. I'm hoping I don't run into any complications with this approach. A consequence I'll go ahead and mention right now is that I'll probably be making less progress each post to avoid having to add too many details.

Introduction

I've gotta say real quick, the sound direction in this game is definitely phenomenal. While I'll definitely miss the clapping from Hoenn's more intense battles, the music in Diamond and Pearl really doesn't disappoint, either.

When we begin our new game, we're met with the typical speech from the professor of the region. This time, it's Prof. Rowan! He gives us the typical spiel welcoming us to the world of pokemon, introducing us to what a Pokemon is, yadda yadda. A nice addition here is that Prof. Rowan offers a menu of questions to ask for information yourself if you need to, or you can skip right past it all and say "no info needed."

As a neat touch, rather than pulling a pokeball out himself, Rowan asks you to press the center of the pokeball on the touch screen--gotta show off that new DS tech, huh?

Pressing the button on the pokeball will cause a Munchlax to appear beside Prof. Rowan! A neat way to make this intro scene a bit more interactable.

 

When asked to choose your gender, you're given a choice between these two whose official names are Lucas and Dawn! Anyone who watches the anime is probably familiar with Dawn who was Ash's companion during the Diamond and Pearl arc.

 

For this playthrough, I'll be using the boy character and he'll be named after the game he's from: Diamond! It's worth noting that this is the first game that does away with names being in all caps! It doesn't quite do the same for Pokemon yet, but yes, character names will be displayed with only one captial letter as a proper noun should be! So if you don't want to stand out like a sore thumb, make sure to name your character with one capital letter and the rest lower-case or everyone will be shouting your name the whole game.

Our rival has the official name of Barry, but I think we can do a little bit better. Since Diamond version is focused on the theme of Time, then I'll name my rival "Pace," after his impatient nature. Perhaps as he grows he'll learn to take his time in order to pace himself and grow into a strong opponent?

Once we're done, we're shrunk down to our little bite-size sprite and the game officially begins!

===================

Twinleaf Town

Our journey begins in a small town called Twinleaf, as is pretty typical for Pokemon games. We're following Jubilife TV's coverage of a Red Gyarados sighting! The coverage ends on a bit of a cliffhanger before we zoom out to our room. Right away, I recommend immediately adjusting your options to your preferred settings and then saving when you start a new game. Not only will this remind you if you forgot to delete your saved data without giving you the heartbreak of having to lose all of your first session, but it also will also save your preferences. Your settings will always revert to your defaults whenever you delete saved data, so you'll have to manually reset text speed to fast. This makes the intro of the game unfortunately very slow as you're forced to mull through it on medium text speed. In other games, if you already had a save file, the settings would at least carry over to a new game.

After making our preparations, there's nothing left to do but to head downstairs where we find our mother watching a TV program about Pokemon Contests! She tells us that Pace had come looking for us, so it looks like we'll want to head over to his house.

Subverting expectations a bit from the typical small starting town, this place does not consist of the player's, rivals, and a research lab. Instead, we just have the player and rival houses as well as two homes for generic NPCs. Talking to the NPCs around Twinleaf, you'll find that Prof. Rowan is the talk of the town. He's finally returned to Sandgem Town after a 4-year trip abroad. 

We'll make our way to Pace's house just northwest of ours when...

THUDD!! 

He comes running out of his own house and bumps into us! He tells us that there's been rumors of a legendary pokemon at Lake Verity and he insists that he's gonna catch it and officially become a pokemon trainer! He wants us to come along for backup and promises there'll be a 1 million P fine if we're late! But then he realizes he forgot something, so he returns to his home. We follow him upstairs and he gets his stuff together before upping the fine to 10 million P if you're late before charging off past you. We'll need to meet him on Route 201.

==================

Route 201

This is our typical early-game route, but there's not much we can do here just yet. Without any pokemon, we can't step into the tall grass. Pace wants us to go to the lakefront, so we'll just have to play along.

===================

Verity Lakefront

There's not much to do here but go through the clearing in the trees to make our way to the lake!

==================

Lake Verity

Once again, absolutely beautiful music here.

 

As we arrive, we see Prof. Rowan and his assistant, Dawn, standing at the lake shore. Dawn asks the professor if he's excited about being back home in Sinnoh, to which Rowan responds that he's come to appreciate that Sinnoh is home to many kinds of rare pokemon that are not easily found elsewhere. The two then take their leave, Rowan parting you and Lucas to move through and Dawn apologizing as she skirts by as well.

Pace notes that there's something sticking out of the tall grass in the distance. He wants to check it out, but it's dangerous since it's surrounded by tall grass. He decides to shrug it off. We'll just be in and out real quick! So, we make a quick dash to the object to find that it's a briefcase that was left behind by those two! That's when...

 

...two pokemon emerge from the grass and attack us! In a panic, Pace opens the briefcase to find pokeballs inside of it! He tells you to grab one of them use them to fight the Starly!

===============

  

As we look inside the briefcase, we're met with our choice of starter! The Grass-type Turtwig, the Fire-type Chimchar, or the Water-type Piplup! I've already got my parties planned out for this generation, so I won't hesitate to choose my starter for this playthrough!

================

 

My Team

----------------------

 Senshi (Chimchar M); Lv. 5

 

Item: None

Ability: Blaze | Moves: Scratch, Leer

================

Vs. Starly (Lv. 3)

Much like in Ruby and Sapphire, our first battle with our starter isn't our rival, but rather a wild pokemon in an emergency situation!

---------------------

                    

                    

This battle is as simple as you'd expect, just use Scratch a lot and Starly will go down.

==============

After fending off the Starly, Pace says that you did alright but then boasts that his Piplup is clearly stronger. But, these aren't our pokemon and he laments that they'll probably just have to give them back.

That's when Dawn arrives to reclaim the forgotten briefcase. She's bothered by the fact that we both seem to have gotten to the rare pokemon inside and decides to return to the professor to figure out what to do. We follow behind her to explain the situation and return the Pokeballs.

==============

Route 201

 

Back on Route 201, we bump into Prof. Rowan and Dawn again just outside Twinleaf Town. Prof. Rowan takes a moment to stare us down before requesting for us to meet with him in Sandgem town. This leaves everyone rather confused, and us a little intimidated. Dawn assures us that we should probably do what he says and come by his lab.

=================

Twinleaf Town

We return back home where our mother is relieved to hear that we're okay. She's surprisingly calm about the situation, though, and decides to give us some Running Shoes! With these, we can run around at faster speeds! Running in tall grass will increase the encounter rate of wild pokemon. A new addition here in Gen IV, however, is the ability to run indoors! Yes, you no longer have to walk indoors, you can run wherever you like! It was always an odd limitation before, so I'm glad it's been changed

===============

Route 201

Equipped with our RUnning Shoes, we can now explore the East side of Route 201! I'll go over the pokemon we can catch here after we get the pokeballs, but you'll probably deal with one or two along the way. Since we can't catch any pokemon just yet, you'll just have to fight them off with your starter.

If you speak with the man in the large patch of tall grass, up against the northern border of the route, you'll find him to be the obligatory PokeMart employee handing out free samples. In this case: A Potion!

===============

Sandgem Town

We soon arrive in Sandgem Town. Dawn catches us at the entrance of the town and brings us to Prof. Rowan's lab. Pace emerges and tells us that Prof. Rowan isn't nearly as scary as he thought he was and actually turned out to be really friendly!

When we go inside to meet with Prof. Rowan, he's kind enough to not only allow us to keep the starter we've chosen, but we can now name it! I decided to call it Senshi, the Japanese word for "Fighter". I decided for Diamond version I'll simply be naming all of my captures after Japanese words since this is actually the last region based on Japan. Going forward from Gen IV, new regions are moreso based on popular vacation spots around the world rather than just local places in Japan. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

After speaking with Prof. Rowan, he offers us a request to help him fill out his new Pokedex which he developed with the assistance of a professor form the Kanto Region. I think we can manage a guess as to who that might be. This Pokedex will be used to gather data on Pokemon from the Sinnoh region! After agreeing to this pretty standard request, we're off to start our journey!

Dawn shows us around town, giving us the typical tutorial and describing the Pokemon Center and Marts before telling us we should probably go and visit our mother before we progress. And that's not a bad idea. But first, I'll want to visit the mart because we can actually buy some PokeBalls before we gain our first free samples!

 

With these Poke Balls, and the free Premier Ball that comes with purchasing 10 or more at a time, we can start catching Pokemon!

================

Route 201

We can make our way back to Twinleaf Town while avoiding the grass by jumping down the ledges.

==================

Twinleaf Town

When we return to our mother in Twinleaf Town, she not only gives us her blessing but even comments about how exciting of an opportunity this must be for you!

Before we head off, she gives us a Journal which we can use to record information about our journey, think like the summary that plays at the start of every session in Fire Red and Leaf Green. This journal will record things like when you arrived in a new city or caught a new pokemon, etc.

After receiving the journal from your mother, Pace's mother comes rushing in, asking if he happened to be over. She mentions that he came rushing through the house saying something about going off on an adventure and left without so much as saying goodbye! She's worried about him and wanted to give him an item to help with his journey.

After realizing we're going off as well, she hands us a parcel to deliver to him if we happen to run into him.

===================

Route 201

And on our way back to Sandgem town, we can finally go over the wild pokemon in the area of Route 201!

  

The first of these two I wound up capturing is Starly, a Normal/Flying type about as standard as they come. Not that standard in this case is a bad thing, Starly is actually a pretty common choice for player's teams in the Sinnoh Region! But, I have my eyes set on a different Flying-type for this playthrough. Starly can be found here at 50%. I named mine Feza!

  

The other 50% is taken by the next pokemon--Bidoof is a pokemon whose bulk is easy to underestimate. He's not a bad choice for a team at all, but his reputation is most well-known for being an HM-user in a region you'll desperately need an HM-user. I named mine Fusei Kodo.

Neither of these two are going on my team, but they'll make fine additions to my Pokedex!

 

 

Now, as you encounter pokemon and pay close attention to them, you may notice small distinctions between them. In Starly's case, some have smaller white markings on their faces while Bidoof might have fewer tufts on their tails! These are gender differences! And while not every pokemon has them, and they're certainly more noticable on some pokemon over others, I'll try to note them wherever I can. But it's such a small detail you wouldn't be alone in having never noticed most of these changes.

In Starly's case, female Starly have the smaller marking while female Bidoof have fewer tufts on their tails.

Honestly, I'm normally a huge fan of tiny details like this to make the world feel more varied and complex, but these details are so tiny you'll really rarely notice the differences unless something just looks off about the pokemon. I'm really not sure why they would go through the effort of including all of making all of these different gender differences. I guess it's just a fun way of testing how much of a Pokemon nerd somebody is by showing them a picture of a Bidoof and asking if it's Male or Female.

==================

Sandgem Town

And as we return to Sandgem Town, I think this is a good stopping point for our session today. Next time we'll explore the area surrounding Sandgem Town and see where we'll be headed from here! I'm excited for our adventure to truly begin!

[Aura]

Route 201

Before we move on today, I wanted to revisit Route 201 for one small detail that I didn't forget but I could've sworn wasn't there when I checked for it.

If you run along the northern path here, all the way to the lakefront...

You'll find a potion hidden among the flowers! I didn't forget about this item, but I must've missed it while searching around for it my first time through. I knew this item was here, but just assumed I must've been mistaken after failing to find the potion. I remembered being surprised when Platinum turned this into a TinyMushroom when I was younger, so I did know this potion was here, but I somehow missed it when I went to collect it. Anyway, weird story aside, I did collect this potion! Potions can actually be pretty useful for the early game to avoid a lot of backtracking. Wild Pokemon and trainer battles in the early game can actually be pretty taxing on your HP, and you're also fairly low on money if you're trying to keep your pokeballs stocked.

=================

Sandgem Town

As promised last time, today we'll be exploring the areas surrounding Sandgem Town. But first, if we explore around town a little bit, we'll find Dawn's home where we can find her little sister and grandfather. Just like us, Dawn is helping Prof. Rowan with his research by capturing pokemon for the pokedex, in a similar role to Brendan/May from Ruby and Sapphire. It seems her little sister really admires her. I always find this sort of character trope to be really sweet!

===============

Route 219

Just south of Sandgem Town is a small beach. Not much can be found here just yet, it's just a dead end of water. Looks like we'll be returning here later on!

There is, however, an Antidote you can pick up on the shore right now, which is probably more useful for you early-game than by the time you have Surf, so go ahead and pick that up now.

=================

Route 202

As we arrive on Route 202 after telling our mother of our journey, Dawn will give us our obligatory catching tutorial. If you haven't met with your mother yet, she will insist you go talk to her before letting you pass, so no skimping out!

                    

                                    

Dawn has told us before that she started with a Turtwig, and this is our first chance to see it in action! She said back then that if we had started with Turtwig, we would've had the same pokemon! But this is a lie! Her starter will always be the one not chosen by you or your rival. In other words, the starter that's weak against yours. In my case, that's Turtwig! Anyway, during this capture tutorial, she'll use her Turtwig to actually attack the Bidoof before throwing a pokeball! Even though I don't like these forced capture tutorials, I at least appreciate thta this one shows you a more accurate representation about how you should approach catching a pokemon by having Dawn weaken it before throwing a pokeball. It always bothered me as a kid that the tutorials just had the NPC throw a pokeball right away and successfully catch the pokemon. Seems like a bad precedent to set for a new player, doesn't it?

Anyway, once the capture tutorial is done, Dawn gives you five pokeballs for free before taking her leave to go on ahead. In the meantime, we can start catching pokemon here!

There are two pokemon of interest here, the first of which is our new party member!

================

 Denki (Shinx M); Lv. 4

 

Item: None

Ability: Intimidate | Moves: Tackle

Shinx is a fairly standard pick for a Sinnoh team because it's a prominent early-game Electric type that's just easy to love! As always, for my first playthrough of a Gen IV game, I wanted to focus primarily on many of my favorite Gen IV pokemon and I just think that Shinx deserves the spotlight! It also highlights a fun new change in Gen IV that I'm excited to cover, alongside Chimchar, but we'll go over it when it becomes relevant.

Shinx is available at a 30% rarity at all times of day.

-------------------

 

Shinx brings with it a gender difference. Can you tell the difference? The Male has a longer tuft of hair on the top of it shead while the female has a shorter tuft!

================

Now, if you've been opening the music tracks as you read these posts, you might have noticed I've switched over to nighttime music in this post. That's because this last session I played at nighttime! That's because this is where I wanted to cover the time of day mechanic.

You see, Gen IV actually brings back a lot of elements from Gen II that were more or less dropped in Gen III. Much like Gold and Silver, I think you can very clearly see the devs' goal to make this the definitive generation of Pokemon. I wonder if they anticipated Gen IV being the last gen, or if they knew they wanted to take the series in a new direction and just wanted to offer the best classic experience they could first?

Anyway, one of these mechanics that are brought back here is Time of Day! This mechanic wasn't necessarily dropped in Ruby and Sapphire, but it was certainly dramatically downplayed only being relevant for a single area, not affecting visuals or wild pokemon, and only affecting the evolution of Eevee. Meanwhile, Gold and Silver had entire NPCs that would only on certain days and the pokemon you could encounter in an area could completely change!

This time around, the time of day mechanic is not only fleshed out a lot more like in Gen II, it's even given a lot more visual variety with a gradual progression from Early Morning, Morning, Afternoon, Twilight, and Night. All of these categories don't actually affect gameplay, though. The actual gameplay-relevant divisions are still Morning, Day, and Night like in Gold and Silver.

Because times are more in-depth visually, it's clear that Diamond and Pearl don't follow the incredibly simplistic AM vs. PM distinction between Day and Night. The time slots for each section also aren't identical to Gen II. Morning is from 04:00 - 09:59; Day from 10:00 - 19:59; and Night from 20:00 - 3:39. Just like in Gen II, the time of day can have effects on what pokemon you can encounter. Unlike Gen II, though, this is a bit less annoying because it's far easier to cheat the system by simply changing your DS's system clock! If you want to play the game at night, simply set your system clock to 20:00 and the game will do the hard work for you! But if you want an accurate experience, make sure to set the time back!

This reliance on the system clock rather than an internal clock packaged within the game card itself comes with another bonus: There's no internal battery issues to fear this time around! If you recall, a prevalent issue that plagued me throughout Gen 3 was the dried up internal battery that caused time-based events to no longer work. I had to meticulously plan out what times I'd set each game to be at and they'd be permanently stuck, leaving certain areas of the game innaccessible on some files, and berry farming impossible. Now, this is no longer an issue and I can farm as many berries as I like! How exciting!

Aside from visual differences, the music will cue you as to what time of day it is. Many areas have slightly different arrangement to their music depending on the time of day, which is a really cool touch!

I bring this up now because this area is home to our first nocturnal pokemon: Kricketot! It's available only at night at a 10% rarity. Kricketot is a very basic bug-type pokemon that I don't believe is commonly used due to its low stats. It's most known for only knowing Bide in the beginning of the game, so you want to be careful about attacking it carelessly. I don't recommend seeking it out here if only because it's surrounded by some other new pokemon in another area coming up soon at the same rarity. But if you happen to see one, go ahead and catch it!

 

Can you tell the gender difference? Male Kricketot have smaller collars than the females.

Anyway, wild pokemon aren't the only thing new on this route. This is also the first route that has opposing trainers! That means we've got a few new trainer classes to cover!

The first of these trainer classes is the Youngster! Still sporting his signature shorts, tube socks, and backwards cap, but with a new red and blue color scheme! As always, the Youngsters generally specialize in common early-game pokemon like Starly and Bidoof. But like I said earlier in this post, don't underestimate these guys early game! Their higher level pokemon can actually be pretty solid walls if you're expecting to just rush through them. Watch the ratio of damage output to damage taken!

This route also introduces the female counterpart to the Youngster: The Lass! Lasses in Sinnoh sport poofier hairstyles and an overall darker color scheme for their outfits. As always, they tend to have a preference for cuter pokemon.

Toward the end of the route, you'll find a potion at the edge of a patch of grass.

=================

Jubilife City

Real quick, before entering the city proper, you can make your way to the little alcove to the west of the stairs and find a hidden Paralyze Heal!

When we first arrive at Jubilife City, Dawn offers some rather rude commentary about the amount of pokemon I have with me! Excuse me, ma'am, I did catch more, but they're in the PC! Little Ms. Just-A-Turtwig!

Anyway, here in Jubilife City, a lot of things open up to us! Strangely, despite the large size, the gym doesn't actually have any gyms in it! Instead, it seems to be the communication central of the region, similar to Hearthome City of Johto. Instead of a Radio Tower, though, Jubilife has its famous TV station! There's also the Poketch development company and the Trainers' School as well as the (unfortunately defunct) Global Trade Station which was certainly a major deal at the time!

Anyway, when we first arrive, an old man standing outside will urge us to go visit the trainer's school to learn more about pokemon. There's not much I expect to really learn from this place, but we'll want to visit it because inside...

We find Pace! We can deliver the parcel to him! He opens the Parcel to find a Town Map! To his surprise, there are actually two! He decides to share the other one with you.

With the Town Map, you can look at the region in its entirety!

We can technically view this map from any Pokemon Center, but it's nice to be able to see it from anywhere we want. Sinnoh has a lot of overlapping paths which actually kind of makes it a little difficult to figure out where you need to go next at times. There are also some rather deceptive connections which can get in the way. All in all, I'm honestly not a fan of the way Sinnoh is designed. I think it can be incredibly confusing to navigate if you aren't intimately familiar with the world already. But once you get your bearings, it's pretty easy to navigate! Of course, I'm getting ahead of myself here. We're not really at the confusing part just yet so we'll get there when we get there.

After receiving the parcel, Pace runs off to continue on his adventure. It seems really important to him to stay one step ahead of you.

 

Aside from Pace, there are also two trainers in here: School Kids! A Boy and a Girl. This is another trainer class returning from previous gens. They look very similar to the School Kids from Hoenn, but with brown hair and the girl's hair is a lot shorter. School kids generally battle with first-stage pokemon.

Both of these trainers come at you with an Abra here in the trainer's school. You might expect these to only sit there and keep trying to use Teleport, but don't let your guard down! These kids have been studying and are experimenting with ways to battle and they've just recently learned about TMs! Both of their Abra know the move Hidden Power which has randomized type and power depending on the pokemon's personality. Neither of these Abra were strong against Senshi or Denki, but they are incredibly fast and have really strong special attack for this early in the game! This battle can actually be pretty darn tough if you're not careful.

After defeating the two school kids, the boy will gift you with a TM for Hidden Power! This move brings with it our first exposure to that new concept I alluded to earlier. Up until Diamond and Pearl, whether a move's damage was calculated by the Attack and Defense stats or Special Attack and Special Defense (or Special stats in Gen 1) was determined by their type. Normal moves always used physical attack while fire moves always used special attack. As a result, Hidden Power was an odd case where it could change between being physical or special depending on the type it's randomly assigned. But, here in Gen IV, this has been changed so that the distinction between phsical and special is determined not by a move's type, but by the move itself! Every single move is categorized as a Physical, Special, or Status move. So, for example, Ember and Flamethrower are still special moves as they always have, but Fire Punch is now a Physical move! This offers a lot more variety among moves! For example, where before there was little reason to run Waterfall over Surf, now, Surf is a Special attack while Waterfall is physical! So if your water pokemon is better at using Physical attacks, you'll probably want to teach it Waterfall instead of Surf.

In the case of Hidden Power, it is now a Special Attack and will always deal Special Damage regardless of its typing. This has some weird effects on Hidden Power's usefulness as it's now been rendered near useless on pokemon that rely heavily on their physical stats, but it's also been made far more powerful for Special Attackers.

=================

Outside of the Trainer's School, there's still a lot to explore! You can find the president of the Poketch Company who's hosting a promotion to give away a free Poketch! Poketch is short for Pokemon Watch. We'll see what exactly it's useful for in a bit, but first, we've got to earn it! The promotion is simple, just seek out three clowns around Jubilife City and answer their trivia questions to receive a Coupon. Bring three Coupons to the President and he'll reward you with your free Poketch!

---------------------

The first clown isn't far away at all.

"Does a Pokemon grow stronger by defeating others and gaining Exp. Points?"

The second is actually a bit past the third. It's rather irritating that they decided to pull this, but it's probably just some sort of joke. You don't have to do them in any particular order, but I sure as hell feel the need to! He's outside the Poketch Company building.

"Just like Pokemon types, the moves of Pokemon also have types?"

The third you have to pass to get to the second. He's blocking the way to Jubilife TV.

"Can a Pokemon hold an item?"

Humorously, the answer to all three of these questions is "Yes," so you can clear this entire promotion just by mashing A. Not that you get penalized for getting any of the questions wrong or that any of the questions are difficult in the slightest.

Upon answering each question correctly, you'll be given Coupon 1, 2, and 3 respectively. Bring them to the president and...

 

You'll be gifted a free Poketch! The poketch you receive will vary in color depending on your gender. The male hero gets a blue Poketch and the female hero gets a red poketch.

Once you receive your poketch, it will automatically be displayed on the bottom screen! There's a green monochrome display and a button that can be tapped to switch between various apps! The poketch comes with only 4 apps, but it also promises the ability to install additional ones using special cards, similar to the Pokegear from Johto! Irritatingly enough, these Poketch apps aren't App 01-04, either. Over the course of the game, we should be gathering new Poketch apps and getting as many installed as we can! It's kind of ironic how hilariously dated yet also progressive this technology is. It really shows the era it was developed in that this was considered the technology of the next generation, and yet it's not actually too far off from smart watches of today! It just relies on old fashioned things like installation cards and monochrome displays. As you can imagine from it being on the bottom screen, you interact with it using the touch screen rather than any button inputs.

Note: Many of the clean screenshots of the poketch I can find are either from Platinum or spoil a future of a later app, so I'll take the lesser of two evils and just use screenshots from Platinum. If you see two buttons on the side, it's from Platinum. The Diamond and Pearl screenshots only have one button. In addition, it seems the Poketch was slightly redesigned for the international version. Some of these screenshots come from Serebii which uses the Japanese version mainly. The Japanese version seems to have a smaller button for switching apps. It also seems to be zoomed out more as the international version ahs the poketch fill up the entire screen... it seems nobody really wants to detail these things properly as they appeared in international DP, huh?

App 01: Digital Clock

This one simply displays the time. If you're unsure whether it's Morning, Day, or Night, this clock can help you figure out for sure. Tapping the clock will cause it to light up.

App 02: Calculator

Just what it says on the tin: The calculator is a basic 4-function calculator which can be used to run quick calculations to figure out how much damage a move might do, the odds of a certain event happening, or anything of the sort.

App 04: Pedometer

This pedometer is one of the most useful apps. It allows you to count your steps which can help you keep track of exactly how close you are to a new chance to hatch or receive a pokemon egg! I suppose that's a minor spoiler, but do you really think breeding's not going to be in this game? It can also be used for more petty reasons, like how many steps it took you to finally find a pokemon you were looking for. Tapping on the C will cause the counter to reset to 0. There's no way to undo this, so if you're tracking something important, be very careful not to press it.

App 05: Pokemon List

This one is perhaps my favorite of the four starting apps. It's simple and straight to the point but conveys a lot of information. It displays the pokemon in your party and a health bar indicating their current HP as well as which ones have held items. It'll refresh whenever you enter a building and the like (whenever the screen fades to black and a new map is loaded), but you can refresh it manually by tapping the screen. Fainted pokemon and pokemon with status ailments will be greyed out. You can tap on any healthy pokemon to hear their cry.

-------------------------

The next thing we can do here in Jubilife City is obtain a Quick Claw from the Jubilife Condominiums in the northwest boundary of the city.

--------------------------

 

The Poke Mart here has two clerks. The clerk on the right offers the standard stuff for you to buy. The clerk on the left, however, offers some special items that differ by location. In this case, the clerk sells Heal Balls and Air Mail.

Heal Balls are special pokeballs that fully heal the pokemon you catch. This is unfortunately incredibly redundant though, because it's essentially completely useless unless you're planning to use the pokemon you catch right away and you don't already have six pokemon on your team. Otherwise, if it's sent to the PC, it's automatically healed anyway, so this item suddenly becomes all about the aesthetic.

Air Mail is our first Mail! This works the way it always has: You give it to a pokemon to hold and write a letter to a friend, then trade that pokemon away to send that letter with them. Mail is incredibly affordable and comes in a variety of different designs. This is what the Air Mail looks like.

-------------------------

Finally, there's an NPC here who will offer to let you create a Group. This is a mechanic I've never really followed so I'm not sure how it works, but from what I gather, every player in the same group seems to get the same RNG for things like daily events... we'll go over these things as they show up, I suppose. I guess it just synchs up a hidden value in your save data? You can only be a part of one group at a time, so you'll either start your own group or join someone else's.

-------------------------

Did you think we were done? Ooh, you poor, sweet soul. Jubilife is huge with lots to check out, but there's still more to be explored just outside the city! Like a fisher in the gatehouse to the west who gives you an Old Rod!

=================

Route 218

Continuing past the fisher who gives yout he old rod, you can reach Route 218! Once again, there's not much we can do here, it's just a pier to fish off of. The Old Rod seems to take a long time to hook fish, it took me well over 10 tries just to get a single encounter!

  

To my knowledge, no matter where you fish with the Old Rod, you'll always find a Magikarp! This is a classic pokemon that's infamous for being useless on its own, but famous for its powerful evolution that it reaches very early on! Gyarados is a lot more powerful here in Gen IV thanks to the Physical/Special Split, so Magikarp here is a strong contender for a recommended party member in this gen especially!

 

Once again, Magikarp offers a gender difference. This time, it's in the whiskers! The male has yellow whiskers while the female has white ones.

===============

Route 204

The path to the north of Jubilife is a really good pit stop for the early game as it's filled with some lovely pokemon of interest.

Our main focus here, though, is our new party member!

==============

 Hana (Budew F); Lv. 5

 

Item: None

Ability: Poison Point | Moves: Absorb, Growth

Budew is another new Gen IV Pokemon! It's a Grass-type that might seem weak for now, but it can prove itself useful given some time! It's most common here during the day, however, where it's available at a 25% rarity.

==============

  

Zubat is another pokemon you can find here! While I don't recommend seeking it out here if only because it's an incredibly common pokemon elsewhere, I did catch one while seeking out a Kricketot, so I named it Uta!

 

And we've got yet another gender difference! Male Zubat have larger fangs while females have smaller ones.

  

I found Budew and Zubat while seeking out my main target here: Kricketot! This is where I recommend hunting it down just because of what it's near. But let me tell you, this took a lot longer than I expected. It may only be a 10% rarity, but I found so many Zubat before this guy it was infuriating! I named mine Uta because these guys love to make noise with their xylophone antennae!

--------------------

There's a Paralyze Heal to the north of the first pond here. You can get it simply by walking through the tall grass.

For the rest of the route, you'll be fighting your way through Youngsters and Lasses before arriving at a cave entrance! There's a youngster outside who tells you that there are boulders in the way, suggesting that maybe a pokemon could smash them... hinting at Rock Smash, I suppose? Gotta love the promise of HMs, and this region is definitely where the HM plague is at its worst.

================

Ravaged Path

We can't get very far in this cave, but just being able to set foot inside is enough!

First thing's first: This is where I recommend searching for Zubat early game. Even if you're not looking for it, you're still practically guaranteed to. It's got a whopping 78% encounter rate!

  

At 20% rarity, the main draw for this area is Geodude. Really, it isn't necessary to hunt for him here, he's much more common in another cave coming up soon, but I figured this was worth noting since it's before one of my story checkpoints that I'll be stopping at. Anyway, I caught Geodude and named her Kesseki.

If you're incredibly lucky, you might run into a wild Psyduck up here! But don't get your hopes up, it's only a 2% encounter rate. Still, that's a nonzero chance and a big reason I chose to hunt Geodude here. It's always exciting to encounter a pokemon in a place where it's rare, but if it happened every time you hoped it did, it wouldn't exactly be rare, would it? That's fine, though. My secondary purpose was to get some extra Exp on Hana while I searched. Needless to say, I don't recommend hunting for Psyduck here. It'll become much more common elsewhere.

-------------------

Outside of pokemon, there's also an Antidote you can find in here without needing Rock Smash, so that's nice.

=================

Route 203

Just East of Jubilife City is Route 203. If you try to leave before getting a poketch, an NPC will stop you and tell you to go do the promotion. So yeah, even though it seems like a neat little bonus, it's technically a story flag! Anyway, the main draw over here isn't necessarilyt he opportunity for exploration, but rather...

Pace meets us just outside the border of Jubilife City and challenges us to a battle! This is actually our first rival battle!

================

 

My Team

----------------------

 Senshi (Chimchar M); Lv. 12

 

Item: None

Ability: Blaze | Moves: Scratch, Leer, Ember, Taunt

----------------------

 Denki (Shinx M); Lv. 11

 

Item: None

Ability: Intimidate | Moves: Tackle, Leer, Charge

It might seem odd that Shinx learns Charge before learning any electric attacks if you've only played Gen III, but Charge now has an added bonus of increasing your special defense on top of increasing the power of your next electric attack.

-----------------------

 Hana (Budew F); Lv. 9

 

Item: Quick Claw 

Ability: Poison Point | Moves: Absorb, Growth, Water Sport

Look at that! A Pokemon that learns Water Sport that actually benefits from it!

================

Vs. Rival #1 (Pace)

Just like Ruby and Sapphire, your rival gets his own battle theme! This is gonna be a trend going forward, so you can look forward to that with each new game!

----------------------

Starly Lv. 7

                    

                   

I led with Hana against his Starly. This was a rather unfortunate matchup to start with, but it's not like I didn't expect it. Naturally, there was nothing Hana could do here, so I had to take the turn to retreat.

                    

                   

Denki was a good switch-in for this matchup since I could hit Starly's attack. After exchanging a few Leers and Growls, we eventually started attacking each other.

                                        

                   

"Don't get cocky kid, this isn't over yet!"

That's a huge surprise for anyone used to Gen III! Yes, starting with Diamond and Pearl, important trainers can now offer commentary during the battle. I'll try to note down the quotes whenever they happen because they can be pretty easy to miss.

                                        

                   

"My Pokemon's HP is low, this could be a close fight!"

...It wasn't a close fight. His Starly didn't stand a chance with its reduced attack.

---------------------

Piplup, Lv. 9

                    

                   

Pace's Piplup came out next. If only I had an Electric move... well, my HP was running fairly low at this point, so instead of going in on the offensive I chose to focus my efforts on reducing Piplup's defense. I didn't plan to send out Senshi next since it's a water type and I expected some water attacks, but I figured in case Hana can't handle this matchup with her low stats, the lowered defense would help Senshi take Piplup out despite the type disadvantage. Piplup, however, didn't seem too keen on attacking, so I eventually switchted to chipping away at its health with Tackle until it finally started hitting me with pound, forcing me to switch out.

                    

                   

Hana rejoined the fight and started setting up with Growth, it's really the only thing she can do. Absorb is an incredibly weak attack, even when super-effective. But, thanks to its HP restoration, I can basically get an Absorb or two off for free and heal off the damage with Absorbs of my own. As a bonus, anytime Piplup would use Growl was a wasted turn for Pace and a free Sp. Attack boost for me! Anytime Piplup attacked, I'd use Absorb to heal off as much damage as I could. Otherwise, I'd use Growth to buff the attack. It wasn't long before Piplup went down.

=================

Pace is amazed that he lost the battle, but doesn't seem phased at all. He insists that he's gonna become the world's toughest pokemon trainer and that he'll start by taking on the Oreburgh City Gym! And then he recklessly runs off again. Goodness, this guy is high energy and hard to keep up with, but I suppose you can't fault him for being so high-spirited! It sounds like our next session will be focused on a pokemon gym? I might divide it up a little better, I don't believe we'll be stuck covering a whole bunch of side things next time, so hopefully that'll mean a shorter update! We'll just have to see though!

[Aura]

Route 203

With Pace defeated, we can get to exploring Route 203! There's still mostly just Youngsters and Lasses populating the area.

You can find the Psychic pokemon Abra in the grass here, but Abra is rather infamous for being difficult to catch. It only knows Teleport in the wild, so it'll flee the encounter on the first turn. Your best bet is to just toss a Pokeball right away and hope for the best. Abra will be much easier to obtain a little bit further ahead and even if you want to catch one in the wild, there's still a better place to look for them, I'd say. Though, to be fair, this is where it appears most commonly. Basically, I'd only recommend catching an Abra here if you really want one with a custom name for your story team.

You can find a Pokeball at the top of the ledge near the start of the route.

And by wading through the sea of grass at the end of the route, you can make your way to a Repel. Somewhat of a sick joke, I'd say, for people who are trying to avoid encounters forcing you to go through all that grass just to get one of these.

==================

Oreburgh Gate

Going into the cave from Route 203 will bring you to Oreburgh Gate.

This place will give you better odds of finding Geodude than Ravaged Path, but if you're looking for Zubat, they're more common there.

As you pass the Hiker here, he'll give you HM06: Rock Smash. And so it begins... We won't teach this to anyone just yet since we don't need it, but in case you've been living under a rock throughout this thread, allow me to smash it for you. These HMs are special TMs that are infinitely reusable. The catch, however, is that the move taught with them cannot be easily deleted. These things are incredibly unfortunate and as I've alluded to before, they're at their worst here. This is the region that'll probably make you want to start using a designated HM-user.

Anyway, the primary use for HMs is to clear obstacles in the overworld. But each HM requires a gym badge to work outside of battle, so we can't use Rock Smash just yet. There are rocks blocking our path to the north preventing us from seeing what's back there.

 

A little bit further ahead, we're met by a Camper and Picnicker! These are male and female counterparts to a trainer class focused on the wildlife around them. Campers are boys and Picnickers are girls. As you'd probably expect, Campers generally like cooler pokemon while Picnickers seem to prefer cute ones.

===============

Oreburgh City

Oreburgh City is a town famous for its coal mine! Where Ruby and Sapphire wanted to flex the graphical capabilities of the new console with reflective water, this game seems to want to flex its 3D environments with the design of this mining area. The way the conveyor belt rises and lowers overhead is something I imagine would be pretty difficult if not impossible to accomplish the way the 2D tilesets worked in Gen 3. They even play with it a bit by making it somewhat of a puzzle to figure out that you can walk under them by placing items on either side of them. It's actually a pretty well-designed area to demonstrate the differences the 3D environments can provide in terms of the way you explore the world.

The city also has a museum that's quite frankly pretty disappointing. It really just has a large block of coal to boast about. More importantly, however, is a receptionist at the desk who alludes to the fact that he can restore pokemon from fossils! So, if we ever get our hands on any fossils, we know where to bring them!

When you first arrive, a Youngster will meet you at the entrance and notice that you don't have any badges! He'll then lead you to the first gym.

But Pace is here! He's blocking the way to the gym. He tells us off for being too slow and says that he already got his gym badge but that the gym leader has run off to the mines, so we'll have to go after him if we want a badge for ourselves. So, it seems getting inside is a bust. Not that there'd be any reason to go in without a gym leader present. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let's look around town and live a little!

 

By talking to NPCs in the tall buildings, you can get your hands on a Dusk Ball and Great Ball! The Dusk Ball is a brand new type of pokeball! Not only does it look really cool and offer a cool dark shadowy effect when a pokemon comes out of it, but this pokeball is famous for being even stronger than an Ultra Ball when used in caves or at night. Otherwise, it has the strength of a regular pokeball. The Great Ball is simply stronger than a Pokeball all around. You only get one of each of these for now, so make sure to use them wisely!

One NPC will ask to see a Zubat! If you have a Zubat in your party, he'll be ecstatic and give you a Heal Ball as thanks. Honestly, I think this should've been swapped with the free Dusk Ball because these things are only useful in the beginning of the game and Dusk Balls are much more valuable. Regardless...

There is yet another new type of Pokeball available from the left clerk at the PokeMart! This one is Devon Corp's own Net Ball! It's stronger than an Ultra Ball when used on Water- or Bug-Type Pokemon but only as strong as a pokeball for any other type. 

You can also buy Tunnel Mail from the clerk here.

The Tunnel Mail looks like this when viewed!

----------------------

 

Remember how I said Abra would be easier to obtain a little bit further ahead? Well, this is it! A girl named Hilary will trade you her Abra, named Kazza, for your Machop! As usual, Kazza's level will match the level of the Machop you trade over, so if you want a really easy time raising your Abra, you can level a Machop up to level 15 then trade it for Kazza.

Unfortunately, you don't get any special note attached to the Abra, the in-game trades this time around instead mostly just come with various berries. And this one's just an Oran Berry at that!

You obviously don't have a Machop just yet, but that can certainly be fixed real soon! For now, though, let's keep exploring Oreburgh.

---------------------

A worker in the southeast part of the mining area will give you a Super Potion.

And up against the giant slag heap, you can get your hands on a bag of Stardust!

================

Route 207

Before we head into the mine to search for the gym leader, let's take a brief step up north into Route 207! There's not too much we can find here because of the steep slope that prevents us from climbing the cliff, but...

 

There are not one, but two Pokeballs that can be grabbed on the other end of the grass here. More importantly, there's new wild pokemon to encounter here!

  

Remember how I said we could find a Machop real soon? Well here it is! I caught mine and named it Omo-sa! Machop is most common during the day at 45%. It's at 35% in the morning and 25% at night.

===============

Oreburgh Mine [B1F]

Oreburgh Mine can be entered from the mining area of Oreburgh City.

Right near the entrance, you can find an X-Defense!

  

Onix can be found down here! I don't recommend hunting it down yet, especially considering it's pretty difficult to catch this early on, unless you want one for your team. In which case, it might not be a bad idea to use that Dusk Ball or Great Ball to try and make this catch. Otherwise, you'll go through a bunch of pokeballs. Onix is available here at 10%, but it's more common in a later dungeon, though, so I recommend putting off hunting for one for a while. I did catch one myself and named it Horu.

===============

Oreburgh Mine [B2F]

Down here there are a bunch of workers hard at work! If you speak to some of them, they'll challenge you to a quick battle. Workers are a new(?) trainer class. Technically, there were workers in Colosseum and XD, but this is their first appearance in the main series! Workers in Sinnoh tend to use pokemon capable of heavy lifting!

 

There's a Potion and Escape Rope as you progress to the end of the cave.

At the depths of the mine, we'll find Roark between two rocks! He tells us to stand back and watch as he demonstrates the Rock Smash technique on the boulder! It explodes into dust! A neat particle effect unlike anything we saw in Gen 3! Roark recognizes that we want to battle him for a gym badge, so he tells us to met him at the gym before walking off. There doesn't seem much else to do. You can use that Escape Rope to make your way back or just manually walk, it's not that far away and this Escape Rope could be used elsewhere!

 

While making my way out, Senshi reached level 14 and evolved into Monferno! And now, he's gained a Fighting sub-type! 

=================

Oreburgh Gym

The Oreburgh Gym is a Rock-type gym! There's a pretty fair spread of pokemon that are strong against Rock-types here, so you're bound to have something to use!

 

The gym trainers here are both Youngsters that use the typical Geodude you'd expect to see, the latter bringing an Onix as well.

Fight your way through the Youngsters, or find your way around them, either way you'll still find the light at the end of this tunnel to be the helmet of our first gym leader!

=================

 

My Team:

----------------------

 Senshi (Monferno M); Lv. 14

 

Item: None

Ability: Blaze | Moves: Mach Punch, Leer, Ember, Taunt

----------------------

 Denki (Shinx M); Lv. 14

 

Item: None

Ability: Intimidate | Moves: Tackle, Leer, Charge, Bite

-----------------------

 Hana (Budew F); Lv. 9

 

Item: Quick Claw 

Ability: Poison Point | Moves: Mega Drain, Growth, Water Sport, Stun Spore

================

Vs. Oreburgh Gym Leader Roark

------------------------

Geodude, Lv. 12

                    

                    

I figured Hana would be the best lead for this battle, being the best fit against Rock-type pokemon. The guide in the beginning warned that Roark could cover for his weaknesses, so let's see if he can put that to the test! This Geodude certainly couldn't hold up to the pressure, a single Mega Drain took it right out!

---------------------

Onix, Lv. 12

                    

                    

Onix, too, went down very easily to a single Mega Drain.

---------------------

Cranidos, Lv. 14

                                         

                    

"Think you can take down the next one like you did earlier?"

Roark's Cranidos is actually a pretty intimidating shift on the typical early Rock-type gym leader. Normally they're focused on powerful defenses. Cranidos here captializes on his mono Rock typing by not worrying so much about defense and focusing on his attack! Headbutt can deal a lot of heavy damage. And if you try to switch out to get away, its Pursuit can really ruin your day!

I decided to shift my approach and, rather than use Mega Drain, I went for a Stun Spore to hinder its offensive presence by halting some of its attacks. I missed the first try, but I got the second hit! Cranidos nailed Hana with a Pursuit which on its own dealt half of my HP. Had I chosen to switch, I would've been KO'd! I can't risk switching here, so I went instead for Mega Drain. This Mega Drain was able to heal off just enough damage for me to survive the incoming Headbutt! Hana held on with just 1HP! I was also able to get Cranidos down low with that attack!

                                         

                    

"No way, not yet! Not giving up!"

With Cranidos' HP now low, I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to retreat knowing Roark would have to take the turn to heal with a Potion.

                    

                    

I brought Denki out for this one! I set up a few Leers before getting KO'd with a Headbutt.

                    

                    

Senshi came next and made the final blow with a super-effective Mach Punch!

-------------------------

 

And with that, we've defeated Roark and earned his Coal Badge!

In addition, he also gives us TM76: Stealth Rock. Stealth Rock is an incredibly influential move for the game's competitive meta! This is a new entry hazard that deals damage to any incoming pokemon based on their defensive matchup against the Rock type! By default, it'll deal 12.5% of a pokemon's maximum HP when it enters the arena. This number will double if it's super-effective to a dangerous 25%! And if it's doubly super-effective, that's a massive 50%! This thing can seriously cause problems and makes Rapid Spin users much more important for the Gen IV competitive field! Otherwise this thing will seriously cripple your ability to switch out.

--------------------

MVP: Hana

While it wasn't a clean sweep, Hana helped significantly with every pokemon on Roark's team, especially the incredibly dangerous Cranidos. Thanks to the paralysis, Denki and Senshi were able to get in there with some good hits that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten! I also have to commend that ability to wiggle out of a KO by predicting correctly and retreating on a heal at the risk of getting nailed with Pursuit.

==================

Well, that's that for today! Next time, I suppose we'll head back to Jubilife and see if anything's changed now that we've gotten a gym badge!

[Aura]

Oreburgh City

During the day, the music is a lot more chipper here!

Last time, we defeated Roark at the Oreburgh City Gym and claimed the Coal Badge! With the Coal Badge, we're now capable of using the HM Rock Smash outside of battle!

With that in mind, we'll need a pokemon as our designated HM-User! That's going to be Bidoof! So, I pulled Fusei Kogo out of the PC and taught him Rock Smash via HM. Now, the world has been slightly expanded for us so let's take a look at some things that are new in familiar areas!

===============

Oreburgh Gate

Our first new area lies in Oreburgh Gate. With Rock Smash, we can now make our way to the lower floor by following the path to the north.

Oreburgh Gate [B1F]

We can't explore this floor in its entirety just yet, but there are a couple of items we can get by Smashing a few rocks. One of them is a pretty important item:

TM70: Flash can be found by smashing the rocks to the west. And yes, you read that right. TM 70. Flash has been downgraded from HM Status and is no longer reusable. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean it's not still needed to explore parts of the overworld. Still, it's nice that it's at least not super restrictive. It's like they're acknowledging that this move was almost completely useless even among HMs!

On the other side, smashing a few rocks in your way will net you another Stardust. There's more to see in this direction, but we can't go any further because there are unsmashable rocks in the way. We'll need a bicycle to get deeper into the cave.

  

In addition to the items, one more thing to look out for down here is Psyduck! As far as I can tell, Psyduck doesn't get any more common than the 30% he's found here, so you may as well seek him out! I named mine Ahiru.

 

While I was exploring down here, Denki leveled up to Lv. 15 and evolved into a Luxio!

 

Luxio also has gender differences similar to Shinx's. Males have a larger mane than females.

================

Jubilife City

When we make our way back to Jubilife City, we'll find a few things are now open to us once we've obtained the Coal Badge!

Global Trade Station

Here we have one of the many tragic reminders of harsh realities of the progression of technology. With the introduction of Wi-Fi capabilities of the DS, it was only natural that the latest Pokemon games would take advantage of Wi-Fi in a big way. In fact, I'd almost go as far as to say Pokemon was the perfect game to take advantage of Wi-Fi Connection.

Unfortunately, wish Nintendo shutting down its Wii and DS servers several years back, this building is now completely defunct. But once upon a time, the Global Trade Station would allow you to link up with and trade with other players around the world. The way it worked is that you could place a pokemon in the GTS and request a pokemon in return, or you could search up a pokemon being offered and see if you have the pokemon they're requesting. Of course, you'd always see a lot of ridiculous offers like a Bidoof for a Celebi, but it was also common for people without friends who like Pokemon to utilize the GTS to get access to pokemon they've never been able to use before, like trade evolutions or pokemon that are excluded from their version of the game. That and swapping starters or legendaries for pokedex completion.

To keep things balanced for story progression, though, a major limitation that made the GTS difficult to use for National Pokedex Completion was the fact that you couldn't search or request any pokemon that isn't already registed as having been seen in your pokedex. So you can't just walk up here from Oreburgh City, trade for a Mewtwo, and then wreck house through the rest of the game.

I, personally, never actually got the chance to play with the GTS while it was active. This was because my family's router had security settings that weren't supported by the DS Lite, only the DSi. But Diamond and Pearl required the use of the DS Lite's interface for Wi-Fi Connection. It could still be used on the DSi, but it had all the same limitations as the DS Lite. Needless to say, I was always somewhat seething as a child over all the online events and stuff I'd be missing...

================

Aside from the GTS, we'll also want to revisit the Poketch Company where that developer who was working on a new app has finally finished! Speaking to him will reward you with...

App 03: Memo Pad

This app is a simple drawing app that allows you to draw anything you want on the notepad. It's perhaps the most universally useful app since you can use it to keep track of anything you want. But, you are limited to the DS's tiny resolution, so it's not like you can keep too much on here. And if you change apps, your memo pad will be cleared!

================

 

 

As we try to make our way out of Jubilife to the north, we'll be stopped by two strange-looking men pestering Prof. Rowan and Dawn! They're demanding Rowan's research papers and threatening to hurt Dawn! We show up just in time to give Dawn a helping hand in punishing these creeps!

===================

                               

                               

Vs. Team Galactic Grunt & Team Galactic Grunt

This is our first encounter with Team Galactic and their rad as hell music!

This is also the first case of a Multi-Battle here in Gen IV! These were first introduced in Gen 3 and were only implemented in the main story in Emerald where you were required to select three pokemon out of your six to battle with. Here, though, the transition is completely seamless! You can use any of your pokemon alongside your partner. Consequently, these multi-battles are significantly easier than any other battles because you get more than six pokemon and your opponents don't. But I suppose you always kind of outnumber your opponents usually, anyway, so it's not a big deal. I'd prefer it this way over the awkward way Emerald handled this.

-------------------

 

Wurmple Lv. 9 & Zubat Lv. 9

                               

                               

It's a simple matchup here. I could start by attacking the Wurmple, but I figured the Zubat would be more annoying, so I used Taunt to prevent it from using SuperSonic. Then it only took a few Embers to take Zubat and Wurmple both down. Easy!

===================

After defeating the two grunts, they both scatter and run off. Rowan tells us how those Team Galactic goons have been trying to steal his research, going on about how his research on Pokemon Evolution has brought to light that pokemon appear to give off some form of energy when they evolve. They're interested in using that energy for some unknown purpose, but their methods were far too arrogant and rude!

Dawn and Rowan thank us for our help before heading off. Meanwhile, it seems an employee of Jubilife TV has been watching the whole event unfold! He approaches us and praises us for the great show we just put off!

He gives us a Fashion Case that can hold special accessories for pokemon before inviting us to visit Jubilife TV which has just opened for public visitors!

          

The Fashion Case come swith a handful of accessories: A Black, Pink, and Orange Fluff, two White Fluffs, a Red Feather, two White Feathers, and a Black and White Moustache! We'll go over what these are useful for soon but you'll want to collect as many accessories as you can.

 

You'll also start with two backdrops in your Fashion Case as well: A Plain Backdrop and another that will be random each playthrough. In my case, it was the Fiery backdrop!

====================

Jubilife TV [1F]

This is Jubilife TV! This is essentially Sinnoh's counterpart to Johto's Radio Tower. Though it's a bit less involved in the game's mechanics, it does tie into the theme of technological progression that you'll notice across the Sinnoh region.

 

There's an NPC here in the lobby on the first floor that'll change for each day of the week. Since it's Tuesday, it'll be Cameraman Tevin who will battle you with his Lv. 17 Pachirisu! Each day there will be a different trainer to battle here, but their levels are surprisingly high so you might be caught off guard with how much of a fight they'll put up.

------------------

In addition to the rotating trainer, there's also the daily lottery! Every day a new number will be drawn and is compared to the Trainer ID of the Original Trainer of all pokemon in the player's party and in their PC. Depending on certain numbers matching, you can receive different prizes!

      

     

If the last number on the far right of the trainer ID matches the lottery, you'll receive a random backdrop from a selection: Ranch, City at Night, Snowy Town, Fiery, Outer Space, Cumulous Cloud, Desert, Flower Patch, Future Room, Open Sea, Total Darkness, Tatami Room, or Gingerbread Room.

If the last two digits match, you'll receive a PP Up.

The last three digits will net you an Exp Share: A Held Item that will allow the pokemon holding it to gain experience even if it isn't used in battle. (Don't worry, this isn't the only way you can get this item)

The last four digits will net you a Max Revive

And if you're incredibly lucky, an exact match will net you a Master Ball!

The strategy for getting good prizes at the lottery is to trade with a lot of people as well as complete all of the in-game trades. At the time of release, the GTS was a huge boon in this goal! If you have pokemon with OTID's ending in all 10 different digits, you'll always receive at least the minimum reward of a backdrop every day!

================

Jubilife TV [2F]

The second floor will lead you to an area where you can put your accessores to some sort of use!

Entering the door near the staris will take you the gallery. Here, you can speak to the Hiker standing outside the dressing room and he'll ask if you want to dress your pokemon up and encourage you to make it look really cute! This will bring you to a small dress-up game where you can drag and drop your accessories and select a backdrop for your pokemon! With your starting accessories, there's really not much you can do, but let's give it a shot anyway!

Once you've finished dressing your pokemon up, you can give the outfit a name using the text interface.

And here's my masterpiece! You can view your creation in the portrait next to the entrance. If you mix records with a friend, your portrait will appear in one of the empty frames nearby while yours will appear in their gallery. Of course, you can overwrite this at any point by dressing up a new pokemon.

Trust me, this isn't the only application of accessories and backdrops. Accessories are certainly an important item to collect, but this feature is just for fun and is, quite frankly, a bit silly. But it lets you play with the dress up mechanic in a stress-free environment which is nice.

Stress-free environment? That might sound a bit ominous... don't worry, it's nothing required! Unless you're going for completion anyway...

------------------------

  

I suppose I should've spoken with this guy first, but the NPC in the hallway just outside the stairs leading to the next floor will give you one of three accessories: The Turtwig Mask, Chimchar Mask, or Piplup Mask matching your chosen starter. 

=====================

Jubilife TV [3F]

 

The two rooms on this floor are ranking rooms. The one on the right is the Group Ranking Room which will compare high scores in various categories among the members of your group, while the Global Ranking Room will compare high scores around the world. Unfortunately, with Wi-Fi gone, this will no longer be able to update.

As for right now, the center machines are under maintenance. The machine on the left carries statistics on your adventure: Pokemon you've defeated, pokemon caught, Eggs hatched, and pokemon encountered while fishing, while the machine on the right records stats on Pokemon Contest performances... oops, minor spoilers, I suppose? Let's not worry about that just yet. I'll turn a blind eye and play coy a little longer. You know me.

----------------------

Before we move on to the next floor, you'll want to turn your attention to the NPC's standing in the hallway: These guys are very special characters with a very mysterious purpose. If you speak with them, they'll ask you for an interview about what you think of TV. After you answer, they'll also ask you for some feedback. This is an opportunity to enter some secret codes!

First of all, do you recall the surveys in the Poke Marts in Fire Red, Leaf Green, and Emerald? Well, that's this guy! If you enter the responses:

EVERYONE HAPPY

WI-FI CONNECTION

With this, you'll unlock Mystery Gift! We'll.. cover this a little bit later on. Normally I'd like to wait until postgame before covering Mystery Gift, but in this game's case, there's something I'd like to touch on a bit earlier than usual.

But that's not all! Because there's an additional purpose for this guy! Remember how you could get an additional wallpaper by telling secret jokes to Walda in Emerald? Well, this feature is expanded upon here in Diamond and Pearl! Unfortunately, the wallpapers you get aren't customizable like Walda's, but they are really cool and you can unlock all of them at once rather than just one! Just like Walda's jokes, though, the keywords you have to use to unlock these wallpapers are random depending on your trainer ID. I'm not sure how you were supposed to figure these wallpapers, but there is a generator online that can be used to find all of the passcodes you need! My only guess is that these passwords must have been generated using some sort of machine at irl events or something? I'm still completely baffled as to how you're supposed to get these to work.

Anyway, you may have noticed that I haven't covered PC Wallpapers yet after making a point to show them during Gen III! Well that's because I wanted to wait until I could show off these guys, too! Granted, I think I probably should've held off because this post is already getting a lot longer than I expected.

Scenery 1

Spoiler

   

Forest | City | Desert | Savanna

Scenery 2

Spoiler

   

Craig | Volcano | Snow | Cave

Scenery 3

Spoiler

   

Beach | Seafloor | River | Sky

Etcetera

Spoiler

   

Checks | PokeCenter | Machine | Simple

As you can tell by looking at these, the themes are once again very similar to their predecessors. They're still all redesigned, though! I'm not as much of a fan of these DP wallpapers and I do wish that I could have Emerald's wallpapers instead. But, perhaps they intentionally kept these a little underwhelming in order to not get in the way of the real stars. The special wallpapers you unlock with the codes!

Friends 1

Spoiler

   

Space | Backyard | Nostalgic | Torchic

Friends 2

Spoiler

   

Trio | PikaPika | Legend | Team Galactic

I'm not really sure why there's a Torchic wallpaper of all things here, but these wallpapers are really freaking cool! It's so bizarre to me that the artists put so much work into these wallpapers and then chose to hide them behind such a ridiculously cryptic mechanic!

==================

Jubilife TV [4F]

There's... surprisingly nothing of importance on the top floor, just a guy who tells you how popular you're going to be as the news of your heroics spreads.

=================

So, my session continued beyond this and into the next area, but I think for now I'm going to call it quits. I think I severely underestimated how much content there was to go over today. My bad! Next time, we'll continue to the north of Jubilife and see what's going on there!

[Aura]

Mystery Gift

Remember how we unlocked Mystery Gift last time and said we'd be covering it a lot sooner than usual? Well, that's because there's actually something pretty relevant to us right now.

Remember that Manaphy Egg we recovered back during Pokemon Ranger? The one Prof. Hastings wanted to have transferred to a responsible trainer in the Sinnoh Region? Well, this is how you can receive that special gift!

Once you have Mystery Gift unlocked, you can access it from the game's main menu. With this mode, you can receive gifts from other players as well as over Wi-Fi Connection to directly receive limited-time releases. To obtain the Manaphy Egg from Pokemon Ranger, you'll need to use the Get Via Wireless option. This will allow you to obtain the gift via DS Wireless Communications and communicate with another system offering the Manaphy Egg!

And you'll be able to receive the egg! The egg will be carried by a deliveryman in any PokeMart, so go meet with him with an empty slot in your party in order to claim the egg! Like any Pokemon Egg, you'll need to carry this around with you in order to hatch it.

Now, you may recall that I decided to play Pokemon Ranger on Wii U Virtual Console, meaning I can't actually transfer the Manaphy Egg to Diamond and Pearl. But that's okay, because I'm a filthy cheater!

That's right, using the benefits of an Action Replay code, I'll be hacking a Manaphy gift into my game! Now, I've stressed throughout this series that I absolutely do not want to rely on cheating to get anything in these games I otherwise can't. However, I do believe this to be a special case. This Manaphy is something I did technically earn just by beating Pokemon Ranger, I just don't have the means of communicating between the games. Had I been playing these games at the time of release, I'd be playing them both on physical DS cartridges and would certainly be able to access this Manaphy by this point in the game. So, by that logic, I think it's okay to use an Action Replay Code to obtain the Manaphy reward.

If you want to do the same, the code is right here:

Spoiler

94000130 FCFF0000
B21C4D28 00000000
B0000004 00000000
0000AA3C EDB88320
2000AA68 00000007
D2000000 00000000

Be careful entering new cheat codes into an Action Replay! You can potentially cause damage to your game if you change the wrong bits.

With this code active, holding L and R while entering the PokeMart will cause the deliveryman NPC to appear carrying the requested Manaphy Egg.

===================

Jubilife City

Once you have your Manaphy Gift received via Mystery Gift, you can make your way over to the deliveryman in the PokeMart to receive the egg!

I always thought it was super fascinating that Manaphy hatched from a special egg. It kinda makes me wish all pokemon had special egg patterns like in the anime.

 

It's Wednesday this time, so we can battle Clown Lee at Jubilife TV! Curiously, Lee is the only member of the Clown Trainer Class in the entire game, making his trainer class entirely defined by the lone Mr. Mime on his team. Perhaps they planned for more of these guys in the game but never found a good place to put them? I'm not really sure, but whatever the case, this is the only place you can battle one!

===================

Route 204

Now that we're done in Jubilife City, let's finally proceed onward to the next story beat!

There's nothing new is available to us on the southern end of Route 204 that we couldn't get to before, so let's make a beeline for Ravaged Path!

================

Ravaged Path

Now that we have Rock Smash, we can explore a bit more of Ravaged Path!

We can smash through the boulder on the west to open up the path to TM39: Rock Tomb! Unforunately there's not much further we can go in this direction since there's a body of water blocking the way. 

The boulders on the east side block the way forward!

==================

Route 204

And now we come out on the northern side of Route 204!

  

After going this whole game mostly just battling Youngsters and Lasses, this area completely blindsides us with three new trainer classes back to back!

The first is an Aroma Lady: A female trainer class that emphasizes pleasant-smelling grass-type pokemon! In Sinnoh, Aroma Ladies have long hair and long green pencil skirts!

Up next we have the staple Bug Catcher! His design still hasn't changed much at all even from Gen 1. I guess all bug catchers around the world have a standardized uniform? Bug Catchers specialize in common bug-type pokemon and are generally really easy to KO.

The last new trainer class are twins! You might be surprised to find that these twins can now see you from more than one tile away! In Emerald, they could only see one tile away, presumably because they didn't want to have to script movement for both NPC's. Now, it seems a bit simpler of a solution! 

Twins specialize in Double Battles and will always challenge you together! Their pokemon are typically either identical or form some sort of cute pairing.

 

Along this route, you can also find an Awakening and TM09: Bullet Seed.

==================

Floaroma Town

We've now arrived in Floaroma Town! Even though this place is really small and doesn't have a whole lot going on, for some reason, it's always been incredibly memorable to me. I think it's all the pretty flowers that really stick with me.

The PokeMart here sells Bloom Mail.

Bloom Mail looks like this when viewed! Quite fitting, huh?

------------------

 

Just outside of the flower shop is an Oran and Cheri Berry Tree! And this time, I can freely and shamelessly use my berries as I see fit since I can easily grow more as long as I leave just one of each.

Inside the Flower Shop, you can find a girl who will give you a Sprayduck! This works just like the Wailmer Pail in Gen 3: It allows you to water berry trees to help them prosper. Frequently watering your berries whenever their soil dries up will help them to relax and provide better harvest!

    

Another NPC in here will give you a random common berry every day: Cheri, Chesto, Pecha, Rawst, and Aspear. All of these restore a status condition: Paralysis, Sleep, Poison, Burn, and Freeze respectively. Some are more valuable than others, but they're all nice to have!

You can also buy some accessories here, but a lot of these accessories are incredibly expensive! Partially because they can't simply be ground out in a sitting or two. Why not? Because this shop doesn't accept standard money! Instead, you pay in berries! And as you scroll down, these prices get absurdly high! Since it's not possible to get most of these accessories just yet, I figured it was for the best to put covering the accessories you can get here off until later when we actually start to delve into where these accessories are seriously going to be used.

----------------------

Finally, perhaps the most important thing here, is a little girl who will ask if you think it's cute the way pokemon pluck berries from trees. If you agree, she'll give you TM88: Pluck! This is a new Flying-type move in Gen IV that deals 60 power worth of damage but additionally consumes the opponent's berry, if they're holding one, and steals its effect. I'm not sure if plucking a berry off an opponent is consistently helpful in Gen IV meta or not, though. Honestly, I kinda doubt it.

-------------------

 

In the back of Floaroma Town, there are two Galactic grunts complaining about their station here and how boring it is as well as how much they're creeped out by bug pokemon. Of course, we can't do anything with them just yet, so we'll leave 'em be and move on to the next area.

==================

Route 205

Since we're not exploring much of Route 205 just yet, and it's actually a pretty sizeable route, I figured I wouldn't put the map of the entire route just yet. It's more or less just a straight shot to the next area.

 

There are two berry trees here, though, providing a Chesto and Pecha Berry. Naturally, you're going to want to replant berries once these are picked!

As we try to move forward, a little girl will ask you for help, telling you those strange men have kept her father trapped inside the Valley Windworks! Sounds like a mission for us! Team Galactic will block our way heading north anyway.

=================

Valley Windworks

This is a place focused on generating clean energy by harvesting the power of the wind with turbines!

But before we get too caught up in the story, there's grass here! And it's surprisingly dense with new pokemon; the first of those new pokemon is going to be our new party member!

===============

 Uki (Buizel F); Lv. 9

 

Item: None

Ability: Swift Swim | Moves: Growl, Water Sport, Quick Attack, Water Gun

-------------------

Buizel is a really cute pokemon you just can't resist! I wanted to use it on my team because it's another example of a pokemon that takes advantage of the physical/special split by being a Water-type pokemon, a traditionally specially-oriented type, and having a more physical build! He's also just one of my favorite Gen IV pokemon designs, so I've just gotta make room for him!

==============

 

Buizel has a gender difference that's actually not visible from the front. Males have two spots on their back while females only have one.

  

In addition to Buizel, you can also find Shellos! Shellos is an incredibly bizarre pokemon. Even at the low levels you find it here, it comes with the move Water Pulse and it's not far off from learning Mud Bomb as well! Shellos is scary in the early game, and catching one isn't a bad choice for your team! If I wasn't a big fan of Buizel's design, I'd probably go for Shellos over it. I named myh Shellos Namekuji.

  

Pachirisu is the last pokemon here! This is the pokemon I'd say cemented the idea that every region going forward would bring with it its own variation on Pikachu's design. A tradition that's still going strong to this day! Unfortunately, these Pikachu clones seem to share a common struggle in that... none of them evolve like Pikachu does. To me, this makes them a lot less appealing for a single-player playthrough, and they're also not very good competitively. (Yes, I'm aware of the infamous story of Pachirisu being on a team that won the championships in fairly recent history, but that's not exactly proof to the contrary.) I do really adore Pachirisu's design and I would certainly want one as a buddy in real life! But it's unfortunately just not able to make the cut for me. I named mine Risu.

 

And once again we've got another gender difference! This time, it's in the stripe on their forehead! The Male's is longer while the girls' is shorter.

==================

 

There's a Galactic Grunt standing in the way of the Windworks, so you'll need to battle him to push your way through, only even after defeating him, he'll still refuse to admit defeat, instead retreating into the building and locking the door from the inside! It seems like we're going to an item to get the path open. So, maybe we should pay a visit to those two grunts from before and see what's going on with them.

===================

Floarama Meadow

The grunts have now cleared out of the way from the northern exit of Floarama Town, so we can now head up to the Floarama Meadow! Here, we'll see the two grunts harassing an old man for honey that they can use to attract pokemon for the good of Team Galactic! What an odd demand, but whatever the case, it looks like we've got some more Galactic beatdowns to unleash!

 

This is your obligatory two-battles-in-a-row encounter. You'll need to take on both of these opponents back to back with no healing in between. Fair, it's not like it's challenging or anything.

After sending the Galactic Grunts packing, the old man will thank us by delivering this Parcel unto. Honey is an interesting mechanic, but we'll go over how it works next time. For now, let's just focus on the idea that Honey can be used to attract wild pokemon and leave it at that, huh? It actually has two uses. One, if it's used like the move Sweet Scent while standing in Tall Grass, it can attract a wild pokemon encounter in an instant! But its primary use is to slather onto yellow trees in anticipation of attracting a wild pokemon! We'll go over exactly what this is like next time, as well as what you'll want to watch out for, but for now, it's just important to slather as many yellow tress as it can help us narrow down the location of a particular pokemon.

In addition to the free honey we were given, we can buy more honey one jar at a time from the man seelling show. 

----------------------

Finally, and most importantly of all, the grunts leave behind a Works Key which we can use to get inside the Valley Windworks as requested!

=====================

Valley Windworks [Interior]

When you first enter the windworks, the grunt who locked you out is sent into a panic and runs off to report to Commander Mars. That doesn't scare me, though! It's off to stop Team Galactic!

 

There are a couple more Galactic Grunts you can battle here before arriving at the end of the windworks.

Commander Mars politely requests you leave after explaining that Team Galactic plains to harness the energy generated at the Valley Windworks for their grand mission. But when you refuse to back down, she decides to make a deal. A pokemon battle will decide who gets to stay and who leaves! She must be confident in her strength! So let's go!

=================

 

My Team:

----------------------

 Senshi (Monferno M); Lv. 16

 

Item: None

Ability: Blaze | Moves: Mach Punch, Leer, Ember, Taunt

----------------------

 Denki (Luxio M); Lv. 16

 

Item: None

Ability: Intimidate | Moves: Tackle, Leer, Charge, Bite

-----------------------

 Hana (Budew F); Lv. 16

 

Item: Quick Claw 

Ability: Poison Point | Moves: Mega Drain, Growth, Worry Seed, Stun Spore

-----------------------

 Uki (Buizel F); Lv. 11

 

Item: None

Ability: Swift Swim | Moves: Growl, Pursuit, Quick Attack, Water Gun

================

Vs. Commander Mars

Now that's some rad music for an admin! Yes, Gen IV finally establishes unique battle themes for high ranking members of the evil team outside of just the leader and I'm here for it! Really makes these guys that much more intimidating!

--------------------

Zubat, Lv. 14

                               

                              

I lead off with Uki while Mars opened up with a Zubat. I used a Quick Attack to get a little damage in there.

                                                    

                              

"What do you think you're doing to my Pokemon?"

Zubat's Bite did a number on Uki thanks to her low level, so I definitely had to retreat now.

                               

                              

Denki was the best fit for this matchup, though he still lacked an Electric attack, he was able to finish Zubat off with a Bite after switching in on a Leech Life. EZPZ!

------------------------

Purrugly, Lv. 16

                               

                              

I opened up by layering on a few Leers, figuring Purrugly was probably a bit too bulky for my liking. Once I'd gotten a few Leers in and my HP was low due to a combination of Fake Out and Faint Attack, I had to retreat. But that was okay because Purrugly's Defenses was low enough that I was confident I could dish out a lot of damage with my next move.

                               

                              

I swapped Monferno in on a Faint Attack which he resisted. From there, it just took a single Mach Punch to win the battle!

-------------------

And that's that! 

================

Upon defeat, Commander Mars is willing to admit defeat and commands her troop to withdraw from the area. The employee they were holding hostage is finally free to go home! The little girl runs in and is excited to see her daddy again! But she quickly comments about how he stinks, to which the man responds that Team Galactic had him working nonstop! That definitely sounds rough! I'm glad this guy can rest! The little girl comments about how maybe that balloon pokemon can start to come visit again? That certainly sounds curious... But for now, this is where our session will end. With Team Galactic cleared out of the area, there should be nothing stopping us from moving forward!

[Aura]

Valley Windworks

It's the next day! We can start by looking into those Honey Trees... This is a bit of a mess of a mechanic so I'm going to try and cover this as accurately as possible, but I can't promise I have all the details correct.

Essentially, Honey Trees are reminiscent of Headbutt Trees from Gen 2. If you slather a tree with honey, it might attract a pokemon! It takes 6 hours for a pokemon to appear at a honey tree and the pokemon will leave after 24 hours have passed. Unfortunately, this can't be gamed by changing the system clock as the game keeps track of how many seconds have passed rather than calculating the amount of time that's based based on the system clock. Berries operate on a similar system.

Just like Headbutt Trees, there are some incredibly rare pokemon associated with these honey trees.

Normally, I hold off covering these more technical pokemon hunts until the postgame when we're doing cleanup for the pokedex, but in this case, this is a long-term project you're probably going to want to start as early as possible because it's very likely even by the end of the game you still won't find the rarest pokemon available from this mechanic by nature of how elusive it is.

Long story short, pokemon that can appear form these honey trees are split into two groups.

     

Group A consists of a 40% chance of encountering Wurmple, 20% chance of encountering Silcoon (Cascoon instead in Pearl), 20% chance for Combee, 10% Burmy, 5% Cherubi, and 5% Aipom. There are lots of new pokemon here, but I'll go over them as we actually catch them, or at least find them in more convenient locations.

     

In Group B, the rarities for a lot of pokemon are shifted a bit. Combee is now in the 40% slot, Burmy and Cherbi now have 20% encounter rates, Aipom has 10%, Heracross has 5% and, to add insult to injury, Wurmple's still around with the other 5% encounter rate.

So, you may think it's as simple as special trees and non-special trees from Johto. Some trees are capable of spawning Heracross, some aren't. But it turns out that is partially true, but this mechanic is a lot deeper than that.

You see, it's true that there are special trees and nonspecial trees, but both groups of pokemon can be pulled from in any trees. Normal honey trees have a 70% chance of pulling a pokemon from Group A and a 20% chance of pulling from Group B. 10% of the time, absolutely no pokemon will be pulled. A total insult to your valuable time!

On a special tree, however, you'll find rarer pokemon a lot more frequently. This is because the rarities of Group A and B are swapped, with Group B being pulled 70% of the time and Group A only being pulled from 20% of the time. However, there's only a 9% chance of not encountering a pokemon. How can that be?

That's because there's actually a secret third group of pokemon that can appear! Well, I say it's a group, but this group only consists of a 100% chance of encountering Munchlax! However, Group C is only pulled 1% of the time on these special trees. This thing is essentially an incredibly obscure 1% encounter rate that you're more than likely going to completely miss during your entire playthrough. Quite frankly, I don't even think it's worth it trying to catch Munchlax in the wild. I think you're better off getting it another way... but more on that later.

So, how do you identify a special tree? Well, much like Gen 2, special trees are hard to identify with certainty in normal gameplay. Because both normal and special trees have a 20% chance of pulling from the opposite group, you can't even be certain you've found a special tree or not by encountering a Heracross or Silcoon/Cascoon! The only way to sus out the location of these special trees is to keep track of which pokemon appear at what trees over the course of the game. If you find yourself consistently pulling Wurmple and Silcoon from a tree, you can probably safely guess that it's a normal tree. On the other hand, if you pull Combee and Burmy frequently from a tree, it's probably a special tree!

There's another aspect to keep in mind, however. This mechanic is useful for hunting the rarer pokemon on these trees but not so much for hunting Munchlax unless you fail to catch the first one you find: The last tree you slather will have a 90% chance of pulling from the same group it pulled from last time. So, if you find a Munchlax and fail to catch it, slather some more honey on it and don't slather honey on any other trees. It's worth noting you can slather honey on trees multiple times. It doesn't do anything to your encounter rates, but it can change the last tree you slathered. This is especially important because, if you suspect a tree to be a special tree, you'll need to make sure it isn't the last tree you slather for the day or you'll practically guarantee that you'll never find Munchlax.

Only four of the trees across all of Sinnoh are the rare trees that can spawn Munchlax, so Honey is something you're going to want to stockpile a lot of if you want to hunt this guy down.

The worst part about this mechanic is that the generation of these trees can't be easily tracked the way rare trees can in Gen 2. This is because the algorithm that determines their location depends on your Trainer ID as well as a special, hidden value called a Secret ID. Outside of RNG Manipulation, there is absolutely no way to know your secret ID without dumping your save data. So your best bet to finding these trees is to start gathering data on each tree as soon as you find it because it'll take several days just to figure out which trees to focus on!

--------------------------------

  

Between the two trees we slathered yesterday, the one outside Valley Windworks and the one in Floaroma Meadow, I only found Wurmple. This leads me to the assumption that neither of these trees are special trees, but just one trial isn't enough to form any sort of educated guess! Wurmple is a new pokemon for us, though, so I caught one and named her Imo Mushi.

==================

And, while we're retracing our steps, let's revisit Jubilife TV and battle our Thursday opponent!

 

This time, we have Interviewers Roxy & Oli! They'll come at you with a Double Battle pairing of Marill and Wooper! Unlike Gabby and Ty from Hoenn, these two won't ask you for an interview after the battle making them a bit less memorable, honestly. This is also the only place in the game that they can appear, which may be a contributing factor.

================

Route 205

Perhaps you can see now why I chose not to share the map just yet in the previous post? Yeah, Route 205 is pretty large and we were only able to access the very southernmost edge of it. But today, we'll be crossing the rest of the route!

To start with, we have a couple of new trainer classes to meet!

The first is the Hiker! Sinnoh's hikers look about the same as they always have. These strongly resemble Hoenn's hikers, but with the thick beard of the hikers of Kanto and Johto. As always, they rely use pokemon associated with mountains. Specifically with a preference toward Rock- and Fighting-type pokemon

The other is a Battle Girl! This is a generic female fighting-type specialist. They're a female counterpart to the traditional Black Belt. They strongly resemble their Hoenn counterparts but with blonde hair instead of black.

    

Items to be found on this route include an X-Attack, Poke Ball, Antidote, Repel, and Super Potion.

 

There is also a Pecha and Oran Berry tree on this route!

To the north end of the route is a small house where you can rest to heal up your pokemon. It's actually a little bit redundant, though, for reasons that will become clear soon as you head up into Eterna Forest.

=================

Eterna Forest

Eterna Forest is an oddly pleasant place with a fairly foreboding and mysterious atmosphere.

When you first arrive at Eterna Forest, you'll be met by Cheryl, a trainer who asks you to escort her through the forest because she's afraid she might run into Team Galactic. But don't be fooled, this isn't some annoying babysitting escort mission. She actually pulls her weight really well! This is actually a new mechanic here in Diamond and Pearl where you'll temporarily team up with an ally throughout a dungeon.

 

Anytime you enter a double battle while a partner is with you, they'll will fight alongside you!

 

While you're navigating a dungeon with a partner, you'll encounter two Wild Pokemon at a time which you'll be able to battle in a double battle! This can help you find rare pokemon more quickly, but there's a drawback. You don't get to control your partner's pokemon, so they just might KO a pokemon you're trying to catch.

Another caveat is that, since catching a pokemon is hardwired to end the battle, you can't actually throw a pokeball unless there's only one target. Otherwise, the game tells you that you can't aim! It's a little baffling that Pokemon XD allowed you to throw pokeballs during double battles but it's somehow an impossibility here. But I suppose there's probably a technical reason for why catching a pokemon has to end the battle.

So, if you want to catch a pokemon that you see, you'll want to KO the other pokemon first and hope your partner doesn't KO the one you want to catch in the meantime. That's easier said than done sometimes. God help you if you encounter a shiny while exploring one of these areas.

Once you reach the end of the area, your partner will leave, giving you the chance to go back into the dungeon to gather anything you may have missed your first time around.

Cheryl's level 15 Chansey is nearly untouchable throughout the forest unless she gets really unlucky with paralysis or something. It can use Refresh to heal status ailments and Softboiled to heal off any accumulated damage. You basically never have to worry about this thing going down. It'll occasionally use Egg Bomb to damage its opponents. Chansey may not have much attack at all, but that doesn't mean its Egg Bomb can't really ruin your day by cutting a wild pokemon's life short.

--------------------------

There are a few new pokemon of note here.

  

The first one to note is Buneary, who can only be encountered here in Eterna Forest with an encounter rate of 19%. I named mine Usagi!

  

And this is where version differences will begin to show their faces. Starting with Silcoon who only appears here as a soft version exclusive for Diamond version! Of course, you can still get Silcoon in Pearl version by evolving Wurmple whose evolution is still random based on its personality. Silcoon appears here with a 20% encounter rate. I named this one Shiruku.

As you can probably imagine, Cascoon is Pearl's counterpart to Silcoon. Like Silcoon, Cascoon can still be obtained in Diamond version simply by evolving Wurmple.

Beautifly appears here with a 2% rarity, but you can catch Beautifly in the wild elsewhere in the game, so I don't recommend hunting for it here. It's also really easy to just evolve a Silcoon. (Especially considering they already come at the level to evolve!)

 

Beautifly are another pokemon with a gender dfiference! Males have larger red spots on the top part of their wings than females.

As you've probably guessed, if you're playing Pearl version, you'll find Dustox in Beautifly's place.

 

Like Beautifly, Dustox also has a gender difference. Females have smaller antennae than males.

And then, at night, our real version exclusive shows its face: And It's gonna be my next party member!

================

 Kuro (Murkrow F); Lv. 10

 

Item: None

Ability: Super Luck | Moves: Peck, Astonish, Pursuit

--------------------

As always, I wanted to include a version exclusive pokemon and thought that Murkrow fit the bill really well! It's a pokemon that's never really gotten the time to shine until now. It used to never be available until the postgame where your team is already well established without it and it's always sort of fallen behind other pokemon due to not having any evolutions. Both of these things have changed here in Sinnoh, making Murkrow a very appealing choice!

=================

 

Murkrow is a pokemon with gender differences! The males have larger "hats" than the females.

In Pearl version, you'll find Misdreavus in Murkrow's place. 

-------------------------

You might not get very far into Eterna Forest before finding a strange object... a seemingly mundane mossy rock that seems to stick out. We can't do anything with it just yet, but it seems like something that'll be important in the future...

The trainers in the area, and most in areas with partners, are all positioned in such a way where you can be seen by two opponents at the same time, initiating a double battle.

 

While there are a lot of the expected Bug Catchers throughout the forest, there are a surprising handful of Psychics! Psychics are a trainer class that specializes in... well, I probably don't have to even say it, do I? Sinnoh's Psychics seem to wear purple robes and have black hair, but they still levitate their pokeballs with psychic powers!

    

Throughout the forest are a few scattered items: An Antidote, Parlyz Heal, Great Ball, Potion, and Honey.

Throughout the forest, most notably at the end, you'll see some Cut trees blocking the way through some shortcuts and an additional area. You'll naturally need Cut to slip through these.

Thanks to a bit of back and forth, it was during my excursion of Eterna Forest that the Manaphy Egg finally started to hatch!

  

The egg hatches into Manaphy! Unfortunately, bulbapedia's Manaphy sprite isn't animated for some reason, which is a shame because DP Manaphy's sprite animation is interesting!

It actually shows Manaphy raising its antennae with their tips glowing!

I had half a mind to actually use Manaphy on my team since this was a bit of a rare opportunity, but I chose to dismiss the idea, namely because Manaphy was such a rare pokemon that I didn't wanna waste any potential it might have by giving it bad EV's and whatnot.

When you finally arrive at the end, Cheryl will thank you for escorting her and will make her way safely out of the forest. Quite frankly, I'd say we should be thanking her! Her constant healing is very convenient and I almost wish she'd continue following us around! ...Well, except for one complication with that idea which will become apparent at one particular partner area.

================

Route 205

As we exit, we arrive at the northern end of Route 205! There's another Honey Tree here that we can slather some of that Honey we found in the woods!

The dock here is kind of plagued with Fishermen. These guys tend to use the local seafood, I mean, fish pokemon, as their name suggests. They're pretty infamous for just throwing a bunch of Magikarp at you, but they'll occasionally surprise you here and there with some tougher fish. Sinnoh's Fishermen seem more or less identical to Hoenn's just with a slightly different hat.

   

There are also Cherri, Pecha, and two Oran Berry trees up here.

There's another jar of Honey to replace the one we used on the honey tree!

==================

Eterna City

And now we've made it to Eterna City! We'll go over this area in more detail next time around. There's quite a lot to do here! So I think this is a good stopping point for this post. Next time, we'll poke our noses around Eterna City and see what we can get!

[Aura]

Before we get to exploring the next city, we've got our daily sweep to do!

  

First of all, in the tree on Route 205, I found a Burmy from the honey tree! I caught it and named it Minomushi.

  

Burmy doesn't have any gender differences, but it does have three different forms that it can switch between! When Burmy battles, it loses its cloak and has to recreate it from the materials surrounding it. This causes it to wear a Plant Cloak in outdoor environments, a Sand Cloak in caves, and a Trash Cloak inside buildings and cities. Its cloak isn't important for it current form, but if it's female, it'll be relevant for its evolution!

===============

Valley Windworks

Back at the Valley Windworks, we find that balloon pokemon the little girl was talking about!

  

Drifloon is a Ghost/Flying type that's a bit infamous to me for its Aftermath ability. Aftermath causes damage to any pokemon that KO'd it with a physical attack. Drifloon is a bit of a rarity, only being available as an overworld encounter at Valley Windworks on Fridays. I named mine Baruun.

====================

  

Back at Jubilife TV, we have Poke Kid Ariel to battle! Poke Kids are a new trainer class that take advantage of sprite limitations so that they look just like actual Pikachu in the overworld! If you talk to them, they might catch you off guard with a pokemon battle! They tend to only use Pikachu and its evolution line. Ariel here specifically has two female Pikachu!

===============

Eterna City

Last time, we arrived at Eterna City, this time we'll actually take the time to explore the area here! Talking to the NPC's, we'll find that apparently this place has been having issues recently thanks to the strange Galactic Building that's been erected here. Many have been complaining that the building puts off a foreboding feeling. That feeling isn't unfounded either as there's talk of Team Galactic stealing people's pokemon in the area!

Unfortunately, we can't quite get to the Galactic Building just yet. We'll need Cut to do so.

Focusing on the areas we can explore, we'll start with the Pokemon Center where there's a woman who will give you a new Poketch app.

App 06: Friendship Checker

Similarly to the party list, this app will display all of your current party pokemon. However, they'll all be swimming around on the screen like fish in a fish tank. If you tap on one of them, a number of hearts will appear depending on their friendship with you. At max friendship, two large hearts will appear over the pokemon's head. Otherwise, it might be two small hearts, one small heart, or no hearts. If the pokemon likes you enough, it'll be attracted to your stylus whenever you tap it on the screen away from any pokemon. If it doesn't like you, it'll move away from your stylus instead.

This can be a good tool for pokemon that evolve via friendship. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem as though this tool actually shows you the precise point at which a pokemon is capable of evolution. I find that to be a little disappointing.

(0-69): No hearts, moves away

(70 - 149): No hearts, move toward

(150 - 199): One heart

(200 - 254): Two hearts

(255): Two big hearts

Once you get the Friendship Checker and return to the Eterna Pokemon Center, the NPC who gave you the app will become a more traditional friendship checker as well, allowing you to show her a pokemon and she'll rate your friendship by offering different lines. This friendship checker isn't very specific, though, and there's a much better one later. Even the app is more precise than her comments.

(0-69): "Hmm… It needs to get used to you more."

(70 - 119): "It's becoming comfortable around you, I think."

(120 - 255): "It seems to like you. It must be happy being with you."

===================

The building next to the Pokemon Center is actually a bit of a special case... I think I want to cover it a bit later as the last thing we look at before we leave Eterna City. I think it'll be worth a dedicated post.

The next building that will probably immediately catch any pokemon fan's attention is the Bike shop! Rad Rickshaw's Cycle Shop! Unfortunately, if we go in, it seems the manager is missing so the store isn't open. No bikes for us, I suppose.

===================

Further down south, next to the Poke Mart, is the Eterna Condominiums.

 

On the first floor here, you can trade a Buizel for a Chatot named Charap! Chatot being a fairly rare and difficult to catch pokemon. Difficult to catch is a bit of an understatement, really. It has the same catch rate as Palkia and Dialga themselves. Not sure why this stupid bird is so resilient to capture, but it is!

Chatot is also a very interesting pokemon thanks to its signature move, Chatter. Chatter, on its own, is a 60 power special Flying attack that has a 1% chance of inflicting confusion. The interesting part is that it can be used outside of battle to allow the player to record any sound they want using the DS microphone. This sound will overwrite your Chatot's cry and increase its chance of confusion depending on the volume of the sound recorded. In the end, Chatot is more or less a gimmick pokemon that can be used for fun with some degree of extra customizability.

--------------------

On the second floor, there's an old lady who will give you TM67: Recycle. This move was around in Gen III, but this is its first appearance as a TM! This move allows you to recover any consumed held items!

---------------------

In the mart, you can buy Nest Balls alongside Net and Heal Balls from the left clerk. Nest Balls return from Gen III and work better on lower-leveled pokemon. It'll work better than an Ultra Ball on any pokemon below level 20 and better than a Great Ball below level 25. At level 30 and above, it works the same as a pokeball.

--------------------

If you head around behind the gym, sussing out a somewhat hidden path between the trees concealed by the roof of the gym, you'll find your way to a Super Potion. Once again, the game is playing with perspective to train you on new ways to explore these pseudo-3D environments.

---------------------

The gatehouse to the south of Eterna leads to Cycling Road! Without a bike, we can't get too far in that direction, but...

You will find one of Prof. Rowan's assistants here! He'll give you an Exp Share if you have 35 or more pokemon registered in your pokedex. This held item still doesn't have the legacy it's rather infamous for, that's not until Gen VI. It's still a held item that splits any gains in Exp with the equipped pokemon. Great for training up low-level pokemon!

---------------------

As you pass by the Galactic Building, you'll stumble across a beautiful woman in black clothes. Your pokedex catches her attention and she introduces herself as Cynthia. She explains that she's been studying Pokemon Mythology and suggests that you take a look at the statue in Eterna Forest, suggesting that you might just run into a pokemon like that as you work to fill out your pokedex.

She gifts you with HM01: Cut to help with your journey. Of course, we'll need the badge from the gym here to use the HM, so it's useless for us here.

----------------------

Continuing past the Galactic Building, you'll reach the other side of Eterna City. This side is more rural and is surrounding the giant Pokemon statue!

The really cool thing about this statue is that it takes clever advantage of the limitations of sprite-based visuals. This sprite is carefully written to resemble either Dialga or Palkia. This is especially impressive considering one is a quadruped and the other is a biped.

(Credit to @MandJTV_Michael on Twitter for the reference)

This image showcases how something as simple as changing the colors makes this thing look like one or the other more clearly.

If you check behind the statue, you'll find a hidden Draco Plate! This is our first Plate. There is one plate corresponding with each of the 16 types excluding Normal. They are held items that operate identically to the generic items that also boost that type. They do have an additional effect on a certain pokemon, but we'll hold off on that one for a while. For now, just know you may have an interest in gathering these Plates.

As you collect them, you'll find different inscriptions. You'll always find the inscriptions in the same order regardless of which plate you pick up first. Perhaps it's destiny?

"When the universe was created, its shards became this Plate."

=================

Route 211

Once again, I won't be showing the map because we can't see a significant chunk of the route just yet.

Route 211 is just East of Eterna City. We can't go much in this direction, but there is a significant chunk of pokemon here including ones that I think are incredibly helpful for our next gym.

  

One of the new pokemon available here is Ponyta. It's available here at 10%. It's available more commonly on a future route, but I managed to catch one while searching for another. This one is Uma!

  

Meditite is our next ally here! Its name is Shuuchuu. Meditite is available most commonly here during the morning and day at 35%. During the night, it's still a healthy 25%.

 

Meditite brings with it a gender difference! Males' ears are higher up than a female's.

  

Chingling can be found here at 10% at all times! This is a new Gen IV Pokemon. It's a Psychic type with some interesting potential development history I'd wanna take note of later on.

  

Finally, we have Hoothoot, who only appears here at night at 10%, cutting into Meditite's spawn rates.

-------------------

Aside from pokemon, we're also introduced to some new trainer classes!

The Ninja Boy is a trainer class introduced in Gen III that hides in the environment and waits for an ambush. They tend to specialize in Poison-types and pokemon that are capable of camouflage like Geodude. Sinnoh Ninja Boys have green hair and large headbands rather than Hoenn's scarves. They also lack the toy katana that the Hoenn Ninja Boys carried. Instead, they're prepared to throw their pokeball like a shuriken!

Using Rock Smash to make your way into the valley below will meet you with a birdkeeper! Birdkeepers are one of the most drastically changed trainer class designs across the entire series. In Gen I, they used to have a more punk mohawk hairstyle (a pun, perhaps?) that carried into Gen II. Gen III gave the birdkeepers a fuller head of hair and a more tough-guy stance. Which I always found odd because they're just caretakers of birds. FireRed and LeafGreen retroactively changed the designs of Kantonian Bird Keepers by giving them a more softer-looking appearance overall. From there to here in Sinnoh, Bird Keepers are now a female only trainer class!

Anyway, birdkeepers specialize in... birds. I guess I need to say no more.

 

Of course, there are some items to be found over here. A Pokeball that's hidden in one of the bald spots of the nearby grass and TM12: Taunt which can be found across from the birdkeeper.

====================

Mt. Coronet [Upper 1F]

This is our first peak into Mt. Coronet which is the central focal point of the Sinnoh Region as a whole. Mt. Coronet is a massive cave that we'll be revisiting several times throughout the game in various parts. As we get new HMs, new areas of Mt. Coronet will become available to us and we'll be able to find all kinds of things here. For now, however, our movements are limited.

I'm using screenshots from Serebii for these areas because Bulbapedia only has maps from Platinum which actually makes this area look a lot different visually.

We can get an Elixir(?) From this side of the cave. I'm gonna be honest, it's hard to tell if I got that item right. I'm seeing conflicting reports of what items are available here and we can only currently explore a very small part of this one area. It's frustrating trying to pinpoint the exact locations as Bulbapedia describes them.

  

There is a single new pokemon at its most common here: Cleffa! At night and during the day, Cleffa only has a 5% rarity. But during the early morning, Cleffa appears a lot more commonly at a whopping 25%! The best time to grab one is then!

=================

Eterna City

With all of that out of the way, I think it's time we return to Eterna Forest and start our coverage of the Eterna Gym!

=================

Eterna Gym

When you first enter the gym, you'll see the leader, Gardenia, standing at the entrance into the main area. She'll tell you that you have to find and defeat all of her trainers before she'll accept your challenge. Then, she'll leave into the main area and hide out until you've completed the gym's puzzle.

The second room is a large maze of trees in a room painted to look like an outdoor area. This type of room design is always vaguely ominous to me. Like you're trapped inside and it's painted to try and make you feel more at ease about that. Or it's trying to fool you into thinking you're free while still ensuring that you're trapped and being monitored. But I'm pretty sure that's not the intended feeling of this room.

   

The trainers here are a Lass, two Aroma Ladies, and a Beauty.

Beauties are a trainer class returning from gen I. Sinnohan Beauties strongly resemble Beauties from FireRed and LeafGreen but with black tops and white shorts. Where Lasses tend to lean toward cute pokemon, Beauties tend to lean more toward beautiful and elegant ones.

After you defeat each trainer in the gym, they'll give you a hint as to where you can find the next one. They don't appear until after you receive the hint, so you have to battle them all in a linear order.

Once you defeat them all, the Gym Leader is all that remains at the end of the maze.

=================

 

My Team:

----------------------

 Senshi (Monferno M); Lv. 20

 

Item: None

Ability: Blaze | Moves: Mach Punch, Leer, Flame Wheel, Taunt

----------------------

 Denki (Luxio M); Lv. 20

 

Item: None

Ability: Intimidate | Moves: Spark, Leer, Charge, Bite

-----------------------

 Hana (Budew F); Lv. 20

 

Item: Quick Claw 

Ability: Poison Point | Moves: Mega Drain, Growth, Worry Seed, Stun Spore

-----------------------

 Uki (Buizel F); Lv. 20

 

Item: None

Ability: Swift Swim | Moves: Swift, Pursuit, Quick Attack, Water Gun

---------------------

 Kuro (Murkrow F); Lv. 21

 

Item: None

Ability: Super Luck | Moves: Wing Attack, Night Shade, Pursuit, Haze

================

Vs. Eterna Gym Leader Gardenia

-----------------------

Cherubi, Lv. 19

                              

                              

I decided to lead off with Senshi, figuring I'd be able to do some major damage with all-out offensive. This would be a great place to try out my newly learned Flame Wheel as well! Sure enough, Flame Wheel made quick work of Cherubi.

-----------------------

Turtwig, Lv. 19

                              

                              

Her next pokemon, surprisingly enough, is a Turtwig! This is the first time a gym leader has ever used a Starter pokemon before and, when I was a kid, I was basically offended by this! It felt like a whole rule had been shattered! Regardless, this Turtwig went down really easily with a Flame Wheel as well.

----------------------

Roserade, Lv. 22

                                                   

                              

"It isn't over yet!"

Roserade can be a dangerous beast here if you aren't prepared for it. It's fully evolved at a really low level. Unfortunately for Gardenia, I am prepared. With a Flame Wheel, I'm able to do a large chunk of Roserade's HP.

                                                   

                              

"Are you saying something? You think you have me cornered?"

Her Roserade eats its Sitrus Berry to heal off some damage and then countered with a Grass Knot. I was expecting her to also heal up the next turn, but... she didn't. So, my Flame Wheel finished off her Roserade.

-----------------------

 

And with that, we've defeated the Eterna City Gym Leader and claimed the Forest Badge!

We're also awarded TM86: Grass Knot

---------------------

MVP: Senshi

When you can sweep the entire team with a single pokemon, the MVP isn't too difficult to shout out. Congrats to Senshi!

==================

And that's that! Next time, we'll continue looking around the city and seeing what this accomplishment opens up for us in the local area!

[Aura]

It's actually been a couple of days since I've been able to update this thread, so I'll cover the Jubilife TV trainers from Saturday as well as Sunday!

  

On Saturday, you'll find Guitarist Aruto. Guitarists generally use pokemon that are associated with sound. Aruto uses two Zubat.

  

On Sunday, you'll find Idol Grace! This is the only Idol in the game, so much like the Clown, Grace's team defines the entirety of her trainer class. They seem to lean toward popular cute mascot pokemon. Grace uses a Pikachu and Clefairy.

------------------------

  

Through the Honey Tree on Route 205, I caught a Combee! It was named Hachimitsu.

 

Combee has another gender difference! Female Combee have a distinctive red mark on the forehead of the bee on the bottom. This is an especially important gender difference to look into because only female Combee are capable of evolution! Make sure you don't make the mistake of raising the wrong one!

  

I also found a Cherubi form the same tree and named it Cherii. 

=====================

Route 204

As we make our way back through Route 204, you might be reminded of a cut tree that was blocking off a small side path. Taking this path will lead you to a girl standing off among the trees. If you talk to her, she'll ask if you're the flirty type.

She'll then give you TM78: Captivate, a move that will sharply reduce the Special Attack of the target, but it only works if the opponent is the opposite gender. Kind of an odd restriction for a move that's already pretty situational. Honestly, I can't imagine much reason you would run this move unless there's some hidden application I'm not seeing on the surface.

================

The first area we'll explore with Cut is this area just at the outskirts of Eterna Forest. If you try to go around instead of through the forest, your way would be cut off by cut trees. Now that we can use Cut, we can get past these trees allowing us to bypass crossing through the forest and creating a shortcut from Eterna City back to Floaroma Town and the Valley Windworks. There's a honey tree here and soft soil for four berries! This is a very useful route for your daily tasks of checking for berries and honey trees.

   

The berries you'll find here are Razz, Bluk, Cheri, and Oran Berries. Razz and Bluk berries, you may recall, were PokeBlock ingredients in Hoenn. What purpose do they serve here? Well, their description describes them as "Poffin" ingredients. If you don't know what Poffins are just yet, well they're Sinnoh's counterpart to PokeBlocks as you'd probably expect. We'll learn more about Poffins in the future.

If you talk to the lady down here, she'll give you the Big Tree accessory for your fashion case!

 

As for the items you can find back here, you'll find SilverPowder to power up Bug-type attacks as well as TM82: Sleep Talk!

--------------------------

Eterna Forest

There are some cut trees you can cut down partway through Eterna Forest to create a shortcut and avoid some tall grass, but it's oddly irrelevant considering you can bypass the entire forest using the shortcut along the outside with Cut as well. More significantly, near the entrance from the Eterna City side, there are cut trees blocking off a new path.

This path has some spotty tall grass. If you used Cut to cut down tall grass in Gen 3, you may be tempted to try and use it to mow down some of the grass here. Unfortunately, you'd quickly discover that this functionality has now been removed as of these games. There's no lawnmowing anymore! You're just gonna have to deal with the grass everywhere you go.

As you follow along the path, you'll find a mysterious abandoned building in the depths of the woods....

Before you go inside, if you check around the outskirts, you'll find an Ether!

If you check against the northernmost edge, you'll find a hidden Insect Plate! The Insect Plate will power up Bug-type attacks.

"The power of defeated giants infuses this plate"

====================

Old Chateau

This strange chateau immediately provides a foreboding atmosphere with that incredibly ominous music. The chateau seems to be long abandoned. Who knows what lies here? Some have even reported sightings of the ghosts of those who used to inhabit the building wandering the dining room and bedrooms... are you brave enough to look for them?

--------------------

  

The only wild pokemon you'll find inside the Old Chateau is Gastly. I named mine Yuurei.

--------------------

Old Chateau [1F] -- Dining Room

Directly accross from the entrance is a dining area.

On rare occasions, upon entering the dining area, you'll see the ghost of an old man at the other end of the table. He'll float off to the west toward the kitchen but then disappear as soon as you head that way yourself.

You can find an antidote in the garbage in the kitchen. Just a crapshoot theory, but maybe the butler killed, or witnessed the killing of, somebody with poison. The antidote couldn't be found because it had been thrown away. Maybe the butler's lingering spirit here is trying to show you what happened by guiding you in the direction of the antidote in the trash?

Or maybe I'm looking too deep into an arbitrary item. It's worth noting this Antidote doesn't appear in Platinum.

----------------------

Old Chateau -- Foyer

If you head up the stairs to the left from the entrance and enter the door on the left side, it'll bring you to a small room where you can find an Old Gateau. This item happens to be the regional delicacy of Sinnoh, similar to Lava Cookies from Hoenn. Like all regional delicacies, the Old Gateau heals any status condition similarly to a Full Heal.

In Japan, this item is referred to as Forest Youkan which is the name I prefer, quite frankly. Old Gateau kind of makes the item sound like it's some really old cake that'd probably be molded and gross. It doesn't even remotely look like a cake, either. It definitely resembles Youkan a lot more. Apparently, this item's name was changed to maintain a Japanese pun in which the building's name, Forest Manor, was the same as the item, just spelled with katakana. The english version was done to keep a similar pun in tact.

-----------------------

Old Chateau [2F] -- Bedrooms

Lots of strange occurrences can be witnessed within these bedrooms. We'll star twith the Eastern room.

Here, we can find a Dread Plate, this plate powers up Dark-type attacks.

"Two beings of time and space set free from the Original One."

-----------------

In the next room over, there's a TV that seems to be flickering on. If you investigate it, you'll not an "oddly malevolent feeling as if it's staring..." Perhaps there's something special about this TV in particular?

----------------

There isn't anything special about the next room over, but the next room after that has some more oddities. The first you might notice is the painting on the wall. It seems to have glowing red eyes, but as you approach the painting, the eyes suddenly disappear! But beyond just this creepy painting, much like the Dining Room, when entering this room you'll occasionally see the ghost of a little girl in the other room. She'll look over at you before exiting her room, but she won't appear on the other side.

------------------

And if you go to visit the room the little girl appears in, you'll find nothing but TM90: Substitute.

To further my theory about the poisoning before, maybe this little girl was the one who was poisoned, and the butler was killed in the process of trying to retrieve the antidote? I think it's really cool how these ghost encounters really get your imagination flowing... this is easily one of my favorite areas in the game. There are so many small details here and it's a very mysterious area that has no bearing on the game's overall story.

As the series goes on, you'll get a lot of weirdly creepy places like this, but I especially like the Old Chateau for the air of mystery that surrounds it. That's mystery that's intriguing to the player on its own. I don't think I'll ever forget my first time exploring the creepy atmosphere here. What a fantastically designed area.

================

Eterna City

We now return to Eterna City where the only thing left to explore are the cut trees around the Galactic Building that's been towering oppressively over the city.

Before we get too far in, you can find TM46: Thief by running along the northern border of the city.

=================

Galactic Building [1F]

When you enter the Galactic Building, you'll find a couple of grunts lounging around. They'll try to cover up the reports of stolen pokemon by implying that they're merely accepting "donations" from generous people for the glory of Team Galactic!

 

Trying to push forward, you'll finally encounter your first female Galactic Grunt! You'll battle her in a pair with a male. They'll threaten to cause you pain the way they had to with the manager of the Bicycle Shop! It sounds like we know where he disappeared to, after all.

 

Galactic Building [2F - 3F]

There isn't much going on on 2F, just a bunch of grunts working away at their computers with some optional battles if you talk to some of them.

Throughout the entire building, of course, you'll be stopped by grunts along the way for some mandatory battles.

You'll encounter a Scientist on the third floor! Another returning trainer class! Aesthetically, they appear mostly unchanged from their predecessors. Sinnohan Scientists have a shift in pokemon preference, however. Instead of being associated with chemistry and technology, these scientists are focused more on their intellectual abilities. Thus, they specialize in Psychic types. Specifically, the Abra line.

While battling my way through this building, Hana leveled up and finally evolved into a Roselia! That's right, Budew is a newly introduced pre-evolution to Roselia! Budew evolves into Roselia by leveling up with high friendship specifically during the day. It's kind of a frustrating evolution requirement, but if you find yourself wanting to evolve your Budew and you just don't want to wait for the next day, you can always fiddle with your system clock!

And as you might have guessed, that Roserade we battled at the Eterna Gym is also the evolution of Roselia! But both of these evolutions are a little bit tricky to explore. This definitely makes Roselia an odd case, being given both a prior form as well as an evolved form in the same generation. This doesn't actually happen a whole lot at all.

----------------------

 Hana (Roselia F); Lv. 21

 

Item: Quick Claw 

Ability: Poison Point | Moves: Mega Drain, Growth, Worry Seed, Stun Spore

----------------------

 

Roselia is another pokemon with a gender difference. Males have shorter "skirts" than females. I guess the femboy stereotype holds true with this one?

Galactic Building [4F]

 

When we arrive at the fourth floor, we'll find the Bicycle Shop manager standing opposite of another Galactic Commander who seems to have stolen his pokemon from him: A Clefairy and Buneary. Looks like we'll need to come to his aid and rescue his pokemon!

=================

 

My Team:

I did some slight refactoring in regards to item distribution this time around.

----------------------

 Senshi (Monferno M); Lv. 21

 

Item: Cheri Berry 

Ability: Blaze | Moves: Mach Punch, Leer, Flame Wheel, Taunt

----------------------

 Denki (Luxio M); Lv. 21

 

Item: Quick Claw 

Ability: Intimidate | Moves: Spark, Leer, Charge, Bite

-----------------------

 Hana (Roselia F); Lv. 21

 

Item: Rawst Berry 

Ability: Poison Point | Moves: Mega Drain, Growth, Worry Seed, Stun Spore

-----------------------

 Uki (Buizel F); Lv. 21

 

Item: Cheri Berry 

Ability: Swift Swim | Moves: Swift, Pursuit, Aqua Jet, Water Gun

---------------------

 Kuro (Murkrow F); Lv. 21

 

Item: Dread Plate 

Ability: Super Luck | Moves: Wing Attack, Night Shade, Pursuit, Haze

================

Vs. Galactic Commander Jupiter

----------------------

Zubat, Lv. 18

                              

                              

Right away, this was a rather unfortunate matchup to lead off with, so I had to retreat.

                              

                              

Denki switched in at a good time, however, because this Zubat immediately went on the offensive with a Wing Attack! Since Denki resisted the Flying attack, I paid very little for the damage. In the mean time, I was able to dish out some damage of my own with Spark for the easy KO!

-----------------------

Skuntank Lv. 20

Now this is where things get incredibly scary. This Skuntank is actually pretty fast and very dangerous! If it can't one-shot you with a Night Slash, it'll often try to reduce your stats. To top it off, Skuntank has a scary typing in Poison/Dark which are very good compliments to each other. The poison type covers the weaknesses of Dark while the Dark type covers the weaknesses of Poison. The only type a Poison/Dark pokemon is weak to is ground!

                              

                              

I decided to open up here with a Leer, but Denki wasn't able to get it off before getting absolutely obliderated by a crit from Skuntank's Night Slash. I would be salty over this convenient crit, but the increased crit chance is a bonus to the weapon.

                              

                              

I decided to bring Hana back out now. I wanted to nail Skuntank down with Stun Spore to keep it from just sweeping my entire team. Thankfully, I was indeed able to land the first one. From here, there wasn't much else for Hana to do, so I had her start using Growth in hopes of getting a decent damage delt-to-taken ratio. Unfortunately, this matchup didn't last long. I'd underestimated just how much Skuntank's Screech would matter and wound up getting KO'd with a Night Slash, not even needing a crit to accomplish the feat.

                              

                              

Finally, things started to get serious. With Senshi, I started to layer on some Leers to reduce Skuntank while it couldn't do much to damage me besides Night Slash. I could take plenty of those since I resisted them! I figured four Leers were enough to connect, and the Night Slashes were ganging up quite a bit. I also had a few Smokescreens stacked on myself, so it was certainly for the best to go for another switch. But before I did that, I made sure to hit Skuntank with a Taunt to ensure I didn't switch into a Smokescreen or Screech.

                              

                              

From one resistance to the next. I brought out Kuro! The only thing Skuntank could do was give me. Thanks to Skuntank's reduced defenses, Kuro was able to break through it with ease using Wing Attack to finish the job!

----------------------

And with that, Commander Jupiter has been defeated! She's amused by this small victory for us as she explains that Mars had fihished capturing energy from the valley windworks and that Team Galactic's plan was already under fruition. 

Jupiter leaves, leaving the bike shop manager's pokemon with him. He thanks us for our efforts and explains that Team Galactic wanted to steal Clefairy "back" because Clefairy came from space! It seems to be a recurring trend here that the Galactic Grunts don't really know at all what their leaders are planning to do and are just following orders...

Well, the manager tells us to meet him at his bike shop next, so let's go do that next time!

[Aura]

Today is Monday which means we've got yet another trainer to battle at Jubilife TV!

 

This time, the trainer is Reporter Kinsey. This is technically a new trainer class but is really just the isolated reporter from the Interviewers trainer class that debuted in Gen 3. There aren't many in Diamond and Pearl, but the idea seems to be that they specialize in pokemon that can repeat your words? Kinsey uses a Chatot.

That's the last of the Jubilife TV trainers as far as I'm aware. Tomorrrow is Tuesday which means we'll find Cameraman Tevin, then Clown Lee, Interviewers Roxy & Oli, etc. In Diamond and Pearl, these trainers' teams don't change at all as you battle them more and more, so there's no reason to keep coming back anymore, I don't think.

=================

Eterna City

So this is the last day we'll be spending in Eterna City. Word of advice: If you still want to stick around Eterna for a bit like me, I recommend not visiting the Bicycle shop after rescuing the manager just yet. If you do, an NPC standing at the entrance won't let you leave Eterna City to check on your berries unless you've taken Cycling Road which means battling your way through a bunch of trainers... it's a headache and really lame design. Just don't visit the cycling shop yet until you're ready to go down Cycling Road.

Anyway, I teased before that the last place we'd visit is the building next to the Pokemon Center. That's because this place is tied to a pretty prominent feature in Gen IV. I think today is a good time to introduce the Sinnoh Underground!

Inside, you'll find an old man called The Underground Man who dug the tunnels underneath Sinnoh. He'll give you a key item called the Explorer Kit and also ask if we'll accept the challenges he provides for you to help you become an expert at exploring the tunnels he dug. If you accept, you'll be given a series of simple tasks to accomplish underground that are designed to tutorialize you on various aspects of gameplay down here.

Your first task is incredibly simple: Go underground.

All you have to do to do so is step right outside of the building and use your Explorer Kit. This will prompt you to save the game before launching DS Wireless Communications and sending you underground.

===================

Sinnoh Underground

When you first arrive down here, you'll be met by Roark! He gives you a brief introduction to the area before making his escape.

The Sinnoh Underground is one of the big new features that are heavily associated with Sinnoh. It takes advantage of DS Wireless Communications to allow you to explore the underground tunnels alongside anybody else who happens to be nearby and playing at the same time. It's incredibly nostalgic to explore these tunnels again, reminiscing of the days people would sneak their DS's onto the school bus and play this and Mario Kart DS. Man, DS Wireless was such a cool mechanic.

Anyway, there's a few activities to do for now, but we'll leave covering that until they become related to the Underground Man's tasks. So, for now, we'll just return. In order to do so, just bring up the Pause menu and select "Go Up". No matter where you go up from, you'll always return to the place on the surface you went down from. However, depending on where you go down from, you'll reach a different point in the underground. You may notice that some areas are isolated from the others. There's nothing too substantial about this, just know that you can't reach everywhere from anywhere. If you want to get to a specific part of the map, you might have to use the Explorer Kit in a specific part of Sinnoh.

-------------------------

  

Your reward for completing the first task is a Move Trap Up, Bubble Trap, and Leaf Trap. Red Traps are more powerful versions of their weaker oragne counterparts.

These traps can be placed underground to mess with other players. They'll all trap the player in place and force them to complete some small task such as popping all of the bubbles on the screen or blowing away leaves with the mic. You can find a bunch of traps just laying around underground or you can find merchants who will trade them to you in exchange for spheres. What are Spheres? Well, those happen to be related to our next task: To go and dig for items!

If you watch the map while exploring the Sinnoh Underground, you'll occasionally see yellow dots appear on the radar. If you go to these areas and tap the bottom screen, you'll see sparkles of light coming from the ground or walls. Go to interact with these and you'll be taken to the excavation screen.

From here, you can dig into the wall in search of various items and treasures. The catch is that you can only hit a limited number of times before the wall will collapse. When the wall collapses, only items you have completely dug up will be kept. Anything else will be lost. There are three types of terrain: Dirt, Gravel, and Rocks. There are some in-between states as well:

Rocks -> Cracked Rocks -> Gravel -> Cracked Gravel -> Dirt -> Cracked Dirt -> Clear

In general, the hammer is best for clearing out thick rocks but will cause more damage to the wall so you'll want to switch over to the pick wherever it's viable. The pick is weaker but is great for peeking through the dirt.

Worth noting is that you can actually see through cracked dirt. Striking dirt with a Pick will clear it and turn the adjacent tiles into cracked dirt as well. This is a great way to search for treasure by testing the dirt and checking to see any color. Most valuable items are larger than 2x2, so if you're running out of space and can't seem to find that last item, it's probably nothing important anyway. The best thing you'd be missing out on is a Heart Scale.

The items you can find include:

Spheres:

These can be exchanged with merchants underground for various goods. In order to purchase a good, you'll need to give up a sphere that is the requested size or larger. I'll explain how to get spheres larger than 21 in a bit.

Spoiler

Common:

    

Small Red/Green/Blue Spheres [1 - 10]; Large Red/Green/Blue Spheres [11 - 21]

Uncommon:

   

Small Pale/Prism Spheres [1-10], Large Pale/Prism Spheres [11-21]

Fossils:

More Fossils will begin to appear later in the game, but for now, only one is available depending on the version you're playing. These fossils can be restored into pokemon at the Oreburgh Museum.

Spoiler

Uncommon:

 

Skull Fossil (Diamond Version); Armor Fossil (Pearl Version)

Plates:

These plates will power up the various types. None of them are exclusive to the underground as far as I'm currently aware, but this is where you might need to go for duplicates!

Spoiler

Very Rare:

        

      

Draco Plate (Dragon), Dread Plate (Dark), Earth Plate (Ground), Fist Plate (Fighting), Flame Plate (Fire), Icicle Plate (Ice), Insect Plate (Bug), Iron Plate (Steel), Meadow Plate (Grass), Mind Plate (Psychic), Sky Plate (Flying), Splash Plate (Water), Spooky Plate (Ghost), Stone Plate (Rock), Toxic Plate (Poison), Zap Plate (Electric)

Shards:

These items currently seem useless, but we'll cover where they can be used at a later point. Of course, you'll probably want to collect a healthy amount of these shards.

Spoiler

Uncommon:

   

Red Shard, Green Shard, Blue Shard, Yellow Shard

Evolution-related items:

These items are required to evolve certain pokemon or, in the case of the Everstone, to prevent evolution. Most of these become more common later on, so you don't have to hunt for them now unless you really need one to evolve a pokemon you get before the postgame.

Spoiler

Rare:

Oval Stone (Held item needed to evolve Happiny into Chansey)

------------------

Very Rare:

      

Everstone, Fire Stone, Water Stone, ThunderStone, Leaf Stone, Moon Stone & Sun Stone

Aside from the Everstone which prevents evolution, these stones all evolve specific species of pokemon. Fire, Water, Thunder, and Leaf Stones evolve pokemon fo their respective types (or Eevee into their types), the Moon Stone mostly evolves Normal types with the odd exception of Nidorina and Nidorino, and the Sun Stone evolves pokemon that get energy from the sun.

Held items:

These items can be held by a pokemon to assist them in battle. Once again, many of them will be made more common later on.

Spoiler

Very Rare:

      

Damp Rock, Heat Rock, Icy Rock, Smooth Rock, Light Clay, Hard Stone, Iron Ball

The Rocks all increase the duration of weather effects. Damp for Rain, Heat for Sunlight, Icy for Hail, and Smoth for Sandstorms.

The light Clay increases the duration of Reflect and Light Screen.

The Hard Stone increases the power of Rock attacks.

The Iron Ball is a held item that might seem a little strange. It lowers your pokemon's speed and nullifies immunity to Ground attacks. It's not very good, but it does have its niche use we'll cover eventually, but as far as I'm aware, the strategy it's used for isn't very competitively viable.

Treasures:

These items are only good for selling in stores.

Spoiler

Very Rare:

 

Star Piece, Rare Bone

Misc. Items:

These are items that don't really fit in the other cateogries. They can help you throughout your adventure!

Spoiler

Uncommon:

Heart Scale

We'll see what Heart Scales can be used for sooner or later, but just like in Gen 3, you're going to want to collect as many as you can!

-------------------

Very Rare:

  

Revive, Max Revive, Odd Keystone

The Odd Keystone is a rare item tied to the discovery of a certain pokemon.

-------------------------

  

After doing a little digging and returning to the Underground Man, you'll be rewarded with a Prism, Red, and Blue Sphere 1.

Then he'll assign you on your next task: To bury the spheres and have them grow!

While underground, your spheres can be buried by selecting them from the pause menu and selectin bury. This will bury them in the ground directly in front of you. You can reclaim them at any point. If you bury multiple of the same sphere together, they'll combine together and grow larger. Any spheres left buried will continue to grow as the days pass by.

-------------------------

After burying some spheres, return to the Underground Man and he'll reward you with an item called a Digger Drill.

The next task he assigns is to use that Digger Drill to create a secret base!

That's right, Secret Bases from Ruby and Sapphire return here! Though they operate on a slightly different system. Instead of relying on mixing records to get your friends' secret bases to appear in your world, secret bases will only appear in other people's games while you're connected via DS Wireless. You also can't battle AI versions of your friends' teams. We'll go over what you can do with other players another day when we start to cover the multiplayer content at the end of the Pearl playthrough.

-----------------------

   

After creating your secret base, you can return again to the Underground Man and receive your next reward: A Plain Table, Wodden Chair, Small Bookshelf, and Buneary Doll.

Your next mission? Decorate your base. This is the final one the Underground Man has in store for you.

If you enter your secret base, you'll have the option to leave the door open or close the door and decorate. If you close the door, you'll disconnect from DS Wireless and be able to decorate the room as you see fit. Make sure to dump any decorations you have on hand into your underground PC.

You can purchase additional decorations from merchants underground. I'll detail all the decorations later on, just like I did in Ruby and Sapphire. But if you're interested, here's a list on Bulbapedia of all the decorations and how you can get to them. Note that some of them won't be accessible until later on in the game, that's why I'm not covering this in detail just yet.

-----------------------

  

After you go and decorate your base, return to the Underground Man and he'll reward you with a Turtwig, Chimchar, or Piplup Doll.

He'll tell you he has no further tasks for you, but if you talk to him again, he comments about how the boulders in your secret base might get away and teases that there is indeed a way to remove them. However, he doesn't trust you'll be able to do it without risking injury, so he instead assigns you one addtional task--a task we don't actually have the means of completing just yet: Steal a flag from another trainer.

This sidequest will have to be continued when we reach this point in Pearl version.

With that, next time we'll finally get moving on beyond Eterna City!

[Aura]

Eterna City

Last time, we finally finished everything there was to do in Eterna City, so this time, we'll finally be moving on and exploring a new area! To do that, however, we'll need a bike to go down cycling road. That's as simple as visiting Rad Rickshaw's Cycle Shop after having rescued the manager from the Galactic Building.

Once we speak with the manager, as thanks for rescuing him, he'll give us a free Bicycle! Rickshaw's Bicycle functions sort of like a hybrid of Rydel's Acro and Mach bikes. It can shift between a third gear which is slower but moves more precisely, and a fourth gear which moves faster but less precisely. The fourth gear doesn't move quite as fast as the Mach bike in Hoenn, but it's by far the fastest form of transportation save for instant warps like Fly and Teleport.

Using the 4th gear, the Bicycle can ride up steep slopes just like the Mach Bike and it can also jump ramps! You can switch gears on the fly by pressing the B-button while on the bicycle. No more running back to Rydel because you don't have the right bike to explore the area!

As a downside compared to Rydel's bikes, Rickshaw's 4th gear isn't as fast as the Mach Bike and the 3rd gear isn't capable of performing tricks like bunny hopping to encounter wild pokemon without moving.

=============

Route 206 -- Cycling Road

Route 206, home of Cycling Road, is a bit of a hybrid of Kanto's and Hoenn's respective Cycling Roads. Like Kanto's, the entire road is a downward slope where you'll automatically roll downhill and have to dodge the trainers up ahead. Like Hoenn's, the road passes over a natural route that you can see from above. There are no items or anything of the sort hidden on the road itself.

 

As you ride down Cycling Road, you'll of course be battling your way through a bunch of Cyclists! Surprisingly, this is a trainer class that's never existed before! The closest thing to these guys were the Triathletes in Gen 3 who specialized in multiple sports, not just cycling. Kanto and Johto just had Bikers who rode motorcycles. But like the biking Triathletes in Hoenn, the Cyclists specialize in Flying- and Electric-type pokemon.

When you reach the southern gatehouse, you can find an NPC who will give you a new accessory: The Flag Pole!

On the other side of the Gatehouse, you can find a Razz Berry. Now, you might be tempted to use Cut to go ahead and explore the lower area of Route 206, but I think it's for the best to go ahead and explore the area to the south of here first!

================

Route 207

Down here is Route 207! This place is home to probably the most easily neglected berries in my experience. For some reason, I consistently forget these berry trees exist up here because they're in a very similar position to the berry trees at the south end of Route 206 and, unlike those, these are always just out of view!

   

Anyway, you can find two Oran Berry trees as well as a Razz and Bluk Berry tree here. There's also a honey tree to slather! And as you move further south...

You'll find Dawn! She has two items for you and asks you to pick a hand. Your choice doesn't matter because she'll ultimately give you both items anyway.

One of these items you'll receive is the Vs. Seeker! This functions just like it does in FireRed and LeafGreen: It allows you to rematch select trainers! If a trainer is eligible for a rematch when you use it nearby, a '!!' will appear over their heads and they'll begin spinning around. Talk to them to initiate a rematch. These rematches include stronger opponents, so watch out! After use, the Vs. Seeker has to be recharged by walking around.

In addition to the Vs. Seeker, Dawn will also give you a new Poketch app!

App 07: Dowsing Machine

I've said it before, but this is the most useful app we've obtained so far! By tapping on the screen, the Dowsing Machine will show you the locations of hidden items. Each little notch on the lines equates to a step in that direction. This is the best application of an itemfinder so far! It's easily accessible, always at the ready, doesn't take up your registered item slot, and is very simple to use and understand. This is generally the app I leave my Poketch on for ease of access because it's definitely the app I use the most.

In fact, if you use it right away, you'll discover a hidden Revive nearby! Make sure to tap on this app frequently to check for hidden items! You'll be surprised what kinds of treasures you might uncover! It's not all just potions and tinymushrooms!

----------------------

Once again, we could explore the rest of Route 207 and make our way forward in the story, but I wanna keep heading south for now. If you do, you'll quickly realize that this is the other side of the route just north of Oreburgh City! It looks like we've come full circle already! Don't worry about slipping down the slope because we have the Bicycle that allows us to simply ride back up!

====================

Oreburgh City

I wanted to come here because I discovered a Skull Fossil during my expeditions underground the other day, so I wanted to go ahead and awaken the pokemon within!

  

The Skull Fossil can be restored into the pokemon Cranidos! Cranidos is a pure Rock-type known for its offensive prowess! It's not a bad pokemon to rely on! I named mine Zugaikotsu.

===============

Oreburgh Gate [B1F]

Before we leave Oreburgh, now is a good time to revisit Oreburgh Gate. If you didn't already, you'll want to collect the Flash TM down here. With our Bicycle, we can reach a little bit more of this cave. By hitting the ramps here with our bike's 4th gear, we can leap the rocks in our path.

 

We can claim TM31: Brick Break in the back corner by leaping these rocks using the ramps. Unfortunately, there's not much else to be found back here. It looks like we'll need Surf in order to explore any more.

================

Route 206 -- Underpass

If you use Cut on the trees on Route 206, you'll be able to reach the underpass of Cycling Road.

This is the place where I recommend searching for Ponyta if you've yet to find one. At their rarest, they appear here at 35% during the Mornings and Nights. During the day, it's an even more frequent 45%!

  

In Diamond version only, you can find Stunky down here! And this is where it's most common at 25% rarity across the board. I named mine Akushuu.

  

I don't recommend seeking it out here, but Kricketot's evolution, Kricketune, can be found down here at 10% rarity. I happened to find one while exploring the route, so I caught it and named it Kokyouku.

 

And here we have another gender difference! Male Kricketune have longer moustaches than females.

Another pokemon you can find here is Bronzor, but I recommend seeking him out in an upcomming area that we're headed toward right now. It's much more common there. But, if you see one on the way, you may as well catch it!

     

Along the route, you can find various items: a Full Heal, Burn Heal, Elixir, Super Repel, Potion, and a Poison Barb to power up Poison-type attacks. Some of these are hidden, so the Dowsing Machine can be a good help in finding them!

 

You can find two Rawst Berry trees down here, another berry location where the berries are easily forgettable. But I find these easier to remember since they're in such a strange location. There's also another honey tree nearby to slather as well!

================

Wayward Cave

When you first arrive in Wayward Cave, the entire cave is pitch black. This is the only place in the entirety of the Sinnoh Region that the move Flash is usable. Now, you can actually get around exploring the entire dungeon without Flash since you do get a small spotlight around your character like in Gen 3, but it's just a good idea to use Flash so that you can see more clearly and ensure you don't miss any items.

I went and grabbed Risu out of the PC for this dungeon. She could use Flash to help light my way! This will reveal the dungeon to be a large maze. You'll need Rock Smash to explore beyond the small starting area. I already have Bidoof with me to cut the trees on the way here, so he can also contribute with Rock Smash!

More importantly, however, here at the entrance, I wanted to look for a certain pokemon...

----------------------

 Ibutsu (Bronzor); Lv. 14

 

Item: None

Ability: Levitate | Moves: Confusion, Hypnosis, Imprison, Confuse Ray

----------------------

Bronzor is a pokemon I've never used before! This will be the final addition to my team for Diamond! It's an incredibly defensive pokemon with only one weakness thanks to its Steel/Psychic typing and its ability. An interesting aspect of Bronzor, however, is that its abilities change which of two types becomes its only weakness: Levitate makes it immune to otherwise super-effective Ground-type attacks while Heatproof makes halves damage from otherwise super-effective Fire-type attacks. Unfortunately, the lack of balancing between these two abilities makes Levitate the obvious choice. It's simply better to have it be immune to a type it's normally weak to rather than just remove a weakness.

The difficult part of raising Bronzor is that it's a very defensive pokemon, so its attacks aren't going to be very powerful at all. Bronzor's physical attack is also stronger than its special attack, but it's gonna be a while before it learns any physical attacks to use.

Right away, I decided to give Bronzor the move Stealth Rock via the TM I won off of Roark. With this, we can use Bronzor to help set up during boss fights and the like. Its not very often foes in the main story will have Rapid Spin to get rid of traps, so the opponents will just have to deal with free damage every time a pokemon comes out!

--------------------

I recommend trying to make a beeline for the northeast corner first and foremost while exploring this dungeon. It'll make the rest a lot less scary. To get there, you'll head north at every junction until you reach the edge. Then, take a right toward the East and start going south as far as you can. From there, go east again and start heading back north.

At the very end of this path, you'll stumble across a little girl who's lost in the depths of the cave. She'll tag along with you just like Cheryl in Eterna Forest.

 

Mira's Kadabra generally tries to focus on support. It redundantly knows both Flash and Kinesis which is bizarre. It also knows the moves Confusion and Shock Wave. Kadabra is a bit more fragile than Cheryl's Chansey, so it's much more likely to go down. It's also not a whole lot of help against the wild Bronzor you'll be encountering along the way. If you're trying to train a Bronzor yourself, her tendency to prioritize the Zubat can also be really annoying as your attacks will basically never take out those wild Bronzor and she loves to spam her Kinesis a lot rather than attack, which can lead to a lot of wasted time. Especially whent he Bronzor start to hit you with Hypnosis and Confuse Ray. What a mess.

 

As you explore, there is a duo of two new trainer classes: The Collector and Ruin Maniacs, both of whom return from Gen 3. Collectors bear a strong resemblance to their Hoenn counterparts, but sport a different hairstyle. Rather than prioritizing rare pokemon, their teams tend to consist of several of the same species of pokemon.

Ruin Maniacs in Sinnoh are a lot younger than their Hoenn counterparts and bear a resemblance to Indiana Jones. They tend to use pokemon associated with the past.

 x 2       

Throughout the dungeon, you'll find a bunch more items. Once again, you'll want to make frequent use of your Dowsing Machine to look for some of these. There are two potions, an Escape Rope, a Nugget, TinyMushroom, Burn Heal, Rare Candy, Super Potion, and TM32: Double Team.

I recommended making a beeline to Mira in the beginning because, as your partner, she'll keep your team fully healed, so you won't have to worry about lingering status effects or wasted PP or anything like that and you can leisurely explore the entirety of the cave as you please.

And when you reach the entrance, Mira will thank you for guiding her out of the cave and take her leave. If you want, you can continue exploring the cave alone.

That'll be a good stopping point for this update! Next time we'll start exploring Route 207 and see what else there is to find!

[Aura]

Route 207

Now that we've explored Route 206 in its entirety, let's finish exploring Route 207 and finally get moving toward the next city!

  

Among the items we can obtain here, we can find a Dire Hit to the south, past a youngster and hiker. A Super Potion is on the northern side of this stretch. If you use the Dowsing Machine near the hiker, you'll find a Rare Candy further along!

===============

Southern Mt. Coronet

At the end of Route 207, we'll find an entrance into the southern part of Mt. Coronet.

As we move through this cave, we'll stumble across a strange man who seems to be going through some sort of crisis. He goes on about how Mt. Coronet was the origin of the world and how there should have been no strife in this world, but the weak state of the human spirit has led to the introduction of strife and is ruining the natural order... and then just leaves... what an odd fellow. His outfit seems to resemble that of Team Galactic, so perhaps he's their leader?

Well, putting that aside, there's a single item we can claim for now from Mt. Coronet. That being an ether hidden on one of the rocks on the central hill.

There isn't anything notable in the way of pokemon to be found here, so we'll just make our way over to the other side of the cave. It isn't too far of a walk.

===============

Route 208

On the other side of Mt. Coronet is Route 208 which is also our first taste of Eastern Sinnoh!

I believe this is our first time seeing a Black Belt! They are essentially the male counterpart to Battle Girls. They generically specialize in Fighting-type pokemon. They haven't changed much at all in appearance across the series so far and that especially holds true between Gens 3 and 4 where their appearance has barely changed at all save for a questionably different hairstyle.

On the path just down the stairs beyond the Black Belt is an X-Speed. There's also a strange pattern of rocks in the walls that look like we should be able to interact with them, but we don't have the ability to do so just yet. (hint, hint, looks like we've got a new HM to look out for!)

There's a pokeball lying behind some smashable rocks.

As we descend from the mountain range, we'll find a patch of tall grass. There isn't much of interest here, but...

This is our first chance to catch Bibarel, the evolution of Bidoof. He's available here at 10%. If you're interested, you can go ahead and catch one, but I'll wait around to seek one out in a place where they'll appear more commonly. These pokemon are Normal/Water which is a bit of a break from the convention of these generic regional rodents which have traditionally remained pure Normal-type evolution lines.

 

Bibarel have another gender difference! The "masks" on males have additional prongs over their cheeks that the females lack.

You can find a hidden jar of honey in the grass down here with the Dowsing Machine.

In addition, there's a somewhat shady-looking Black Belt near a honey tree who will give you an Odd Keystone and tell you to take it to Route 209 and to go underground and talk to many people and listen at the Hollowed Tower... it's a very strange experience, but it sounds pretty important so we'll keep it in mind.

You'll find an Artist here which is a brand-new trainer class introduced here in Gen IV! Though similar in concept to the Painter class from FireRed and LeafGreen, the Artist specializes in pokemon capable of copying your moves. Don't give them any ideas!

   

There are also four berry trees on this route holding Nanab, Razz, Bluk, and Pinap Berries. Nanab and Pinap Berries, of course, being more Poffin ingredients like Razz and Bluk.

I wouldn't be too quick about planting any berries, here, though. First, I recommend going to speak with the Berry Master inside the nearby house. Similarly to the Berry Master in Hoenn, he'll give you a free berry every day! This berry can include some pretty rare ones as well, so you'll definitely want to keep an eye out for them!

   

The Berry Master's Wife is also an important NPC this time around! If you're an avid fan of farming berries, she might be of interest to you. She'll sell you four different kinds of Mulch than can be used before planting a berry to improve the soil and support the growth of your berries in various ways.

Growth Mulch will cause berries grown with it to grow much faster, but also dry out more frequently. It can be handy for growing berries that take a long time to grow.

Damp Mulch has the opposite effect. It causes berries to grow much slower but also makes their soil dry out less frequently, meaning the berry requires less attention to thrive. It's great for berries that grow too quickly to really keep up with like Razz and Bluk Berries.

Stable Mulch causes the berry tree to stay alive for a longer period of time after reaching a fully grown state.

The Gooey Mulch makes it so that the berry will regrow more times than normal.

All four of these mulches only cost 200P, so buy them up if any of them catch your interest! They just might making your berry farming that much more bearable! Especially if you're trying to get some of those accessories from the flower shop!

===================

Hearthome City

If Jubilife City is Goldenrod, then Hearthome is Saffron City! Located right at the heart of Sinnoh, this place is a major tourist trap for travelers to the region. When you first arrive here, the exits are blocked, so you'll have to take your time to enjoy the atmosphere which is fine because, just like Eterna City, there is a lot to unpack here! It's probably gonna be another couple of posts before we're ready to move away from Hearthome City.

Perhaps the first thing you'll want to do is talk to the Hiker in the Southeast. He'll give you an Egg to care for! Apparently this egg mysteriously appeared at the Daycare in Solaceon Town. The other NPC's in this area are discussing the phenomenon and allude to the Johto region being where eggs were first discovered. I wonder what will hatch from this egg? There's only one way to find out! We'll carry this egg with us whenever we walk around town.

The major talking point of the town is the Super Contest Hall! That's right, Pokemon Contests return from the Hoenn Region here in Hearthome City in an evolved "bigger and badder" form: Super Contests! We'll cover what exactly that means in the next post. This post will instead focus on some of the basics of prep work for the contest halls.

The building with the heart in the front is the Pokemon Fan Club where fans of Pokemon gather to discuss their favorites!

Speaking with the chairman will have him talk about how much he loves feeding his pokemon Poffins before deciding to share the joy with you by giving you a Poffin Case so that you, too, can take in the joy of feeding poffins to your pokemon. If you haven't put it together yet, Poffins are essentially just a replacement for Pokeblocks. We'll see how they differ from PokeBlocks soon enough.

The lady here in the back is a friendship checker that is more precise than the Poketch app or the lady who gave it to us. I suppose technology just can't replace talent.

(0): "Oh, my… I think this one really hasn't taken too kindly to you."

(1 - 49): "Hm... it seems to dislike you a little."

(50 - 99): "It's feeling neutral towards you. It's up to you to change that."

(100 - 149): "It's warming up to you. That's my impression."

(150 - 199): "It's quite friendly to you. It must be happy being with you."

(200 - 254): "It's very friendly toward you. I can tell you treat it kindly."

(255): "It simply adores you! Why, I feel like I'm intruding!"

Unfortunately, this one, too, fails to capture some of the most important milestones of friendship. Really, it's only good for highlighting just how badly your pokemon hates you. Not a very good look, I suppose. She's more precise about lower levels, but higher levels still have roughly the same thresholds as the app. So I suppose you should just stick to the app unless you'd rather rely on a more traditional friendship checker, which is fair, I suppose.

--------------------------

The building nextdoor to the fanclub is the Pokemon Hotel. You can take the elevator to the next floor to find an old lady who will give you a Shell Bell! This was an item we missed out on back in Gen 3 thanks to it requiring the passage of time to be crafted from Shoal Shells and Shoal Salt. Here we just get it for free! Which is actually quite fitting because it's a surprisingly underwhelming item. It heals you by a fraction of the damage you deal which sounds alright, but the healing is almost never worth it. It seems like you'd be better off running Leftovers or even a Sitrus Berry.

--------------------------

The left clerk in the mart here will sell Heart Mail alongside Heal, Net, and Nest Balls.

Heart Mail looks like this!

-------------------------

Next to the Poke Mart is the Poffin House, but I'm going to hold off on covering that until the next post because it's quite extensive... Instead, today we'll be focusing on something a bit simpler.

--------------------------

One thing you'll find in the city is a Cathedral. It's a bit of an odd location. It doesn't serve any purpose, no plot significance, and is just filled with people talking about Pokemon and peace... They just... put a church here? I suppose they really wanted to drive the creation theme of Sinnoh, but the choice to include a church is a bit bizarre to me. It seems like they'd want to distance themselves from religious content. But maybe with the subject matter they're dealing with, the devs figured religious parallels would be drawn anyway, so they just decided to lean into that angle a bit. Can't really be too sure.

----------------------------

Next to the Pokemon Center is the home of Bebe, who is the administrator of the PC Storage System in the Sinnoh region. Once she's introduced herself, "Someone's PC" will be changed into "Bebe's PC." You don't get anything of particular note by doing this, however.

---------------------------

If you try to enter the gym, you might be disappointed to find that the gym leader isn't inside and the elevator is inaccessible. It looks like we'll just have to come back later...

If you approach the Super Contest Hall, you'll see the gym leader, a fashionable woman, but I think we'll wait a bit to approach her. We've got other things to worry about.

====================

Amity Square

Finally, we arrive at the focus of today's post: Amity Square. This is  peaceful park where you can go for a stroll with your cute pokemon! In a bit of an ironic twist, only a select few pokemon are considered "cute" enough to be allowed into the park. Humorously, there's even a blackbelt near the park complaining they won't let his Onix or Steelix inside.

      

Pokemon that are considered cute enough to enter Amity Square include: Psyduck, Pachirisu, Drifloon, Buneary, Happiny, Clefairy, and Pikachu.

Even more ironically, while Clefairy and Pikachu are considered "cute" enough, Cleffa and Pichu are not. Which is even stranger considering there's an NPC inside the park that actually has a Cleffa! Perhaps an accidental oversight?

Anyway, some of these pokemon we haven't actually seen yet, but that's okay. There's actually a few more pokemon you can bring in as well, but they're not available until later on.

If you bring one of the allowed pokemon with you, in my case, I brought Risu the Pachirisu, you'll be able to enter the park with that pokemon following behind you! This is a very small controlled area, but you can tell this was somewhat of an experiment to see if they could feasibly get a mechanic like this to work in the game... this mechanic will later be fleshed out a lot more and implemented for a wider variety of pokemon in future games. For now, though, we're stuck with this limited pool. The fact that these pokemon have to walk around with you might shed some light on why only this very specific set of pokemon is allowed. It seems to be a simple truth, really: They just had to stick to the pokemon they already had overworld sprites and walking cycles for. It didn't make too much sense to commit too hard to a mechanic they weren't even sure would be applicable to anything substantial for the game. It makes sense, it's a new gen and they probably wanted to prioritize getting everything running on the new hardware. Still, it would be nice to be able to have these pokemon follow you around outside of Amity Square... (heh heh...)

 

Around the park, you can find TM43: Secret Power and TM45: Attract.

If you poke around the strange rock structures in the back, you'll find a Spooky Plate. This plate will boost Ghost-type attacks.

"Three beings were born to bind time and space."

Tucked away inside one of the Rock Huts is an Amulet Coin! Letting a pokemon hold this item will cause you to win extra prize money if it participated in the battle.

---------------------------

Now let's talk about the main draw of Amity Square... Accessories! A healthy chunk of the game's accessories can be obtained by walking through Amity Square with various pokemon. Every 200 steps you walk inside the park, your pokemon will pick up an accessory or a berry. You can turn around and speak to your pokemon to get the item it picked up! This is a great place to take advantage of the step counter app! Simply reset the counter whenever you get an accessory and turn around every time it reaches 200 to get the next one!

The berries you can claim fall into two categories:

   

Common: Cornn, Magost, Rabuta, and Nomel Berries

    

Uncommon: Spelon, Pamtre, Watmel, Durin, and Belue Berries

------------------------

As for the accessories, the types of accessories you can obtain depend on the pokemon you're walking with. Differnet pokemon pull from different pools and each one also has different categories.

 

Psyduck & Pachirisu

     

Common: Jagged Boulder, Snaggy Pebble, Brown Fluff, Round Pebble, Black Moustache, Shed Horn

  

Uncommon: Narrow Scale, Mini Pebble, Green Scale

Rare: Thick Mushroom

----------------------

Drifloon

     

Common: Pink & White Fluffs, Red & Yellow Feathers, Black Beard, and Narrow Scale

  

Uncommon: White Moustache, Shed Claw, Narrow Leaf

Rare: Purple Scale

-----------------------

 

Buneary & Happiny

     

Common: Pink Scale, Shed Horn & Claw, Pink & Black Fluff, Yellow Feather

  

Uncommon: Snaggy Pebble, Big Leaf, Green Scale

Rare: Black Pebble

------------------------

Clefairy

     

Common: White & Orange Fluff, White Feather, Mini Pebble, Small Leaf, Blue Scale

  

Uncommon: White Beard, Thin Mushroom, Large Scale

Rare: Stump

----------------------

     

Common: Orange, Brown, & Yellow Fluffs, Small Leaf, Red & Yellow Feathers

  

Uncommon: Glitter Boulder, Large Scale, Black Moustache

Rare: Purple Scale

=================

The accessories you collect here will be of help in the Super Contests, so that's why I decided to cover them here and now.

  

In addition, the steps I took walking around amity park had a double purpose: Hatching the egg I just received! It hatched into a Happiny which I named Yorokobi!

Next time, we'll be covering the basics of making Poffins!

[Aura]

Route 206 -- Underpass

Before we get into today's update, I want to briefly touch on the fact hat I think I've found one of my save file's Munchlax Trees. Twice in a row, at the honey tree on the underpass of Route 206, I found two Aipom in a row! In Group A, Aipom only has a 5% chance of appearing. In Group B, it's a 10% chance. Neither are very likely to appear twice in a row.

Now, there's no way to be certain that this is a Munchlax tree from this experience, it could very much be a coincidence. Keep in mind that even normal honey trees still have a 20% chance of pulling from Group B as well. It's also possible I may have simply forgotten to slather another tree after this one at some point. I'll keep special attention on this tree, but I'm certainly not going to stop looking for new special trees as well.

Of course, the best comfirmation that this is indeed a Munchlax tree is simply to find a Munchlax on it! Incredibly unlikely, but we can all hope!

Usually, I consider a honey tree "deconfirmed" if I encounter two Wurmple or Silcoon in a row without having the tree be the last slathered. Wurmple is only a 5% encounter out of group B and Silcoon can't be found at all. The odds of getting two 20% chance Group B pulls are also pretty slim. But, if I've consistently found rare pokemon from the same tree, I'll still continue to give it special attention.

  

Anyway, say hello to Te the Aipom!

 

Aipom have a gender difference in their tufts of hair. Females' hair is much taller and spikier than males'!

  

I also caught a female Combee. This may seem a bit redundant since we already have a male, but only female Combee are capable of evolution, and females are a lot rarer than males, so it's important to keep your eye open for that red mark! I named this Combee Joou.

Hearthome City

So last time we explored the majority of Hearthome City, but left some select areas untouched. We'll be going over those areas today!

==============

Poffin House

The Poffin House is the building right next to the Poke Mart.

If you don't have a Poffin Case, not much can be done here. Make sure to stop by the Pokemon Fan Club in order to get one from the chairman!

Anyway, Poffins are just like Pokeblocks. I'll go over a lot of the more specific details when we come back to cover Pokemon Contests in a more serious light, but for now, I'll be focusing on the more basic concepts to keep this section from being too overwhelming on something that ultimately doesn't really matter much unless you're going for total completion.

Just like Pokeblocks, you'll need to put a berry from your bag into the mixture. Each berry has different flavors which you can see by checking their tag. Generally, berries that are specifically designated as Pokeblock ingredients are the best since they have no other effect. But, you'll want to keep your eyes on them anyway.

The actual process of mixing berries into poffins is a bit more involved this time around. As you can probably expect, it takes advantage of DS hardware to work!

Unlike the rhythm game you had to play to make PokeBlocks with a Berry Mixer in Hoenn, making Poffins in Sinnoh relies on you stirring the berry into batter with a DS Stylus!

Once you select your poffin, you'll toss it into a pot filled with batter. Then, you've gotta get stirring asap! You'll need to stir counter-clockwise or clockwise depending on the direction the arrow points. If you stir too quickly, the batter will spill, but stirring too slowly will cause the batter to burn!

As the batter gets closer to finishing, it'll become thicker and harder to spill. Take advantage of this and stir faster toward the end to get some extra turns in!

As you can imagine, this process is a lot more involved than making poffins and, quite frankly, that causes it to be a lot less fun. I find myself getting tired a lot faster and it causes making tons of poffins at once to be a really exhausting process. Like a lot of things in Hoenn, I guess you're just expected to approach this with a more lax pace over several days.

    

Depending on the type of berry you use, you'll receive a different flavor of Poffin! Dry, Sweet, Bitter, Sour, and Spicy. As you can imagine, these are all correlated to Pokemon Contest stats that are represented by the same colors. They look kind of like dyed easter eggs, but I imagine they're meant to resemble something more like a macaron? Anyway, rarer berries will provide more flavor to the poffin.

Like Pokeblocks' Level and Feel, Poffins have Level and Smoothness. You want the Poffin's level to be high and its smoothness to be low. I don't really like calling the value "Smoothness" because having a high smoothness value seems to imply it's a really good poffin to me. But that's not true. You want low smoothness because this is the Poffin's counterpart to the Feel value of a Pokeblock, meaning the higher the smoothness, the fewer Pokeblocks a pokemon can consume.

And, yes, the horrifically unforgiving sheen mechanic returns from Gen 3. A pokemon can only eat so many poffins before its sheen is maxed out permanently and it can never be reset. I cannot fathom why they ever thought this was an okay mechanic but it always deterred me from experimenting with these mechanics when I was younger. Which is a shame because, quite frankly, when I was younger was probably the only time I would've had the patience to really practice and get good at these contests. Oh well, that's just the way the cookie crumbles, I suppose.

Anyway, there's a lot more detail to making poffins than what I've covered, but these are the very basics. I think it'll be important to hold off on covering the rest until we have access to a larger variety of berries.

=================

Hearthome City

Finally, I think it's time to approach the Super Contest Hall.

As noted before, there's a fashionable woman blocking the way to the building. If we speak to her, she'll apologize for being in the way and introduce herself as Fantina, the gym leader of Hearthome City as well as an expert at Pokemon Contests! She'll tell us that we are not ready to challenge her at her gym and that we'll need to get stronger before we can. Normally, I'd resent such a claim, but, well, let's just say there's a reason for that. Anyway, don't think we're just gonna be jumping into the next gym so soon.

===============

Pokemon Super Contest Hall

After Fantina leaves, we can head inside where you might be surprised to find...

 

Your mother and the woman whose Buneary we stopped at the entrance to the city! Yes, as it turns out, your mother is a highly experienced Pokemon Coordinator and a personal friend of Keira, who is one of the contest judges. I think it's a little suspicious that they'd just allow a judge to be friends with one of the coordinators, but maybe we can trust that she's good at remaining unbiased as a judge?

Your mother will give you a fancy outfit to change into for Pokemon Contests. For boys, you'll receive a Tuxedo.

Girls will receive a pretty pink dress.

Keira will also give you a gift: an accessory called Glitter Powder!

And that's not all. Blocking the way to the registration counter is a gentleman named Jordan, who turns out to be another contest judge. Jordan will give you yet another item if you have a poffin case.

A Lv. 60 Mild Poffin with 40 Smoothness! This is, oddly enough, the greatest poffin you'll ever get. No poffin made by the player can match its ability to boost all contest stats at once, so be sure to make your use of this poffin count! Because of the whole Sheen thing, this seems like an incredibly useful tool for a good all-around contest star.

=================

Pokemon Super Contest

And finally, it's time to enter a Pokemon Super Contest.

So, what makes Pokemon Contests so "super" in the Sinnoh region? Well, unlike Hoenn contests, Sinnoh contests are split into three competitions: Visual, Dancing, and Acting. Only the Acting competition is similar to the more traditional Pokemon Contests you're familiar with from the Hoenn region, but even that is changed up a bit.

The first category is the Visual Competition in which you'll be given a 60-second time limit to dress your pokemon up with accessories to match a given theme. A list of all the accessories in the game and the themes they fall into can be found here. You only have 60 seconds, so this can be surprisingly stressful! Something I learned the hard way, it seems that accessories have to be placed on the pokemon for them to count for your score. If they're next to, above, or below, and are not overlapping the sprite anywhere, they are excluded. Kind of rude, if I'm being honest. For the Normal Rank, you'll only be allowed to place five accessories on your pokemon. As the rank increases, more accessories will be allowed.

The second round is the Dance Competition. Each pokemon will get a turn to lead a series of dance moves in a rhythm game which the three other competitors must match. Just make sure to stay on beat and you should be good to go. It may be that I just suck at rhythm games, but it felt like I did have to tap on the buttons a bit earlier than what felt natural to me. As the rank increases, you'll have to keep track of more dance moves.

And finally, there is the acting competition! This competition is more or less identical to the familiar Pokemon Contests we know and love from the Hoenn Region. Here, your pokemon must make appeals to one of the three judges using the four moves it knows. Just like in Hoenn, each move has a secondary face for contests. Once you've obtained the Poffin Case, you can view a Pokemon's Contest Stats from their summary screen as well as the contest stats of the moves they know.

The basics all follow the same convention, but I'll briefly sum them up here:

• Each move has a contest category, appeal value, and secondary effect that only applies to Pokemon Contests.
• Using a move of the same category as the contest will excite the crowd and increase voltage, represented by a star.
• Using moves of the adjacent contest categories (For example, Smart or Beautiful for a Cuteness contest) will have no effect on voltage
• Using moves of opposite contest categories (For example, Tough or Strong for a Cuteness contest) will reduce voltage, represented by the loss of a star. This will also reduce the appeal of your move but it may be a tactful maneuver if you want to reduce the voltage to prevent someone else from scoring big, and the secondary effect of that move just might be worth it!
• Increasing voltage to five stars will net you a huge boost in appeal!
• Some combinations of moves form a 

Now, let's talk about how things are different.

• There are now three judges instead of just one. In addition to choosing your appeal, you'll also have to choose which judge to appeal for. Each judge has their own voltage meter.
• Each judge will give out bonus points at the end of each round. The points will be divided evenly among all pokemon who appealed to that judge and none will be given if everyone appealed to the same judge. As a result, your best bet is to try and guess which judges other coordinators will be most likely to appeal to and choose a different judge. This can feel like a bit of a crapshoot at times, but voltage can be a huge influencing factor in people's decisions.
• The same move cannot be used multiple times. There are some special exceptions due to certain move effects, but in general, you'll have to use more than one move.
• Contest Combinations seem to be gone completely.

Once the three rounds are over, the results will be tallied up and the winner will be announced!

If you're feeling uncertain about any of these competitions, you can practice them each individually at the practice counter. But I just wanna dig in to the real deal!

===================

 Denki (Luxio M); Lv. 20

 

Item: Shell Bell 

Ability: Intimidate | Moves: Spark [Cool], Roar [Cool], Charge [Smart], Bite [Tough]

I decided to enter Denki because, out of all the pokemon on my team, I thoght Denki had the best rounded moves for a pokemon contest. I entered him into a Tough contest because, even though he has two Cool moves, the Tough category allows him to freely use all four of his moves without having to worry about hurting the voltage.

===================

  

My opponents were Luis, Dakota, and Anna.

-------------------

Visual Competition

Our theme was "The Natural"

After dressing up our pokemon, it was time for the big reveal!

Luis' Pikachu: Sparky!

Dakota's Bidoof: Dots!

Anna's Bonsly: Sprout!

And, rather embarrasingly, my Luxio: Denki.

Once again, I had no clue that accessories would only show up if they were on my Pokemon! I defintiely would've made this look much better had I known that! To fit with the theme, I tried to focus more on the surroundings of my pokemon, but it didn't pan out too well when everything was stripped away...

---------------------------

Dancing Competition

I think I did pretty well in this category! I took a little bit to get the rhythm down, but once I did, I was able to get Excellents across the board!

-------------------------

Acting Competition

Now it was time for the real test of strategy!

I kinda flubbed my first turn by using the move Roar to prevent voltage decrease, but I didn't consider the fact that I was going last. Still, I appealed to Dexter while everyone else appealed to Jordan, so I still came out with more hearts than anyone else!

On the second round, I decided to use Charge. Charge's effect doubles the appeal of my next round. I used this appeal for Keira. Two of my opponents appealed to Dexter. But more importantly, only one person appealed to Jordan. Jordan's voltage was now at 5. I scored the least this round which meant that I got to go first the following round. That means...

For the third round, I was able to score big by using my tough move, Bite, to appeal to Jordan. Not only did I get double the appeal, but I was able to max out the voltage, granting myself even more hearts!

For the final round, I had a bit of an awkward encounter. I just had to use Spark to appeal because I couldn't use Bite again.

====================

The results!

I definitely fell behind due to flubbing the initial visual competition, but I could hopefully make it up!

The results of the Dance Competition definitely helped me make up for some lost ground, but I've still gotta get further ahead if I want to win!

Unfortunately, while I outperformed the others in the Acting Competition, it seems my poor start really costed me the overall win. I ended up scoring in last place.

I'm confident I could win if I tried again, but it's not too important to me right now. Sooner or later, I'll return to this just like I did in Gen 3. I'll try and complete the Master Rank in one of the categories! But before I commit to that, I'll want to have access to all of the resources that will really help me master it all. Until then, we'll just have to let it go!

Next time, it looks like we're done in Hearthome. We should be able to move onward!

[Aura]

Hearthome City

Yesterday, we finished up around Hearthome, at least for now, and participated in our first Pokemon Contest! We definitely have some room for improvement there, but for now, we'll need to make our way out.

And it was on our way out that I was completely caught off guard by Pace! I was just on my way to do a quick berry run, so I hadn't even healed yet! But, that's probably fine...

=================

 

My Team:

----------------------

 Senshi (Monferno M); Lv. 24

 

Item: Cheri Berry 

Ability: Blaze | Moves: Mach Punch, Leer, Flame Wheel, Taunt

----------------------

 Denki (Luxio M); Lv. 24

 

Item: Shell Bell 

Ability: Intimidate | Moves: Spark, Roar, Charge, Bite

-----------------------

 Hana (Roselia F); Lv. 25*

 

Item: Rawst Berry 

Ability: Poison Point | Moves: Giga Drain, Growth, Worry Seed, Stun Spore

*Hana was in the PC to make room for Fusei Kogo

-----------------------

 Uki (Buizel F); Lv. 24

 

Item: Cheri Berry 

Ability: Swift Swim | Moves: Swift, Pursuit, Aqua Jet, Water Gun

---------------------

 Kuro (Murkrow F); Lv. 24

 

Item: Dread Plate 

Ability: Super Luck | Moves: Wing Attack, Night Shade, Pursuit, Haze

----------------------

 Ibutsu (Bronzor); Lv. 24

 

Item: Quick Claw 

Ability: Levitate | Moves: Extrasensory, Hypnosis, Stealth Rock, Confuse Ray

================

Vs. Rival #2

----------------------

Starly, Lv. 19

                              

                              

Senshi was the lead of my party. I decided to try and wipe this Starly out quickly with a Mach Punch, but it unfortunately didn't do enough damage, so Senshi ended up taking a super-effective Wing Attack.

                                                   

                              

"Oh yeah? I'll show you something wicked, too!"

Unfortunately for Pace, another Mach Punch was enough to finish the job.

----------------------

Prinplup, Lv. 21

                              

                              

This was a matchup I wasn't going to stay in. I figured I could expect a Water attack, so I decided to retreat into a pokemon who could take it and deal out some damage. I didn't have Hana with me at the time, though, so my next best choice was Denki.

                              

                              

Denki switched in on just a Growl, so our Attack stats were reduced equally thanks to Intimidate. The following turn, all Prinplup could use was Metal Claw, so I was able to get an easy KO with Spark and heal off any damage dealt thanks to the Shell Bell.

-----------------------

Ponyta, Lv. 20

                              

                              

This one was a bit of a "mental misclick". In my head, I was expecting Roselia to come out next, so I planned to use Roar to get it out and let Denki deal with Ponyta instead. But instead, Ponyta came out next, but my muscles were already predisposed to selecting Roar... oops. Denki was hit by an Ember before I was able to get the Roar off.

---------------------

Roselia, Lv. 20

                              

                              

Denki's HP was fairly low at this point, so I wasn't totally confident in his ability to handle this matchup.

                              

                              

I switched Senshi in on a Mega Drain and then followed up with a Flame Wheel to take out Roselia easily enough.

                              

                              

Due to not being able to heal, Senshi's HP was pretty low by this point, so I wanted to play it safe. I went for Mach Punch to weaken his Ponyta and was met with a Tackle. We exchanged blows again, this time I was hit with a Growl to reduce my attack.

                                                   

                              

"What the?! We're in trouble?! But there's no giving up on me!"

Ponyta was in KO range of another Mach Punch, even with the reduced attack. I expected Pace to heal his Ponyta with a Super Potion at this point, and I figured it would be a losing battle to try and finish the fight with Senshi like that, so I chose now to retreat!

                              

                              

To my surprise, I switched Uki into a tackle! I suppose Pace wasn't going to be using potions. So, it was a simple Aqua Jet to finish the battle off.

----------------------

And with that, the battle is won! He's distressed to have lost again, but tells himself he has to keep trying and sets out to take on the Veilstone Gym next! Sounds like that's where we're headed as well!

====================

Once you defeat your rival, the NPC's will clear out from the East exit of Hearthome, allowing you to pass through and finally move on to the next area. We'll need to come back for Hearthome Gym!

====================

Route 209

Route 209 lies on the other side of Hearthome! There's some grass nearby right away, so let's start with the new pokemon we can find here!

This is the first route where we can find Staravia, the evolution of Starly, in the wild. It's available at 25% during the day and 15% during the morning and night. It'll be more common elsewhere, though, and it's quite a common pokemon on its own, so you shouldn't have too many issues finding one to catch while looking for some of the other pokemon available here.

 

Staravia brings with it another gender difference. The spot of gray feathers on its forehead is smaller for a female than a male. Quite frankly, until this was pointed out, I'd always assumed this to be a lighting thing. Huh.

  

Bibarel is more common over here than on the other side, being available at 45% during the day, and 35% during the morning and night, so this is where I'd recommend seeking him out! He's actually capable of using a few more HM's than Bidoof is, so it might be worth the upgrade! I named mine Fuusa.

  

At only 5% during the day and at night, but 25% during the early morning, you can find Mime Jr. in Diamond version only! I named it Mohou Suru.

In Pearl version, you'll encounter Bonsly here in Mime Jr.'s place.

It might seem like the obvious choice is to hunt for Mime Jr. or Bonsly during the early morning, but actually, there is reason to go ahead and hunt them at other times if you're like me who likes to catch as many pokemon as I can out of the wild...

  

At a flat 5% rate across the board, you can find Chansey, the evolved form of Happiny! You're probably better off simply evolving Happiny if you want to get your hands on a Chansey since you do get that Happiny egg for free, but catching evolved forms out of the wild makes a living dex look a bit more complete! I didn't actually try to catch a Chansey until the end of my session today and, to my surprise, it was the very first encounter I found! That's, quite frankly, a really unfortunate place to waste such fantastic luck, but hey, anything that keeps me from playing for three hours longer than I should! I named this Chansey "Kikai." The tricky part of catching Chansey is ensuring that you don't KO it in one shot with a physical attack but also watch out for its Softboiled and Refresh moves that can heal damage and status ailments. My method for catching this thing was mostly just Confusing and Hypnotizing it with Ibutsu and then chipping away at its HP with Extrasensory, hoping that Confusion would stop it from healing whenever it wakes up. I started throwing Heal Balls (I like to match the pokeball to the type of pokemon!) at around half HP. 

-----------------------

Before we proceed to the trainers, I want to address that, by speaking with the Fisherman on the dock near the entrance, you can get a Good Rod! This rod will catch pokemon much more easily than the Old Rod and even help you to find new types of pokemon!

  

Using the Good Rod, you can find Goldeen here at 45%! I named mine Kingyo!

 

Goldeen has another gender difference! Males have larger horns than females.

--------------------------

As for trainer classes, we've got some new ones as well!

 

You find both male and female Pokemon Breeders! Sinnoh's Breeders wear Green outfits and brown hair, making them resemble the ones from the Sevii Islands more than their Hoenn counterparts. In Hoenn, breeders tended to specialize in squads of six low-level pokemon that can hatch from eggs. Here in Sinnoh, they instead specialize in squads of three Baby pokemon!

Next up is a Jogger! These Joggers might catch you by surprise if you're playing earlier than usual as they'll only battle you in the early morning. You might want to set your clock to morning hours to go ahead and get them out of the way before they catch you off guard at an unfortunate time. Much like running Traitheletes in Hoenn, they specialize in Pokemon that can keep up with them while running.

The next trainer class is a new one introduced in Gen IV: the Cowgirl who specializes in pokemon that live on ranches! There's only one lone Cowgirl in the entire region, though, so this one specifically just uses a bunch of Bidoof.

Toward the end of the route, you'll find a recurring double-battle trainer class: The Young Couple who specialize in pokemon that form pairs together. They're a boy and a girl who form a cute, flirty couple going through a bit of a honeymoon phase. Aside from that detail, they differ drastically from their counterparts in Hoenn or Gen III's Kanto.

----------------------

Next up are the items across the route!

There's a jar of Honey in the northeast corner of the patch of grass near the entrance.

 

The first patch of berry soil on this route contains a Leppa and Chesto Berry Tree.

Using the Dowsing Machine near the twins will reveal a Revive!

Across from the Poke Kid, you'll find an X-Accuracy. You can cross the bridge to the south to get over there without Surf.

--------------------

As you pass by, you'll find a strange rock formation.

If you interact with it with that Odd Keystone from before in your bag, you'll find that the keystone can be inserted into the object. Doing so will reveal the letters "The Hallowed Tower"... It's not too clear exactly what this means, just yet, but it'll all become apparent eventually...

--------------------

  

Using the Dowsing Machine around the craters, you'll find a Super Potion, Awakening, and TinyMushroom!

 

There are two Razz Berry trees in the second patch of soil.

Going around the west side of the trees nearby, it'll require passing through some grass, you can use the 4th gear of the bicycle to climb out of the crater on the other side. It'll require some skillful moves, but give it a few tries and you can slip right through the rocks and up the steep slope to get a Calcium!

-------------------

Just past the second berry patch, you'll find a strange tower called the Lost Tower. We'll return to this shortly, but at this point, I think it's best to push to the next town.

If you explore the area around the Lost Tower and cut the nearby tree, you'll be rewarded with TM47: Steel Wing!

================

Solaceon Town

Wow, Route 209 is a very short route but it had a lot of content to go over! Well, we're going to explore Solaceon Town a bit more later on, but for now, we'll be focused on that Lost Tower we left behind earlier.

   

Before we leave, though, I do want to collect the berries, no sense in leaving those behind! There's a Persim, Figy, and two Nanab Berry Trees here!

With that out of the way, let's head back to the Lost Tower on Route 209!

=================

Lost Tower

This tower overlooks the outskirts of Solaceon Town. Much like Pokemon Tower in Lavender Town, it seems to be a crypt that serves as the final resting place for the bodies of deceased Pokemon.

 

Lost Tower [1F - 2F]

There isn't anything particularly interesting by way of Pokemon here. Mostly just Gastly, Zubat, and Murkrow or Misdreavus depending on your version. The most interesting aspect of this area are the items you'll find. Other than that, there are a bunch of trainers here mourning the loss of their pokemon. Quite frankly, this is probably my favorite take on this concept of area. I always felt the trainers in Mt. Pyre in Hoenn were a bit out of place and came off as rather rude and disrespectful. Pokemon Tower only had people mourning in the basement area, most of the tower was populated by spirit mediums trying to calm restless souls. It wasn't much of a place of tranquility, either.

But here, the people you find all feel like they have a reason to be here. Even the trainers who battle you are doing so int he memories of their lost pokemon. It's actually really sweet the more you think about it.

Item-wise, things are a bit of a different story when it comes to points of interest. On the second floor, you'll find an Oval Stone that looks suspiciously like a Lucky Egg. This is an item used to evolve Happiny into Clefairy if you're not interested in training it up.

With the Dowsing Machine, you can also find some Stardust on this floor.

 

Lost Tower [3F - 4F]

Starting on the third floor, you can start to find Golbat! Though Golbat will be much more common in future areas, so I don't recommend hunting for one here. Still, if you're interested, it's more common on the top floor.

 

Golbat brings with it a gender difference. Just like Zubat, females have smaller fangs than males.

You can find a Roughneck on the third floor. These guys were referred to as Cue Balls in previous gens. They'd normally specialize in tough-looking Fighting-type pokemon, but there is only one Roughneck here in Sinnoh and he ironically only has one pokemon: A cute little Cleffa. He says that all of his pokemon were taken by Team Galactic. It's hard to tell if he means they were stolen, or... considering our location... either way, it's kinda sad. And defeating him has him mention how he needs to move on and turn the page. To me, this dialogue heavily implies his pokemon were actually killed somehow. Perhaps this Cleffa was spared because it wasn't with him when he lost the others. Maybe it was still in an egg at the Daycare? Regardless, I'm glad our battle could help!

 

Male and Female Pokefans can be found on both the 3rd and 4th floors. They tend to specialize in cute pokemon, mainly the Pikachu line. The Male Poke Fans are playing with their kids while Female Poke Fans carry dolls with them. Other than the female pokefans carrying Bonsly dolls instead of Wailmer or Clefairy Dolls, they both are basically identical to their Gen III counterparts. PokeFans care deeply about their pokemon and have them all hold Sitrus Berries to heal them in a pinch.

On the 4th floor, you'll find a Belle & Pa! This is a pairing of a Cowgirl and her male counterpart, a Rancher. Once again, these trainers specialize in pokemon that can be found on a ranch.

 

It was while battling trainers here that Uki reached level 26 and evolved into Floatzel! Now, she's got some extra firepower behind her attacks!

 

Like Buizel, Floatzel has another Gender Difference that's better visible from behind. A male Floatzel has two spots on its back while a female only has one.

You can find TM27: Return on floor 4.

And the Dowsing Machine will reveal the location of a Great Ball on 4F as well!

Lost Tower [5F]

On the last floor, you'll find a pair of old ladies.

 

One of these ladies will give you HM04: Strength while the other will give you a Cleanse Tag to help you get back down with fewer wild pokemon encounters.

Of course, we can't quite use the HM Strength just yet. We only have the badges to use Cut and Rock Smash, so we'll have to keep going a little bit longer.

And that's gonna be it for today's update! Next time, we'll poke our heads around Solaceon Town!

[Aura]

Solaceon Town

So, yesterday we arrived at Solaceon Town and collected the berries but didn't look much more into the area. Now, we have the freedom to explore a bit more! This is a small town that borders a mysterious ruin to the east. It's also quite well known for its Day Care where trainers can leave their pokemon to have them grow stronger as well as occasionally discover an egg!

To start with, the mart here is the first place where we can actually purchase Dusk Balls! I really wish I could've bought these sooner because I really wanted Kuro to be in that Dusk Ball I got in the beginning of the game, but the one I caught didn't have the right ability and I saved before considering that possibility, so I had to settle for a Premier Ball. Anyway, these are some of the best pokeballs in the entire game, especially for someone like me who plays a lot during the night. They also have some of the coolest visual effects. Really cool all around!

The building behind the Poke Mart, neighboring the Pokemon Center, is the Pokemon News Press. If you approach the man at the desk, he'll notice your Pokedex and comment about how you must be doing work for Prof. Rowan! In that case, he requests that you show him a different pokemon each day. If you happen to have, or catch, one, you can show it to him by the end of the day and receive three of a random type fo pokeball! Special types of pokeballs like the Master Ball are obviously excluded from this.

There is a man in town who will give you a free Poketch app!

App 10: Pokemon History

This app will display the last 12 Pokemon obtained by the player. You can tap on them to hear their cries!

--------------------

Pokemon Daycare

You all know what to expect at this point out of the Pokemon Daycare, I probably don't need to go into too much detail about it. You can leave a pokemon here and they'll gain experience as you walk around. It'll cost 100p + 100p * the number of levels gained in order to reclaim a pokemon left at the daycare. The Daycare can hold up to two pokemon at a time. If you leave pokemon of different genders and the same egg group, you'll receive an egg that will hatch into the youngest form of the mother's evolution line (with the odd exception of baby forms of earlier gen pokemon introduced in Gen III and IV which require special incenses as an awkward explanation as to why they wouldn't appear in Johto). The baby inherits the species from the mother and any potential egg moves from its father.

As per usual, I'll go over the details of breeding in Gen IV at the end of the gen as we work to develop our best competitive team.

If you leave a pokemon at the daycare, leave and return, you'll find a man at the table inside the building who will ask if you're a fan of the Day Care, too, and give you another Poketch App.

App 09: Day-Care Checker

This App was designed in collaboration between the Poketch Company and the Day Care. It's used to monitor your pokemon at the daycare. You can tap the screen to refresh it. It'll update to show the levels of the pokemon you left as well as show you if an egg has appeared! It's really handy for breeding!

Now, that's mostly it for the town, but of course you're going to be naturally drawn to the steppe area over on the eastern side of town.

Before going down any of these ledges, you'll want to use your Dowsing Machine at the easternmost edge to find a jar of Honey in the tree.

Taking the right steppes down to the house further south, you'll find a lady who will give you a Seal Case and tell you her son likes to visit the Solaceon Ruins and make seals based on the pokemon there. She suggests that you show him some pokemon from the ruins and see what he thinks.

This Seal Case is yet another aesthetic mechanic somewhat akin to Accessories... oh boy. Yes, this is yet another set of items we get to collect! We'll go over exactly what these are in a bit, but for now, let's focus on those ruins!

=================

Solaceon Ruins

These ruis are found at the easternmost edge of Solaceon Town and will need to be accessed by dropping down the right sets of ledges.

Solaceon Ruins [1F]

At the entrance, you'll find a strange message written in the font of a familiar shape... Unown.

Quote

 

TOP RIGHT

LOWER LEFT

TOP RIGHT

TOP LEFT

TOP LEFT

LOWER LEFT

 

You may want to use your Memo Pad app on your Poketch to note these directions, though it isn't hard to feel your way around even without them. This dungeon isn't quite Lost Woods-esque like similar dungeons in previous games. Wrong paths will just lead you to dead ends.

  

As a matter of fact, some of these dead ends even hold some goodies for you hidden on the rocks! So it's not exactly a bad idea to check them all anyway. As you progress, though...

  

...You just might stumble across a pokemon that probably won't come as a surprise: Unown! No puzzles necessary to be solved here!

You'll eventually also stumble across the son of the lady we spoke to before who gave us the Seal Case. After speaking to him, he'll return home.

     

If you follow the path instructed by the message in the first room, you might find that the Unown forms in each room are always the same. First is 'F', then 'R' in the next room, then 'I', then 'E', then 'N' and 'D'. 

F R I E N D

It seems the Unown like our ability to read their message and think of us as a friend?

Solaceon Ruins [B4F]

It is in this final room, that we can find another Unown message.

Quote

FRIENDSHIP

ALL LIVES

TOUCH OTHER

LIVES TO CREATE

SOMETHING

ANEW AND ALIVE

This is where the underlying themes of the Sinnoh region really start to take shape: Creation. It's been hinted at here and there, but I think this is the first time we see tangible evidence of it outside of the ramblings of that strange man at Mt. Coronet. The importance of Friendship to these Unown also seems to add credence to my theory I proposed way back in my Crystal playthrough about the Unown and their relationship to an ancient tribe in Johto.

If you recall, Pokemon Crystal had the following messages which will be revisited soon enough.

Quote

"OUR WORDS SHALL

REMAIN HERE FOR

THE AGES"

"THUS WE SHALL

ERECT A POKEMON

STATUE OUTSIDE"

"THEY POSSESS

GREAT INSIGHT

AND REFUSE THE

OUTSIDE WORLD"

"WE HUMANS MUST

LEARN TO WALK IN

HARMONY WITH

THEM

WE DEPART FOR

THEIR SAKES"

These quotes were also written with Unown across four different chambers hidden in the depths of the Ruins of Alph, with the last message implying the messages weren't written by Unown, but by people who lived alongside Unown. It is unclear whether "they" and "them" refer to the Unown or Pokemon in general, but I think the Solaceon Ruins shed some insight on this. At the time, I proposed that this tribe may have been unable to live peacefully with pokemon. Perhaps they feared pokemon and may have faced some dire consequences for their inability to live with them. Therefore, they left these warnings for future societies before departing from their home.

I now believe the location they ended up in would later become the Solaceon Ruins. The use of Unown as a language is a strong similarity already, and the emphasis on friendship also seems to be a direct continuation of their messages from the Ruins of Alph. Perhaps the arrangement of the Unown here to form the word "FRIEND" shows that, perhaps this tribe was successful in their goal to befriend pokemon? Maybe they became the original pokemon trainers? Who knows? Perhaps we'll just need to keep digging!

There is still more to uncover about this mystery that further links these two locations, and we'll certainly cover this when we get to it. This is just the type of lore I really love to dig into! It really captures your imagination and this is my favorite part of this era of Pokemon! I really feel like you don't quite get this level of connection between regions all that much anymore. It really feels like there's a grander story that's been built up between these games and I'd love to see it more fully explored!

To further drive home the similarities to the Ruins of Alph, what do we have in this chamber but four valuable items arranged in a square?

  

There's a Nugget, an Odd Incense, and a Rare Candy. The Odd Incense is the Incense needed to get a Mime Jr. egg instead of Mr. Mime.

The most interesting of these four items, however, is the Mind Plate, which will boost the power of Psychic attacks.

"Two make power and three make Spirit, shaping the world."

Perhaps the inscriptions on these plates were written by this tribe as well, after having discovered some grander purpose in the world? A lot of these separate details are starting to seem a lot more connected than we may have thought...

---------------------

Anyway, for the rest of this session, I chose to focus on completing the, granted, imaginary, Unowndex. At least, as completely as I can for now.

    

    

    

    

The remaining Unown letter forms 'A' - 'C', 'G', 'H', 'J' - 'Q', and 'S' - 'Z' can all be found interchangeably in any of the dead-end rooms. Only 'F', 'R', 'I', 'E', 'N', and 'D' are limited to specific rooms.

===================

Solaceon Town

Once you're finished exploring the ruins and catching Unown, you can leave the ruins and return to Solaceon Town where you can revisit the lady and her son to show the son your findings. You'll want to bring the Unown with you and show him all of them! He'll only check the first slot of your party, so you'll need to put each Unown in the first slot and speak to him. When shown an Unown of a certain form, he'll give you 10 seals of that letter! He tells you he's learning the alphabet by playing with these seals!

So, what exactly are these seals? Well, it's actually fairly simple but also unfortunately adds a needlessly complicated layer to it.

Once you get a Seal Case, you'll gain a new section under your PC: "Ball Capsules"

From here, you can customize up to 12 different sets of Ball Capsules!

When you go to edit a Ball Capsule, you can place seals around the capsule and they'll cause different effects to appear around the pokemon sprite when it pops out of its pokeball! Obviously, I can't show off all these effects myself, but it's fun to play around with them! Once a Ball Capsule is saved with Seals, you can easily set the capsule to a pokemon in your party!

Unfortunately, the "needlessly complicated layer" that I complained about earlier is that a pokemon set to a ball capsule cannot be stored in the PC. You have to manually unequip the Ball Capsule before storing the pokemon. It's unfortunate and causes this feature to go underutilized for me. It's just not worth the hassle of constantly unequipping your Ball Capsules every time you need to swap out the pokemon in your party with ones from your PC. I really wish this wasn't an element and the game just knew to automatically unset your Ball Capsules, or that they could simply be attached to pokemon in the PC. Unfortunately, this isn't the case and it won't be for many, many years.

Anyway, I think we're done here in Solaceon Town. That wasn't nearly as bad as Hearthome, was it? Next time, we'll progress further ahead to see what's going on on the way to Veilstone City! It sounds like it's a long trip, so we'll need to be prepared!

[Aura]

Route 208

One small detail I realized between sessions is that I actually missed a Poketch app! You can get this one from the daughter of the Berry Master inside of the Berry Master's house. Thankfully, it's not out of the way at all and is just a quick stop on your daily berry run.

App 08: Berry Searcher

This app is another one of the fairly useful ones, but it's also unfortunately limited in its use. This app will tell you where any fully ripe berries that you've planted can be found! It displays a miniature map of the Sinnoh region which, admittedly, seems a bit more detailed than the actual Town Map!

Unfortunately, this app does not show you the states of non-fully-grown berries, nor the locations of berries that need watering. Considering those are the most important aspects of checking on your berries every day, this app kind of fails in its goal to simplify berry farming. But, if you're the type to just plant berries and come back to them later, not caring about getting the optimized results, then you might find some more use out of this tool!

Like the Day Care Checker, you can refresh it by tapping on the screen.

===================

Route 210

Moving on with our journey, last time we finished up in Solaceon Town, so this time we'll be checking out Route 210 which lies just beyond the north exit!

This route introduces thick tall grass which you can't ride your bike through.

If you don't have a Ponyta yet, this is the route where it's at its most common: 50% during the day and 30% during the night and early morning. If you've been doing daily berry runs, though, you've probably gotten a bunch of these guys.

Other than that, there isn't anything of any particular interest here in terms of pokemon. You will find another Honey Tree on this route, though, so make sure to check it! Keep looking for that elusive Munchlax!

   

Near the entrance to the route, you'll find a berry patch with two Aspear Berries, a Razz and a Pinap Berry.

As for new trainer classes, we've battled a lone Cowgirl as well as Belle & Pa, now it's time for the Pa himself, a Rancher! Ranchers, like Cowgirls, use pokemon that help on the ranch. Also like Cowgirls, there's actually only one lone Rancher in the game, so it's difficult to generalize their preferences. If I had to guess, the Rancher tends to prefer pokemon related to dirtier jobs while the Cowgirl prefers the more lovable critters.

On top of the cliff just south of the honey tree, there's a trainer who gives you TM51: Roost. This is a new move in Gen IV that is a more accessible counterpart to moves like Softboiled and Recover. It's mostly only learned by Flying-type pokemon and causes them to forego their Flying typing for the turn it's used. If applied with some strategic timing, you could use this to avoid a super-effective attack. But typically, this is a downside that removes your pokemon's resistances and immunities.

A Great Ball can be obtained along the west side of the route. You'll need a bicycle to ride up a slope to get there, and you'll need to get past some Twins and a Pokemon Breeder.

Another Great Ball can be obtained with the Dowsing Machine near the honey tree.

-------------------

After heading a certain distance to the north, you'll come across the Cafe Cabin! There are some trainers to battle here including a new trainer class!

Introducing the Waitress! Would you be shocked to find that this is the only Waitress in the game? It seems like a running trend to only use trainer classes once. Anyway, once again it's hard to generalize what the class is all about. This one just uses a Clefairy so I suppose they specialize in cute, showy pokemon similarly to idols?

The waitress behind the counter will sell you Moomoo Milk. You can only buy one bottle at a time, but at only 500p a pop, it's incredibly cost-efficient healing!

------------------------

          

         

 

Outside of the cafe, you'll find some Psyduck blocking the path further north. They seem to be standing in place because they're collectively suffering from bad headaches. So the rest of Route 210 can't be reached for now. Instead, we'll need to head east. That's fine, because that's the direction toward Veilstone anyway!

===================

Route 215

Route 215 is the next area over here! On this route, the weather is rainy, so be prepared! Fire attacks will be weaker and water attacks will be stronger! In addition, Swift Swim doubles the speed of a lot of Water pokemon, making them incredibly difficult to outspeed. Some other abilties will also take effect in the rain, so stay wary!

There's another Honey Tree near the beginning of the route to slather some honey on in pursuit of that Munchlax.

  

Kadabra is a new pokemon that can be caught here! It still knows Teleport, but it's a bit easier to catch with access to Confusion and Disable, so it won't always just try to Teleport turn one. Still, Senshi's Taunt is a fantastic help for catching these guys. I named mine Okaruto.

 

Kadabra's got another gender difference! The males have longer whiskers than the females.

  

With a similar trick utilizing Senshi's Taunt, I also went ahead and caught an Abra here. Personally, I'd recommend just catching a Kadabra and breeding it for an Abra if you want one of your own, but if you've got an easy plan to catch Abra, then whatever works for you! Abra is technically more common way back on Route 203 where he can be found at 15%, but I prefer hunting them here since I can also look for Kadabra at the same time. Of course, there's also that in-game trade at Oreburgh City if you don't wanna deal with the hassle at all!

I named my Abra Arato.

================

You can find an Ether by the Jogger first jogger.

Speaking to the Blackbelt on the cliff, he'll give you TM66: Payback. It's a physical, 50-power Dark attack that doubles in power if the user moves after the target. A great choice for slow, bulkier Dark-type pokemon but not so good a choice for faster pokemon.

On the lone peak between the two bridges, you can use the Dowsing Machine to find a jar of Honey!

Cutting down the nearby tree and battling past the Blackbelt behind it, you'll find a Fist Plate!

"The Original One breathed alone before the universe came."

The Fist Plate will power up Fighting-type attacks of the pokemon holding it.

 

Behind the next cut tree is a berry patch holding a Pecha and Bluk Berry tree.

A Guard Spec is the next item that can be found if you cross the next bridge.

 

The Dowsing Machine will reveal a Hyper Potion near the cut tree north of here. And further west, a Zinc can be found against the western wall in the large patch of grass near the end of the route.

Behind the next Cut Tree is TM34: Shock Wave.

A Full Heal can be found at the bottom of the ledge near the end of the route.

 

At the very end of the route, you might be caught off guard by a surprisingly challenging double battle with two Ace Trainers! This is a great debut to these Ace Trainers. This trainer class was called the Cooltrainer in previous generations. They specialize in rare and strong pokemon, making them a major force to be reckoned with among generic trainers. These two will come at you with some dangerous duos. They certainly gave me a run for my money which I wasn't expecting! But, I was able to defeat them with few casualties.

 

You can find a Wiki and Mago Berry Tree on the other side after fighting your way through the Ace Trainers as your reward!

===================

Veilstone City

And with that, we've finally arrived in Veilstone City! We'll be checking this place out more thoroughly next time. There's lots to do here!

[Aura]

Veilstone City

Veilstone City is a town carved out of stone as its name implies! The buildings are all on top of rocky plateaus. This place is essentially Sinnoh's Celadon City, even featuring similar landmarks: A gym, the Game Corner, the Department Store, and even Team Galactic seems prominent here with another large building overlooking town!

At the east edge of town, there appear to be some meteorites. They might become important eventually, hint hint, but for now, we can't do anything with them.

Using the Dowsing Machine in the lot just north of the entrance will reveal a TinyMushroom... I find it a little frustrating that a lot of the best hidden secrets in the game are really underwhelming rewards like this while a lot of valuable hidden items are hidden in very obvious spots like at dead ends or on top of rocks.

Case and point, there's a Revive hidden between the trees and the Department Store. This is a much more suspicious spot that I'd be more likely to check with my Dowsing Machine, or even just running up and pressing A. Why couldn't this be swapped with the TinyMushroom? It's really disappointing to find a secret you've never known about before only to find out it's just a TinyMushroom.

West of the Galactic Building, you can find a PP-Up.

Speaking to a roughneck at the south part of town will reward you with TM63: Embargo. A new move in Gen IV that prevents the opponent from using items on the active pokemon! This is a little ambiguous, so a bit of research on Bulbapedia will reveal that this move, more specifically, nullifies the effect of the pokemon's held item as well as preventing trainers from using items such as potions on the pokemon.

Now, let's start talking about the city's landmarks!

-------------------------

At the entrance to town, you'll see two Galactic Grunts standing guard over a warehouse. Speaking to NPC's around town will reveal that they're holding a Fly HM inside! Hm... that could certainly be useful for our Berry farming exploits... But we can't get passed the guards just yet, so that'll have to wait.

=====================

Veilstone Department Store

The next building that'll catch your attention is the Veilstone Department Store! Yes, just like every region to date, there's always a department store ready to sell you all sorts of exclusive items!

Veilstone Department Store [1F]

But we're not just here to buy stuff.

  

Remember the mask you got in Jubilife TV? Well, back then you got the mask of your starter. The lady here near the entrance will give away the mask of the starter your starter is strong against. So, you'll receive the Piplup Mask if you started with Turtwig, the Turtwig Mask if you started with Chimchar, and the Chimchar Mask if you started with Piplup.

As always, each floor will contain clerks that sell different categories of items. The service lady on the right will recommend an item for you to buy and explain what it does. She doesn't really provide any useful service.

 

The clerks sell items that can be found in any standard Poke Mart but without badge restrictions. So you can go ahead and buy not only Great Balls, but Ultra Balls freely here as well!

  

You can also buy medicines such as Hyper Potions, Max Potions, and Full Heals, too!

  

The clerk on the left sells pokeballs alongside a selection of mail and other miscellaneous goods. Among the selection of mail are three exclusive to the department store: Grass, Flame, and Bubble Mail.

  

Here's what they look like! I probably don't need to explain which is which, do I?

--------------------

Veilstone Department Store [2F]

On the second floor, you can find Battle items such as X-Attack and X-Defense as well as vitamins such as Protein and Calcium.

More importantly, speaking to the man across the counter will reward you with a new Poketch App!

App 11: Counter

You receive the Counter app over the Counter! That pun isn't lost on me and the game ensures it isn't lost on you, either.

This app is as basic as it gets. Tap the button in the middle to increment the counter. It counts up to 9999. This may seem pointless and arbitrary, but it's actually very useful for things like EV training! So long as you remember to increment the counter enough times every time you KO a pokemon, that is. You might also be able to find other uses for this app, but that's the first one that comes to mind!

-------------------------

Veilstone Department Store [3F]

The third floor sells TMs!

      

The clerk on the north side offers more support-focused TMs: TM83: Natural Gift, TM17: Protect, TM54: False Swipe, TM20: Safeguard, TM33: Reflect, TM16: Light Screen, and TM70: Flash. In case you accidentally overwrote Flash before fully exploring Wayward Cave (hint: We actually have yet to fully explore that cave! There's a bit of a secret that will require us to revisit the place later for!)

Natural Gift is a strange move that was introduced in Gen IV. It can only be used if the pokemon is holding a berry. It will consume the berry and convert it into an offensive attack! The attack's type and power is determined by the type of berry that was consumed. It doesn't seem as simple as flavor corresponding to type, so you can find a list of the possible stats of the move on bulbapedia.

False Swipe is also useful to note as a lot of rare pokemon in Sinnoh, namely pokemon from honey trees, might be really low level when you encounter them in the late game. False Swipe can help you catch these pokemon more easily without risking a KO.

     

The clerk across the room will sell more offensive TMs. TM38: Fire Blast, TM25: Thunder, TM14: Blizzard, TM22: SolarBeam, TM 52: Focus Blast, and TM15: Hyper Beam

While the majority of these moves are familiar, I want to call some special attention to Hyper Beam as this move has almost completely flipped its usefulness from Gen III. Previously, this was an incredibly powerful physical attack. However, with the physical/special split, it is now a Special attack instead! Consequently, a lot of pokemon that used to be able to use Hyper Beam to great effect will now deal significantly less damage, but also a lot of pokemon who couldn't use it very well can now use it far better! Don't worry too much about this shift, as there is a new move that will fill the void Hyper Beam leaves on your moveset.

Focus Blast is the biggest standout here for veteran players. Focus Blast is a new Special Fighting-type attack with 120 Power and 70 Accuracy. It also has a chance of reducing the target's special defense if it hits.

------------------------

Veilstone Department Store [4F]

The fourth floor sells decorations for your secret base underground. On purchasing any of these items, they're automatically transferred to your secret base PC.

    

The clerk on the north will sell regular household furniture for surprisingly affordable prices. A Yellow cushion, a cupboard, a TV, a Refrigerator, and a Pretty Sink.

     

The other clerk will sell you dolls! Specifically, she seems focused on dolls of pokemon that were used to preview Generation IV: Munclax, Bonsly, Mime Jr. Mantyke, Buizel, and Chatot dolls to be exact.

------------------------

Veilstone Department Store [5F]

And the fifth floor doesn't hold any clerks. You can access the vending machines to buy your traditional Fresh Water, Soda Pop and Lemonade for more really cost-efficient healing.

Talking to the two men standing close to each other will net you a Stick Barb. I suppose they're stuck to each other because of one of these things? They try to play it off like it's cool which is really funny to me.

The Sticky Barb is a new gimmicky held item introduced in Gen IV. It'll damage the holder at the end of each turn. It can be passed to another pokemon when making physical contact. Note that Physical Contact doesn't necessarily correlate to a physical attack. Physical attacks are moves that require physical strength and special attacks use more supernatural forces to attack. Physical contact differs. For example, Rock Throw is a physical attack that does not make physical contact. The move Grass Knot is an example of a Special Move that does make physical contact. There are definitely more examples of Physical moves that don't make contact than special moves that do and some moves might not be what you expect. You can find a list about contact on bulbapedia as well.

====================

The next building to catch your attention will probably be the Veilstone Game Corner and the Prize Exchange Building right next door. We'll have to come back to these buildings once we get a Coin Case, so let's put a pin in it for now!

-----------------------

In the next building you'll pass, you can find a lady who will offer a massage for your pokemon. Alongside increasing your pokemon's happiness, the lady can also find accessories! As far as I can tell, the accessories she can find are completely random and don't really follow any particular pattern of rarity.

        

       

The accessories you can find from the massage girl are: Pretty Dewdrop, Snow Crystal, Sparks, Shimmering Fire, Mystic Fire, Determination, Peculiar Spoon, Puffy Smoke, Poison Extract, Wealth Coin, Eerie Thing, Spring, Seashell, Humming Note, Shiny Power, and Glitter Powder.

------------------------

Just nextdoor to the massage lady, you'll find a clown who will happily play a minigame with you. If you can guess which hand he's holding a coin in, he'll reward you with a Coin Case! And now... it's time for the main action of today's update.

==================

Veilstone Game Corner

This place has an odd techno remix of the classic Game Corner theme. It starts out rather unrecognizable, but mixes in the traditional tune from the Rocket Game Corner about 40 seconds in.

As always, you can speak to the NPC's here and get some free coins, but you can get coins form the clerk at the desk. You know the drill. 50 coins costs 1000p and 500 coins costs 10000p. From the NPC's, you'll get 70 coins in total across two of them.

But your main money maker, of course, are the slots. Unfortunately, there's no Card Flip or roulette, it's all the slots. However... this is actually the most satisfied I've been with a slot machine in the series so far, and the reasoning is simple... the "slots" part is all a facade to cover up a much simpler minigame that feels more involved. I'll elaborate on what I mean in just a bit...

==================

Image from GamesRadar

Veilstone Game Corner Slot Machines

The top screen displays a traditional slot machine while the bottom screen displays a beautiful cliffside with a view of a full moon. If you press Down, you'll automatically insert three coins. You can then press X to spin the wheels and the other three face buttons to stop each individual slot.

The reason I said the slots are a facade? Well, that's because no matter how well you try to time it, you will never line up any icons at all under normal circumstances. Winning is impossible, these slots are rigged.

Going forward, I'm going to be citing this Reddit post I found from TechnoTrainer, someone with a lot more experience in this minigame than I do. Some of the info provided may not necessarily be accurate, but there's testimony to back it up. Very specific details might be a bit muddy because little is actually covered of this game on sources like Bulbapedia and Serebii, so it's stuff like this we've gotta turn to.

Except, every once in a while, you'll notice a pokeball pop up on the bottom screen. It can be a Poke Ball, a Great Ball, an Ultra Ball, a Safari Ball, or a Premier Ball. When these pokeballs pop up, you might notice you win a lot more frequently.

In case it isn't clear, yes, these pokeballs indicate when wins are not only possible, but guaranteed. I don't know if this is necessary, but stopping the slots in order from left to right will always net you a win when there's a pokeball on the bottom screen. I recommend doing it from left to right because an NPC specifically suggests that you do it that way. I haven't tried experimenting with pressing the buttons in any other order. This is the fastest way to do it. This entire game can actually be played without looking at the top screen at all! 

Knowing the way these slots work is crucial for your sanity. You can simply mash your way through the standard slot machine of this and still consistently win, making it a lot less mindless. I absolutely love this as opposed to the previous games trying to fool you into thinking it's a skill-based timing game and then throwing all kinds of BS slides to add in a layer of luck. They always felt a bit too much like real-life slot machines. Never did like the slots. I appreciate that, even though there is that facade that can fool you into thinking you might be able to win through timing, there is a secret to it that you can figure out and get in the groove for consistent net gains. Slot machines in other games don't really seem to accomplish that and I consistently end up having to load saves in order to avoid losing more coins than I gain.

Here, the game is more of a test of patience rather than a timing game that you have to master only to still only win sometimes. It feels more like searching for and catching a rare pokemon which makes the luck element more satisfying to deal with in my opinion.

Anyway, the type of pokeball that appears will foreshadow what reward you will get as well. Pokeballs will lead to cherries worth 2 coins each, Great Balls will lead to a free Replay, Ultra Balls will lead to Pikachu worth 10 coins, Safari Balls will lead to three Moonstones worth 15 coins, and the Premier Ball will provide a random result of one of the other pokeballs.

You may notice that none of these allow you to line up the Galactic Logos or the 7's for big money. You may also notice that you're usually just breaking even at best going off of the meager handouts of these pokeballs. That's because the direct rewards from the pokeballs aren't your main money maker.

Any type of pokeball has a chance of opening up to reveal a Clefairy! This Clefairy can be Normal Colored, Shiny, or it could even be a Ditto in disguise! Some sources claim the type of Clefairy affects the RNG going forward, but I haven't seen any contributing data to that. They all seem to behave the same and have the same chances of success. As far as I can tell, this is just a cute little cosmetic detail and nothing more.

---------------------

Credit to gaymateria on Tumblr.com for gif

Bonus Game

When the clefairy pops up, the music will change to a remix of the Mt. Moon Square from Gold and Silver. Let me just say, you're going to have to get used to this music. It's a bit repetitive and it's kinda sweet at first, but you'll be listening to it for a long time if you want everything the Game Corner has to offer.

Anyway, once a clefairy pops out, the Bonus Game won't quite begin just yet. Clefairy will start clapping. While Clefairy is out, the chances of lining up three 7's or three G's will dramatically increase! One source mentioned timing the slots with Clefairy's clapping will help you get the 7's and G's, but I'm not sure if that's true. Still, you can use Clefairy's clapping as a visual aid to help in your timing if you feel it'll help. The Reddit post mentions nothing about Clefairy's clapping, so I suppose it isn't too terribly important if at all relevant.

Once you line up three 7's or three G's, the Bonus Game will officially begin!

During the Bonus Game, each spin only costs one coin instead of three and Clefairy will point to the slots in a specific order. You'll usually want to press them in the order Clefairy points to. This will always line up three Replay icons which, during the bonus game, will earn you 15 coins. Clefairy will continue to do this for 15 spins at which point the bonus game will end. At which point, a few different things can happen. Clefairy might immediately start another bonus game, Pikachu might show up to cheer Clefairy on and encourage it to start a new bonus game, or Clefairy might go back into its pokeball and leave. On rare occasions, Clefairy will give you a heart attack by returning to its pokeball only to immediately pop back out and start the next game.

Between the 7's or G's and the 15 rounds of guaranteed wins from the bonus game, this is definitely where the bulk of your profits will come from. Naturally, the more bonus games you can string together, the more coins you'll get out of the deal. The game will keep track of how many bonus games in a row you manage to get and display the number in front of the moon at the start of each one. Your primary goal might be just to get enough coins for the prizes you want, but a secondary task you can focus on along the way is trying to get 10 bonus games in a row for "an explosion of luck!"

In order to accomplish this task, you'll want to understand the best way to increase your odds of continuing bonus game chains. And, well... there's really not much, but there is one additional factor you can keep in mind.

As far as I can tell, the amount of times you follow Clefairy's guidance doesn't normally affect the probability of going into a second round of bonus games. The exception is when the moon glows... every once in a while during a Clefairy Bonus game, the moon will glow red or white. If it glows red, following Clefairy's instructions for that round will dramatically decrease your chances of continuing your chain. If it glows white, following Clefairy's instructions for that round will dramatically increase your chances of continuing your chain. These aren't guaranteed according to TechnoTrainer who has seen a bonus game continue after following instructions on a red moon or fail after following instructions on a white moon, but they definitely seem to affect the odds significantly. So, I recommend following Clefairy's instructions to a T unless you see a red moon. In which case, you'll want to go out of your way to avoid following Clefairy's instructions. Get the first stop wrong, the second stop you should make should be the first one Clefairy pointed to in order to avoid getting stuck with Clefairy pointing at the only slot you haven't stopped.

Other than hoping for the occasional White Moon and keeping an eye out for Red Moons, there's really nothing you can do to increase your odds of continuing, so it's all up to the whims of Clefairy.

If you can manage to maintain 10 bonus games in a row, you can speak with the lady at the counter who will comment on your "explosion of luck" and reward you with TM64: (You guessed it) Explosion. This is a really powerful TM and it's really unfortunate that it's limited to these slot machines.

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As an unfortunate reality, Generation IV is where Game Freak infamously began to run into issues with the slot machine minigame and the games' PEGI ratings. Due to policy changes in the PEGI rating system, Game Freak had to remove the slot machines from pokemon games going forward. They'll still find ways to sneak in for a few more games, but by the end of this generation, they'll be completely phased out of Pokemon altogether.

Diamond and Pearl are the first games to be hit with this issue, namely the Korean localizations of the game where the slot machine minigame has been completely removed. Instead, you simply get coins from a daily event, checking each slot machine and receiving... get this... 20-30 coins at a time. Assuming you can get coins from each of the available slot machines, that's a maximum of 3300 coins a day. A total nightmare for some of the more expensive prizes from the prize exchange. Thank God I don't live in Korea!

While I still think this minigame could be a lot more transparent, I definitely appreciate that you can consistently win coins from it thanks to the bonus games. The fact that there's a trick to it at all makes it a lot more bearable than previous Game Corner slot machines. Of course, there's also always the option of simply spending all of your money on coins to essentially just buy the prizes directly for a massively marked-up price. Time is money, after all. Just know that, as long as you have the time on your hands, and your DS is charging, you're statistically always going to turn a profit if you keep spinning for those bonus games! Even if it looks like you're losing money!

...good lord, maybe PEGI is right...

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Prize Exchange

So, what are we building up all those coins for? Well, the Prize Exchange, of course! As always, there are some rare TMs and held items we can get for our hard-earned coins!

   

Each of the held items offered costs only 1000C. They include the Silk Scarf, Wide Lens, Zoom Lens, and Metronome (Not to be confused with the move of the same name).

All but the Silk Scarf are new items.

The Wide and Zoom Lenses are counterparts to the Scope Lens which increases critical hit ratios. The Wide Lens increases the accuracy of the holder's moves by 10%, so it can be a good held item for a pokemon that suffers from unreliable accuracy with the strong moves it requires.

The Zoom Lens is a slightly more complex version of the Wide Lens. If the holder moves after the target, it will increase accuracy by 20%! But it will do nothing otherwise. Naturally, this move is good for pokemon that are slower. The items' in-game description wrongly suggests that it boosts the critical hit ratio instead of accuracy. Perhaps hinting at an earlier build of the game where the Zoom Lens would be a stronger counterpart to the Scope Lens rather than the Wide Lens?

             

There are lots of TMs available for purchase here as well!

 

For 2000C, you have TM90: Substitute and TM58: Endure

 

For 4000C, TM75: Swords Dance and TM32: Double Team

  

For 6000C, TM44: Rest, TM89: U-Turn, and TM10: Hidden Power

U-Turn is a physical Bug-type move with 70 power that allows the user to attack before switching out. It's a great way for a fast pokemon to get out of a dangerous matchup while mitigating the downsides of switching.

 

For 8000C, TM27: Return and TM21: Frustration

   

For 10000C, TM35: Flamethrower, TM24: ThunderBolt, TM13: Ice Beam, and TM29: Psychic

For 15000C, TM74: Gyro Ball

Gyro Ball being a physical Steel-type attack whose power is determined how much slower the user is than the target. It's a great way for a wall to punish a really fast attacker.

While it's a bit upsetting some of these really useful TMs are only available in the Game Corner, Gen IV does a really good job of making these TMs much less important. They're still really useful TMs, mind you, but there are also lots more options available to you. Gen IV brings a more tactical approach to Pokemon Battling, especially thanks to the Physical Special split opening the door for lots more building opportunities for pokemon. Ice Beam isn't so important anymore. But, of course, these TMs are all renewable since they can be earned here whenever you want. Just expect to spend an evening gambling your time away for another copy.

And that's it for Veilstone City! Next time, I think we should finally get moving onto that pokemon gym!

[Aura]

Veilstone City Gym

The Veilstone City Gym is a gym that specializes in the Fighting type. It's designed to look like a fighting dojo. The gym's puzzle is fairly simple if not rather tedious. There are sliding doors that can be pushed along the slots in the ground. The doors have openings at various points and pushing them to the right positions will open the way forward. You'll need to go slide them back and forth in a few places a few to fully open up the path to the gym leader.

   

The gym trainers here are all Black Belts. They're siblings who call themselves the Karate Quads. I always like it whenever the game gives individual trainers relationships with each other like this. It makes them seem more like real people, which might be ironic considering these guys are a bit over the top. But, it makes them stand out compared to the generic Black Belts they could've been.

Anyway, the trainers here all predictably use Fighting-type pokemon. Their Meditites can be a little annoying with their use of Detect to evade your attacks, and their Machokes can take a few hits and dish out some pain. They like to set up with Foresight, though, so they aren't too bad to deal with.

Then, in the back of the room, you have the gym leader: Maylene who is a lot smaller than you might expect from a Fighting gym leader... but she's still a gym leader and she should be our toughest yet, so let's not underestimate her!

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My Team:

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 Senshi (Monferno M); Lv. 28

 

Item: Cheri Berry 

Ability: Blaze | Moves: Mach Punch, Leer, Flame Wheel, Taunt

----------------------

 Denki (Luxio M); Lv. 28

 

Item: Shell Bell 

Ability: Intimidate | Moves: Spark, Roar, Swagger, Bite

-----------------------

 Hana (Roselia F); Lv. 28

 

Item: Rawst Berry 

Ability: Poison Point | Moves: Giga Drain, Toxic Spikes, Worry Seed, Stun Spore

-----------------------

 Uki (Floatzel F); Lv. 28

 

Item: Cheri Berry 

Ability: Swift Swim | Moves: Swift, Crunch, Aqua Jet, Water Gun

---------------------

 Kuro (Murkrow F); Lv. 29

 

Item: Dread Plate 

Ability: Super Luck | Moves: Wing Attack, Night Shade, Assurance, Haze

----------------------

 Ibutsu (Bronzor); Lv. 28

 

Item: Quick Claw 

Ability: Levitate | Moves: Extrasensory, Hypnosis, Stealth Rock, Confuse Ray

================

Vs. Veilstone Gym Leader Maylene

----------------------

Meditite, Lv. 27

                              

                              

The natural opening for me was Kuro who I figured could make quick work of Maylene's early pokemon. I half expected Maylene's Meditite to use Detect, but instead, my Wing Attack was able to take it out right away!

----------------------

Machoke, Lv. 27

                              

                              

Machoke went for a Leer to reduce Kuro's defense. I'm not really sure why... In hindsight, it could've gone for Rock Tomb and potentially gotten a KO! I was able to get a free Wing Attack in because of this, followed by another for another easy KO!

---------------------

Lucario, Lv. 30

Lucario is a fan favorite pokemon from Gen IV and it's not hard to see why! He's certainly one of my favorite pokemon to come out of Gen IV! It has a bit of an odd typing with being a Fighting/Steel type. It's a bit infamous for not quite looking like it would be a Steel type, but it grants him a lot of resistances, so he's no pushover!

                                                   

                              

"Oh! But this isn't the end, my friend!"

With reduced defense, I wasn't expecting Kuro to be able to take a hit from anything this Lucario could dish out, so I decided to make a switch and reduce Lucario's Attack.

                              

                              

I retreated into Denki who switched in on a resisted Metal Claw. From here, I went for Spark hoping for that chance of paralysis but to no avail. On the contrary, Lucario was able to paralyze Denki with Force Palm! Things weren't looking good for him, but he's already fulfilled his purpose: Intimidate.

                              

                              

If I couldn't get any parafusion off on Lucario, then my next best bet was to confuse it in its sleep! I switched Ibutsu in on a Drain Punch which dealt an uncomfortable amount of health and healed Lucario up a bit as well. I then went for Hypnosis to try and put Lucario to sleep. Unfortunately, I missed the first shot and was hit by a painful Force Palm. Another Hypnosis did the trick, however. From there, I confused Lucario with Confuse Ray and then retreated.

                              

                              

Now it was time to go for broke. Lucario was disabled with both sleep and confusion, so now was the time to attack with Senshi! Senshi could take advantage of Lucario's Steel typing and attack with a STAB Flame Wheel! It didn't quite KO Lucario and he got to heal off some of the damage with his Sitrus Berry.

                                                   

                              

"I'm in a bit of a bind, aren't I?"

Lucario was able to wake up the next turn as well as attack through its confusion, but it only hit me with a... Metal Claw?? Quite frankly, I was expecting Malene to heal or at least go for a Drain Punch, but... nope. He was done! One more Flame Wheel brought Lucario down!

-----------------------

 

And with that, Maylene was defeated and we obtained the Cobble Badge which allows us to use the HM Fly outside of battle!

Alongside this, we get TM60: Drain Punch. A Fighting-type attack with 60 power and an absorption effect similar to Giga Drain. It only has 5 PP though, and its offensive power is a little weak so you may not want to rely on it as your only form of attack unless you're really confident in your attack stat.

--------------------

MVP: Ibutsu

While Senshi and Kuro did wonders on the front of damage, I'm not so sure how well Senshi would've handled that Lucario if it wasn't for Ibutsu's Hypnosis disabling it.

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Anyway, since this update was brief and only consisted of a gym battle, I figured I'd note an additional detail: Polishing badges! If you go to your trainer card, like any other game, you can view your collected badges. In this game, however, the badges are on the touch screen. You may notice your older badges getting a little dusty. Well, if you rub them a bit, you'll actually be able to dust them off! You can keep dusting until they're nice and clean. But beyond that, you can polish them further until they're shining with two little sparkles. If you continue to polish them even more, four sparkles will appear!

It's a very small and pointless detail, some might even consider it annoying, but I actually really like it. Polishing your badges is just a small task that feels nice and also makes the badges feel more like a treasured belonging than the statistic it usually feels like.

In addition to visuals, you can also tap on the badges to hear a note! The note will be deeper the more dust that's settled on the badge. When all of your badges are polished, you'll notice they make up a neat scale! 

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Well, it's been a while since we've claimed a new badge! This is only our third badge, but the stretch between the second and third badges is a bit infamous for being a bit too wide in Diamond and Pearl. There shouldn't be as much between our next badges. Next time, we'll see what our new badge opens up for us and maybe make our way toward our next city!