All the Pokemens

May 25, 2020

5 hours ago, NyxAvatar69 said:

Don't get used to it, because from this point on, Ledian sucks hardcore and never improves, even in Colosseum, which has limited options.

Disclaimer: Ledian was never good anyway. As someone masochistic enough to do a Ledian solo run in Gold, I know this all too well. Never again. You'd have to pay me to redo that torture.

Oh no, I'm well aware. I just meant that with the random team, he was more help than I would have expected. I think the only reason he was helpful was because my only other nice to use against Rock/Ground Types was Water Gun.

May 25, 2020

Challenge Cup -- Ultra Ball Division

The Ultra Ball division is designed around level 60 pokemon. The pokemon are mostly in their final stages with a few pokemon that seem to be the stage before.

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My Team:

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Kingler

Item: Mystic Water

Moves: Strength, Swagger, Mud Slap, Crabhammer

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Sunflora

Item: Miracle Seed

Moves: Endure, Giga Drain, Sweet Scent, Hyper Beam

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Pidgeot

Item: Bitter Berry

Moves: Sunny Day, Gust, Steel Wing, Swift

(Why this thing has Sunny Day I'll never know... Maybe to counteract Rain Dance Thunder?)

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Sudowoodo

Item: Hard Stone

Moves: ThunderPunch, Toxic, Rock Slide, Defense Curl

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Forretress

Item: MiracleBerry

Moves: Spikes, Take Down, Rollout, Solar Beam

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Kadabra

Item: GoldBerry

Moves: Reflect, Ice Punch, Thief, Psybeam
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This team is looking like a pretty solid disaster area. Kadabra is probably going to end up being my main fighter because it actually has a decent moveset. Kingler might also help and Sudowoodo and Forretress are going to need to be paired together. An offensive Forretress is basically a sin! I could use Sunny Day with Pidgeot and switch into Forretress for Solar Beam, but that's putting Forretress at major risk of getting hit by a Fire attack. This team also lacks a ground-type to soak up electric damage meaning I'll likely have to rely on Kadabra, Sunflora, or Forretress to take those hits... I'm not entire confident in this team, but I suppose I'll need to just do the best I can.

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Round 1

Camper Marcus

And right off the bat we have a very potentially awkward team to go up against. Kingler will probably be a big help against most of this team, but Quagsire and Magneton are scary for me, especially Magnemite since I don't have a Ground-type to counter it. My best bet here is to go for Sunflora to defend against them. I really have nothing at all to fight Steel-types with. Maybe Forretress can take it out with Rollout? I decided to lead with Forretress hoping that I'd be able to buy myself a free turn to set up Spikes as they switch into a Fire-type. I also went for Kingler and Sunflora as previously suggested as backup. He opened up with Magneton and pretty much immediately took Forretress out with Thunder. I really had nothing else to use but Sunflora spamming Giga Drain. Magneton immediately paralyzed me and followed up with a Crit. A fun battle, to be sure. I was now down to just my Kingler, but his Magneton was nearly down. If I got incredibly lucky, I might be able to squeeze by with a narrow victory, but I do not like at all how my team is looking here. Perhaps I could have gotten by sending out Kingler for Mud Slap earlier, but if I'm being honest I kind of just wanted to lose as an excusse to get a new team... "thankfully," his next two pokemon happened to both be weak to Kingler's Crabhammer, so I had at least another round to go.

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Round 2

Rocket Grunt M

This battle looked like Kadabra's time to shine. Sudowoodo and Kingler together would probably also help out with Shuckle which otherwise could prove to be quite problematic. So, I led with Kadabra with those two as backup. He led with his Suckle so I immediately switched to Sudowoodo. He immediately used Toxic to which I responded with a Toxic of my own. The obvious follow-up was to switch to Kingler and Swagger at it then proceed to hammer it with Crabhammer. It did manage to get a Toxic on Kingler, but since Shuckle was really all I needed Kingler for, that meant nothing to me. For whatever reason, he decided it was necessary to switch out to protect his Shuckle at 1HP. Since his Weezing was just using Sludge, I switched back to Sudowoodo since Shuckle's Mud Slap had given my accuracy quite a hit. From there, it was just a matter of rock sliding away. I switched back to Kingler hoping Strength would be enough to finish Weezing off without losing a pokemon, but that proved not to be the case. Naturally, Kadabra should be enough to finsiht he rest of his team.

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Round 3

Picnicker Melissa

Again, the lack of type variety on my team was really hurting me, but perhaps I could make something work. The biggest concern here was Skarmory and Dewgong. My best bet for Dewgong was to hope Sunflora would be able to deal significant enough damage with Giga Drain after taking an ice attack. While Sudowoodo's Thunderpunch isn't going to be especially powerful, it still might help a bit against Skarmory. Kadabra should be able to get through some of these pokemon pretty well between Ice Punch and Psybeam. Again, I'm not entirely confident going in... I led with Sudowoodo and was met by her Noctowl. Rock Slide was the only obvious choice here and it nearly finished Noctowl off! I'm still primarily worrieda bout Dewgong, though... Her next pokemon was Jumpluff. I wasn't going to leave Sudowoodo in against that matchup, so i switched into Kadabra while it built up its Solar Beam. It shockingly managed to outspeed Kadabra so its solar beam did land and deal a lot of damage, but one ice punch was enough to take it out. Murkrow was her last pokemon and I wasn't too afraid of a super-effective Dark-type move. Perhaps I should have, though, because its faint attack was enough to take out Kadabra. Switching out would have been just as dangerous, though, because it was entirely possible it knew Pursuit. Still, with Sudowoodo still around, this battle was looking good. Had she used Dewgong, though, I'm doubtful I would have won.

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Round 4

Guitarist Daren

Kadabra was my best answer against Tangela and Jumpluff. Sudowoodo would be a decent counter to Raichu, but given his weakness to the majority of the opponent's pokemon, I think Sunflora would be a better solution thanks to Giga Drain for Lanturn and Hyper Beam for Raichu. I don't think Raichu can really learn any moves that would be dangerous for Sunflora. However, since none of my other pokemon are particularly solid matchups either, I figure Sudowoodo should take the last spot anyway. Let's see how this goes. I naturally led with Kadabra with Sunflora and Sudowoodo as backup. Daren led with Lanturn which immediately switched out to Lanturn. A switch that's sure to raise an eyebrow from me, but I'll let it slide for now. Sunflora was able to take quite a few hits from Lanturn. When Raichu came along, I just started going for Hyper Beam. he missed three Iron Tails in a row! Unsure if Giga Drain would be enough to finish it off, I just went for a second Hyper Beam which meant another dead turn against his Jumpluff. Not too big of a deal though. Since Jumpluff wasn't doing very much damage either, I decided to go ahead and go for another Hyper Beam. All it was doing was spamming Headbutt, so I decided to try and bait it into using a grass-type attack by switching into Sudowoodo, then switching back to kadabra. From there, an Ice Punch should be able to finish Jumpluff off easily. It got two Giga Drains on Kadabra before getting slammed in the face with Ice Punch. And with that, I earned my first continue! Somehow with this sub-par team, I managed to make it to the second half!

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Round 5

Fisher Curtis

Octillery is always a bit scary to see because of its wide move pool. Still, it was looking like Sunflora would be taking center stage here. I wasn't sure if Sudowoodo would be a great choice due to its weakness, but I decided to give him a chance. Kingler's Strength and Mud Slap might also prove helpful. Curtis has no safe switch-outs from Sunflora. The safest he has is Qwilfish which admittedly wouldn't take a whole lot of damage. So when Curtis led with his Quagsire, it went down pretty hard after stalling out a Giga Drain with Dig. I figured the Seaking he sent out next probably knew an Ice move, so I switched to Kingler. Instead, it pulled out a Rain Dance. If this thing wasn't going to take advantage of its physical attack, I certainly would! I used Swagger on it before following up with Strength. His final pokemon, Octillery, likely knew Thunder given this setup. Lowering its accuracy with Mud Slap wouldn't be worthwhile given the rain dance. Instead, though, it went for Octazooka! This meant he must not know Thunder! Unfortunately, it did reveal Swift, making lowering its accuracy any further pointless. Since it was going for Swift, I switched into Sudowoodo and it took itself out in confusion earning me a second continue!

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Quarterfinal

Medium Peggy

Another rather scary team to go up against. I really don't have very many pokemon that are good in any of these matchups and its entirely possible that Kadabra and Hypno both know elemental pokemon to make quick work of whatever choices I make. I'd unfortunately likely have to choose not to go with Kadabra for this one. The match-ups just weren't favorable enough. Instead, I'd go for Kingler as my lead with Sudowoodo and Sunflora as possible switch-ins. She led with her Haunter but immediately switched out into her SlowBro. I wasn't sure what to expect here, so I went for Swagger instead of immediately switching out. Then switched into Sunflora hoping it'd hurt itself. Unfortunately, it attacked through confusion on the second turn and hit Sunflora with Psychic. Still, Sunflora did outspeed it, hiting it with a solid Giga Drain and healing the damage off. I swiched back to Kingler now that it was only down to 5 HP and used Swagger on me. I didn't want to risk dealing such damage to myself. Hypno was the next opponent. I once again answered with Swagger. Since she didn't switch to Hypno earlier, I'm confident this one at least doesn't know ThunderPunch. After confusing it, I just went to wittle its health down and was able to take it out without a hit. Last was his Haunter which she carefully swiched out of her Haunter, that told me this was an unfavorable matchup. Naturally, I went for Crabhammer only to be pelted with a Psychic to the face. I obviously wasn't surviving another hit, so I switched to Sudowoodo and took a crit from Psychic... Thankfully, another Psychic wasn't enough to take me out even after the crit and I was able to finish Haunter off earning me a third continue!

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Semifinal

Rocket Grunt F

A mono-normal team can be quite scary since Normal types are known for their wide move pools. Sudowoodo seemed like a pretty solid choice here and so did Kingler. I wasn't so sure about Sunflora because I'd probably have to deal with a lot of Blizzards and Fire Blasts, so I instead decided to lead with Forretress to at least set up Spikes. With Sudowoodo and Kingler following up, hopefully I wouldn't have much to worry about. Her Clefabel met my Forretress and only went for Headbutt to my surprise! Without so much as a switch, I felt really confident about this choice, so I decided to go for Rollout instead. Her Clefairy proved pretty annoying because its Headbutt caused me to flinch three times in a row!! I finally managed to get a Rollout but then I missed the next turn. With luck like this, things were clearly going nowhere, so I switched into Sudowoodo and went for Toxic instead. I switched right back to Forretress now that it was poisoned and once again started going for Rollout. Her next choice was Chansey which did in fact know Fire Blast. I have no clue why she didn't switch to this thing before, but I suppose that's none of my business. Sudowoodo was back out and went for another Toxic. Again, her strategy seemed to just be to flinch hax me to death but her Chansey was doing even less damage than Blissey and its physical stats were also pretty abysmal so it was taking more damage from Sudowood's Rock Slide. Her last pokemon was Grabull and... let me guess... it's gonna use Headbutt? No! Bite! A shocking revelation! As fun as this battle was, I'm glad it ended when it did. Bleh.

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Final

Juggler Dwight

This team looked like a bit of a headache. Just like in the beginning, I really didn't have an answer to Dwight's Magneton. My best bet was just to hope Kingler could outspeed it and Mud Slap would cause its Thunder to miss, assuming it even used Thunder. Even then, Lock-On or Rain Dance would fix that issue. I decided to lead with Sudowoodo, keeping Kingler and Sunflora as backup. I expected him to lead with Mr. Mime and set up Reflect before switching out. Instead, it went for Swagger which caught me off guard and caused me to hurt myself. I hit myself twice while it started to charge for a Solar Beam, forcing my hand into switching into Sunflora with no Toxic setup. My best bet here was to just go for Hyper Beam. His Swagger sharply raised my attack, so this could potentially be devastating for him if I could just attack through it! But, as if reading the RNG, he siwtched to his Magneton! Since Magneton couldn't do anything, I just went for another Hyper Beam which MISSED. Why is it always the finals where this type of crap happens? But, it was now locked into Rollout so Kingler was a pretty safe switch-in. His Mr. Mime naturally came in next and went for Solar Beam... uh-oh. I figured my best bet here was to just sacrifice Sudowoodo and then next turn go for Swagger to hopefully stop Solar Beam in its tracks. Of course, despite hitting myself in confusion four times in a row, he attacks through confusion here and takes me out. If it wasn't for RNG, I'm pretty confident this battle would have gone better so I went back in with the same team and same strategy. Right off the bat, it seems RNG was on my side this time! I snapped out of Confusion as soon as possible and got a crit to boot, taking out Mr. Mime in one shot! His Piloswine's only idea to battle Sudowoodo was spamming Mud Slap. Eventually, this would stack up and Rock Slide would stop hitting, so I switched to Sunflora. On the same turn he started using blizzard OKAY. Thankfully, he missed and I was able to take a hit before using Giga Drain to heal off some of the damage. His Magneton went for Rollout again which barely did any damage to Sunflora. I got two more crits with Giga Drain and Magneton went down!

I..... have no words for what just happened here. I got three very influential lucky crits throughout this battle leading to a rather unsatisfactory final battle. I'd like to stress that none of my pokemon have a Scope Lens or anything like that and none of my moves had an increased crit chance so I genuinely have no clue where all these crits came from. I'm pretty confident even without the RNG favortism I would have been able to win against his strategy, but it still left me kind of feeling scummy for the win. As you could tell from the tone of my writing at the beginning of this post, I genuinely did not expect this team to get me very far at all considering I was struggling with something as basic as a Steel-type wall. But I was actually able to get through most of these battles without too many issues!

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Anyway, above all odds, I think my MVP this time around came as a massive surprise to me.

MVP: Sunflora

I never thought I'd live to see the day, but Sunflora really did prove to be the most useful pokemon for this team! It was able to take a shocking amount of hits, both physical and special, and still deal some decent damage with its attacks. I've always considered Sunflora a garbage-tier pokemon but this tournament just might have convinced me this pokemon maybe has a bit more potential than I initially thought. I just might consider giving it a try in a future game. Who knows? Maybe I'll be surprised.

Of course, Sudowoodo and Kingler are honorable mentions as well. Both of these two carried me through a lot of awkward situations. Forretress and Kadabra both surprised me with how little play they actually saw. If you put Sunflora and Kadabra on the same team and told me I'd be using Sunflora more, I'd call you a liar but, here we are. That's not to say Kadabra wasn't useful, though. He definitely helped out with the lack of type balancing on my team thanks to Ice-Punch being a pretty powerful offensive typing covering Grass, Ground, and Flying-types. It certainly wasn't a bad Kadabra by any means, it's just that the rest of my team didn't really make up for its weak points very well so I never got a lot of opportunities to use it.

Pidgeot was of course my token everything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better pokemon. Gust was hardly an answer for my need for Flying-type attacks and Steel Wing really doesn't do anything but cover its own weakness to Rock. Sunflora was a much better option for dealing with Rock-types, so Pidgeot just didn't really serve a purpose here. Most useful thing it'd be able to do was set up Sunny Day so Forretress could use Solar Beam, but even then that really wouldn't do much at all and as previously stated, would more so just serve for Forretress to get burned at the stake even more easily.

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As for GS Homework, I went ahead and got the first wave of breeding over with. I now have my breeding pairs for each of the pokemon on my Little Cup team and my Phanpy is already ready! I went ahead and deleted Conversion 2 on Porygon so he can be transferred back to RBY and taught the necessary TM's. This Porygon is mostly ready with the exception of the necessary moves, but both Chinchou and Houndour are going to need some grinding to learn some of their more important moves, too.

In addition to the breeding, I also went ahead and grabbed the necessary TM's from gen 1. This actually proved to be a bit of fun, it was an excuse for me to do a mini solo speedrun. It turned out I actually had quite a few spare Thunder Wave TM's, but I was missing the necessary Ice Beam. This wasn't much more of a problem than getting Thunder Wave, actually. You might think I'd have to play through the entire game all the way up to the Fourth Gym to be able to get to Celadon and get the Ice Beam TM, but Gen 1 didn't accomodate for the possibility of using future technology to transfer items between games. The only thing stopping you from getting into Celadon from as early as Cerulean City is the guard who wants a drink. Unlike in FRLG where the specific drink he wants is a key item, all you need here is a Fresh Water, Lemonade, or Soda Pop. This means you can just slip a Fresh Water into your inventory from an already-compelted file and you can get into Saffron right from the start. This makes a ton of really useful TM's easy to get really quickly: Thunder Wave, Psychic, Ice Beam, Rock Slide, and Tri Attack can all be gotten with this method as early as pre-gym 2. (You don't actually have to complete Misty's gym, all you need to do is visit Bill before you can move on to Vermillion City.) If you want, you can also go out of your way to clear Lt. Surge's gym and get Thunderbolt as well, but this requires at least clearing Misty's gym in order to be able to use Cut. You also might want to transfer in a pokemon that knows Cut.

I also pulled a few strings to make things a bit easier for me. Using MissingNo. duplication, I was able to quickly apply 10 of each vitamin for the two gen 1 pokemon, maxing out their level 5 stats with ease. I'm going to have to buy the rest legitimately in GS since there's no way to transfer items forward. That's going to get real pricey real quick as even just four pokemon, that's 50 vitamins each for a wopping 200 vitamins. At $9800 a pop, that'll cost almost $2,000,000. That's obviously unrealistic so we're going to need to budget here. Calcium is a must have because in Gen 2 this increases two stats: Sp. Atk and Sp. Def. Carbos is also very necessary because being outsped is a no-go. But not every pokemon needs Protein. As a matter of fact, the only ones on my team that even know any physical attacks are Phanpy and Scyther. Still, that only leaves us at 180 vitamins which will still cost around $1.8M. To put this into perspective, you get $22,900 each time you defeat the elite Four. In Gold, I currently have $145,559 due to all the Poke Balls, Max Repels, and TM's I had to purchase over the course of my adventure. Assuming I don't spend a single dime going forward, I still need around $1.7M. I'll have to beat the Elite Four 72 times to earn that much...

That said, perhaps I'm worrying a bit too much. Little Cup is only a single tournament in this game. It doesn't have multiple divisions like the Poke and Challenge Cups. Looking at the rentals, none of them are powered up at all. If this mode is completable with rentals only, then with even just some of my pokemon powered up, I should have no problems getting through. Still, I'd like to challenge myself to build the best team I can possibly build, so I think I'll assign myself a budget to work toward and see what I can do from there. Additionally, with my plan for Scyther, I just might be able to work around getting this guy powered up Gen 1 style as well! Regardless, I think I have my Master Ball homework cut out for me...

May 26, 2020

Challenge Cup -- Master Ball Division

I would have expected this division to be designed around level 100 pokemon, but it's actually specifically level 75. I guess they didn't want to rival the Prime Cup. All the pokemon seem to be fully evolved here so no holds barred!

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My Team:

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Aerodactyl

Item: Gold Berry

Moves: Wing Attack, Attract, Ancientpower, Take Down

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Meganium

Item: MiracleBerry

Moves: Headbutt, Swagger, Solar Beam, Fury Cutter

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Nidoking

Item: Soft Sand

Moves: Toxic, Ice Punch, Detect, Earthquake

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Pinsir

Item: Burnt Berry

Moves: Hyper Beam, Attract, Fury Cutter, Seismic Toss

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Rapidash

Item: Charcoal

Moves: Curse(WHY??), Fire Blast, Agility, Hyper Beam

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Starmie

Item: MysteryBerry

Moves: Curse(Again, WHY??), Psychic, Double Team, Water Gun

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Some of these pokemon have some questionable moves, but none of them stand out as especially bad. Unfortunately, once again I'm stuck with my strongest water attack being Water Gun and this time my only alternative is Solar Beam which takes a turn to charge. I also don't have any electric attacks so Ice Punch is going to be what I'll need to rely on for a lot of situations. As such, I imagine I'll probably be leaning more toward Nidoking than anyone else, but I've been proven wrong in the past. Maybe Starmie's high special attack will make Water Gun more useful, who knows?

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Round 1

Twins Jan & Jane

This team is looking mighty vulnerable. I may have to watch out for some rock attacks from Aerodactyl, Pinsir, and Tauros but I should mostly be fine. Rapidash is looking like a good lead with Nidoking and Aerodactyl as backup. They led with Tauros from which I expected an earthquake, so I switched into Aerodactyl and took a resisted Taker Down instead. From there, it just became a battle of Take Down and Wing Attack. They then sent out their own Aerodactyl. Anticipating an Ancientpower, I switched to Nidoking to resist it. From there, Ice Punch should make quick work of Aerodactyl. It used Fly, but Detect protected me from that! I could have stalled out its PP for Fly but that would've been a major waste of time. Her final choice was Scyther which I of course answered with Ancientpower from Aerodactyl for a continue!

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Round 2

Schoolboy Oliver

And right away, the lack of water attacks is seriously hurting. I decided this could be a good opportunity to give Starmie's Water Gun a chance, but I'd be leading with Nidoking since he'll be more helpful against the majority of these opponents. I also went for Meganium as a switch-in because Solar Beam will still be able to do some pretty heavy damage to every pokemon on this team, even if he switches out against it. Oliver led with his own Nidoking and switched straight into Donphan. I wasn't going to leave Nidoking out to get an Earthquake from this thing so I switched to Meganium who took minimal damage from Earthquake. I decided to go for Swagger hoping it would stop the opponent from hitting but it only made it hit harder before switching into his Nidoking. I switched back into Nidoking after he set up a Sandstorm. This was a dangerous choice but I figured he either would have switched or used Fire Blast. I went for Ice Punch to finish off his Nidoking but it damage ranged and hung on with 5 HP, allowing it to get off an Earthquake! He then sent out Donphan and I wasn't able to finish it with an Ice Punch either, leading to a KO. Starmie came out next and plucked off the remainder of Donphan's HP. Her last pokemon was Golem, the best case Scenario for Starmie. This was the perfect opprotunity to try out Water Gun which... didn't even OHKO a Golem. Still, his Magnitude 5 did miniscule damage so I was able to finish it off with another hit. Water Gun is just such a sad move at this level.

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Round 3

Sailor Curt

Immediately following a battle that makes me with I had water moves is a battle that makes me wish I had electric moves! Great! Nidoking does have Toxic to help deal with the bulkier water-types. I was thinking I'd open with Meganium and use Solar Beam unless he led with an Ice Type. At worst, I'll take an Ice Beam or Blizzard from one of his non-ice type pokemon which Meganium should be able to take at least one of. This will help me get a powerful hit on his lead or whatever pokemon he switches into to deal with Meganium. (Predictably Jynx). Though I imagine his lead will probably be Jynx or Jolteon as these trainers tend to lead with their odd ones first. Jynx could have a variety of moves under her sleeve so I'm not really sure what to expect from her. I was on the fence as to whether to go for Rapidash or Starmie to counter Jynx. Rapidash is weak to the rest of his party except for Jolteon but Starmie doesn't have anything to use against Jynx. I ultimately decided to go for Starmie. Perhaps Double Team could be enough to outlast Jynx. At the start, Curt led with Blastoise so I opened with Solar Beam. Sure enough, I was hit with not only a Blizzard, but a crticial hit, of course. This made it so that Meganium went down before Solar Beam could get off. I sent out Nidoking to hit Blastoise with a Toxic. I then went for Detect to stall an extra turn before switching into Starmie. From there, I just built up Double Team but eventually he hit through it and took out Starmie. At this point, there was no winning so I had to use a continue thanks to that BS crit right off the bat.

On the second battle, he led with Cloyster which didn't do nearly as much damage as Blastoise's crit. Cloyster went for Swagger to protect itself from my SolarBeam, but my miracle berry turned that into an advantage! When Feraligatr came along, I went for another Solar Beam. It only went for Surf which told me he had no out to Meganium anymore. Solar Beam was enough to take it out but of course my deduction was wrong as his last pokemon, Kabutops, came out of the ball with a Blizzard. Feraligatr was just there to soften me up. Nidoking was able to take out Kabutops with two earthquakes, so I was able to clear the round but I've already lost my one continue and didn't earn one to make up for it.

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Round 4

Swimmer F Darcy

This was looking like a pretty solid team for Starmie and Nidoking to run at. Meganium would also be able to turn some of their attack stats against them! A pretty easy team to choose my pokemon against, perhaps a little too easy? She led with Porygon2 so I switched into Nidoking. It opened with Lock-On implying to me that its next move was planned to be Zap Cannon. Instead, it used Psybeam. After setting up Toxic, I switched back to Starmie anticipating a second Psybeam. I figured it'd probably go for Lock-On Zap Cannon again so I figured I'd do a fake out and stay in with Psychic. Instead, I critted and the Toxic damage was enough to finish it off. Kangaskhan was the next opponent I was met with. I switched to Meganium to go for Swagger. It used Attract, though, which kept me from attacking twice in a row before my Swagger finally got through. At this point, I switched to Nidoking only for Kangaskhan to snap out of confusion and hit me with dizzy punch, confusing me and causing me to hit myself. Now I have to deal with an attack-up Kangaskhan. My only way of getting through at this point was Double Team which worked so well last time... I decided to go for Double Team three times because I'm pretty sure there is a point of diminishing returns with this move. Kangaskhan did manage to hit me but didn't get the confusion thankfully. Of course, she hit me again taking me out. With no continues, I had to start over... All because of garbage RNG against her Kangaskhan.

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Attempt 2

My Team:

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Ampharos

Item: Scope Lens

Moves: Defense Curl, ThunderPunch, Thunder Wave, Hyper Beam

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Donphan

Item: Gold Berry

Moves: Strength, Attract, Earthquake, Rollout

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Rapidash

Item: Quick Claw

Moves: Hyper Beam, Swagger, Tail Whip, Fire Blast

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Feraligatr

Item: PRZCureBerry

Moves: Strength, Double Team, Detect, Hydro Pump

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Xatu

Item: MiracleBerry

Moves: Future Sight, Attract, Fly, Solar Beam

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Porygon2

Item: Bright Powder

Moves: Psychic, Sunny Day, Tri Attack, Thief

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Now THIS is a team I can get behind! Again, there are some moves I'd rather swap out for more consistent options, but beggers can't be choosers. The type coverage no this team is unlike anything I've had through this entire mode and I can't tell you how happy I am to have a decent Water- and Electric- moves! And Donphan with Earthquake? It's like my little Phanpy buddy from PokeBall is all grown up! I'm not sure Xatu will see much play, but I've been surprised before!

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Normally, I wouldn't cover my revisits, but due to the random nature of this mode, I figured it would be worthwhile to take note of this. Especially given that I can no confirm each trainer does indeed have a random selection of pokemon, though they seem to pull from a limited pool as the first opponent shares many of the same pokemon as before. I won't go through as much detail, though, and just sum up my strategies

Round 1

Twins Jan & Jane

This team is largely the same as it was before but with Machamp and Scizor in place of Tauros and Heracross. My approach would still be much the same. I chose to lead with Rapidash as whatever it couldn't deal with, it could use Swagger before switching into something better suited. Ampharos is strong against most of the opponents and Xatu would probably be a safer counter to Machamp than Porygon2.

Of course, I should have known RNG was laughing at me. The twins led with their Aerodactyl which was holding a Bitter Berry to cure confusion from Swagger. From there, it took Rapidash down with Ancient Power. Ampharos was able to take a solid hit with more than half health, but then THE DAMN THING BOOSTED ITS STATS WITH ANCIENTPOWER. From there, it was able to take a ThunderPunch and finish Ampharos off with a second Ancientpower. All I had left was Xatu which of course was going to go down in one hit. I got a really good team and got totally screwed over by RNG in the first round. What a bunch of crap.

For the record, I still don't argue that the game's RNG is "against you." I've had some pretty BS wins myself throughout both of these games. It's not uncommon for genuine RNG to appear weighted because genuine RNG doesn't accomodate for recent rolls. My favorite example of this is flipping a coin. If you ask a human to predict the result of five coin tosses, you'd probably get something like: "Heads, Tails, Heads, Heads, Tails". But then if you go and actually flip a coin, you'd be just as likely to get a result like "heads, heads, heads, heads, tails". Luck is just a bizarre thing like this. So, while I feel cheated, I still wouldn't argue that the game adjusts RNG to create artificial difficulty. That's a claim I see spread around all too comfortably and I just can't agree with it. I've watched plenty of competitive battles between humans with this same type of horrible luck on one side. In a game with so much RNG, this type of thing just happens. The reason it's such a big factor here is because I have no control over my team, so I don't have the option to build my team around minimizing my reliance on RNG like I usually do. Luck plays a major factor in this tournament and for that reason, I'm really just not a fan of the Challenge Cup. I feel like even when using rentals, you at least have the option to choose your favorite movesets, even if most of them are pretty bad or on bad pokemon.

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

Attempt 3

My Team:

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

Scizor

Item: Metal Coat

Moves: Attract, Fury Cutter, Detect, Steel Wing

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

Nidoqueen

Item: Berry Juice

Moves: Fire Blast, Double Team, Growl, Earthquake

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

Snorlax

Item: PRZCureBerry

Moves: Sandstorm, Body Slam, Swagger, Earthquake

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

Cloyster

Item: Quick Claw

Moves; Clamp, Swagger, Endure, Aurora Beam

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

Flareon

Item: Charcoal

Moves: Swift, Toxic, Fire Blast, Detect

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

Electrode

Item: Endure, Thunder, Rain Dance, Swift

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

This isn't nearly as satisfying of a team as before, but it's got some decent pokemon I can work with. It's lacking in water power once again, and on the contrary has an overabundance of Fire power. This makes Rain Dance/Thunder a bit less appealing, but Electrode with a powerful Electric attack is more than welcome. Nidoqueen is much less appealing than Nidoking but it could maybe take a hit more two more. Snorlax is always nice to see, but this one has a pretty bizarre moveset. I can't guarantee it'll see much use. While Clamp isn't very good for dealing damage, it might prove useful in trapping opponents along with Swagger.

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

Round 1

Twins Jan & Jane

Nidoqueen seems like a solid lead against this team, with Snorlax and Electrode as good backups. Xatu was the biggest problem here, especially considering it had a MiracleBerry to answer Snorlax's Swagger, but it still wasn't able to do much at all to Electrode's special defense. A Rain Dance helped to weaken Flareon's Fire Blast and guarantee my hits. I was ultimately able to score a perfect here!

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

Round 2

Schoolboy Oliver

Once again, I was really thirsting for some water attacks. I figured Snorlax would be the best lead here. Cloyster could also help with Arora Beam and Electrode could possibly help out against Aerodactyl. Of course, once again, I got RNG'd out of all my continues without any water moves to use against any of these pokemon.

This tournament is beyond stupid.

Half of the strategy in this game is about building your team. How in the world you're supposed to strategise your way out of having no type coverage is beyond me. Especially when they give your opponents selections of pokemon with such great synergy like a team of pokemon that are all immune to sandstorm and all KNOW Sandstorm! It's like there's no point even trying to strategise if you don't have a fantastic team and even when you do get a good team, you get screwed over by RNG anyway! There's just no fucking winning outside of getting lucky!

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

Attempt 4:

My Team:

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

Starmie

Item: PSNCureBerry

Moves: Rain Dance, Thunder, Icy Wind, Bubblebeam

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

Steelix

Item: Metal Coat

Moves: Cut, Iron Tail, Double Team, Dig

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

Victreebel

Item: MIracleBerry

Moves: Sweet Scent, Razor Leaf, Cut, Sludge Bomb

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

Aerodactyl

Item: Hard Stone

Moves: Wing Attack, Attract, Take Down, AncientPower

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

Porygon2

Item: PRZCureBerry

Moves: Endure, Swift, Agility, Psychic

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

Electabuzz

Item: Magnet

Moves: Psychic, Swagger, Thief, Thunderpunch

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

I'm kind of just done analyzing these teams at this point. I'm just gonna make do with whatever I have each round. If I start celebrating over a good team, it's only gonna make me more frustrated to lose.

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

Round 1

Twins Jan & Jane

Starmie's Rain Dance proved pretty useful here. BubbleBeam was able to two-shot Scizor. Scizor got a crit on me, but after finishing it off, I switched into Aerodactyl against her pinsir and WIng Attack was able to make quick work of Pinsir and Heracross, earning a continue.

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

Round 2

Schoolboy Oliver

With a solid water attack, this battle was far easier to deal with. Due to a bit of luck, I was also able to earn a second continue here!

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

Round 3

Sailor Curt

I was unable to get a perfect here, mostly due to an irresponsible switch on my part. But I did manage to get through without losing a continue! Starmie was able to sweep most of the team with Rain Dance and Thunder/Bubblebeam while Electabuzz helped deal with some more annoying opponents with Swagger.

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

Round 4

Swimmer F Darcy

Aerodactyl was able to make quick work of this entire battle. It's entirely focused on physical attackers, so being able to take a lot of physical hits really helped. And I was able to earn a continue!

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

Round 5

Officer Gerald

Finally into some new territory and I gotta say that that Houndoom is pretty scary as always. I'm expecting some Sunny Day shenanigans here and Houndoom makes me really hesitant to use Starmie, but everything else besides Electabuzz and Aerodactyl are weak to fire or in the case of Porygon2, is completely defenseless against a Dark-type. Thankfully, he only went for his three Grass-types for some reason which made his team especially vulnerable to getting swept by Aerodactyl alone, earning me another continue! I did get a lucky crit against his exeggcutor, but the worst it could have done was probably SolarBeam or Psychic. I'm pretty sure I'd have been able to take either of those and still win, so I don't think that crit mattered.

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

Quarterfinal

Kimono Girl Emiko

Holy crap this Snorlax was a pain in the ass to get around. Once again, because RNG just loves to play games with me. It doesn't even have an impressive moveset. No Rest or any annoying held items except maybe a Scope Lens. By the rate this thing was critting me it better have been holding a fucking Scope Lens. It only used two moves: Headbutt and ThunderPunch. But this was all it needed. Aside from bullshit crits, let me put into perspective the sheer amount of BS I had to deal with in one round. I had Aerodactyl out and switched into Electabuzz to take the Thunder Punch. My plan was to use Swagger to help reduce its health more rapidly because my team really lacked a proper answer to Snorlax without a Toxic user. So I make the switch and get hit by ThunderPunch, and get paralyzed. Let me remind you that, since Electabuzz is an Electric type, Thunderpunch's already rare 10% chance to paralyze is reduced further. Beyond that, I get fully paralyed for my next turn. The turn after, I land Swagger and get taken out. Naturally, I send Aerodactyl back out and SNORLAX SNAPS OUT OF CONFUSION. Yes, Swagger alone isn't a super consistent strategy, but my options were severely limited here. The only way I was getting around this brick wall was hoping it hurts itself in confusion. Thanks to this battle, I had to use two continues, but I still have two more going forward.

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

Semifinal

Scientist Roberto

There was a huge salt moment here where it was Starmie vs. Starmie. I went for Thunder not wanting to risk setting up Rain Dance for his Starmie, and I miss. The kicker? He uses Zap Cannon and hits me immediately after. Uh-huh.

Thankfully, I got really good RNG for the rest of the match, His Starmie missed with Flash against my Electabuzz and his Houndoom's double team didn't affect anything before I was able to confuse it with Swagger and then hit it with ThunderPunch for a paralysis. All in all, I think luck was a little more balanced in my favor here, and now I have two continues going into the finals. I'm genuinely scared to see how the RNG Gods decide to punish me next.

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

Final

Gentleman Travis

This team was... shockingly easy to deal with compared to some of its predecessors. He wasn't prepared at all to deal with my Electabuzz alone let alone the rest of my team. Between Swagger, ThunderPunch and Psychic, Electabuzz was unstoppable. He tried to switch into Machamp right away, so I assume it probably knew Earthquake or something that would make quick work of Electabuzz but he never got it off which sealed the deal for his Jynx and Politoed.

And thank fuck. I'm never revisiting this challenge cup again. If you want to understand just how badly I hate this tournament, I was on the fence about possibly playing through Round 2 since there were unlockables I could obtain that way. Absolutely no chance in hell anymore. This one mode has single-handedly guaranteed I will not be doing Round 2 because the heavy reliance on RNG here made me want to rip my hair out. Never. Again.

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

Now then, my team this time was actually all-around really good! Starmie was a really impressive Mixed attacker and Electabuzz's Psychic gave it a lot of good type coverage as well. Victreebel's typing made it a good switch-in, Aerodactyl was fantastic at taking hits, outspeeding, and dealing some pretty heavy hits with Wing Attack. Though Steelix and Porygon2 didn't see much play, they both were pretty respectable for their own roles as well. While I immediately assumed my MVP would be Starmie going in, thinking back on all the battles, there was one pokemon that really held its ground a lot more than all the others.

MVP: Electabuzz

Electabuzz's Swagger, while not totally reliable, really helped me out of a lot of awkward situations, and he also got really lucky with a lot of paralysis with ThunderPunch to top it off! This guy really pulled through some of the more RNG-heavy sections and I have to congratulate it on that!

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

Unfortunately, due to how long the Master Ball Division took, I didn't really get around to as much progress on my Little Cup team as I would have liked. My plan was to get the grinding out of the way today and be prepared for breeding the second set of babies today, but in the end, all I was really able to do was get one of the Houndour's parents prepared. I allowed it to evolve once it reached level 43 and knew both Flamethrower and Crunch. This one was raised from level 5. Next, I'll be raising the one I caught in the wild to the same level.

I started by battling the Elite Four which I understand to technically be more efficient, but between waiting for the ending and credits to roll and being sent back to New Bark Town and having to take the express back to Kanto every time, I found this to be far more tedious than anything else, so I ultimately decided to go through Mt. Silver. Now, upon defeating the Elite Four, Red reappears at the summit of Mt. Silver and while he is probably the best source of Exp, it's not really time efficient for my case. He's still the most challenging opponent in the entire game and it's no easy feat winning the battle without items. So I'm gonna have to make a hard pass on using Red for grinding. Instead, I just focused on the wild pokemon like before. Thankfully, this Houndour is probably the most time-consuming pokemon to raise. The rest don't need to be leveled nearly as highly. Chinchou just needs to reach 29. I also decided I wouldn't be grinding my Phanpy all the way up to learn Double Edge. It just didn't seem worth all that time.

As for Scyther, I've realized that even though my plans had it inheriting Steel Wing from a parent, it didn't actually have to be that way. I can have this thing inherit only Quick Attack and Wing Attack, then use Gen 1 to boost its stats as well as teach it Swords Dance by TM before transferring it back and teaching it Steel Wing. This should save some time with grinding as I'll only need to raise two Scyther to level 30 and it'll also mean I can get more vitamins from Gen 1, allowing my budget to be spread among the remaining three pokemon.

May 27, 2020

Prime Cup

The no-holds-barred tournament that's clearly meant to be the final challenge in Pokemon Stadium. I figured I'd go ahead and do this now since I haven't yet finished my Little Cup team. As I've said before, there's no easy way to level a team up in GS so I opted instead to once again give the spotlight to the nostalgic all-star team from Gen 1! Normally I'd be worried about bringing a Gen 1 team to Gen 2 mechanics, but looking at my movesets they're mostly all improved by Gen 2.

Gold

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

Khan (Mewtwo)

Item: PRZCureBerry

Moves: Fire Punch, Psychic, Barrier, Hyper Beam

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

Darnius (Dragonite F)

Item: Bitter Berry

Moves: Hyper Beam, Dragon Rage, Thunder Wave, Blizzard

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

Prince (Dodrio F)

Item: Bright Powder

Moves: Drill Peck, Tri Attack, Agility, Fly

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

Skuttle (Blastoise F)

Item: Leftovers

Moves: Blizzard, Seismic Toss, Surf, Earthquake

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

Watt (Electrode)

Item: Focus Band

Moves: Reflect, Explosion, Thunderbolt, Thunder Wave

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

Firma (Nidoking)

Item: Quick Claw

Moves: Surf, Earthquake, Thunderbolt, Rock Slide

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

There are a few changes I'd like to make that I won't be able to, though. For example, ideally, I'd teach Mewtwo Shadow Ball over Amnesia, but since I've already used up all my Shadow Ball TM's, that's not an option. I instead opted for the more available Fire Punch TM. This should help Mewtwo with some pesky Steel-types. While I don't have a direct out to any Dark-type pokemon, I'm not sure that'll prove too necessary since most Dark-types have a secondary typing that's covered here. Overall, I'm feeling pretty confident in reusing this team even with some of the disadvantages I'll have over some Gen 2 pokemon. We'll have to see how it goes. There's only one division for the Prime Cup here so we're gonna have to go in with our best shot!

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

Round 1

Lass Terry

Right off the bat, a bunch of Normal types. I figure Darnius would make a good lead here. If any of her side shows make an appearance, I can easily switch into Watt or Firma to take care of them. She led with her Furret. At first all it did was use Surf, but the next turn it pulled out an Ice Punch to my surprise. Even more to my surprise, it froze Darnius... I switched into Watt to finish it off. Next came Bellossom which would have been easy if I still had Darnius, but with the dragon frozen I had no choice but to keep using Firma's Earthquake to chip away at its health. Her last pokemon was Wigglytuff. It tried to put me to sleep with Singbut missed, thankfully. And with two Earthquakes, it was down giving me a continue!

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

Round 2

Black Belt Yang

This is looking like a pretty solid team for Mewtwo to steamroll, but as always Wobbuffet is a scary sight to behold. I went with the mixed attacker Blastoise to help deal with that complication. If I could get a paralysis on the thing to help prevent Destiny Bond from getting off, that'd be even better. After a set of mind games, I was able to paralyze it between Safeguard fading and setting up again. It countered my Seismic toss, taking me out, but leaving it vulnerable to being finished off! And.... it held on with a Focus Band of course. All I had to do though was stall with Barrier until it was stopped with paralysis. Now that Khan's defense was up, it was just a matter of blasting through the rest of his team with Psychic. Unfortunately, Wobbuffet prevented me from getting a perfect as you typically expect anytime you see a Wobbuffet on the opposing team. It's an annoying pokemon that's tedious to get rid of but, what are you gonna do?

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

Round 3

Bird Keeper Adam

Watt seemed like the obvious lead here. He led with Dodrio and didn't switch Gligar into my obvious Thunderbolt which was a good sign and his second pokemon was Aerodactyl. Aerodactyl did manage to hold on and use an Earthquake on me, but it just wasn't enough. Charizard was his last pokemon and I decided to switch into Skuttle to protect my continue. He got a crit with Flamethrower but it meant little to nothing and before long Charizard went down giving me a second continue!

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

Round 4

Cooltrainer F Floria

This team seems to be built around Sleep. Just what you like to hear. Thanks to Sleep Clause, the main gimmick of her team can be completely sidestepped. Clefable though is still a huge pain as always. It just spammed ThunderPunch the entire time so all I needed to do was outlast it with Hyper Beam. Lastly was Poliwrath which went down pretty easily to Prince's Drill Peck.

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

Round 5

Fisher Chase

I'd have to be warry about bringing in a Dragonite to deal with other Dragonite. Any Gen 2 Dragonite is likely to have Outrage which will be dangerous against my own Dragon type. Blizzard can help me deal with the issue but I'm not certain it would be worth it. Watt and Skuttle together likely have this covered, and Prince could be a nice switch-in for Quagsire. I was hoping he'd switch into Quagsire giving me a chance to set up Reflect, but he led with it instead. I went for a couple Tri-Attacks hoping for a status but had no luck. Unfortunately, it survived my last hit and took prince out. Skuttle was able to make quick work of it, though. His next choice was to bring out Lanturn which was vulnerable to Earthquake. Lanturn's only electric attack was Spark which, lucky for him, managed to paralyze Skuttle. Good to know the age-old tradition of Skuttle getting paralyzed at every opportunity still stands. I switched into Watt and it managed to paralyze him, too!! Thankfully, his last pokemon was only Mantine which went down to a single Thunderbolt from Electrode. Not a perfect, but a victory is a victory.

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

Quarterfinal

Scientist Craig

Craig says he hasn't battled in a while... that's... strange given that we're in the Quarterfinal of the Prime Cup.

Up until now, Scientists have typically used really annoying evasion-focused teams and looking at the team I'm presented with here, it doesn't look like that's changing any time soon. Firma seems like a good lead here and Khan's Fire Punch will help out in some rough patches. I'm pretty confident Firma will be able to do fine on his own, but Skuttle will make for good backup. Right off the bat, his Electrode is clearly going for a very familiar strategy leading with Swagger against Firma. I attack through it and take him out. I decide to chance it against Crobat, but after he starts using Screech, it's clear I'm gambling with too much, so I quickly switch to Skuttle. Skuttle does hit itself in confusion but snaps out shortly after and Blizzard is enough to eliminate Crobat. Let's not forget, though, that my defense is down four stages due to Screech. Thankfully, Blastoise's naturally high defense makes it so that I'm still not taking very much damage. His Ninetails tries to trap me in with my reduced stats using Fire Spin. Without paralysis, though, this strategy isn't nearly consistent enough (A lesson I painfully had to endure in Challenge Cup, let me remind you.) I'm so glad I just had to deal with a confusion team rather than the Evasion team I was expecting. I was able to pretty easily earn a third continue here!

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

Semifinal

Skier Kathy

I lead with Watt against Kathy's Lapras and, anticipating the inevitable switch to Piloswine, opened with Reflect. The obvious switch from there was Skuttle. I figured a switch was inevitable so I went for Earthquake instead of Surf. Sure enough, she switched to her Slowking. Thanks to Seismic Toss, I was able to guarantee a three-hit KO against an otherwise annoyinly tanky pokemon. Not wanting her Piloswine to get hit by Surf, she sent out her Lapras next. Seismic Toss was again the obvious choice here and while I was initially worried about Psychic, it seemed she only had Ice Beam to ball back on. At this point, all she could do was hope for a Freeze. Five Seismic Tosses later and Lapras finally went down, leaving her Piloswine unprotected. Piloswine was able to take out Skuttle but it was too little too late. Firma's Surf was enough to finish the fight.

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

Final

Cooltrainer M Marty

Just like in Stadium 1, the final opponent in Prime Cup has a Mew! I'm honestly surprised they didn't give him a Celebi, but I suppose Mew is impressive enough. I led with Firma to be met by Mew to my surprise! I expected Mew to be saved for last and this one certainly has some scary moves and swept my entire team! Unfortunately, due to the Dark types here, Mewtwo isn't looking like he'll be much of a help. My best bet once again was to use Skuttle's Seismic Toss to take this guy out. It's holding a Miracle Berry so you basically have to sacrifice a pokemon if you want to paralyze it. Due to some pretty good RNG, though, my Dragonite was able to avoid two blizzards and paralyze it without a problem. His last pokemon was a Muk which was able to take otu Skuttle. I could have been a bit more strategic by going for Reflect to minimize damage, but at this point all I had to do was get a few hits in to finish the job.

With an epic Explosion, the Prime Cup has been completed! I'm a but saddened that Mewtwo didn't get as much time in the spotlight as I'd hoped, but things worked out in the end!

MVP: Skuttle

I definitely have to say Skuttle was the MVP here. So many battles heavily relied on her ability to soak up damage like crazy and Seismic Toss was a great out to the bulkier pokemon I had no answer to. I definitely missed Magnanimus' Swagger and Thunder Wave, but I'd argue this was a more consistent strat since I don't have to fear the opponent's berries. Watt was also a big help in setting up for his allies and where he wouldn't hold, Darnius certainly would. Prince unfortunately never got to shine much and neither did Mewtwo, but I wouldn't argue either of these pokemon were built to their peak Gen 2 performance. They just had to pick up on whatever scraps were laying around. I was also genuinely surprised by the distinct lack of Steel-types in this tournament. Throughout the entire tournament the only Steel-Type was Forretress in the quarterfinal. I figured they'd be a bigger threat to me than they ultimately were. Above all else though, words cannot express how thankful I was to be able to use good pokemon again!! All that's left now in Stadium Mode is Little Cup, so I've gotta get to work on those little guys ASAP!

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

As for GB Homework, I finally finalized my team! And let me say right now that I am never breeding for little cup again. This little experiment just proved to be one frustration after another.

Remember how I mentioned that pokemon with the same DV's in Defense or Special would never breed no matter what? Well, it turns out that when you breed with ditto, these IV's always match the Ditto's. That means if you breed any two pokemon with ditto, they will never be able to breed with each other. While I'm thankful that this removes incestual implications, it's also makes breeding extremely inconvenient. I ran into this issue when trying to breed for Chinchou: The LAST pokemon I expected to have issues with. I ended up having to catch a new Chinchou in the wild in order to get mine to breed. Scyther wasn't a problem though because of the many I caught from bug catching contests.

The next issue I ran into was pokemon failing to inherit the correct moves and this I honestly have no answer for. From what I understood, the male passes on TM's or HM's as well any moves in the baby's learnset that are shared between parents. Somehow, though, when breeding for Chinchou and Scyther both, Thunder Wave and Quick Attack got overwritten by other moves from their standard learnset like SuperSonic and Leer. All it seemed to take to fix this issue was bringing the parents to the Move Deleter to erase all the moves I didn't want to inherit. But having to breed these pokemon a second time wasted a LOT of time.

All in all, this was an experience that I went into expecting to be a fun opportunity to explore new options in competitive battling. Instead, I was met with complication after complication that just made me want to tear my hair out! But, I finally managed to get the Little Cup team together for tomorrow! Was it worth it? Probably not... But, at this point, I'm just glad to have everyone together!

May 28, 2020

Little Cup

A tournament all about breeding. Only newly-hatched level 5 pokemon are allowed entry here. Technically wild pokemon that were caught below level 5 and leveled up are allowed as well, but their movesets aren't likely to be as impressive as one that's been bred for. I've already voiced my many frustrations with the breeding mechanics in Gen 2 so I don't believe there's any need to delve into them again. Little Cup is a very interesting twist on competitive battling. Because the pokemon are such low level, every point you can get matters so much more. Unfortunately, Little Cup isn't totally balanced as there are still some pretty notable pokemon that are permitted entry. Scyther being probably the most noteworthy as its stats were set up to let it compete with End-game pokemon in Gen 1, but since it got an evolution in gen 2, it's now eligible for Little Cup. As noted before, Scyther has since been banned from Little Cup by Smogon along with the Gold Berry which will heal your pokemon all the way for free. Even though it's just one series of battles, I'm excited to get to use the pokemon I've bred for this whole time!

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

Gold

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

NES (Porygon)

Item: Leftovers

Moves: Thunder Wave, Swagger, Psychic, Ice Beam

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

Psonder (Abra F)

Item: Focus Band

Moves: Thunder Wave, ThunderPunch, Psychic, Reflect

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

Clash (Scyther F)

Item: Bitter Berry

Moves: Quick Attack, Steel Wing, Wing Attack, Swords Dance

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

Chao (Chinchou F)

Item: Quick Claw

Moves: Thunder Wave, Surf, Confuse Ray, Thunder

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

Popper (Phanpy M)

Item: Gold Berry

Moves: Rest, Sleep Talk, Earthquake, Strength

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

Houl (Houndour M)

Item: Bright Powder

Moves: Crunch, Flamethrower, Iron Tail, Hidden Power [Fighting]

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

Round 1:

Youngster Bernie

Bernie's entire team was almost entirely weak to Chao, so I led with her but also brought along Clash and Psonder to help with Sunkern and Mankey. Ultimately the two were unneeded though and Chao was able to sweep the entire team since he only went with Slugma, Omanyte, and Togepi.

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

Round 2:

Picnicker Stacy

This was looking like a great opportunity to let Hidden Power prove its worth! I also brought in Psonder and Chao to help sweeten the deal, but I was pretty confident Houl would be able to handle everything. I did realize during this battle though that... I forgot to give Houndour any Protein to power up his physical attacks. This just might make Hidden Power and Iron Tail prove to be useless moves. Between the weakness of Hidden Power, Chao getting flinch hax'd by Meowth's headbutt, and Teddiursa hanging on with 1HP and hitting Psonder with four fury swipes, I actually ended up losing this battle.

This battle has actually started to reveal to me that I think I overestimated the usefulness of Leftovers in Little Cup. It doesn't heal nearly as much as at higher levels and pokemon go down much faster due to the low HP. It's turning out this tournament might just not be the walk in the park I was expecting it to be.

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

Round 3:

Camper Grant

NES was able to deal with most of this battle, and the battle between NES and Chinchou was kind of hilarious. It was just the two of us constantly getting confused and snapping out but ultimately it won out through a series of good luck. That was fine because I still had Psonder and Chao to fall back on. Chao turned out to be all I needed to win the day.

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

Round 4:

PokeFan F Janet

Janet loves evasion a little too much. Thankfully, I was able to take her pokemon out quick enough that this never became an issue. Clash was a good lead and Popper helped to take out Geodude and her Spinarak for a perfect win.

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

Round 5:

Schoolboy Jack

This was finally an opportunity for Houl to finally show off his true strength! Unfortunately, this opportunity was cut short when Growlithe decided to go for Dig, but the opportunity was fun while it lasted! NES was able to take care of the rest!

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

Quarterfinal:

Swimmer F Cora

Cora warned me of a surprising strategy, but most of her pokemon seemed pretty standard. I suppose it's just supposed to be surprising that her pokemon have powerful, late-game attacks. Anyway, her team went down pretty easily to NES and Psonder, so no more questions, really.

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

Semifinal:

Teacher Tina

Tina's Scyther immediately stood out like a sore thumb. I wasn't shocked to find that the game would be taking advantage of a pokemon like this which is why I didn't feel any shame in putting one on my own team. Popper was enough to tank it out. I didn't even need to rely on the Parafusion plan I was originally going to go with. Popper also took out her Elekid like nothing and Chao was able to Surf away her leading Swinub.

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

Final:

PokeFan M Rex

Rex was the last opponent to deal with and his team was surprisingly simple. Surprisingly enough, the only difficulty I had here was his Magby critting Popper right off the bat taking it out in one shot. After that, I had to rely on Chao to hold the line the rest of the way. I was planning to use Popper to make quick work of Chansey because the rest of my team was almost exclusively special attackers. I ended up relying on Parafusion to take this thing out but it was a pretty close matchup. It turned out, he didn't even use his Abra which is what I was most afraid of going in, though I was pretty prepared with Houl at the ready. His last pokemon was his Gastly which could do nothing but confuse Houndour and spam Shadow Ball. Naturally, it went down in a single Crunch.

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

MVP: Chao

I was honestly surprised by how much help Chao turned out to be. I was definitely expecting the Gen 1 pokemon to leave the others in the dust and, granted, I did consciously lean more toward the Gen 2 pokemon for that reason, Chinchou still managed to outshine the others quite a bit. Its excellent typing helped it deal with a wide variety of opponents with little resistance and even when it was outmatched, Confuse Ray and Thunder Wave helped it to set up for whatever I needed to switch into. I definitely think, though, that NES probably would have been more useful had I given him a better item to hold. It turns out that Swagger and Thunder Wave just isn't a totally necessary combo in Little Cup. Type Coverage is much more important. For that reason, maybe something like Thunderbolt or Tri Attack instead of Swagger would have been a better option. Houndour was an unfortunate blunder on my part, but if it proved to be too much of an issue, I still could have hopped into Silver to buy some Protein for it. Scyther I was especially cautious about using too much, but in the few times I did use him, he predictably tore the competition to shreds. Abra was also able to deal with a lot of opposition, but its low defense, even with max stats, still left it really vulnerable to a lot of counterattacks if it failed to one-shot the opponent.

May 28, 2020

Vs. Rival

Upon completing Stadium and Gym Leader Castle, the sun begins to set and you receive a challenge from the ultimate trainer of White City. This is the final boss of Stadium 2, taking the place of Stadium 1's Mewtwo Battle. The rival is the ultimate trainer. This battle is a bit more difficult than the one from the previous game as instead of six on one, this is a six on three battle. The Rival will use a Mewtwo along with Ho-oh and Lugia. This one naturally takes a bit more strategy to overcome. Also, since my only level 100 pokemon are from Gen 1, this just might prove to be even more difficult. I'll of course be going in with my Gen 1 team but if things prove to be too much, I just might have to pull out a few rentals to help the cause.

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Gold

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Rival

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This battle took me several attempts to get through, all of his pokemon know SafeGuard and due to their high speed, this can make a huge difference. I did find, though, that he often prioritized damage over setting up SafeGuard against certain matchups which was a strategy I'd need to exploit if I was going to win. Usually, he'd lead with his Ho-oh, so I'd start with Firma to either get a Rock Slide on his Safeguar or hit his switch-in with Rock Slide and potentially follow up with a Quick-Claw Earthquake against his Mewtwo. But on my victorious run, he caught me off guard by leading with Mewtwo instead. This actually proved highly beneficial for me because Firma's quick claw let it get a solid Earthquake on Mewtwo before being taken out. Because he didn't set up SafeGuard ahead of time, I was able to tank a Psychic get a Thunder Wave off. From there, I just exploded and took out a large chunk of his health. At this point, Mewtwo wasn't much of a threat and I was able to use Prince to finish him off. Ho-oh was next and Prince was able to outspeed it as well! I went for Tri-Attack but couldn't get anys tatus ailments up before being taken out. I got burned by Sacred Fire which I can't be too salty about considering the move has a 50% chance of burning. This burn cut the damage I was able to deal to Ho-oh, but I then sent out Skuttle to finish off Ho-oh with Surf. Skuttle also stayed in for quite a while against his final Pokemon, Lugia. There was a humorous round where his Aeroblast missed but so did Skuttle's Blizzard, but I was able to get a few solid Blizzards on him while he set up SafeGuard, unfortunately removing the possibility of getting a freeze but buying me a free hit which was more than a welcome tradeoff. From there, Darnius was able to tank the rest and I actually didn't even need to send out Khan at all!

MVP: Skuttle

Once again, Skuttle really pulled through. His ability to take hits and deal massive damage was extremely helpful in this battle. Khan also was a valuable asset but unfortunately being unused means he never really got the chance to shine. But Skuttle being the MVP doesn't mean he overshadows just how useful the rest of the team was. I was genuinely surprised that everyone was able to chip in something, even Firma who typically just went down to a Psychic as soon as he was sent out. Darnius' bulk also helped tremendously, but unfortunately he was just too slow for his Thunder Wave to be of any use. Still, he was able to take a ton of hits as well. And though Khan didn't contribute anything to the successful run, during many of my failed attempts he brought the battle very close in a stand-off with Lugia.

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

Upon defeating the Rival, I was met with a very bizarre curtain call of all the pokemon in the game followed shortly by the credit roll featuring pre-rendered art of all the various trainers from gym leader castle battling each other. It was a really cool touch and I loved seeing all these matchups! Most interestingly is one of the final shots that depicts the rival battling the female trainer from Pokemon Crystal! As far as I'm aware, there's no way to see that portrait anywhere in the game, even if you're using a copy of Crystal, so this is a portrait that I'm pretty sure goes entirely unused!

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

After viewing the credits, you're booted back to the title screen which then transforms into this beautiful art that I honestly wouldn't mind having as a wallpaper! Upon entering the game, you'll find that Round 2 has been unlocked.

White City now looks like this. I've always loved the aesthetic of the Sunset so this is really cool to see. As previously established, we can go through Gym Leader Castle and Stadium mode again for Round 2 and unlock the Doduo and Dodrio GB Towers for Gen 2 games, but I don't see much of a need at this point. Again, I may come back some day in the future. Still, there's a few more modes to take a peak at before moving on to the next game!

May 29, 2020

On 27/05/2020 at 13:06, Aura said:

Final

Cooltrainer M Marty

This guy was the worst part of Prime Cup with only rentals. It became a major prediction game because would always bring Mew, Umbreon and Ursaring vs. my Wobb, Primape, and Zapdos. Zapdos was a win con for potential Starmie or Tyranitar, so I couldn't let him die. I actually lost a couple of tries on this battle and then outpredicted the bot and got a lucky Thunder crit too.

15 hours ago, Aura said:

Final:

PokeFan M Rex

This guy and his Abra can actually go die in a hellfire. The guide I used for Little Cup suggested you use Mankey, Phanpy and Squirtle in this battle. He would always bring Chansey, Gastly, and the infamous Abra. The first two mons are no issue, but the Abra has Psychic and can basically one shot your whole rental team (because Houndour isn't used in Round 1). The guide suggests Squirtle...so that you can get a Hydro Pump crit, and if you don't, you autolose because the Abra has a Gold Berry and can tank one Hydro Pump at full HP while Squirtle can't tank two Psychics, especially since Abra outspeeds. I got so pissed off, I said the forbidden words very loudly (that Charmander is a better starter, and as someone who likes the Water starter and doesn't like how much spotlight the Charmander line gets over all the other starters, and this was long before Sword and Shield came out, yes, those are forbidden words), then I switched to Voltorb so I could hopefully Mirror Coat the Abra to death, and as luck would have it, he brought Poliwag instead and it missed it's Hypnosis when it was 1v1 against my Voltorb. I celebrated loudly, then immediately got slaughtered by Clair for the 4th time.

Also Challenge Cup Master Ball. I lost my run on the 4th battle twice, reset because of bad teams twice. One run, I had the bright idea of setting up Swords Dance with my Scyther because I had Endure so I could tank the Snorlax's Hyper Beam and sweep at +6, then a Miltank comes out, survives my Wing Attack and lands Dynamicpunch first try and kills me. On another attempt, I had more Snorlax Hyper Beam shenanigans to deal with, but this time I had a Tentacruel with Double Team. The Snorlax landed every single Hyper Beam and I was at +4 evasion. I was beyond pissed.

I also got hax'd by Red once. His Meganium got a crit Body Slam and got the para first shot on my win con Tentacruel when I was one Sludge Bomb away from winning first try. Rage and bad language followed, naturally. This game actually hates me. I even got trolled by the bots on Barrier Ball. They wouldn't let the ball get near me and played like I wasn't even there.

May 29, 2020

7 hours ago, NyxAvatar69 said:

This guy and his Abra can actually go die in a hellfire. The guide I used for Little Cup suggested you use Mankey, Phanpy and Squirtle in this battle. He would always bring Chansey, Gastly, and the infamous Abra. The first two mons are no issue, but the Abra has Psychic and can basically one shot your whole rental team (because Houndour isn't used in Round 1). The guide suggests Squirtle...so that you can get a Hydro Pump crit, and if you don't, you autolose because the Abra has a Gold Berry and can tank one Hydro Pump at full HP while Squirtle can't tank two Psychics, especially since Abra outspeeds. I got so pissed off, I said the forbidden words very loudly (that Charmander is a better starter, and as someone who likes the Water starter and doesn't like how much spotlight the Charmander line gets over all the other starters, and this was long before Sword and Shield came out, yes, those are forbidden words), then I switched to Voltorb so I could hopefully Mirror Coat the Abra to death, and as luck would have it, he brought Poliwag instead and it missed it's Hypnosis when it was 1v1 against my Voltorb. I celebrated loudly, then immediately got slaughtered by Clair for the 4th time.

I genuinely believe it, too. Judging by the damage and speed of his pokemon, I'm pretty sure they have boosted stats. On top of that, Abra is one of the fastest pokemon in the cup and has a dangerously powerful move pool. With the limited selection of rental options, this thing seems like an absurd wall to get over. Using Houndour just might be the best option since the rental does know Crunch which is the most powerful Dark-type move in the gen on a pokemon that is not only immune to Psychic but has decently high special attack to boot. Using Houndour may make some of the other battles more difficult, but I can't imagine much else in the cup can hold a candle to this guy. Another strategy could be to paralyze it with a chance Zap Cannon from Magnemite. It's inconsistent, but considering your limited options, the 50% hit could very easily be your best bet. You gotta be wary of Abra's Firepunch though, but Magnemite has some pretty decent bulk, it just might be able to survive the hit. Especially if you can get a Light Screen set up from Staryu or Elekid. But I suppose at that point the strategies are a bit too weighted over just the abra and you might have more difficulty with the rest of the tournament. After all, Zap Cannon won't be able to reliably paralyze throughout the tournament. I'm shocked absolutely none of the rentals know Thunder Wave!

May 29, 2020

Mini-Games!

I have to say that this is one of the modes I've been looking forward to playing from the moment I popped this cartridge in. Not gonna lie, the minigames in Pokemon Stadium 2 shot this game up as one of my favorite N64 games as a kid. I must have spent hours on hours playing these minigames over and over and I'd never get sick of them. I constantly strived for perfect scores in every game and while I never got super great at all of them, I did get good enough to unlock the "Very Hard" difficulty eventually. I think I spent more time in this mode than any other as a kid.

The minigames are much more varied this time. They aren't all just button mashers or rhythm games like in the previous game. Most of them involve the control stick. My favorite part of this mode, though, is that if you have the appropriate pokemon in your save file, you can use your own pokemon in the minigames! There are even some special minigames in which you can use species of pokemon that are not normally usable unless you bring them in from your own save. Since I've never had a physical copy of Gold or Silver that could retain a save before, it goes without saying that I've never been able to see these pokemon in action! I'll make special note of these as we go down the list.

As for how I'll be tackling this mode, I'll be going down the list and playing each game on Normal difficulty. I'll be saving Pichu's Power Plant for last because there's a little special touch on this one I want to explore. As I play the games, I'll give my opinions on each one. Then we'll do a quick championship against the AI, depending on how rusty I am I may raise the difficulty depending on how comfortable I am with the games. There are some games I was always able to absolutely destroy as a kid, but some I don't think I ever got the hang of entirely.

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Gutsy Golbat

The object of this game is to fly around the screen collecting the hearts that float in from the right. You want to be careful hanging around the right side of the screen because there are also Magnemite that will shock you if you touch them, making you drop hearts you've collected. You move with the control stick and fly faster by repeatedly tapping A. You're not hammering the A-button though because that'll give you too much momentum and send you flying straight into a Magnemite. If you bump into other Golbat fast enough, you'll knock hearts out of them that you or other Golbat can collect. At the end of the cave, you'll meet the Jynx that's been sending these hearts with kisses and the Golbat that collected the most wins.

I've found the best strategy with this game is just to hang back and not get too greedy. Collect whatever hearts you can, but don't try to hit other Golbat to knock it out. Focus instead on dodging any that come into you because if they miss, it's pretty likely they'll hit a Magnemite giving you lots of hearts for free. Just focus on avoiding getting hit and collecting whatever hearts you can.

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Topsy-Turvy

This is basically Bumper Balls from Mario Party except good. You control a Hitmontop with the control stick and press A to use Rapid Spin. This is important because the goal of the game is to score points by knocking other Hitmontop out of the ring. You'll only earn the point though if you hit them with your Rapid Spin. Otherwise, that player will just take a few seconds to hop right back in. The game continues until either one player scores five points or the timer runs out, giving the win to whoever has the most. I don't remember caring much for this game as a kid but it's a lot more fun than I remember it being.

I'm not sure there really is much of a strategy to this game. Just make sure you're lined up to hit somebody and use Rapid Spin just before colliding with them. If you miss, you'll be easily knocked out yourself. You can also knock your opponents into each other to score multiple points at once. I actually won by knocking out all three of my opponents in one hit. Just keep in mind there's risk versus reward at play here. If you shoot into a crowd of three people and don't hit all three, you're pretty likely to get bounced right out of bounds.

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Clear Cut Challenge

This is one of the first games with a special guest pokemon: Scizor. If you don't have a Scizor in your save file, you can only use Scyther or Pinsir. So, Cross was able to help me out for this one!

The game itself is kind of like a game of chicken. There are five rounds. Each round, Spinarak will carry a log to the top of the screen and then drop it. You have to cut the log as close to the white line as possible and you'll earn points depending on how close to the line you get it. Cutting it right on the White Line earns you a perfect and 20 points, meaning this is a game you can get a perfect score in: 100. I distinctly remember practicing this game for hours as a kid and eventually being able to cut right on the line every time. It's risky if you're out of practice, though, because if you cut above the line, you end up losing points instead of gaining them. The farther away you are from the line, the more points you lose and if you miss the log entirely, you lose 10. Your score never goes below 0 thankfully, so you can't get totally screwed over by messing up in the end. In fact, if your opponents aren't very good, you could miss every single hit and score one or two perfects and still come out on top.

Once again, the strategy is just to know your limits. If you don't trust yourself with getting a perfect, don't go for them. The window for scoring 10 points is much larger than scoring 20. As a kid, I seem to recall finding the game easier with Scyther because his thin blades show more precisely exactly where you're going to cut, and in that respect, this makes Scizor the hardest because his claws are so large.

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Furret's Frolic

This is one of the stranger guests. This game can normally be played only with Furret as the name suggests, but if you have a Girafarig in your save, you can use it as well!

From the four corners, pokeballs will roll down the slides and into the center square. The object of the game is to bump the pokeballs into your square by being the first to press A. You'll always knock the ball in the direction of your goal and if the ball is near one of your opponent's goals, this will either send the ball back into the center or onto one of the slooped ledges where, depending on your timing, it can roll back toward your opponent's goal, toward the center, or it'll roll toward your goal. As the game goes on, stronger pokeballs will start to appear that are each worth more points than the last. This game is extremely hectic but in a fun way.

The only strategy here is to keep the eyes on the prize and remember to prioritize. Go for the highest scoring balls. It's okay to prioritize these over the smaller pokeballs. Also keep in mind the larger the ball, the harder it'll be to move so, especially with everyone going after it at once, it may take several hits to get it to move to the next square. Just hit A as soon as the ball is in reach and as soon as you knock it toward your goal, move over to hit and hit A again before anyone else in order to get it inside. If multiple players hit the ball at the same time, it'll pop up in the air and fall right back down, so make sure ot pay attention to where the ball goes after you hit it! This is a game about action and reaction. Quick thinking is very important as well.

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Barrier Ball

This game is basically a mixture between four-player Pong and Topsy Turvy. Like Topsy Turvy, the object of the game is to be the first to score 5 points or just score the most before the timer runs out. When the ball passes your paddle and hits your goal, you lose a point. You gain points by hitting the ball into another player's goal. By hitting the ball while moving, you can add a spin to it. As the game goes on, multiple balls can fly around at once allowing this game to get pretty hectic. The most important thing here is to make sure you don't let the ball pass you. Keep in mind that you'll only score a point if you were the last to hit the ball with your paddle. You'll know if this was the case because the ball will be glowing the color of the last player that hit it.

The only advice I can really give is to watch the speed you're moving. You're in direct control of the spin you hit the ball with. This is especially useful if there are two balls out at once. If two players are dealing with a ball, take advantage of this and try to spin the ball in such a way where it hits the other side of one of their goals while they're distracted. You also may want to prioritize in scoring on whoever has the most points so that their points decrease.

I don't think I ever really got good at this game, it often kind of just feels like luck. As @NyxAvatar69 has pointed out, you could go an entire game without the ball ever even going in your direction. Still, this game can get a lot of fun just to watch. Especially when you have the balls flying everywhere.

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Rampage Rollout

This is a game I've never fully understood how to play well. The object is extremely straightforward. The first to finish nine laps wins the game. Obviously, you'll want to stick as close to the inside as possible to make this happen. The catch? Each time you pass the goal in 2nd, 3rd, or 4th place, you'll earn one, two, or three dust clouds that you can drop for not only an extra boost but to stun any opponents that run into the cloud you leave behind. Think like a banana from Mario Kart. Something about this game just never felt right to me though. I never really felt totally in control. Maybe it was because this game uses the D-pad instead of the control stick, but it feels like it takes too much time to side step a dust cloud because you have to go straight to the side before turning back forward. The hitboxes on the dust clouds are also very weird. I guess you just have to learn what these hitboxes are and how to get really close to them without touching them. Obviously, as the race continues, more and more tornados will appear around the inside of the lap as the people in the back race to the front. I guess you'll just want to watch the players in front of you and make sure they don't have any dust to throw back at you. Otherwise, make sure you don't stay behind them. I feel like these clouds help the player in second a lot, but third and fourth kind of get the short end of the stick because not only are they they furthest behind, but they also have the most tornadoes to deal with. Sure the last place player gets three, but the best they can do is hurt the first-place player who might be laps ahead. I'm not really much of a fan of this one.

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Streaming Stampede

This is a game i'm honestly surprised doesn't have a guest. I would have expected Togepi or some other baby Pokemon to be playable here, but I suppose with Togepi and PIchu each having their own games, it would be overkill letting them star in two.

Anyway, this is a game that's pretty easy to get a perfect in and, consequently, also pretty easy to tie between human players. The object is simple enough. There are five rounds. At the start of each round, you'll be given a target pokemon to watch for. A herd of pokemon will start to run onto the screen and among that herd, you'll have to count out the pokemon you were told to look for by pressing the A button. At the end of the round, the answer will be revealed and you'll earn points based on how close you were. The player with the most points wins. While it sounds easy enough and also a bit problematic thanks to the easy ties, I actually enjoy this game quite a bit. There's not much to it, I just think counting the individuals out of a crowd can be pretty fun, and the game also tries to throw you for a loop now and then. It's also really funny to watch the AI sit there and continue pressing the button well after the pokemon stopped showing up. It's especially hilarious when they get the answer wildly incorrect. I've had the AI guess as high as 12 when there were only four pokemon total.

Some of the rounds can get pretty tricky, though. For example, one round asked me to look for Diglett while having a bunch of Dugtrio pop in around them, making individual Diglett really difficult to pick out. The final round will always have you counting every pokemon that comes into view. This is a lot trickier than it sounds though because quite a lot of pokemon come in at once. It can be easy to accidentally miss one that was behind another, for example. Pay close attention!

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Tumbling Togepi

This is probably the weirdest guest appearance of them all. While Togepi is normally the only pokemon available in this minigame, if you have one in your save file, Omanyte (of all pokemon) is also playable! What makes this especially bizarre is the only Gen 1 pokemon among these guests with one exception and it's not even available in Gold and Silver. If you've completed your gen 1 pokedex, it's entirely likely you don't have an Omanyte anymore because you evolved it. This means you're more than likely going to have to transfer your omastar to Gold and Silver and breed it, or start a whole new game just to get an Omanyte in gen 1 just to use Omanyte in this game. Thankfully, I needed an Omanyte for Pokedex completion anyway, so I had no issues breeding my Omastar.

Anyway, this game is an evolution of Run, Rattata Run from Stadium 1. Instead of being a button masher, though, this game is more about navigating with the control stick. There are many obstacles in your path that will slow you down or trip you up. You want to hit as many boost panels as you can to increase your speed while avoiding obstacles that will slow you down. While rolling from a boost panel, you can jump over logs, but it will slow you down. Obviously, the strategy here is just to react to the obstacles as quickly as you can. Depending on how sharply you'll have to veer, hitting a log might actually save time by allowing you to jump over a rock, but the lower speed may not make that worth while. Make sure there's a boost panel coming up if you try something like this, but for the most part, just try to run in as straight of a line as you can. This game always kind of feels like a crapshoot to me. It's not one of my favorites.

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Dlibird's Delivery

This is another weird one that I never really understood the dominant strategy for. The goal of the game is to collect presents at the bottom of the screen and delver them to the top of the screen while avoiding the Swinub. If the Swinub hit you, you'll drop the presents in your bag and have to collect more. The more presents in your bag, the slower Dlibird will move. If you collect multiple of the same item in a row, you'll earn a bonus multiplier. I suppose in a way you can consider this an evolution of Sushi-go-Round as your goal is to collect the most expensive presents as many times in a row as you can.

I usually just go to the bottom of the screen and collect the most expensive item I can see and hang around a bit to see if any more appear before rushing to the top of the screen to drop them off. Obviously, the more expensive items are rarer but seem to appear more commonly toward the end. Diamond rings will always appear with a special jingle. You'll want to prioritize these over all others, especially if you can get multiple in a row for a huge bonus.

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Egg Emergency

This is another game I'm surprsied doesn't have a guest star. Blissey just seems like such an obvious addition to this minigame.

Anyway, this is by far my favorite minigame. I practiced it over and over as a kid to the point where I always scored a perfect. Over the course of the minigame, 100 eggs will fall from the sky and you have to catch as many as possible while avoiding the Voltorb that will shock you and cause you to drop some of the eggs you've caught. You'll get one point for each egg leaving room for a perfect score of exactly 100. It's a lot easier said than done though, especially on the higher difficulties where eggs will start to fall extremely fast and even frequently fall between two Voltorb forcing you to either successfully catch the egg or lose your own eggs in the process. I think there's also something funny about playing this game on easier difficulties and effortlessly catching all of the eggs while listening to at least one of your opponents failing to catch every single egg. LIke, I swear the AI intentionally avoids doding the eggs. On easy mode, voltorb very rarely appear at all so they don't even have that excuse!

There's no real strategy here, it's all about reaction time. Just use L and R to catch as many eggs as you can and avoid the Voltorb! Going for a perfect is really fun here, especially on the harder difficulties! If I have any gripes with this game, it's that the division between screens is extremely thin. It's easy to mistake your opponent's eggs for eggs of your own, I imagine this is especially the case if you're the 2nd or 3rd player.

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Eager Eevee

This is another really fun one. It's basically Musical Chairs but with an added twist. Aipom will drop down with a basket over a fruit and will eventually lift the basket revealing the fruit. At that point, you have to quickly press A in order to be the first to collect the fruit. So what's the catch? First of all, Aipom will sometimes fake you out. He'll lift the basket slightly before lowering it back down. If you bump into the basket, you get stunned for a brief period during which the basket will be opened for everyone else more than likely. But beyond that, sometimes there will be a Pineco under the basket instead of a fruit. Hitting the Pineco will result in the Pineco SelfDestructing, knocking your Eevee out for the next round. This game is built entirely around psyching your opponents out because you can even use the B button to fake a dash and potentially trick your opponents into dashing instead. For the most part, you'll have to be the first to reach the fruit in order to get any points at all, but if it's a pile of strawberries, they can be divided among multiple pokemon that get there at roughly the same time.

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Pichu's Power Plant

This is the special minigame I held off on because it has a special requirement for its guest. Pikachu can be playable in this game but only if you have a copy of Yellow version. This is an evolution of Thundering Dynamo from Gen 1 but it comes with the added perk that you have to use the control pad to point toward the nodes that light up rather than just mashing the button. At its core, it's still just a button masher, but as the only button masher in the game, it's much more acceptable here. I don't feel like I have to tear my arm up if I want to get good at the minigames in this collection. Since a node won't go away until another node appears, you also don't have to worry about being blindsided by the game suddenly switching from A to B like in Thundering Dynamo.

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Mini-Game Championship

After wetting my toes with the minigames once again, I feel pretty confident in jumping into a minigame championship on Hard difficulty. This works similarly to the championship of the original but with a few extra twists. Just like before, the player who selects the next minigame is randomly chosen among the players in last place. But instead of just jumping into choosing the next minigame, they'll roll a die to determine how many coins the next game will be worth as well as whether they'll get to choose the minigame or if the game will be completely random. Minigames can be worth anywhere from 1-3 coins and can even involve stealing coins from the player(s) in first place.

I actually have never heard of this before, but upon winning the competition with a Gold cartridge in the controller, I actually earned coins from the Game Corner for winning a competition on Very Hard! I'm not sure how many but I can't imagine it's very much. When I loaded the game up I had 73 coins. I don't know for sure how many I had before, but I wanna say it was 23. If that's true, i won 50 coins for winning a 5-coin championship which tells me you probably earn 10 times the number of coins in the championship. If that's true, then this may actually be a more consistent way to earn coins without soft resetting in the actual game. Still, I'm pretty sure soft resetting is a much faster way of getting the coins you need for some of the more absurd requirements to be met. I'm not sure if you have to play on Very Hard difficulty to get this reward, but in case you do, it should be worth noting that all you need to do to unlock Very Hard difficulty is to win a 7-coin championship on Hard difficulty. It's nowhere near as absurd as it is in Stadium 1.

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1P Quiz

This uses a similar system to the questions in the classroom. The game will ask many questions about Pokemon trivia and you'll have to answer as many in a row. In the 1P mode, the game challenges you to see how many questions you can answer in 100 seconds.

Make sure you read this questions thoroughly, because they like to be tricky, even on the easy difficulty. For example, one of the questions opened with "Which pokemon has a long" and I immediately answered Lickitung because it's the only pokemon among the selection that was notable for a long feature. But the rest of the question read "which pokemon has a long tail"

Even then though, some of the questions are pretty BS. I got a question asking "Which pokemon rolls around in a minigame?" to which Donphan was apparently incorrect and the correct choice was Togepi. Despite the fact that, on the final lap in Rampage Rollout, Donphan does indeed start rolling around. The time pressure also makes getting the high score pretty luck-based. Some of the questions inherently take longer to finish because of the necessary information you need ro process. Sometimes instead of pictures, the answers will all just spell out the pokemon's name. It obviously takes longer to read each name than to look at each picture. Additionally, some questions will have four pokemon and "Which of the pokemon is" followed by a random color. If these questions pop up, you have to just wait until the entire question is written out before you can finally know what color it's asking about. On the flilpside, sometimes you'll get questions like "What is this pokemon?" with a picture of the pokemon immediately plastred on the screen so you can answer the question immediately without even needing to read the question. It's a flawed system, but it is just a distraction at the end of the day.

Obviously, on the harder difficulties the questions get trickier. For example, on medium difficulty, you'll get questions like "Corsola is a Pink pokemon. Which of the following pokemon is Brown?" On hard difficulty, the game takes it up a notch and will start to ask you things like what route you should go to to get Juggler Irwin's number or which TM number can be bought at the store.

My records for Easy, Medium, and Hard respectively are 37, 22, and 13 questions.

There's also a multiplayer quiz in which multiple human players compete to be the first to get 10 correct answers.

May 30, 2020

Free Battle

Free Battle is a lot more interesting here than it was in Stadium 1. First of all, the Free Battle stadium is much more aesthetically pleasing being set inside a beautiful park instead of a generic green field. But what's really cool is that, unlike in Stadium 1, you can choose any stadium you've previously battled on. This includes the gyms from Gym Leader Castle as well as even Silver Cave where you battled Red or the Ruins where you battled the Rival.

If you choose to battle against the AI, rather than being a generic trainer, you'll actually battle against Cal, the trainer from the Trainer House in Viridian City designed after Gold himself. If I had to make a guess, I'd assume this was originally designed to be a new generic trainer design to reflect the protagonist of the new games. You can set the AI to Easy, Normal, or Hard and you can battle with any cup rules, including Challenge Cup complete with random pokemon and all. Out of the context of having to win 8 battles in a row, Challenge Cup rules can be pretty fun to play by!

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The main screen also prominently features two other modes besides White City to go into. These are Event Battle and Battle Now! Both of these serve as quick fixes to people who are only interested in experiencing 3D battles and nothing else.

Event Battle

Event Battle requires two GameBoy cartridges with save files. This is basically a fast link to Free Battle where you can chose any of the existing cup rules or create your own custom rule set. Custom rules aren't anything too interesting. You can't use rental pokemon with them. All you can do is decide what pokemon and level ranges are allowed as well as adjust other things like Sleep Clause, Items Clause, etc. An additional touch exclusive to Event Battle is the ability to set a time limit. As the name implies, this mode seems designed around hosting public events. It's actually a pretty cool idea if you have the necessary tools to host such a thing. You could host your own tournament with your own custom rules!

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Battle Now is basically an immediate Challenge Cup battle. This mode actually changes in Round 2 to allow for stornger level 70, fully evolved pokemon as opposed to the weaker level 40, unevolved pokemon from the standard Battle Now. This is a single-player alternative to Event Battle where you can battle against Cal. You can switch between Round 1 and Round 2 on the main menu by pressing C-Right.

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And that's everything in Stadium 2! Honestly, I was planning on completing the pokedex here, but I really don't think I have any interest in doing so anymore. Not after all that breeding garbage I went through for Little Cup. Still, I have made a lot of progress toward pokedex completion so it'd be pretty sad to just let all that fall away now. With that in mind, I'll probably come back to completing the pokedex after finishing our next game.

May 30, 2020

Released on the same day as Pokemon Stadium 2, December 14th of 2000, was the final core series game of Gen 2: Pokemon Crystal. I'm sure some people were questioning why I didn't play this game before Stadium 2. After all, Stadium 2 does have some small exclusive features tied to Crystal version specifically. The reason I did this first is because I'll actually be emulating this one. I've already explained the struggle I had previously gone through with getting my hands on a functioning Silver version. With Crystal being a much more expensive game to get your hands on these days, it's just too much of a risk to invest a ton of money into an extra copy of the game that may or may not even work properly. And as I said with regards to Silver, I could personally change out the battery myself, but I never feel comfortable cracking open consoles or cartridges and messing with the internal hardware especially when it involves something like soldering. It's something I'd rather stay as far away from as possible. If I damage the hardware, I won't even be able to resell the thing to make my money back.

Anyway, there is a plus to emulating this game. This time around, I can provide screenshots of my own pokemon rather than just ripping images from Serebii and Bulbapedia! I'll still be ripping maps from Bulbapedia though just because it gives a much better view of an area than any single screenshot can.

This is also the first time in this thread that I'll be detailing my experience with another version of a game I've already gone over. So I suppose I should take the time to explain how this is going to work. I'm still going to be playing the game at about the same pace, but I'll be using a completely different team from my previous playthroughs. I'm trying to try out as many different pokemon as possible over the course of the series. Normally for my first playthrough of a generation, I'll be focusing on using a variety of pokemon that evolve into pokemon that cannot be caught in the wild. This is to minimize grinding in completing the pokedex in each game. For the next playthroughs, I'll focus on specific pokemon I've always wanted to give a try, usually putting emphasis on pokemon that were unusable or difficult to obtain in the other version for one reason or another. In the case of Silver, I used a lot of trade evolutions on my team as well as Katana, a version exclusive for Silver. This time, since I'm not playing a hard copy of the game, I'm much more limited in my options for team building. Trade Evolutions are much more difficult. However, I'll still be designing my team around pokemon that were made more accessible in Crystal. In this case, it's less about pokemon species that are more available, although I did consider some that were adjusted for this purpose, but more about pokemon moves that are exclusive to Crystal version. This is going to become much more prominent after the Elite Four though. Many of the pokemon I'm using here are pokemon I've considered using for previous playthroughs but ultimately went with other pokemon instead. My team plan has changed many times but I think I'm pretty satisfied with the choices I ended up with.

As for what I'll be covering here, I won't be nearly as thorough. I'm just going to focus on key story moments and along the way highlight the changes I've noticed between Gold and Silver and the new Crystal version. Hopefully this doesn't bore anyone. With the new team setup, I should have different experiences with some of the more difficult battles, so I'll still be detailing things like gym leaders and the elite four.

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Starting off, the very first difference with Crystal is that this is actually the very first game to introduce the ability to choose your gender! I think it goes without saying that I'll be playing as a girl this time! I usually prefer the female portagonists to the males and I definitely think Kris here is one of if not my favorite of the female protagonists! She's just so cute!

Another small change I found pretty early on is that your mother has company over at the start of the game! This neighbor of yours talks about how her daughter wants to be the assistant to Prof. Elm. It doesn't seem to add anything, but it's a small but strange change. Instead of your mother ambushing you as you come out of your room, you can instead talk to her to get your PokeGear. I assume if you don't talk to her, she'll stop you before you walk out, but this is another small but welcome change.

As for my starter, I of course went with the last remaining choice: Chikorita! And this sprite right here is one of the things that makes Crystal a very exciting game to get into: Pokemon Sprites are animated! This is the first instance of this! As a kid, I always thought this was a brand new feature for Pokemon Emerald so I remember being really surprised to find animated Gen 2 sprites online many years ago. I distinctly remember initially assuming these were fan-made. Since I'm only sharing screenshots, I'll try to post the animated sprites of any pokemon I come across in these moments.

I nicknamed my Chikorita "Lief." And yes, I'm aware I misspelled it. Normally I do "misspell" names to give it a more unique look, but this one was genuinely an accident. I'm just stuck with the nickname until I get to the name rater. Don't worry, I'll fix it!

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Another cool new feature in Crystal is the addition of these nameplates as you enter a new area! This is another feature I'd naturally assumed as a kid was introduced in Gen 3. It's very nice knowing what an area is called without having to seek out a sign or NPC to tell you.

One of the first changes in terms of pokemon availability you may notice is that Hoppip can now be found here on Route 29 during the morning and day at a 5% rarity. At this level, they only know Splash so they make for some free Exp whenever you run into them. All other encounter rates are mostly unchanged here, with the only difference being Pidgey dropping from 55% to 50% to make room for Hoppip.

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On route 46, just north of Route 29, comes one of the biggest changes to Crystal that will become pretty apparent throughout a lot of the early game.

The pokemon Phanpy is actually catchable this early on! It's only avaialble as a 5% rarity during the early morning and has a chance of fleeing every turn, but this is much, much earlier than it's available in Silver where it's only catchable just south of Blackthron City. This makes it a much more viable option for your team! Just be prepared to spend a lot of time hunting it down and know that it's not going to know a STAB move naturally, meaning until you get Earthquake in Victory Road, you're going to be stuck with Mud Slap from Falkner as your only STAB move on this thing for a long time.

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Route 30 features another example of a pokemon being made available earlier than normal, though this one is a bit less significant.

The pokemon Poliwag is available right here in the grass! It's only available at night, but it's available at 20%! Normally, you would have to wait until you got the Old Rod, which isn't too far off. I'm honestly not sure if getting Poliwag this early is super helpful because all you're really missing between here and the Old Rod is Sprout Tower where it'll be weak to almost all the attacks, and Violet Gym. The only really advantage it has during this period is knowing Hypnosis really early on, but I really don't think it's necessary.

It's also worth noting that both Ledyba and Spinarak are available here. These two used to be version exclusives to each other but you now have access to them both! Spinarak's sprite was also recolored to more accurately match its official artwork instead of the blue color it had before.

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On the way back, there was of course the first rival battle. I forgot to take screenshots during the battle, but we all know how this one goes.

His Cyndaquil was pretty much defenseless against Leif who was already level 7 at this point.

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After getting the pokeballs, I was once again going to need a temporary flier, so I caught a Pidgey and named it Perri!

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On route 31, you can find Poliwag at 30% at night as well as Gastly at a humble 5%. There really isn't any reason to look for a Gastly here though because they're much more common in Sprout Tower right around the corner.

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In the Dark Cave, though we don't have Flash, we can still feel our way around enough to find some pokemon and in Crystal version there's another addition to the early roster.

Just like Phanpy, the opposite version exclusive Teddiursa is also available early right here! And just like Phanpy, it's only available at 5% in the early morning.

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Back on route 31, I got Bug Catcher Wade's phone number and this highlights yet another difference from GS! The PokeGear gets a lot more functionality in many exciting ways! In the case of the phone, the trainers who call you now have a lot more personality. Rather than the generic copy and paste lines every trainer would print out like a machine, now every trainer has their own hobbies and interests they'll like to discuss with you. Some of them will even offer services outside of battles. In the case of Wade here, he will occasionally call you up and give you berries he found. I'm actually surprised to find this feature was here as I always assumed it was added in HGSS because that game replaced all of the berry trees with apricorn trees, so I figured this was added to make up for the lack of berries.

I love the extra life the new phone conversations bring to the world of Crystal, but it's a bit of a double-edged sword. Sometimes getting a phone call could already be a little annoying in GS and some of the new phone conversations can go on for a bit longer than if they just told you they nearly caught a Weedle the other day.

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Getting into Violet City, there's something I'd like to do before making any progress in either of the dungeons. The city itself doesn't seem changed at all from Gold and Silver, but there's an extra touch that changes the way you might go about it.

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On Route 36, just east of Violet City, a new patch of grass has been added! With this, you have access to the pokemon on this route much earlier and the wild pokemon available were adjusted to compensate. You can't catch Stantler here and you can't find Nidoran either, but Bellsprout has been added.

More significantly, though, you can actually catch Growlithe here! This is perhaps the most useful addition to the early roster in this game because now you can have a Fire-type regardless of your choice of starter going into Sprout Tower, Azalea Gym, and Ilex Forest. And I'm here to hunt one down for my team!

Now, the problem with Growlithe is that, while it is available at a fairly consistent 10% during the morning and day, just finding one isn't enough because these guys are pretty likely to just use Roar to scare you off. You'll just need to get lucky and hope the Growlithe decides to stand its ground while you throw pokeballs at it. Needless to say, it took several encounters to catch one of them. But along the way, I got an unexpected surprise...

If you guessed a Shiny Pokemon, you were absolutely correct! A genuine, vanilla Gen 2 shiny pidgey right here! Of course, it had to be after I switched over to an emulator so I wouldn't be able to use this thing in Stadium or anything. But it's still really exciting to encounter one right here in the generation that debuted them! This is approximately a 1 in 9,000 chance and I'm really glad to have gotten this opportunity! What's more, this is especially cathartic for me. I'm pretty sure I shared the story earlier in this thread, but to reiterate, one of my most painful shiny-related memories was finding a Shiny Pidgey in HeartGold on the way to Mr. Pokemon's house. That is, before I could have possibly obtained any pokeballs to catch it with.

So, sorry Perri, but this is a rare opportunity I can't pass up. Welcome aboard, Mercury the Pidgey! I should mention right now that Perri was intended to be a temporary party member. I was planning on replacing it later on down the line with a Farfetch'd. But Pidgey was a pokemon I was considering using as well and it never really got a full chance to spread its wings. Now I see no better excuse than to use it on my team! Unfortunately, this means that Farfetch'd is probably gonna have to wait until at least Fire Red and Leaf Green to be used.

I eventually also caught my Growlithe and named him Grarl!

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Since Grarl was lacking in levels compared to the rest of the party, I figured I'd do Sprout Tower first before going into the Violet Gym. There's no notable changes here from what I could tell.

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Violet Gym

Once again, no notable changes were made to this gym.

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[screenshot taken after gym battle... shh...]

My Team:

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Leif (Chikorita M); Level 11

Item: None

Moves: Tackle, Growl, Razor Leaf

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Mercury (Pidgey M); Level 11

Item: None

Moves: Tackle, Sand Attack, Gust

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Grarl (Growlithe M); Level 11

Item: None

Moves: Bite, Roar, Ember

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Due to the levels of my team after hunting down Growlithe, this gym would be a total breeze.

He led with a pidgey against Grarl. It was just a few Embers away from going down, but it did manage to get a Mud Slap up on Grarl.

Last but not least was his Pidgeotto. I was pretty confident that Grarl could hold his own here, but there also was no reason to keep him in there with his hindered accuracy. Plus, if PIdgeotto was going to go for Mud Slap again, it would be an easy switch into Mercury.

Unfortunately, PIdgeotto went for Gust instead of Mud Slap. Still, Mercury was easily able to finish the deal against Falkner.

And in the end, I was able to earn the Zephyrbadge, bringing the first chapter to an end!

May 31, 2020

After getting the Zephyr Badge, I came to make a quick pit stop at the Ruins of Alph. This place that was originally just the nest for Unown has seen a pretty significant redesign to expand on the lore surrounding the Unown. From what I understand, there seems to have been plans to incorporate this more directly into the game's story, more specifically, it seems there would have been a subplot surrounding the Unown communicating with Suicune using radio signals which is referenced in Crystal's intro. Dialogue in the japanese version also implies that the differences in the ruins are caused by radio interference from the communications center in Goldenrod, but since this was cut from the international release, so to was the dialogue that references it.

As for what exactly this redesign entails, well, inside each of the puzzle rooms lies a new engraving with Unown spelling out a word. This word is a hint toward the solution of a new puzzle. Of course, you can also solve the slide puzzle to unlock Unown forms in the main hall just like the previous games, but I'm just going to be focusing on the new content here. We can only access the Kabuto puzzle room at the moment, so we'll focus on that first. The engraving here reads "escape." The solution to this puzzle is to stand near the engraving and use an Escape Rope.

Of course, this will cause you to leave the chamber, but upon re-entry, you'll discover a hole where the engraving was!

Inside this hole is a mysterious secret chamber with four different items: In this case, there's some Heal Powder and EnergyPowder, both of which are strong healing items that come with the drawback that they make your pokemon less happy. I rarely use items in the first place, so these items don't mean too much for me. In Gold and Silver they were only available to purchase from a store in the underground marketplace in goldenrod. There's also a berry and PSNCureBerry. We can leave the way we came in, but then there's the mysterious pit at the back of the room. Jumping down this pit reveals yet another secret chamber...

"Our words shall remain here for the ages"

In the southeast corner of the chamber is another pit that drops you back into the main hall where Unown can be found if you've completed any of the Slide puzzles.

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Moving on to Route 32, we have perhaps the first disappointment when it comes to pokemon availability. A common staple of Gen II teams is the Electric-type Mareep that is normally caught right here. However, Mareep happens to be missing in action here. That's right, the Mareep line is completely uncatchable in Crystal version. This has always been a very strange omission to me because Mareep is pretty much the only option for a standard electric type until Magnemite. There are other options for Electric types, but Mareep is the gen 2 electric-type pokemon.

What's more, there aren't any super interesting additions to this route aside from Ekans being available.

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There isn't anything super note-worthy in Union Cave except for the presence of Sandshrew and Wooper during the day or night respectively.

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Geodude is available here on Route 33, but again, this isn't terribly significant. He's never been particularly rare. This is more of a realism addition featuring pokemon that have wandered out of the cave. It's a neat touch but doesn't really affect the game much at all.

After battling the Hiker on this route, Leif did evolve into a Bayleef!

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Next is Azalea Town. As you might recall, you can't go straight to the gym without dealing with the Rockets blocking your way. The Slowpoke Well event is unchanged from Gold and Silver.

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What has been changed, though, is that Kurt has been changed to be much, much more conveneint. He can now accept multiple of a single Apricorn, making several pokeballs in a single day rather than just one at a time. This makes Kurt's pokeballs much more accessible, but to my knowledge they're still just as broken as they were in the previous games, so the Lure Balls, and Level Balls as these are the only ones that not only work as advertised, but also come with effects that work on a large selection of pokemon. These are made from Blue and Red apricorns respectively.

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Azalea Gym

This gym already wasn't anything too worrisome in the previous game. With access to Growlithe in Crystal, it becomes a total joke. None of the trainers stand a chance against you.

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My team:

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Leif (Bayleef M); Lv. 16

Item: Miracle Seed

Moves: Tackle, Poison Powder, Razor Leaf, Reflect

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Mercury (Pidgey M); Lv. 15

Item: None

Moves: Quick Attack, Sand Attack, Gust, Mud Slap

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Grarl (Growlithe M); Lv. 16

Item: PRZCureBerry

Moves: Bite, Roar, Ember

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Azalea Gym Leader Bugsy

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As expected, Grarl was able to eliminate the Metapod just by sneezing at it with Ember.

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And the same story with Kakuna.

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Scyther is of course Bugsy's scariest pokemon as even with a Fire-Type, Fury Cutter can still build up quite a bit of damage. Of course, Scyther was still no match for Growlithe. It took a couple of embers to go down.

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And with that, I earned the HiveBadge!

June 1, 2020

Of course, as you try to leave Azalea Town, you're met by none other than your rival!

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His Gastly was first and, knowing no harming moves besides Lick, this thing could do nothing against a normal type like Mercury. He was completely defenseless.

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Zubat, too, went down with little problem, though it did manage to take out a bit of Mercury's health.

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Due to Gastly's Spite, Mud Slap was out of PP by the time Quilava came around so I unfortunately didn't have that advantage. Not that it mattered because Mercury wasn't going to survive much longer. I decided to chance it and see if I could get another hit in. I managed to survive an Ember and get a good gust in before switching out.

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Grarl was switched into an oncoming Ember and at this point, his Quilava wasn't strong enough to keep up and ultimately went down.

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Moving on into Ilex forest, once again there are some differences in wild pokemon encounter rates here. Weedle and Kakuna are available during the night while Caterpie and Metapod are available during the day.

Venonat and Psyduck are now available through just walking in the forest.

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Of course, in order to progress through Ilex Forest, you'll need a pokemon that can learn Cut. I went back to Union Cave to catch myself a Sandshrew once again for this purpose.

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Another small change isn't actually accessible today. But there is data in Crystal for an event right here at the shrine in Ilex Forest. Through an event distribution, the player would receive a GS Ball at the communications center in GoldenRod in Japan or from the GoldenRod Pokemon Center in the international version.

The GS Ball could then be taken to the forest shrine where the player would be met with the elusive mythical forest guardian Celebi. While this event was never officially distributed in the US, it has been translated and you can hack a GS Ball into your inventory to access the event, but it is otherwise inaccessible. I won't be doing this, but I just thought it would be worth noting. The Celebi would be level 30. Before this point, there was no way to obtain Celebi without an event placing it directly into your party.

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It's here in Ilex Forest where you also get the TM for Headbutt, giving you access to a small collection of new pokemon! The Headbutt tree pokemon have been adjusted slightly in Crystal. I'm not going to go into detail too much because of how much the coverage of this mechanic confused me during my hunt for Heracross, but just know that the encounter tables are changed up a bit more to make rare trees feel more unique.

For example, in Ilex Forest, Butterfree, Beedrill, Pineco and Noctowl can only be encountered at a Rare tree, so if you see any of these pokemon, it's much more immediately apparent you've found a rare tree! If you're interested in more information, the tool I linked to during the Silver cleanup also works for this game.

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Ilex Forest also added a new Bug Catcher here who says he found a rare pokemon while headbutting a tree. He hints at the existence of rare trees, which makes this a bit less cryptic but I still say it's too vague to be helpful in actually finding them without external help.

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Route 34 has also made another pokemon more easily accessible!

Snubbull is no longer tied to swarming. It is instead available here as a 30% rarity as a daytime counterpart to Drowzee who is consequently now only available at night.

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While battling the trainers on this route, Mercury evolved into a Pidgeotto!

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At the Day Care, there is a new addition in Crystal to pique your curiosity surrounding breeding. The first time you talk to the Old Man, he'll give you an Odd Egg. This egg can hatch into one of a predetermined selection of pokemon. While this may seem to be just any old NPC-given egg that hatches into a baby pokemon on the surface, this one is special.

The egg can hatch into any of the baby pokemon available in Gen 2 excluding Togepi. This is actually a pretty big deal because Elekid and Pichu are normally not available until you catch their parents in Kanto. Beyond that, while Magmar can be caught in Burned Tower in Gold and Silver, he's actually not available there in Crystal, so Magmar is also made much more accessible by this. What's interesting to note is that there are two of each of these pokemon the egg can hatch into. Their IV's are predetermined. Most of the time, the egg will hatch into a standard pokemon, but there is a relatively high 14% chance that the egg will hatch into a shiny version of one of these! What's more, in the japanese version, this was even higher. There was a whopping 50% chance! I assume this was due to all of the pokemon being weighted the same while in the international version, they gave each individual outcome a different rarity. (Standard Pichu has an 8% chance, while standard Cleffa or Igglybuff is 16%).

I normally wouldn't soft reset for a shiny, but due to the high chances of it here, I feel like it'd be a crime not to!

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Eventually, my egg did hatch into a shiny Cleffa. Regardless of what pokemon your egg hatches into, it will come with the special egg move Dizzy Punch! I actually hadn't factored this into my initial plans, but I think I actually will let Cleffa have a spot on my team. I feel like this is very much an element of Crystal that warrants representation on my team as it's probably one of the features that stands out the most here. Besides, how could I resist having the rare opportunity to have two shiny pokemon on my team? So, welcome aboard Ciel!

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Goldenrod City is home to one of the biggest changes between the english (left) and japanese (right) versions. On the surface, you may not immediately be able to tell what the difference is. But in the Japanese version, the Pokemon Center is replaced with the Pokemon Communication Center.

This was Pokemon's very first look into online battling. By linking your system to a mobile phone, you could communicate with players over long distances for trades and battles, much like WiFi communications in more recent Pokemon Games. Unfortunately, this feature was a bit too ahead of its time. From what I understand, the adapter wasn't selling well because not many kids at the time had their own mobile phones to use with their gameboy. Still, it's really cool to see online battling existed as far back as Gen II!

The aforementioned Odd Egg was actually accessible as an event using an Egg Ticket here instead of at the Day Care and as mentioned previously, the GS Ball was obtained here as well.

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The PCC isn't the only change to Goldenrod, though. The GoldenRod department store now has a rooftop floor just like Celadon's.

There isn't much going on here. I did find these vending machines and got really excited about the possibility of getting Pokemon Dolls more easily, but these machines are a total tease. They're always almost empty and the player can't actually interact with them, sadly.

On certain days, there will be a rooftop sale here where Pokemon are you can buy certain items at bargain prices. If you have Camper Todd's number from Route 34, he will call you on days where a sale is going on. There isn't anything super interesting about these sales, but you can still save quite a bit of money. You can buy Full Restores for only 600P!

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The radio tower is slightly redesigned from Gold and Silver. The quiz you have to take to get the Radio Card asks different questions.

I actually haven't mentioned it yet, but the PokeGear is blue here. I don't know if it's just blue in general for Crystal or, perhaps more likely, it's blue to match Kris' color. Either way, the blue PokeGear looks really nice!

Anyway, booting up the Radio Card, we can find an additional new show is being broadcasted: Buena's Password! If you tune in to this show every day, you'll hear a password...

The show is being broadcasted from just one floor up! In this new corner studio, you can find Buena herself. If you talk to her and tell her the correct password, you'll earn a point! These points can be exhanged for a variety of items, most interestingly: the aforementioned absurdly expensive vitamins! Over a long period of time, as long as you check in every day, you could actually realistically max out your favorite pokemon's stats with this method without any grinding.

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Anyway, most of the rest of Goldenrod is the same. Normally at this point I'd head straight for the gym, but since we have a new baby in the party, I suppose it's only fair to level Ciel up a bit!

I went into the Goldenrod Underground to battle the trainers there and get a haircut for CIel, it evolves with happiness, after all, and came back up to head North to battle the horde of trainers that lay waiting.

On route 35, the encounter tables were changed yet again. Growlithe can now be caught here during the day and Psyduck can be encountered in the grass at night. Hoothoot is much more common at night and Snubbull is once again here as a daytime counterpart to the night-exclusive Drowzee. Jigglypuff can now be found here at a low 5% chance and Yanma unfortunately remains a swarm pokemon. The Nidorans are no longer catchable here, either.

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National Park was given some minor aesthetic changes.

A fountain was placed next to one of the park benches and the small pond in the center of the park now has a fountain in its center.

The encounter rates were made much more diverse here compared to Gold and Silver, but most noteworthy is that this is where you'll be finding the mysterious Nidoran that have been eluding us this whole time. They're still accessible at the same point in the game so there's no use stressing over their relocation. I actually like them being placed here as well, it makes the National Park feel more significant and alive. The encounter rates during the Bug Catching Contests remain unchanged, though. You don't have to worry about being beaten out by somebody catching a wild Heracross or anything absurd like that.

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While not technically a new area, the experience here on route 36 is slightly different in Crystal. Thanks to the existence of the new patch of grass on the East side of the route bordering Violet City, the grass on the west side now has significantly lower level pokemon to match thanks to the two patches sharing an encounter table. This does mean that you have to finish Goldenrod gym before you can catch a Stantler, or so I believe...

Approaching the Sudowoodo, you come to meet a girl from the flower shop who tells you she'll tell her sister to let you borrow a water bottle to help deal with the Sudowoodo. I believe you have to actually beat the goldenrod gym before her sister will let you borrow the bottle, but it's still a cool touch. I know a lot of people got stuck at this point in Gold and Silver, so I'm glad they have this new aspect to help point lost players in the right direction.

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Goldenrod Gym

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With the trainers battled and Ciel catching up with the rest of the party, it was time to take on the Goldenrod gym! As always, the gym trainers aren't super noteworthy and I was able to get through with pretty much just Ciel's Dizzy Punch.

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Look! I fixed Leif's name!

My team:

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Leif (Bayleef M); Lv. 20

Item: Miracle Seed

Moves: Tackle, PoisonPowder, Razor Leaf, Reflect

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Mercury (PIdgeot M); Lv. 19

Item: Bitter Berry

Moves: Quick Attack, Sand-Attack, Gust, Mud-Slap

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Grarl (Growlithe M); Lv. 19

Item: Charcoal

Moves: Bite, Roar, Ember, Leer

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Ciel (Cleffa F); Lv. 20

Item: Quick Claw

Moves: Pound, Charm, Dizzy Punch, Sing

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Goldenrod Gym Leader Whitney

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Whitney's first pokemon, Clefairy, is a bit of a joke, but if you're unlucky, it could give you a bit of trouble with Metronome. Its Metronome turned into Ancient Power which unfortunately caused me to lose more HP than I would have liked, but it ultimately went down with little resistance.

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

Next came the infamous Miltank. Since my team was pretty vulnerable to Rock attacks, I had to get a bit creative with this approach. My initial plan was to exploit Rollout's unreliable accuracy with Mud-Slap. Unfortunately, Mercury on his own wouldn't be able to last very long, so I decided to take an extra measure.

I switched into Leif to set up Reflect. This could buy me some more time to Mud-Slap Miltank's accuracy away. Unfortunately, the rollout already started. I set up reflect and decided the best course of action would be to poison Miltank so that its health would deplete while I'm setting up and stalling out. Rollout unfortunately built up a lot more damage than I expected against Leif and took him out before I could even get a Razor Leaf going.

Out came Mercury and I hoped I could get a Mud-Slap out before Miltank moved and hopefully get a miss from Rollout. Instead, Mercury got hit hard and went down.

Things weren't looking good even for so much as stalling. I sent out Grarl and managed to avoid Rollout only to be met the next turn with an Attract. I didn't want to risk switching out and I typically try to avoid exploiting HM users as meat shields. So I left Garl out and just hoped to out-RNG the infatuation... it didn't go too well.

Things were not looking good as I sent Ciel out. All I could hope for at this point was to get a lucky confusion with Dizzy Punch while chipping away at this thing's health. I did have Charm, but every turn I'd use Charm would be another chance for Rollout to start building up again. Let's not forget that Miltank also knows Milk Drink, so the last thing I'd want to do is encourage this thing to go for a more defensive strategy. Thankfully, Miltank eventually did lock herself into Rollout which starts out dealing low damage, so I was able to take her down with a consistent flow of damage! Keeping Ciel around really did prove to be an excellent choice indeed!

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

Of course, after making Whitney cry, we got our PlainBadge!

June 1, 2020

One last change in Goldenrod is the flower shop which is now more decorated to make it stand out more compared to the generic building it was in Gold and Silver. Now that we've beaten Whitney, the lady at the flower shop will lend us her Squirtbottle, allowing us to move on past route 36!

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

Of course, we can't advance without catching Sudowoodo! Other than the added factor of talking to the girl at the tree, the battle itself is unchanged from Gold and Silver.

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

On route 37, Growlithe was made much more common and Stantler was made a night-only encounter. In addition, Noctowl, Ledian, and Ariados were added at 5% rarities.

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

Ecruteak City has some more design changes from Gold and Silver which we'll cover in a bit more detail as they become relevant.

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

But first, we'll take a step into the Pokemon Center to meet Bill!

Once we meet with Bill, he'll return to his home in Goldenrod where you can talk to him and he'll give you an Eevee to take care of! This isn't actually anything new, you could always get an Eevee in this manner. What is new, is that Eevee will be joining our team this time! Say hello to Aeon!

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

Back in Ecruteak, I would normally make a beeline for the local gym. However, stepping inside we're met by this old man who tells us that the gym leader is absent and won't let us inside. That's strange, in Gold and Silver we could just walk right in! Where has Morty gone?

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

The answer is the burned tower which now has an updated tileset to actually reflect the fact that it was burned down. Previously, it looked just the same as any other tower, completely in tact, just a bit shorter.

Entering inside, we're met with a new character introduced in Crystal: Eusine! He's very enthusiastic about the legendary Pokemon Suicune and has been searching for it for years. He came to the tower with Morty to search for the legendary pokemon that are rumored to be here. But, unlike before, there is no sign of the legendary pokemon on the surface!

As we make our way to the center of the room, we find that we're not alone in this search as Silver is here searching for the very same legendaries!

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

His Haunter actually has options to fight back against Mercury with Mean Look and Curse, but it still goes down really easily.

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

His next pokemon was Magnemite. While I could probably take it out with Mud Slap, the Curse damage would probably be enough to take me out if I didn't get a lucky miss thanks to the accuracy drop, so instead I went for a switch.

Grarl was the obvious switch-in. Of course, at this point Magnemite went down really easily to a solid Ember.

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

Zubat was pretty much helpless against Grarl and went down pretty easily as well.

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

His Quilava, though, actually proved to be quite the pain. Obviously, Grarl wasn't going to be sticking around for much.

Leif came in with a Poison Powder to help wither his health away. I was planning on doing more, but he critted with an Ember.

Mercury came back out but luckily managed to Mud-Slap the rest of his health away.

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

During the battle, the floorboards must have been weakened, because immediately after the battle is over, the floor collapses underneathe you and you fall into... the hidden chamber below?

Lucky thing, too, because it's here that you discover the resting Legendary Beasts! They all scatter on sight, but Suicune strangely seems to take particular interest in you before running off with its comrades.

Eusine dug his way down after you and is shocked to see Suicune dash by. He tells you Suicune is said to test humans by allowing them to get close. Does this mean anything as to why it stopped to look at us?

Yes, as the cover of the game suggests, Suicune is what the majority of the changes in Crystal are centered around. This is the start of a brand new subplot revolving around Eusine's search for the Legendary Suicune.

We can now leave the Burned Tower and return to the lower floor through the hole dug by Eusine.

Outside of the tower, the old man who stopped us at the gym before now tells us the legend of the Burned Tower and the three pokemon who died there and were given life by Ho-oh.

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

Ecruteak Gym

As some people may have noticed, my team is rather ill-equipped for battling Ghost-types. While I have some outs to them, the majority of my team really can't do anything at all and that is not a good sign. This gym actually proved quite tough. I just used Grarl to bite my way through the majority of the opposition, but then came Morty...

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

My team:

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

Leif (Bayleef M); Lv. 20

Item: Miracle Seed

Moves: Tackle, PoisonPowder, Razor Leaf, Reflect

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

Mercury (Pidgeotto M); Lv. 21

Item: Bitter Berry

Moves: Quick Attack, Sand-Attack, Gust, Mud-Slap

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

Grarl (Growlithe M); Lv. 23

Item: Charcoal

Moves: Bite, Roar, Ember, Leer

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

Ciel (Cleffa F); Lv. 21

Item: Quick Claw

Moves: Pound, Charm, Dizzy Punch, Sing

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

Aeon (Eevee M); Lv. 20

Item: PSNCureBerry

Moves: Tackle, Tail Whip, Sand-Attack, Growl

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

I hope you're comfortable because this battle took me a looong time to get through. You can blame Morty's terrible decision making related to Mean Look for that one. I actually lost twice before this successful run, but this one took so long I could barely remember the context of any of my screenshots for the first two, I also forgot to take some shots during those attempts, so I just omitted them entirely.

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

I of course led with Grarl this time. Bite would make quick work of his first couple of pokemon.

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

His Haunter managed to survive a hit and was able to deal a little bit of damage with Night Shade, but otherwise went down without an issue as well.

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

Things seemed to be going well, and then came the infamous Gengar and this is where things went to shit. Obviously, Grarl was just a few Shadow Balls away from being KO'd. I decided to exploit his use of Shadow Ball rather than Dream Eater by switching out once Grarl's health was low.

Since this Gengar is so bent on using Sleep and Dream Eater, I figured the best course of action was to once again exploit the unreliable accuracy of hypnosis by making it even more unreliable thanks to Mud-Slap. I was able to get two Mud-Slaps off before being put to sleep with Hypnosis. His Dream Eater was easy to predict from there, so I switched out.

I switched into Ciel and went for Sing. It would require some luck, but if I could put this thing to sleep and switch back to Mercury, there was a chance I'd be able to wake up before it did and continue using Mud-Slap. In hindsight, it probably would have been a better idea to switch instead to Aeon and use Sand-Attack, but I had completely forgotten Aeon even knew Sand-Attack if I'm being honest.

Of course, Gengar did wake up before me and the reduced accuracy didn't take effect. He just used two Dream Eaters to finish off Mercury.

Aeon was next and this is where I was reminded of Sand-Attack. I started out with using Sand Attack to lower his accuracy and in the process, he used... Mean Look. It was a decent strategy here. Aeon was completely defenseless. The problem was, with his accuracy so low at this point, so was he. This battle rapidly devolved into rapidly draining the PP of all of our attacks until we were able to use Struggle, which does deal typeless damage in Gen II, so it would work here! HIs moves simply had much less PP than Aeon's did, though, so it didn't take long for Aeon to go down to a Struggle.

Since he was now reduced to struggling, it was as good of a time as ever to send out Leif and set up Reflect. A few turns later and I was able to finish it off with Razor Leaf.

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

If you thought the struggle (pun entirely intended) was over, you've got another thing coming. Leif was only able to deal so much damage to Haunter before going down.

The natural follow-up was to send Ciel out to put it to sleep so I could switch back to Grarl and finish the job. But, say it with me, he decided to use Mean Look.

Once again, both Ciel and Haunter were completely helpless against each other and had no choice but to drain the PP of all of their moves, ultimately leading to Ciel getting KO'd with Sruggle.

Grarl wasn't quite able to One-shot Haunter with Bite, but was thankfully able to take a hit from Struggle and finish the fight. Finally winning me the FogBadge. Surprisingly, this was the only time I ever struggled with Morty during these gen II playthroughs. It wasn't the consequence of any differences in Crystal, it was just a product of my poor planning for the early-game. It also didn't help that this time I had a Grass-type starter who is the only one resisted by all of his pokemon. It's no secret that Chikorita is the hard mode of Johto just like Charmander is for Kanto. Anyway, I can finally put this battle behind me!

June 2, 2020

With the FogBadge under our possession, it's time to move on! The Dancing Studio is unchanged from Silver, so there's no need to cover it here.

On Route 38, there are a few strange omissions. Snubbull is no longer available here but he's more common elsewhere now. Farfetch'd is also no longer available here. He isn't available until quite a bit later. Mewoth is no longer available during the day, but he is still available at night. Tauros and Miltank are now only available during the day, but Tauros has been boosted from 4% to 5% with Noctowl taking their nighttime slots at 10%. Magnemite is available here, as always, though!

This Beauty was also relocated. She used to be waiting inside the grass.

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

Route 39 shares the same changes as Route 38 so there isn't much to talk about here aside from some more trainer reolcations and the addition of a new Pokefan in the back corner of the grass who seems to only be interested in battling at night.

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

Olivine City

Of course, just like before, Olivine Gym is completely vacant when we first arrive here because, as our rival informs us once again, the gym leader is busy tending to the sick Ampharos at the top of the Lighthouse.

Olivine City features a slight redesign for Glitter Lighthouse that makes it appear more like an actual lighthouse rather than just a really tall house like in Gold and Silver. But before we enter the lighthouse, there is something I wanted to do here. After getting the Good Rod and the HM for Strength, I headed down to the harbor.

It's here that I started to fish for my next partner. At this point, you may have guessed exactly who that will be.

Say hello to Chie, the Chinchou! I'm not certain this pokemon will stick around to the end of the playthrough, but she'll certainly be giving our team a temporary boost in elemental diversity alon gwith another bit of help...

Because while fishing for a Chinchou, Ciel evolved into Clefairy!

With Ciel evolved, I was able to return to Goldenrod and buy the TM's for Ice Punch, ThunderPunch, and Fire Punch! I would normally teach it Return at this point as well, but I think Dizzy Punch has a right to stick around being a unique move and all. Plus a chance for confusion is always nice.

During this detour, I also got a call from Schoolboy Alan on Route 35 about a Fire Stone he wanted to give me! That's right, using the new phone calls, some trainers will now give you elemental stones! Strangely enough, this part seems to have been omitted from the Remakes. I can't really say I understand why.

And on my way back, I got a chance encounter with the legendary beast Raikou! Obviously I had no chance of catching this thing here, so I just tossed an Ultra Ball at it. Surprisingly enough, I actually got three shakes before it broke out!

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

Bakc in Olivine City, the Lighthouse is pretty much identical to the way it's always been, so I climbed the lighthouse and met with Jasmine. Now I needed to go to Cianwood to get the Secretpotion, you know the drill!

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

The encounters on Route 40 are all the same, but there is a special addition here in Crystal: The Battle Tower! This is another of the big new additions added to this version of the game. We'll cover it in a bit more detail once we're done with the Ampharos quest.

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

Aside from the presence of Mantine, there isn't anything noteworthy about the encounters on Route 41.

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

Cianwood City sees a slight redesign from Gold and Silver. We'll cover this in more detail soon as well. But for now, we're going to get the SecretPotion and make a beeline for the Gym so we can quickly fly our way back to Olivine!

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

Cianwood Gym

Once again, the gym is unchanged. Just power your way through a bunch of trainers who each use a low number of high-level pokemon. Nothing too dangerous aside from the first two trainers who will battle you in back-to-back battles with Hitmonlee and Hitmonchan.

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

My Team:

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

Leif (Bayleef M); Lv. 27

Item: MiracleSeed

Moves: Tackle, PoisonPowder, Razor Leaf, Reflect

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

Mercury (Pidgeotto M); Lv. 27

Item: Bitter Berry

Moves: Quick Attack, Sand-Attack, Gust, Mud-Slap

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

Grarl (Growlithe M); Lv. 26*

Item: Charcoal

Moves: Bite, Roar, Ember, Leer

*Left in storage for HM User

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

Ciel (Clefairy F); Lv. 27

Item: Quick Claw

Moves: Ice Punch, ThunderPunch, Dizzy Punch, Fire Punch

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

Aeon (Eevee M); Lv. 25

Item: PSNCureBerry

Moves: Quick Attack, Growl, Shadow Ball, Leer

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

Chie (Chinchou F); Lv. 26

Item: PSNCureBerry

Moves: Thunder Wave, Swagger, Spark, Surf

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

Vs. Cianwood Gym Leader Chuck

Chuck is just as much of a pushover as he's always been. This is very welcome after the disaster of a gym battle we went through in Ecruteak.

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

His Primeape get a couple crits with Karate Chop which unfortunately made Mercury defenseless, but I was able to get a Gust and Quick Attack off, taking out a huge chunk of its health.

From there, it was just up to Leif to set up Reflect before picking it off.

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

His Poliwrath does know Mind Reader, but he seems too impatient to ever use it effectively. In my experience, he always prefers to just spam Dynamic Punch. He did at one point go for Hypnosis and manage to hit a Dynamic Punch immediately as Reflect went down, taking Leif out entirely.

His health was already pretty low at this point, though. All it took was a quick Spark from Chie to finish the job.

And with that, I earned the StormBadge and with it, the ability to Fly!

June 3, 2020

Since there isn't a whole lot between gyms 5 and 6, I decided to make a quick clean-up operation detailing some changes I've glossed over up till now.

This new trainer I alluded to before can only be battled at night. She comments on a new mechanic I believe was introduced in Crystal. She mentions that she caught her Meowth here and that it grows friendlier when she trains here. Indeed, pokemon do gain happiness a lot faster in the areas where they were first caught or hatched. In case you forgot where exactly you met a certain pokemon, don't worry, there's a way to figure it out I'll cover in a bit.

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

When I first turned the game on today, I was called by Lass Dana who told me a boy gave her an item after battling with her and offered to share it with me. This item was a Thunderstone! With this, a certain pokemon is available much earlier in the game than ever before.

Using the ThunderStone, I evolved Aeon! Once again, this decision was a bit improvised. I was originally planning on evolving Aeon into an Espeon or an Umbreon and even brought it to get a haircut for that purpose. There's a problem with this, though. Unfortunately, Jolteon learns Thundershock at level 16 and, if you recall, we got this Eevee at level 20. Consequently, the only way we'll get an elemental attack on this thing is teaching it Thunder by TM. Otherwise, we'd have to wait all the way until level 52 where it would learn Thunder naturally. So...

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

The game corner in Goldenrod saw a slight redesign from its appearance in Gold and Silver. The games themselves are unchnaged.

The TM's are the same as they've always been, but as you can see, the pokemon available are different. Kind of screwed up that they're handing out Orphans as prizes for gambling, but we'll look the other way because there's no other way to get Thunder...

...which I may or may not have exploited the fact that I was using an emulator to cheat my way into getting Thunder a lot faster. I will neither confirm nor deny but, I mean, come on, why would I risk getting kicked out of this fine establishment?

In addition to teaching Aeon Thunder, I also taught Grarl Dig in preparation for the next gym battle.

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

The Battle Tower!

This is something we can technically do now but... Well, I'll just let my experience speak for itself.

You can enter only with a team of three pokemon and you choose the level of challenge you want to face in intervals of 10 and you cannot use pokemon higher level than the limit you chose. There are restrictions on what pokemon are legal up until level 70+. Said restrictions are the standard ones from Pokemon Stadium: Mewtwo, Mew, Lugia, Ho-oh, and Celebi. As you can probably tell from the way I'm describing this, this is very much akin to the Stadium Mode in Pokemon Stadium. Once you choose your level, you'll battle through a series of seven trainers and if you win all seven battles in a row, you'll be rewarded with five of a certain vitamin, making maxing out your pokemon's stats a much more viable option in Crystal.

That said, the Battle Tower itself is not a pushover. Like I said, it's just like Pokemon Stadium. These are pokemon with fully complete movesets and you'll be dealing with lots of Hyper Beams, Blizzards, etc. Odds are, you're probably not gonna be able to do much at all here until post-game. It's worth noting, though, that after you've entered the hall of fame, you can no longer participate in challenges below level 50 regardless of the level of your pokemon.

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

As mentioned before, Cianwood City has been expanded a bit northwards with the addition of a new house at the northernmost edge. This is the home of the Poke Seer. She will look at one of your pokemon in your party and tell you where you met it! If you're looking to quickly raise a certain pokemon's happiness, this is a great way to figure out where best to raise it. I'm still not sure this is totallly useful because I think it would usually just be faster to level your pokemon up a lot to raise its happiness that way, but I suppose if you're trying to evolve a happiness pokemon at as low a level as possible, this would be the way to do it.

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

Just east of the Poke Seer's house is this little Alcove where you'll first find Suicune standing. When you try to walk up to him, he'll jump past you and dash across the sea.

Immediately after, you are met by Eusine who tracked Suicune down all this way. He'll challenge you to a battle in order to earn Suicune's respect.

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

This battle isn't really worth going into detail about. Aeon was able to win the whole thing just by spamming Shadow Ball.

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

And that was everything I could think to cover up to this point, so now it's off to Olivine Gym which, just like before, has no trainers aside from the leader herself.

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

My Team:

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

Leif (Bayleef M); Lv. 27

Item: MiracleSeed

Moves: Tackle, PoisonPowder, Razor Leaf, Reflect

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

Mercury (Pidgeotto M); Lv. 27

Item: Bitter Berry

Moves: Quick Attack, Fly, Gust, Mud-Slap

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

Grarl (Growlithe M); Lv. 25

Item: Charcoal

Moves: Bite, Dig, Ember, Leer

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

Ciel (Clefairy F); Lv. 27

Item: Quick Claw

Moves: Ice Punch, ThunderPunch, Dizzy Punch, Fire Punch

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

Aeon (Jolteon M); Lv. 26

Item: PSNCureBerry

Moves: Quick Attack, Thunder, Shadow Ball, Growl

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

Chie (Chinchou F); Lv. 26

Item: PSNCureBerry

Moves: Thunder Wave, Swagger, Spark, Surf

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

Vs. Olivine Gym Leader Jasmine

The obvious lead against her Magnemite was Grarl. This was exactly why I taught Grarl Dig just now. In hindsight, this is a move I should have made a while ago, but I wasn't confident Grarl would be remaining on my team, so I held back on that decision. Anyway, Grarl used Dig to make quick work of Jasmine's Magnemite.

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

To answer the imminent threat, she sent out her Steelix next. While this still wasn't a favorable matchup for her, it was much better than Magnemite and she had a fighting chance here.

Anticipating a STAB Ground attack, I switched into Mercury only to be hit instead by a super-effective Rock Throw. If he was using a move like Rock Throw, though, it showed that his moves were lacking in accuracy, so out came the Mud-Slaps! I was able to survive quite a few hits before he finally managed to hit Mercury with an Iron Tail to take him out.

This thing was quite powerful, so I next wanted to set up Reflect with Leif as it only seemed to know physical attacks.

From there, I switched Chie into an Iron Tail which he did manage to land. Thankfully, due to my type resistance along with the Reflect, I was able to avoid any serious damage. Surf dealt a nice amount of damage before it set up Sunny Day and then Jasmine used a Hyper Potion on it. I've heard this Steelix be criticized for knowing Sunny Day, but this is exactly why it knows it: To weaken water attacks. After all, switching into a Fire Type means potentially switching into a Rock Throw. Surf was now getting me nowhere and with reflect faded, I didn't want to risk keeping Chie out, so I went for Swagger and then switched out.

Back into Leif, I set up another Reflect and started pelting Steelix with Razor Leaf. Eventually, it did succumb.

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

Last was her second Magnemite. There wasn't much for Leif to do here, so I switched out.

I figured Chie's electric typing would help it take one Thunderbolt, but this was a bad judgment on my part and Chie went down.

The obvious choice here would have been to send out Grarl, but I figured Ciel hasn't gotten much of a chance to shine since she evolved, so I decided to give her the spotlight here and with a Fire Punch, I finished the job!

And with that, the MineralBadge is ours!

June 4, 2020

On route 42, the Gold exclusive Mankey is actually not available. Of course, Mareep and Flaafy are still missing in action. In fact, just about everything that made this route stand out has been stripped away making it a pretty generic route to look for pokemon in. There are some evolved pokemon that are available for capture here, though.

Arbok, Fearow, Golbat, and Marill are all available to catch here, but all at pretty low rates. The former two available during the day and the latter available at night. But those nighttime pokemon are available much more easily inside Mt. Mortar which is also right here, so it doesn't make sense to hunt for them here.

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

And Mt. Mortar is one of the more significantly changed dungeons in Crystal. I didn't actually bother exploring it myself though because, just like Gold and Silver, it's really annoying to navigate with high encounter rates and is kind of inconsequential. If you don't hatch a Tyrogue from the Odd Egg, this is the only place you can get a Tyrogue but you need Waterfall in order to reach Kiyo. Other than that, there are a few really nice items here and there, and Crystal did make an effort to make the dungeon less annoying to navigate by replacing many of the one-way ledges. If you're exploring here, I strongly recommend using repels though because this place is huge and wild pokemon will get real annoying real fast.

As for new encounters, there isn't anything super significant. The only major difference is that Marill can now be found here at 5% at night while walking, but if you enter from the center entrance, you can find Marill at 30% while surfing during all hours! Marill is much more accessible here than in Gold and Silver, so if you really want one this is where to get it, but that said, I still say Marill and Wooper should have swapped places because Marill feels way too weak to use so late in the game.

If you're after Tyrogue, make sure you have the eighth gym badge and have a Waterfall user on your team as well as an empty slot or you'll have to come all the way back after making room for the pokemon.

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

In Mahogany Town, once again, the gym is blocked off until we complete the Team Rocket event.

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

Route 43 saw some more additions to the encounter list to make the area more diverse.

Venomoth can now be found here at night along with Furret and Sentret during the day. Raticate can also be found at 5% during the day and 25% during the night. Of course, Mareep and Girafarig are not obtainable.

Perhaps the most significant detail about this location is that Farfetch'd is finally available here. As previously stated, I was originally planning on using Farfetch'd on my final team in this playthrough, but finding a shiny Pidgey changed my mind on that deal. This where I originally would have been replacing my Pidgey.

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

The Lake of Rage doesn't seem to have any changes.

Once again, even the scripted Red Gyarados encounter is unchanged from the original.

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

The Rocket Hideout event is completely unchanged so once again I won't be detailing it, but during the raid, Chie evolved into Lanturn! She's been lingering around level 27 for a long time now so I'm glad she finally got her chance to shine. My team is quickly approaching a state of being fully evolved!

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

With the Rockets cleared out, it's time to get started on gym 7!

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

My Team:

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

Leif (Bayleef M); Lv. 28

Item: Miracle Seed

Moves: Tackle, PoisonPowder, Razor Leaf, Reflect

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

Mercury (Pidgeotto M); Lv. 28

Item: Bitter Berry

Moves: Quick Attack, Fly, Gust, Mud-Slap

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

Grarl (Growlithe M); Lv. 28

Item: Charcoal

Moves: Bite, Iron Tail, Ember, Leer

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

Ciel (Clefairy F); Lv. 29

Item: Quick Claw

Moves: Ice Punch, ThunderPunch, Dizzy Punch, Fire Punch

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

Aeon (Jolteon M); Lv. 28

Item: PRZCureBerry

Moves: Quick Attack, Thunder, Shadow Ball, Growl

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

Chie (Lanturn F); Lv. 28

Item: PSNCureBerry

Moves: Thunder Wave, Swagger, Spark, Surf

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

Starting out, I led with Aeon against Pryce's Seel. A quick Thunder was all it took to take the Seel down.

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

Obviously he wasn't going to sit back and let my Jolteon sweep his water-types, so he answered with Piloswine.

Expecting a Ground-type attack, I switched into Mercury only to be met by a Fury Attack instead. Thankfully, the hit missed and I was able to dodge a Blizzard with Fly. The next turn, though, Blizzard naturally took Mercury out.

From there, the most direct out I had was Ciel. A couple of Fire Punches was all it took to take Piloswine down, but of course not before he got a five-hit Fury Attack, eating away at half my health.

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

After a brief exchange of blows, his Dewgong was able to overcome Ciel with little damage sustained.

It just took a bit more of a push before Aeon was able to finish the job wiht Thunder!

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

And the seventh badge, the GlacierBadge, is now ours!

June 6, 2020

The last couple of update have kind of been the calm before the storm because between gyms seven and eight, as we all know at this point, there's a sizeable chunk of plot. In Crystal, this is pushed a bit further because of a new event that's made available to us here. Obviously, I'll cover this in detail when we get to it.

The Rocket Takeover at the radio tower is mostly unchanged, but there is this added bit of dialogue here where talking to Buena has her tell you today's pasword is "HELP, of course!" something about this bit always got a chuckle out of me.

Of course, after getting the basement key, we have to face off against our rival once again.

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

I opened up with Grarl, but after his Golbat confused it, I decided to switch into a more favorable matchup.

Chie was able to swtich into a Wing Attack which barely did anything and was able to take out the rest of Golbat's health with a Spark.

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

While I was pretty confident Chie could take out Magnemite with Surf, I really wanted Grarl to gain some levels because he was rapidly approaching the level I needed him to evolve at. However, I had incorrectly written in my notes that he could be evolved at level 30. In actuality, he'd have to wait until 34, so I wasn't quite as close as I thought.

I switched Grarl back into play and he was hit by a Thunder Wave but otherwise took care of Magnemite without an issue.

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

Haunter was on the receiving end of a Bite, but was able to push through and deal some heavy damage with Shadow Ball.

Anticipating another Shadow Ball, I took the opportunity to switch Ciel in under the cover of its normal typing and from there, taking Haunter out was a simple job.

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

Sneasel was a victim of circumstance. A surprise Fire Punch or two was enough to take him out without a problem. Though I do want to take a moment to point out that Sneasel is another pokemon whose sprite was recolored between Gold and Silver in order to more accurately portray its official art.

If you recall, this is what Sneasel's color palette looked like in Gold and Silver. In my opinion, the blue feathers more accurately reflect its ice typing, but I can't deny that the red feathers do make it look much cooler.

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

Of course, his Quilava was last. Ciel didn't have any strong attacks for it so I just went for Dizzy Punch to hope for a confusion. I didn't get it and it wouldn't take much for Ciel to go down so i switched.

Chie came out once again to take the Flame Wheel like a champ before washing Quilava out with a Surf and finishing the deal.

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

The rest of the takeover event plays out the same up until the director gives you the Clear Bell instead of Silver or Rainbow Wing with the same story about how the bell was found in the rubbel of the tower torn down for the Radio Tower. He then tells you that a big event seems to be taking place at the Tin Tower and urges you to go there.

THIS IS A TRAP

You do not want to go to the Tin Tower unless you're prepared to battle and catch Suicune. Right now we have a handful of Great Balls and nothing else. We're going to be pressing on for a bit until we can get our hands on more Ultra Balls.

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

Route 44 is home to some more slight encounter changes.

You can now find Poliwag and Poliwhirl here in the grass at night as well as the water, but more prominently, Lickitung is made much more common here being boosted from 15% to a whopping 40% at the cost of now only being available during daylight hours. This change I don't feel is too terribly important because I never felt Lickitung's 15% was particularly frustrating to search for, but if you're looking for a gen 2 lickitung, Crystal is the best place to go.

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

While battling my way through the trainers on this route, Leif evolved into a Meganium! That's one step closer to a fully-realized team!

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

Ice Path was given a complete visual overhaul. Where it was previously a vaguely ice-themed generic cave, it is now a brightly-lit ice cavern. The first of its kind! This is by far my favortie dungeon in Crystal with such a beautiful color palette!

In addition to a visual overhaul, the wild pokemon encounters were changed quite significantly as well. Delibird is now a 40% night-time counterpart to the now-daytime-only Swinub. But more significantly...

Sneael is now available in the basement floors, becomign more common the deeper in the cave you go with a 10% encounter rate at the third basement floor. Normally Sneasel is only available at Mt. Silver, so this is a great addition! That said, Sneasel still... seriously lacks in usefulness in gen 2 which is a shame because it's such a cool pokemon. But there is a future game where I do hope I'll have the opportunity to use Sneasel at its peak!

Jynx isn't made any rarer than it was before, but its rarity was adjusted to be more consistently available at its highest rarity. Instead of only being available after morning hours, it is now at its maximum 10% rarity during all daylight hours. But, like Sneasel, it gets more common the deeper in the cave you go. Any higher than B3F and you'll never find it at 10% anymore.

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

Here at Blackthorn City, we could go straight to the gym, but more importantly, we have access to the only store that sells Ultra Balls in all of Johto outside of temporary rooftop sales at the department store. Thanks to this, we can finally stock up on Ultra Balls and head off to Ecruteak to see what all the fuss is about!

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

When you first approach the Tin Tower, this monk initially tries to turn you away until he hears the sound of your Clear Bell. Once he recognizes your potential, he urges you to enter the tower and approach Suicune.

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

As you try to go to the Tin Tower, you're met by three Monks who challenge you to an endurance round of three battles in a row with no chance to heal in between. The battles aren't too tough, though. Each one just has a Noctowl and one of the Kanto Eevolutions. These monks start to dump a whole lot of lore on you surrounding Ho-oh, Lugia, and Suicune. This is where the lore seems to have changed from what I always interpreted to be the original intent that the Radio Tower was built in place of Lugia's Tower while the Burned Tower was the sight of the original tower for Ho-oh that was rebuilt as the Tin Tower to which Ho-oh never returned until the player arrived with the Rainbow Wing.

Here, the monks explain that the Burned Tower was where Lugia stood before the tower was struck by lightning and the legendary beasts Raikou, Entei, and Suicune were killed inside until Ho-oh came and brought life back to them. This contradicts my interpretation of the lore as presented in Gold and Silver. Perhaps it's a retcon, or perhaps I simply understood things incorrectly. Still, this makes the tower the Radio Tower was built in place of all the more mysterious. Why was it there? Who built it? What purpose did it serve? Why was it so unimportant that the people had no problems tearing it down yet still was important enough to house such an important legendary artifact as the Clear Bell?

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like we're getting any answers to those questions here. Instead, we're met with the very change that put Suicune on the cover of the game! After defeating the three monks, we're permitted entry into the Tin Tower.

Make sure you save before entering the tower.

When we first enter, we're met with the three Legendary Beasts and Suicune itself. Just like before, Raikou and Entei scatter and leave, but Suicune jumps at you and initiates battle. This battle is automatic. Suicune doesn't wait for you to approach like most legendaries. This is why I stress that you save before entering.

Suicune here comes at level 40 but thankfully Crystal removed the move Roar from its moveset, so you don't have to worry about that! Since this is a static encounter, it won't try to flee from you either so you can focus on standard legendary tactics to catch this thing. After paralyzing it with Chie and taking its health down with Spark and Razor Leaf from Leif, its health was low and I just started chucking Ultra Balls at it. It took all 30 of my ultra balls and still didn't get caught. Finally, I threw a Fast Ball and caught it on the first try! I'm not sure this means the Fast Ball was fixed or not from Gold and Silver, it very well may have been, but I still recommend using Ultra Balls just to be on the safe side as I can't find any confirmation onilne that this is the case. I may have very well just gotten lucky. It's not unprecedented as Chuggaaconroy rather infamously caught his Zapdos in FireRed in just a pokeball after using up all of his Ultra Balls on the same pokemon.

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

After battling Suicune, Eusine and the three monks come rushing in to congratulate you! The monks even allude that Ho-oh just might return to the tower now that the legendary beasts have gathered here.

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

And with Suicune caught, I suppose it's time to say that this is going to be our final party member! Again, I try not to rely too much on legendary pokemon, but I usually try to make room for the mascot legends on my team, especially when they're plot-relevant like Suicune is. This is the flagship pokemon of the game so it only makes sense to have it on my team. Now the problem arises... I have six pokemon on my team already and Suicune is a water type. Some of you might have been wondering why I decided to evolve Eevee into Jolteon when I already had Chie as my electric type and I'm sad to say... this is why. Chie has really pulled her weight on my team and honestly proven to be arguably my best pokemon, but my original plan for its role on my team was as an electric-user and that was before I realized Jolteon would be made available and I could get Thunder so easiy thanks to... I mean, I realized I had the will power to put the hard work and determination into legitimately earning my Thunder TM. *cough cough*

In all seriousness, though, I still do think Chie is a really good pokemon for type coverage and I'm not going to underestimate it going forward. Maybe I'll use another Chinchou in a future playthrough, we'll have to see. Until then, though, I'm thinking Aurora will be our new water-type because it comes with a boon Chie doesn't get as a water-type: Ice attacks. And I made sure to feed this thing a rare candy before going into the next gym so that it could learn Aurora Beam because it was going to be a huge help.

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

Blackthorn Gym

Once again, Blackthorn Gym is entirely unchanged from Gold and Silver so there's not much to say. You need a strength-user to push the boulders down the holes but after that you can leave it in the PC and come back and the boulders will still be in place.

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

My Team:

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

Leif (Meganium M); Lv. 33

Item: Quick Claw

Moves: Body Slam, Poison Powder, Razor Leaf, Reflect

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

Mercury (Pidgeotto M); Lv. 32

Item: Bitter Berry

Moves: Quick Attack, Fly, Gust, Mud-Slap

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

Grarl (Growlithe M); Lv. 32

Item: Charcoal

Moves: Bite, Iron Tail, Ember, Leer

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

Ciel (Clefairy F); Lv. 34

Item: Pink Bow

Moves: Fire Punch, ThunderPunch, Dizzy Punch, Ice Punch

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

Aeon (Jolteon M); Lv. 32

Item: PRZCureBerry

Moves: Quick Attack, Thunder, Shadow Ball, Double Kick

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

Aurora (Suicune); Lv. 41

Item: NeverMeltIce

Moves: Surf, Aurora Beam, Rain Dance, Gust

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

Vs. Blackthorn Gym Leader Clair

Leading off against her first Dragonair was Ciel. Thanks to Ice Punch, I was able to whittle down most of her health, but Dragon Rage really tore through my HP!

With its health low, Mercury was able to finish it quickly with a Quick Attack.

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

With the next Dragonair, I quickly switched out knowing Mercury wasn't going to be able to do much damage.

Anticipating a Thunder, I switched into Leif to resist it. Instead, Dragonair went for Thunder Wave which thankfully missed. It actually went for Thunder Wave again and missed again! WIth a couple of Body Slams, I was able to finish this dragonair off.

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

For the next Dragonair, I switched into Aurora and took an Ice Beam. From there, Aurora beam was able to make quick work of the last Dragonair.

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

Last but not least was the infamous Kingdra. Its only weakness is Dragon which, outside of Hidden Power and trading, is entirely unobtainable up to this point. A few Dragonbreaths and a hyper beam later and Aurora wasn't able to hold up against it.

With Aeon, all it took was a couple of Thunders to finish it off. Since it used Hyper Beam, I got a free two hits from this deal.

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

Of course, even after defeating Clair, you still don't get the gym badge. You have to jump through some extra hoops here. However, in Crystal version, the trial she assigns you is a bit different. Instead of retrieving the Dragon Fang from the Dragon's Den, she tells you to visit the Dragon Shrine and take the monks' test.

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

Dragon's Den iteself is now populated with a handful of trainers, making it feel much less empty, but it still feels a little lacking. The actual geography of this area is mostly unchanged so you still don't get much room to walk around and listen to the music. Regardless, this area definitely feels much more important than ever before. It seems that skilled trainers come here with permission from town elders to take tests for permission to train Dragon Pokemon.

The Dragon Shrine, which previously was just a building with no door, is now accessible with a new patch of land in front of it.

Inside, you're met by three monks who test you on your abilities as a trainer. Just giving the obviously not wrong choices will get you the best result. We'll go over just what that "best result" refers to.

After passing the test, Clair will come barging in on the assumption that you failed because she's never been able to pass. She's of course shocked to learn that you passed so easily.

She still refuses to surrender the badge to you, but when she's scolded by the monk who threatens to tell Lance, the only trainer she fears, she'll give in and finally reward you with the RisingBadge.

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

After leaving the shrine, Clair will approach you to apologize and give you the TM for DragonBreath, which I prompty taught to Grarl.

Instead of leaving the Dragon's Den, though, you can head back inside the Shrine and the Monk will have a reward for you!

You will always be rewarded with a level 15 Dratini. If you answered with all right answers, you'll have a special Dratini that comes with the move ExtremeSpeed!

I've previously named Dratini Darnius, Dratz, and Dangry. To fit with the naming conventions, I decided to get a little more edgy here and named this one, the greatest of all Dratini, Damnium. That said, I won't actually be using Damnium since I've already used Dragonair and Dragonite in previous playthroughs and, in all honesty, ExtremeSpeed isn't really that super interesting of a move for Dragonair to begin with.

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

If you're interested, you can also still find the Dragon Fang in the same location as in Gold and Silver, it's just no longer a required pickup for this trial.

June 6, 2020

South of Blackthorn, Route 45 now features both Gligar and Skarmory. Phanpy is still available here along with the additional Donphan. Skarmory, Phanpy and Donphan are all available only during the day while Graveler is more common during the night.

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

Teddiursa is no longer available on Route 45, but have no fear because it and Urasring are still available in Dark Cave, and they're more common on this end.

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

Along the way down Route 45, Grarl finally learned Flame Wheel, so I let him evolve. Similarly, while I thought I'd have to wait out a bit more time to get a Moon Stone, when I went to the PC to retrieve my Fire Stone, it turns out my mom had actually gotten a Moon Stone for me and stored it in my PC! Because of this, I went ahead and evolved Ciel as well!

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

Before moving on to the Pokemon League, I decided to take a moment and revisit the Ruins of Alph. Now that we have surf and strength, we can visit all of the remaining chambers.

The first one, the Aerodactyl chamber in the Southeast, has the engravings "Light". Simply using Flash here will open the secret passage.

Inside are four more items including the Moon Stone we would use if we didn't get one randomly before. The other items include a Gold Berry, an Energy Root, and more Heal Powder.

The engravings on the chamber below read

"Thus we shall erect a pokemon statue outside."

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

The Omanyte chamber in the Southwest which requires a trip through Union Cave using Surf and Strength to push a boulder out of the way is home to an engraving that says "Water." We're going to need a Water Stone to solve this puzzle, which we currently lack. So we'll have to come back here later.

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

The Ho-oh chamber in the Northwest which also requires a different entrance from Union Cave comes with the fitting engraving "Ho Oh". Clearly, we're going to have to come back here after capturing Ho-oh.

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

Now that we've made that detour, it's off to the pokemon league! On Route 27, there are only minor changes to wild pokemon encounters. Nothing new was added, but you can no longer catch Sandslash here and Arbok is present.

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

On Route 26, Sandslash can be encountered! Other than that, it's pretty much the same story as Route 27. Nothing much to say.

It's on this route where Mercury evolved into Pidgeot! And with this evolution, I do believe my entire team is fully evolved!

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

Victory Road is home to most of the same pokemon, but neither Ursaring nor Donphan will be found here.

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

I'm going to preface this by swearing that I am not using any sort of hacks during this playthrough because my luck here is pretty unbelievable.

While battling my way through Victory Road, I visited the Pokemon Center to swap out pokemon since I had to make room for an HM user. It was here that I learned my pokemon had contracted Pokerus! In case you're unaware, Pokerus is a virus that has no negative repercussions on pokemon that contract it. Rather, it actually strengthens their bodies and allows them to grow much stronger much faster. This is actually even rarer than a shiny pokemon! After every battle, your pokemon has approximately a 1-in-22,000 chance to contract the virus compared to the rough 1-in-9,000 chance for a random shiny. This is a very rare sight indeed and considering this is the same save I found a shiny pokemon in, I can't even begin to guess the odds of that! Unfortunately, this is on emulator so I have no chance of transferring this information to a full console. This would have been such a huge help in Gold or Silver!

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

Back at Victory Road, it's time to battle our rival once again! Aeon is pretty well built to single-handedly sweep the majority of his team.

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

Double Kick was enough to make quick work of Sneasel thanks to the quad-weakness.

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

Double Kick turns Magneton into a two-turn kill.

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

Shadow Ball makes quick work of Haunter thanks to its low physicial defense.

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

Kadabra as well is no match for Aeon's immense speed.

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

Sadly, the sweep stops here with Typhlosion as I don't really have a direct counter to it. If I had Thunder Wave, I could resort to that, but that's sadly not an option.

Aurora was able to easily switch into a Flame Wheel from Typhlosion with little damage and Surf was all it took to finish the job.

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

From there, Golbat went down with a couple of Aurora Beams.

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

And with that, Silver was defeated once again!

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

And now we've arrived. It's time to take on the Elite Four! Once again, I want to avoid grinding if I can. So after stocking up on Revives and Full Restores, I'm going to be throwing myself right at the Elite Four right here.

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

My Team:

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

Leif (Meganium M); Lv. 38

Item: Quick Claw

Moves: Earthquake, Poison Powder, Razor Leaf, Reflect

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

Mercury (Pidgeot M); Lv. 36

Item: Bitter Berry

Moves: Quick Attack, Fly, Wing Attack, Mud-Slap

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

Grarl (Arcanine M); Lv. 36

Item: Charcoal

Moves: DragonBreath, Iron Tail, Flame Wheel, Take Down

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

Ciel (Clefable F); Lv. 37

Item: Pink Bow

Moves: Ice Punch, ThunderPunch, Duzzy Punch, Fire Punch

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

Aeon (Jolteon M); Lv. 37

Item: PRZCureBerry

Moves: Quick Attack, Thunder, Shadow Ball, Double Kick

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

Aurora (Suicune); Lv. 41

Item: PRZCureBerry

Moves: Aurora Beam, Surf, Rain Dance, Gust

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

[Note: It took several tries to actually defeat the Elite Four, so I actually forgot to take some screenshots]

Elite Four #1: Will

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

I led with Ciel whose Ice Punch was pretty convenient to deal with Will's leading Xatu.

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

Will's answer was his Jynx. I would have surprised it with Fire Punch, but he managed to land a Lovely Kiss on me, stopping my counter attack. Unfortunately, I remained asleep long enough for his powerful Psychic attacks to take me out.

Thankfully, ol' reliable Aeon was able to make quick work of her.

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

Exeggutor's bulk gave it a solid fighting chance against Aeon, but thankfully it wasted its first turn going for Leech Seed, so I was able to build up enough damage with Shadow Ball to take it out with Aeon still raring to go.

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

Slowbro went down to a single Thunder.

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

His strongest Xatu went down to yet another single Thunder.

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

And with that, Will was done.

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

Elite Four #2: Koga

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

Once again against Koga, I decided to lead with Ciel. Fire Punch was able to make quick work of Ariados despite its Double Teams.

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

Venomoth managed to get off a SuperSonic and got a lucky coin flip for me to hit myself. This bought it enough time to set up Toxic before I took it out with Fire Punch.

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

His next choice was Forretress which unfortunately used Protect to defend against Ciel's Fire Punch for a turn. Thankfully, Ciel was able to survive the round of poison and took it out in one hit the next turn.

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

Koga's Muk is probably his biggest threat. I decided to let Ciel take a risk and try to confuse it with Dizzy Punch, unfortunately with no luck before getting taken down by poison.

Leif came out next and got a few Earthquakes in to finish Muk off.

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

Crobat managed to finish off Leif, but Aeon came along and shocked it right out of the skies with Thunder, finishing the fight!

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

Elite Four #3: Bruno

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

Most of Bruno's pokemon have pretty simple counters. Mercury took care of Hitmontop just fine.

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

Onix took the switch-in opportunity to set up a Sandstorm which I immediately shut down with Rain Dance before raising the tides with Surf.

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

Thanks to the boost of rain, Aurora was able to make quick work of Hitmonchan. Unfortunately, his ThunderPunch did manage to get a lucky paralysis on Aurora.

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

Thanks to the paralysis, Aurora was only able to get a single Surf in against Hitmonlee before getting taken out.

Thankfully, Mercury was able to seal the deal with Wing Attack!

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

Lastly comes Bruno's Machamp which actually is pretty scary thanks to its Rock Slide. Luckily, between two Fly attacks and a lucky miss with Rock Slide, the type coverage didn't prove to be an issue and I was able to finish him off.

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

Elite Four #4: Karen

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

Leading against Umbreon, I set up a Reflect and started Earthquaking away. Umbreon can take some pretty solid hits, so it took a little while to get through. I didn't quite get to finish it off thanks to confusion.

Thankfully, Leif was able to weaken it enough so that Mercury could come in with the Quick Attack to finish it off.

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

Against Gengar, I pretty stupidly went for a Fly despite the obvious Curse that would be coming. Still, I was able to land the hit and take it out despite losing half my health to Curse.

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

I switched Grarl into a Stun Spore from Vileplume before Flame Wheeling away at Vileplume to take it out.

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

Murkrow came along and unfortunately, Grarl couldn't do much to it being paralyzed.

Thankfully, Aurora came in to pick up the slack.

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

Lastly came Houndoom whose powerful Crunch dealt some pretty significant damage to Aurora but thankfully the damage wasn't enough to save it from a Surf which took it out in one shot!

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

And with that, Karen and the last of the Elite Four was defeated.

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

My team was admittedly a little unprepared in terms of power, but a little hard work was all it should need to finish the fight!

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

The Champion's room was slightly redesigned to more accurately reflect Lance's relation to Dragons.

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

Pokemon League Champion Lance

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

Once again, Ciel was my lead. While it couldn't outspeed Gyarados, it was able to take a solid hit and ThunderPunch was still strong enough to one-shot it thanks to the quad-weakness. In adition, Ice Punch would give it a solid leg up on the following Dragonite, too. After losing this battle a few times, this was the strategy I settled on. In this run, Gyarados opened with Rain Dance which wasn't to help it so much as the Thunder of the Dragonite to follow up.

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

Naturally, his follow-up was a Dragonite that knew Thunder. Naturally, he was able to take out Ciel with ease, but Aeon could also take advantage of the rain! With a few Thunders of my own, I was able to take out his first Dragonite!

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

His next Dragonite quickly followed suit and I proceeded with the same strat. Of course, the rain didn't last much longer and Dragonite managed to take me out with Hyper Beam.

Unfortunately I misclicked and accidentally sent out Grarl instead of Aurora as intended! Still, it could have been worse as DragonBreath wasn't a bad out and I was able to finish it off after it used Thunder Wave on me.

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

With Aerodactyl as the follow-up, there was absolutely no way Grarl would be of any help here paralyzed, so I had to give in to the Rock Slide.

From my prior experiences, I actually assumed I was going to lose here because of my misclicks, so I didn't take any screenshots for a little bit and got a bit sloppy with my choices.

I was desperate to keep Suicune with as little damage as possible, so I sent out Leif to set up Reflect and hopefully soften up Aerodactyl a bit.

I also used Mercury to continue dealing out the damage.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to avoid the harsh damage from Hyper Beam that I was trying to avoid. Thankfully, I was able to take a Hyper Beam thanks to Reflect and used Surf to finish Aerodactyl off.

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

Next up was Dragonite whose Outrage did some really heavy damage. It was at this point where I decided I would go ahead and use a Full Restore to make up for my misclick earlier. After the Full Restore, I was able to finish off Dragonite with a second Aurora Beam.

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

Charizard was his last opponent and while on the surface this matchup seems favorable, that quickly turned on its head. Lance's Charizard outsped me and was able to take quite a few hits. It opened up with a Hyper Beam. I took advantage of the free turn with a second Surf and it still survived! The game was in the bag, though, I was able to take one more Hyper Beam and...

...he critted...

...Thankfully, Aurora held out with just one HP!

With just 1 HP remaining on my final pokemon, this was certainly a battle for the ages! And with that, I finally finished the game!

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

After defeating Lnace, the ending plays out all the same and we're registered in the hall of fame!

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

This was definitely the sloppiest team I've ever used in a Gen 2 playthrough, mostly due to the fact that I was constantly changing my plans around throughout the entire game. I also focused on pokemon that I wanted to use in previous playthroughs but just never found the room for. While I don't think this team is particularly weak, I did struggle greatly due to most of them not really getting their best moves until post game. Hopefully that will mean I'll have an easier time against Blue and Red but until then, it is what it is.

Of course, as always, we're not done with Crystal just yet. There's still Kanto and some more cleanup to do in Johto now that we have the Elite Four completed a few more events open up for us, so next time we'll be focusing on those! Until then, enjoy the credits!

June 8, 2020

As for what our "Cleanup" of Johto entails, we won't be getting around to all of it just yet. Some of the content I expected to be able to get right now it turns out we'll have to wait a bit for. But one thing we do have access to, effective immediately after entering the Hall of Fame, is the Move Tutor! Pokemon Crystal is the first game to feature a Move Tutor. These NPC's going forward typically appear in these "third-version" games or remakes and usually serve the role of teaching pokemon moves that were once TM's but no longer are. Like TM's, these tutors usually are single-use, but that's only partially the case here.

Outside of GoldenRod's Game Corner, only on Wednesday and Saturday, you'll find Bill's father: A gambling addict who spends all his money on coins inside. Where does that sound familiar? nervously laughs in porygon.

Anyway, we can feed his gambling addiction further by paying him 4000 coins and he'll teach us one of three very, very helpful moves that I certainly would have loved to have access to in Stadium 2. Just saying.

Anyway, we'll first need to get ourselves 4,000 coins. So, once again, I'm going to exploit my incredible luck and not at all the features of my emulator to rack up 4,000 coins pretty quickly.

After risking getting kicked out of the Game Corner a second time, I went back to Bill's father and taught Flamethrower to Grarl! I'll probably teach Thunderbolt to Aeon to follow up and then Ice Beam to Aurora before finally teaching Ice Beam to Ciel. There's a problem with this plan though. I repeat that Bill's Father only appears on Wednesday and Saturday. Beyond that, he will only teach you one move before entering the building and he won't be available until the next Wednesday or Saturday. A sad truth indeed. Odds are, we're probably going to be finished with our playthrough by the time it gets to that point, but I might be able to pad out some time with some revisits to other games such as finishing the Pokedex in Gold.

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

The next thing I wanted to do was explore the remaining chambers in the Ruins of Alph, but that's going to need to wait a little longer. There's no easy way to get a Water Stone at the moment, but my pokemon are at a very convenient level to start taking steps toward catching Ho-oh. We can technically catch Ho-oh before moving on in the story, but it'll be much easier once Aeon learns Thunder Wave. Thing is, Aeon learns Thunder Wave at level 43, which is higher level than what I need it to be for the first steps.

At first, I thought making Ho-oh appear was as simple as entering the Hall of Fame, but apparently this is incorrect. In Crystal, Ho-oh requires you to capture all three Legendary Beasts on your save file. It isn't enough to have the pokemon registered in your pokedex. You have to have actually caught them yourself. If you KO'd any of them, or failed to catch Suicune during your first and only encounter with it, Ho-oh will never appear. This is absolutely cruel considering the huge trap that Suicune was already. Once you KO these beasts, there is no way to get them to respawn.

Anyway, armed with the knowledge of what I had to do, I went out tracked down the legendary Beasts to catch them once again which thankfully didn't take too much time because I was playing on an ~~emulator~~ extremely lucky day. Hey, I already caught all three of these legitimately, I'll have plenty more roaming legends to deal with in the future!

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

With all three beasts captured, I decided it was time to move on to Kanto. I'll come back to Johto at a more convenient time, but right now, I wanted to do some quick work in Kanto to make things accessible. Long story short, I quickly did the Power Plant quest and got myself the Rail Pass. I also cleared out the way to Mt. Moon and visited the Department Store in Celadon mistakenly assuming that I'd be able to buy Water Stones there. You actually can't buy evolutionary stones like a thought... oops. There are other ways to get Water Stones which I will be looking into soon. For now though, I'll be covering some of the differences in Kanto that I passed by in the process of all of this. I also got the TM for Psychic from Saffron and taught it and Solar Beam to Ciel in place of Fire Punch and ThunderPunch. Admittedly, Solar Beam is arguably a better move for Leif, but technically Meganium can learn Solar Beam naturally at level 61. It's not gonna reach that point, but that is a thing. I also got the TM for Steel Wing from Rock Tunnel and taught it to Mercury. Lastly, I got the TM for Sunny Day from the Dept. Store in Celadon for Leif. Since there are so many routes I ran through so quickly, I won't be going into too much detail and just be highlighting particularly significant changes to wild pokemon, such as pokemon that were previously unavailable up to this point.

Starting with route 6, we can see that they actually made an effort to add more trainers to the empty routes of the Kanto region to make it feel more alive.

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

Of course, you still have to interrupt Misty's date at Cerulean Cape in order to challenge her gym. I'll go ahead and knock that out.

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

This isn't anything new, but thanks to the puzzle in Ruins of Alph, it's given a bit more significance. In Bill's house, you can find his grandfather who will request you show him various pokemon in a sequence.

He'll first ask to see a Lickitung. Bringing him one will earn you an Everstone.

Next, he'll ask for a Growlithe in Crystal; a Vulpix in Silver since Growithe is unobtainable. Here, you'll get a Fire Stone.

Then comes pichu for a Thunder Stone

Next is Staryu for a Water Stone which can be used for the aforementioned puzzle at Ruins of Alph. I'll be doing this if I can't get a Water Stone from Fisher Tully before the end of Kanto.

If you continue past this point, you can earn a Leaf Stone for showing him an Oddish.

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

In the grass of Route 9, 10, and in Rock Tunnel, you can find Marrowak instead of only Cubone in Rock Tunnel.

On Route 7, Houndour was made much more common: From 5% to 20%!

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

While it's not much of a difference from Gold and Silver, it's worth noting the Silver Wing can be obtained from the Old man who in Gold and Silver gave you the Silver Wing in Gold or the Rainbow Wing in Silver.

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

The last stop I made was in Mt. Moon where I was ready to challenge Silver once again.

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

Once again, Sneasel went down easily to double kick.

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

Magneton, too, went down to a few Double Kicks but not before paralyzing Aeon.

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

Gengar could have gone down easily to a Shadow Ball, but of course, it got the parafusion on me and I wasn't able to attack through it once.

Of course, Leif's Earthquake was all it took to take it out.

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

Of course, out came Golbat next and this was no matchup for Leif to stick around for.

I switched Aurora into a Confuse Ray before taking Golbat out with a few Aurora Beams.

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

Alakazam was able to finish Aurora off with Psychic thanks to Aurora's confusion stopping its attacks.

Leif came back out to exercise its newly learned Light Screen before finishing Alakazam off with Earthquake!

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

In a dream world, Leif would have been able to finish Typhlosion off. And thanks to Light Screen, it very well could have had it not been for the excessive damage from Alakazam.

I switched Ciel into a Flame Wheel which, thanks to Light Screen, dealt very little damage. Psychic was able to do a sizeable chunk of damage before Light Screen wore off and Typhlosion was able to finish Ciel off.

Last but not least, Grarl was able to outspeed with DragonBreath and finish the job!

June 8, 2020

Kanto Gym Leaders

For this post, I'll once again make one long post and edit it frequently as I defeat each of the Kanto gym leaders. This time since I ended the last post with battling Silver, I'll be starting from Pewter Gym and moving up in the same order as gen 1.

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

Pewter Gym Leader Brock

Obviously Brock's team was almost entirely weak to Ciel's Ice Punch and I tried Solar Beam against Omastar, but it had Protect, so I had to switch into Leif who finished the rest of the battle effortlessly earning me the BoulderBadge.

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

Cerulean Gym Leader Misty

Misty's got some decent coverage against Grass-types. Thankfully, a Light Screen, Sunny Day, and Switch into Clefable can get me some strong special defenses and powerful Solar Beams off. Lapras was able to force a switch with Perish Song and Starmie caught me by surprise with an Ice Beam against Leif, but other than that, the battle went pretty smoothly, earning me the CascadeBadge!

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

Vermilion Gym Leader Lt. Surge

Surge's gym battle is designed to be the first you battle and it shows. His entire team can be swept effortlessly with Earthquake and all he really has to defend himself is Double Team. With Leif, I was able to sweep his team and earn the ThunderBadge!

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

Celadon Gym Leader Erika

Much like Lt. Surge, Erika is very easy to sweep. Grarl was able to burn all her grass-types out with Flamethrower earning me the RainbowBadge!

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

Fuchsia Gym Leader Janine

Jasmine may be my favorite of the Kanto Gym Leaders, but her team doesn't protect itself well. Ciel was once again able to sweep the entire team without a problem using Psychic, earning me the SoulBadge

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

Saffron Gym Leader Sabrina

Sabrina's team was a bit less vulnerable to sweeping. Thanks to Mr. Mime's Barrier and Alakazam's Reflect, her pokemon can soak up quite a few hits from Shadow Ball. Still, Aeon was able to sweep the team regardless of her defensive tactics to earn my MarshBadge!

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

Cinnabar Gym Leader Blaine

Blaine's gym is as simple as ever. Aurora was able to wash it all away with Surf earning me the Volcano Badge.

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

Since Blue happens to be the strongest of the Gym Leaders, I think it's fair to give him his own section. Next time I think I'll focus on tracking down the remaining legendaries back in Johto.

June 9, 2020

Ceanup Round 2

Now that we've explored more of the world and leveled our team a bit more, I think now is a good time to finish our cleaup including some of the last few changes to this game.

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

First, we're gonna start with sommething that's not really new to Crystal but that I never really got around to doing in Gold or Silver. On Monday nights, you can come to Mt. Moon Square to see the Clefairy dancing around a meteorite. Using Rock Smash on this meteorite will reward you with a Moon Stone! This is a renewable source of obtaining Moon Stones so for Pokedex completion, you may be interested in revisiting this area every week until you have all the Moon Stones you need.

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

The Whirl Islands aren't actually all that frustrating to navigate as long as you know what you're getting into. With a Psyduck knowing Waterfall, Flash, and Strength, you don't actually need multiple HM users. I still think this is a pretty annoyingly designed dungeon as not many pokemon can learn that unique combination of HM's. Additionally, if you haven't explored the islands before or followed a map, you would have no way of knowing how many islands there are as far as I can tell and the encounter rates and sheer number of trainers surrounding the islands make it extremely annoying to look around. It's annoying, but armed with knowledge of our previous expedition, it's not nearly as bad as it was before.

Of course, we've come to put our Silver Wing to use! We've come to challenge Lugia!

In Pokemon Silver, Lugia is available around the time Suicune is available here and, like Suicune, it was level 40. In Gold, it was level 70. Here in Crystal, both Ho-oh and Lugia are level 60. The only requirement to battle Lugia is to obtain the Silver Wing by talking to the old man in Pewter City. I decided to do this one first since I feel Lugia is the easier of the two to meet the requirements for.

Actually catching Lugia is a bit of a hassle. At level 60, it knows Recover so you're constantly going to be attacking it to weaken it. Thankfully, Aeon is assisted by its Rain Dance but once Aeon gets KO'd, it's down to the others to finish the job. Thankfully, this is no roaming legendary and you don't have to worry about it fleeing. Just pelting it with Ultra Balls is the way to go.

In the end, I was of course able to catch the legendary guardian of the sea.

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

Returning to the Tin Tower after defeating the Elite Four, this monk will tell you that the tower shook and he will excitedly exclaim that Ho-oh must have returned!

I never actually thoroughly explored the bottom floor of the Tin Tower before, but I wouldn't have gotten very far. There are no stairs available for you to access the next floor. On the opposite side of the pillar in the center of the tower, there will be a Monk standing against the wall. In order to climb the tower, you'll need to obtain the Rainbow Wing from him for "protection."

In order to be worthy of the Rainbow Wing, as mentioned before, you'll need to catch all three of the legendary beasts Raikou, Entei, and Suicune. I repeat, they cannot simply be in your pokedex. They must have been caught by you. Simply trading them over from another save won't do.

Once you've met the requirements, the monk will give you the Rainbow Wing before revealing the hidden staircase that leads to the upper floors. The rest of the tower seems unchanged from Gold and Silver.

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

And at the top, of course we'll come face to face with the legendary bringer of life: Ho-oh!

Once again, Ho-oh at level 60 knows Recover, so catching it can be a bit of a pain. In addition, Sunny Day decreases the accuracy of Thunder, so Aeon isn't going to be nearly as useful past using Thunder Wave to paralyze it. Thankfully, Aurora is able to bring the storms and drown out its clear skies. Just keep chucking Ultra Balls while its health is reasonably low and it'll eventually be caught.

It took me three whole tries, but I was eventually able to capture Ho-oh myself!

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

After catching Ho-oh, returning to the Tin Tower, you'll find Eusine who will congratulate you on catching Ho-oh!

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

Next, I wanted to finish off the Ruins of Alph. But, of course, I'm still lacking the Water Stone. Again, there are two ways to get one. I can either wait out the days until Fisher Tully randomly decides to call me and give me a Water Stone as a gift, or I can go through the quest with Bill's grandfather. The problem with that is, that quest is actually pretty tedious. It would require me to not only wait until tomorrow since it was already night time when I got around to playing and Lickitung is only available during the day, but it would require me to catch a second Growlithe and breed a Pikachu before even being able to get myself a Water Stone by bringing him a Staryu. Obviously, I could just do this and it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but for the sake of convenience, I decided to do something that may come off as a bit controversial...

I found a cheat code that allows you to modify the items sold in pokemarts. Now, I must stress that I will usually avoid using cheat codes as much as I possibly can, especially during this series, in order to get the most genuine experience I can. This is the first time in the entire series I've used a cheat code and I only did it in the interest of convenience so that I wouldn't have to wait until tomorrow to finish my cleanup. I don't feel this is totally cheating for a handful of reasons:

1. I could technically have already gotten a Water Stone at any point that I got a non-scripted Pokegear Call after getting Fisher Tully's number simply by being luckier.

2. There is a way to adjust the system clock in-game using dev tools that were left in. This requires a randomly generated key based on your Trainer ID, but there are tools out there that let you find the password associated with your unique save file. I could use this to adjust the time in-game, or just adjust the time on my computer in order to advance time and make the pokemon available, but I think this option feels just as much like cheating as using a code or glitch.

3. The Water Stone is not being hacked directly into my inventory. I have to buy it for the standard price of 2100P. This means I'm not simply getting it for free.

4. I'm not getting any unfair advantage by hacking this option in. I have no use for the Water Stone other than exploring the Ruins of Alph and the items I get from that really are more than likely not going to see any use at all anyway. The only reason I'm going out of my way to do this is to share with you guys the extra lore added in Crystal.

5. I think it's pretty stupid that they tied something as menial as this to such an obscure item in the game. It's also pretty stupid that you can't simply buy the Evolutionary Stones in Gen 2 period. It's kind of absurd, really, just how rare these items are.

With all that said, I did use the cheat code and purchased the Water Stone from a mart before immediately turning the code off and deleting it.

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

With the Water Stone in my back, I stepped into the Omanyte Chamber and immediately on entry, the engraving broke open to reveal the secret passage once again.

Inside, there was a MysteryBerry, a Mystic Water, a Star Piece, and some Stardust. Like I said, none of these items are especially useful and this is the only gameplay benefit of doing this. Of course, this chamber wouldn't be complete without another pitfall into a secret chamber with a new message.

"They possess great insight and refuse the outside world."

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

With Ho-oh at the lead of the party, entering the Ho-oh chamber gives us the same effect as the Omanyte chamber. The secret passage opens right away.

Back here, there is a Gold Berry, an additional MysteryBerry, another Charcoal, and a Revival Herb.

And, as expected of such a requirement as having caught a legendary pokemon, the secret chamber here comes with the largest message of all the chambers, spanning multiple screens vertically.

"We humans must learn to walk in harmony with them."

"We depart for their sake."

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

So, to put this lore dump together, let's pull the images of each chamber from Bulbapedia and peace together each one.

"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 sake."

It is unclear exactly what these messages are referring to. All known information surrounding these ruins seem to point to these words being left by an ancient people who mysteriously disappeared. It's unclear who "They" referrs to, nor the "Pokemon statue," though that can be implied to reference the many mysterious pokemon statues throughtout the ruins. There is no single Pokemon statue, but all of the statues are identical and don't seem to depict any pokemon in particular. "They" could be inferred to reference the pokemon these statues are depicting, or it could be in reference to the Unown that inhabited the area.

Unown's pokedex entry in Gold mentions the Unown's likeness to the hieroglyphs and implies the two are related. Perhaps this ancient people designed their language around the Unown they lived among. As the chambers are read, it seems these people came to realize at some point that the Unown know much more than they appear, but perhaps the Unown were angered or disturbed by something they had done. Recognizing that they were no longer welcome, the people left these messages in their chambers in hopes that anyone who stumbled across the ruins of their civilization would learn from their mistakes before abandoning their way of life and leaving the land of Johto.

Monks in the Tin Tower explained that ancient people once attacked legendary pokemon out of fear and drove the pokemon to flee. Perhaps this is the action that these ancient people did to anger the Unown?

With such a huge mystery added into the game, along with the previously mentioned relation between the Unown and Suicune implied by the game's intro, I think seems to further hint that the Unown were planned to be much more involved in the game's story but their role was cut back at some point. Unfortunately, at least at this point in the series, it seems these mysteries won't be fully explored. Still, the Unown are a very big focal point of a lot of fan speculation which I'm a huge sucker for. Leaving unanswered questions keeps the game intriguing!

June 9, 2020

My Team:

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

Leif (Meganium M); Lv. 47

Item: Quick Claw

Moves: Earthquake, Sunny Day, Giga Drain, Light Screen

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

Mercury (Pidgeot M); Lv. 47

Item: Bitter Berry

Moves: Quick Attack, Fly, Wing Attack, Steel Wing

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

Grarl (Arcanine M); Lv. 47

Item: Charcoal

Moves: DragonBreath, Iron Tail, Flamethrower, Take Down

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

Ciel (Clefable F); Lv. 47

Item: Leftovers

Moves: Ice Punch, Solar Beam, Dizzy Punch, Psychic

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

Aeon (Jolteon M); Lv. 47

Item: PRZCureBerry

Moves: Quick Attack, Thunder, Shadow Ball, Thunder Wave

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

Aurora (Suicune); Lv. 47

Item: NeverMeltIce

Moves: Aurora Beam, Surf, Rain Dance, Gust

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

Viridian Gym Leader Blue

Of course, just like in Gold and Silver, you'll have to talk to Blue at Cinnabar Island before he'll be available to battle at his gym. Other than that, the gym contains no trainers to get in your way so it's a straight shot to the gym leader.

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

Right off the bat, Jolteon missed with Thunder and was hit with a Mirror Move Thunder himself. This didn't do much, but was a bit of insult to injury. After that, it just took a single Thunder to cip Pidgeot's wings.

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

To counter my Jolteon, out came Rhydon.

My answer was to switch into Leif who could no-doubt handle the Earthquake while still dishing out a ton of damage. The Earthquake turned out to be a crit and dealt a much more significant amount of damage, but Giga Drain was able to heal all the damage back.

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

Exeggcutor came next but Leif had no out to this. Once again, it was time to switch.

Out came Grarl and instead of a Psychic, I was surprised to be met with the thing charging for a Solar Beam. This gave me a free chance to burn it away with Flamethrower without taking any damage at all!

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

I didn't really have any good, safe switches for Gyarados, so I just left Arcanine in to go down. I just used DragonBreath in hope of paralysis. At worst, this could bait him into using a Full Restore. I didn't get a paralysis at all, though before getting finished off with Hydro Pump. But not before setting up a very convenient Rain Dance!

Naturally, I just had to take advantage of the rain and nail Gyarados with a free Thunder.

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

Blue's next defense was his Alakazam who went down to a couple of Shadow Balls but not before tearing through a significant chunk of Aeon's health with Psychic.

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

Finally, Blue's Arcanine came out kicking with ExtremeSpeed to take out Aeon without a chance of hitting another Thunder.

Last but not least came Aurora. Just as the rain dropped, Aurora renewed it again to take Arcanine out with a single Surf.

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

And with that, I earned the final badge: The EarthBadge!

June 10, 2020

Well, we're coming up on the final moments of the game which I'll be covering here. I've padded out the last couple days to stall until today, Wednesday, so that I could visit Bill's Father one more time as well as do the final Rival battle. But now that this day is here, I can finish up everything that remains. To start, I went back to the Goldenrod Game Corner and got to work gathering 10,000 coins. Unfortunately, you can only hold 9999 at a time, so I had to learn one move first. Since I'm not going to be playing any longer than this, I decided I'd go ahead and teach Ice Beam to Suicune and Bizzard to Ciel by TM. It'd rather both of them know Ice Beam, and I'd also rather Aeon know Thunderbolt, but I figured I'd at least set this up.

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

After completing my moves, I took a quick stop at the Pokemon League to meet up with Silver for the ultimate rival battle.

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

Unfortunately, since Aeon no longer knows Double Kick, he can't single-handedly sweep Silver as easily. That's not much of an issue though. Thunder is still able to one-shot Sneasel.

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

Without Double Kick, Aeon unfortunately has nothing to do against Magneton, so it was time to swtich.

Leif switched into a Thunder Wave and then predictably tore down his Magneton with Earthquake.

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

Next came Crobat which Leif wasn't prepared to fight, so time to switch back.

With the minor roadblock of Magneton out of the way, the rest of Silver's team was just dinner for Aeon. Thunder for Crobat.

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

Shadow Ball for Gengar

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

And yet another Shadow Ball or two for Alakazam

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

Once again, I'm pretty confident Aeon would have been able to handle this fight with Typhlosion, but I figured I should let more of my team share the spotlight.

Aurora switched into Fire Blast, set up a Rain Dance, and washed the Typhlosion out!

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

Before taking the final steps, I decided to head back to my home and set up the dolls my mother had purchased for me.

Afterwords, I came to collect the money she'd been saving for me over the course of the game. I wasn't going to have any more need for this going forward, so I figured I'd spend it all on vitamins to help boost my pokemon's stats this time around. WIth my pokemon's stats boosted, it was time to head out to our final trial.

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

Visiting Prof. Oak after collecting all 16 badges in the game, Mt. Silver once again becomes available to you.

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

The only significant change in Mt. Silver is inside the cave.

In Crystal, this is the only place where you can catch Magmar in Crystal. It's a bizarre change, but it's pretty significant if you're an unfortunate soul who wanted to use Magmar as your fire type. The only way to get one before this point without trading is through hatching a Magby from the Odd Egg.

Additionally, Donphan is no longer available to catch here, but in the back room, you can now encounter Parasect and Machoke at the cost of no longer being able to find Quagsire.

Pupitar can now be found at 1% at the summit of the mountain. And of course, it's here that our final challenge awaits us.

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

My Team

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

Leif (Meganium M); Lv. 50

Item: Quick Claw

Moves: Earthquake, Sunny Day, Giga Drain, Light Screen

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

Mercury (Pidgeot M); Lv. 49

Item: Bitter Berry

Moves: Quick Attack, Fly, Wing Attack, Steel Wing

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

Grarl (Arcanine M); Lv. 50

Item: Charcoal

Moves: DragonBreath, Iron Tail, Flamethrower, ExtremeSpeed

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

Ciel (Clefable F); Lv. 50

Item: Leftovers

Moves: Blizzard, Solar Beam, Dizzy Punch, Psychic

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

Aeon (Jolteon M); Lv. 50

Item: PRZCureBerry

Moves: Quick Attack, Thunder, Shadow Ball, Thunder Wave

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

Aurora (Suicune); Lv. 50

Item: NeverMeltIce

Moves: Ice Beam, Surf, Rain Dance, Gust

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

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

Leading against Red's Pikachu, I sent out Leif. Setting up with Light Screen is a vital step in order to survive some of his more powerful attacks. Unfortunately, this left me open to a Charm which weakened Earthquake enough to turn it into a two-hit KO susceptible to bad damage range to turn it into a 3-turn. If that happens, it's game over because I'll have soaked up way too much damage with just Leif way too early on. On a really lucky attempt, Charm will miss and Pikachu will go down in one hit with Earthquake. In my successful run, I actually got really lucky and he missed with Thunder.

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

Up next came Venusaur. Sometimes he goes for Sunny Day, other times he'll go straight for the Solar Beam. Sunny Day is the desirable choice but Solar Beam still buys me a free switch anyway.

I switched Grarl in on a Sunny Day which is more than convenient for me because it boosts my already powerful Flamethrower.

After an exchange of blows and a few ExtremeSpeeds to finish the job, Venusaur went down.

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

Next up is Espeon who is still a force to be reckoned with. ExtremeSpeed was able to do a bit of chip damage before Espeon went down.

I tried to send out Leif to set up Light Screen. It managed to hold on, but obviously would be unable to follow up with an Earthquake without a lucky Quick Claw.

Next came the battle of the Eevee. I paralyzed it with Thunder Wave half expecting to not be able to last. I followed up with Shadow Ball, which it met with Reflect, so I switched up with Thunder the next turn and finished him off!

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

Snorlax was definitely the biggest threat on his team for this run. Honestly, getting past this thing was blind luck for me. Between Amnesia boosting his special defense, my lack of physical power on my team, Rest to heal off any damage I've piled up and Body Slam to deal massive chunks of damage to my pokemon and when it doesn't KO, it seems to paralyze pretty consistently. My best bet here was to use Thunder Wave to paralyze it and hope for it to be paralyzed on turns it would normally go for Rest and Hope for crits.

If I'm being honest, I actually assumed I'd lost at this point, so I started fast forwarding. I'm not entirely sure what happened during this process, but I know he got fully paralyzed a few times and I got a few lucky crits. Between these, I suppose Snorlax just never got the chance to get a Rest off.

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

At this point, I was backed into a corner. My remaining pokemon just weren't enough to hold out against the last two members of his team on their own, so I decided to start using some items starting with a Max Revive on Aeon.

After Aurora went down, I sent out Mercury and used a Max Revive on Aurora as well. Sorry Mercury, but I really needed a meat shield on this one!

Next up, I decided to go a few turns using Ice Beam while soaking up damage from Surf. I did manage to get a lucky Freeze! From there, I quickly set up Rain Dance for the final assault!

Aeon's Thunder was enough to finish off Blastosie in one hit. Thanks to Rain Dance, I didn't have to worry about any misses, either!

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

From here came the most stressful point in the battle.

Even with Aeon's incredible speed, Charizard still outsped him. Beyond that, Aurora had low health and if Aeon couldn't outspeed Charizard, Aurora certainly wouldn't be. Thankfully, Slash didn't do too much damage to me and I was able to get an attack off.

From here, Thunder still landed thanks to Rain Dance, but it didn't finish off Charizard!

Another Slash very easily could have spelt the end for me with a little damage range, but I was able to barely cling on to life and take Charizard out with one more Thunder!

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

And with that, I've finally reached the true end of Pokemon Crystal Version!

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

Honestly, I found myself surprised by how little in this game was actually changed, even compared to Yellow before it. Yellow had gym leaders with entirely different teams from Red and Blue and Emerald did as well. Even the wild encounters really weren't very significantly different. Many of the complaints about pokemon availability I had in Gold and Silver still apply here. Some pokemon were made available a little bit earlier than normal with some changes more significant than others, but none of them felt particularly impactful. Most of the changes to wild encounters just involved common pokemon becoming available in even more places. That said, despite some odd exclusions to pokemon availability, I'd definitely say this is the definitive version of the three games. There are definitely many quality of life features of this game that made me wish I had access to this game for Pokemon Stadium 2. Vitamins were made much more accessible, the move tutor makes Ice Beam, Thunderbolt, and Flamethrower much more accessible and these moves can be passed on through breeding just like TM's as well. It's nice that they used this opportunity to expand on the lore of the Johto region as well. I found myself genuinely interested in the mysteries presented by the Unown.

Most of the changes in Crystal seem to affect the very beginning of the game and add to its longevity with more replay value. The animated sprites were really cool and helped the pokemon feel much more alive than ever before, which is a line you'll be hearing me say a lot going forward. But many of my Gen 2 complains still hold true here. The Game Corner is definitely not something I appreciate important TM's being locked behind and the lack of pokemon options during the main story makes it really difficult to create a unique team. I am still pretty proud of the team I was able to scrounge together, but I don't think it holds a candle to the Silver team I used for most of Pokemon Stadium 2. I do appreciate many of the more difficult to catch pokemon being made more common, but many of the changes felt more for the purpose of realism rather than having any actual gameplay value. It was kind of disappointing that the majority of pokemon I ended up using were still available in Gold and Silver. The only exceptions being Jolteon and Clefable which both wouldn't have been available until Kanto in Gold and Silver.

There are definitely many improvements I feel like should have been made. I feel like Gym Leaders should have had modified teams. I understand why they wouldn't have added new TM's for the sake of compatibility with Gold and Silver, but I still wish the Move Tutor was more readily available. At the very least, I don't think it should have been tied to only two days in the week and only once per day. In order to teach all three moves once, you have to wait at least over a week.

Of course, I certainly had fun exploring the new content this game had to offer, and I'd definitely recommend this game if you're interested in playing Pokemon Stadium 2. There's just many changes that felt like they were missing.

I could still play through the Battle Tower, but you've pretty much already seen everything that place has to offer. It's pretty much just more of the same if you've played Stadium 2. With all that in mind, I think it's time to finally move on from this game. I don't think I'll be going back to Gold and Silver to finish completing the pokedex. That's a lot of grinding and hatching that I really don't want to bother messing with at the moment. It's contrary to the main reason I wanted to play both Gold and Silver in the first place, but there's so many inconveniences in Gen 2 that I'm kind of just ready to move on and let bygones be bygones.

June 11, 2020

As a bit of a bonus, I wanted to touch on some of the exclusive features relating to Crystal version in Pokemon Stadium 2. There isn't anything much. I'd arguably say there's more exclusive content to Pokemon Yellow relating to Pokemon Stadium than either Stadium 2 or Crystal has with the other. Still, there are two minor details I'd like to touch one.

One, is that, if you're playing using a save file from Crystal version in which you chose a female trainer, the portrait of your avatar in the game will show a girl instead of a boy. Using Pokemon Crystal is the only way to see this portrait in-game so I thought this was an interesting tidbit that I'm sure not many people actually knew about.

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

I've previously mentioned that having a copy of Crystal in your transfer pak unlocks information from Crystal version when studying in the library. From day 1, you could use this tool to see what pokemon move options became available in Crystal version specifically.

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

Lastly, as mentioned near the beginning of the Crystal section, the Japanese version of Pokemon Crystal featured the Pokemon Communications Center where you could connect to a mobile phone adapter in order to do online battles with other players over a long distance. This mode also came with the ability to record your battles and watch the replays later on.

Well, it just so happens that the Japanese version of Pokemon Stadium 2 also comes with an exclusive feature: The Mobile Stadium! There really isn't much to talk about here, unfortunately. All this mode did was let you watch your battle replays from the PCC in 3D in Stadium 2. I can imagine this being a new, really exciting new way to relive online battling experiences for japanese kids at the time, but nowadays it really doesn't seem nearly as interesting. Still, an exclusive mode is an exclusive mode.

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

Unfortunately, there aren't any extra minigame guest stars or really significant modes. The credits may lead you to think that you could possibly unlock a battle with Kris somehow, but as far as I can tell, that's not a thing and the portrait of Kris is only used in the credits sequence of Stadium 2.

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