Hello lovelies and welcome back to Kanto! We start here on Route 4, where we can encounter a new Pokémon to catch! So first things first: now that we might encounter fusions in the wild, I had to make a decision about how to handle them for the rules of the Nuzlocke. My choices were threefold:
- Ignore the wild fusions and only catch unfused Pokémon.
- Catch fusions but unfuse them if I have an unfused Pokémon waiting for a partner.
- Catch the fusion and leave it as is.
I have decided to go with the final option, I think it has the most randomness in it and randomness is both challenging and fun. I will let myself reverse the fusion if that would turn out to be very beneficial however.
Anywho, let’s get the show on the road.
The addition of flowers on this route makes things a lot prettier than the originals. And wait, what’s that to the south?
Looks like we’re already heading back into Mt. Moon!
It’s a very short area with a little Strength boulder puzzle that we can’t complete yet. The items here are a valuable Nugget and the TM for Sandstorm which is neat.
These berry bushes held a Leppa Berry and a Sitrus Berry. If these respawn, they might be worth farming – Sitrus Berries especially will be helpful for survival.
Something really nice about this game is that you can get back to Mt. Moon through Route 4 even after going to Cerulean, so we can backtrack to Pewter City if we needed to. Now let’s see what our next Pokémon is.
Well I’m not entirely thrilled about it. The Hoppip line are very frail and don’t exactly learn fantastic moves. Hopefully this guy’s fusion fodder will be worth it.
That’s five quite disappointing Pokémon in a row.
I’ve been playing a lot of Demon’s Souls lately.
Welcome to Cerulean City! Before I hit up the Pokémon Centre let’s take a tour of the place. It’s all a bit different now!
While everything is rearranged it’s still recognizable as Cerulean. I like that the Slowbro is now an Electrobro or whatever it’ll end up being named. Let’s chat up some locals.
That’s two out of four of the classic weathers acquired! This contains Sunny Day, which could potentially be useful against Misty’s gym.
:3
Who wants to take bets that we’re going to have to listen to man talk about a Rapidash before we can get a bike of our own?
Called it.
Some things never change. I pop into the Mart here to stock up on healing items and DNA Splicers now that we have a nice bit of money from selling our valuables. Lots of Potions especially are important.
I bet this is where we’ll get the TM for Return once we get a Pokémon up to maximum happiness.
We’ll be back.
We’re going to see quite a lot of this throughout the game.
This guy will teach a starter Pokémon one of the Pledge moves for 500 dollars, but they’re not especially powerful so I pass on the offer.
The clown… tells jokes.
They’re… yeah. You can tip the clown but I’m not entirely sure what that does.
Assistant: The professor has tasked me with giving you this item if you’ve fused Pokémon at least 5 times. Let me have a look… Hmm… That’s no good. I can’t give it to you.
We’ve fused 4 times. It won’t be long before we get this item and believe me we want this item.
So there’s an entirely new place in Infinite Fusion called Crimson City.
Me neither, but I’m sure we’ll get there eventually! It’s worth noting that this game encompasses both Kanto and Johto, so there’s a ton of stuff to be done!
The house on the top right of the city is filled with Team Rocket. Talking to any of them will get you unceremoniously kicked out of the house as they recognize you from Mt. Moon. But that’s a suspicious looking piece of paper…
This has to be relevant to something.
I am not entirely sure what this could be. My initial guess is that it’s part of the password for the computer in Mt. Moon. I have a feeling we might piece it together with more clues from Team Rocket.
This is another really cool thing! Rematching the trainers who allow it levels up their Pokémon up to I believe your team’s average! So they’ll give more EXP and be more of a challenge. Something super nice in a game that might end up requiring lots of grinding to catch up if we take some important deaths.
Heading upstairs, we can find more NPCs with quests!
Lady: What do you say?
Well lady, you’re in luck! We caught something this very hour that will satisfy your needs!
Lady: You’ve shown me a Pokémon I had never seen before. Have this as a token of my appreciation.
We get a Full Restore for our troubles, which is quite nice!
Aw, this is cute.
Of course we’ll help out! He helpfully tells us that she usually hangs out on a route near Cerulean City. I happen to know where she is, and we’re going to find her today.
Now the final quest:
Ah, rats.
So now that we’ve explored Cerulean, I want to do a bit more training before we take on our Rival or the gym. Heading south, we have a whole new route. And you know what that means!
Pidgey, Rattata, Zubat, now we have the Triad of Too Fucking Common. At least it’s quite a high level!
LAAAANAAAA!
And hey, time to fuse! Both outcomes are a little bit underwhelming, so we’re going to go with the fusion that will have the most Special Attack and Speed, as they’ll be its most important stats. It’s not going to be strong though.
A reminder of who’s fusing. Quite normal looking Pokémon right?
I take back everything bad I’ve said about Peach.
Let’s look at, thankfully, our real new team addition.
Oh I’m not liking that silhouette.
I suppose we’ve seen worse.
What’s cool with many fusions is that we are often allowed to choose which ability the fusion inherits. In this case, Pidpip gets Chlorophyll, doubling our speed in the sun. This could be quite useful as usually Chlorophyll is limited to quite weak Grass types, but with the agility of the Pidgey line behind them, it might end up being great. To that end, this new Pokémon gets taught Sunny Day.
My boyfriend is watching a Lord of the Rings lore video at the moment. Peregrine is a nice name, I think.
Now that we’ve fused Peregrine, we can now get this very valuable item!
This is going to be utterly vital for grinding up weak wild Pokémon to a useable level. It’s not like recent games where it spreads Exp out equally, but a simple hold item.
A new quest to take on shortly too!
Before we head north, we’re going to explore the rest of Route 5. It’s a short one though.
Oh! We have a love letter to deliver to this woman! But first, we have to crush her.
Her first Pokémon is a Togepi who manages to be a huge pain. With both Sweet Kiss and Yawn he handily shuts down April May, forcing me to switch to Peregrine to take it out with some Gusts.
Munchsly has Rock Throw which is problematic for Valefor, but Valefor has 5 levels on him and so Vine Whip takes it down in two turns.
Captain Ike has the Exp. Share at the moment, and will probably keep it for a few levels, Peach also needs it to get to level 15 where both her Pichu side and Igglybuff side will evolve.
I keep Valefor in against Magkid in order to heal April May up a bit, as she’s likely my best chance of taking it down without much trouble.
Maude’s last Pokémon is this adorable little thing. It manages to Paralyse April May but after that it can do nothing but fire off really weak Disarming Voices which do nothing but scrape my Poison-type Pokémon until it gets one shot by Venoshock.
Maude: I’ll make sure to get back to him! Thank you!
Ah, young love. We get 5 Love Balls, which is just so thematically perfect.
Some trainers don’t rematch you or trade with you! Some of them give you an egg! Now, I’m not yet sure if they’re random or fixed, or if you can get multiple. In the spirit of the challenge and showing off as much stuff as possible, I’ll hatch and use all the eggs I get, but I won’t take any more from trainers if they offer multiple. I won’t be counting them as Pokémon acquired in certain routes, but they will be fused asap in the order they hatch. Every egg will stay in the party until it hatches too!
Now, enough of that. More battle.
I hate this.
Hyper Fang is incredible. Psypix deals a lot of damage with Confusion but doesn’t manage to fight off my Strong Rat.
In classic ‘old lady’ style she gives us a cookie if we chat to her after winning. It’s also notable that she gives us a ton of money for winning, which is probably why we can’t rematch her.
This item is a Revive, a useless feature in this playthrough that I’ll be selling. Remember, if one of our lil’ abominations faints it’s dead forever and will go into the PC Graveyard.
Flute Dude is back, and we’ll chat to him after beating Misty.
The Daycare is the daycare. There’s not much to say about it.
It’s like any other Daycare in the main series, and can take two Pokémon. As she’s basically dead weight at the moment, I decide to leave Peach here for a while.
The back room has some goodies.
This would be very nice if we messed around with breeding. But we won’t, as fused Pokémon cannot breed.
Another egg so soon! Also, clock the typo.
We take the egg, and thus have two eggs!
Not very useful for us, but I really love that this is a veranda.
A nice detail in Cerulean is that at nighttime some Team Rocket goons start patrolling the area around their mini-base here.
Let’s round out this update with a Rival battle!
I’m nervous about this one.
Pidgeotto proved to be an annoyance. He used Sand-Attack a lot, making many of April May’s Hyper Fangs miss a lot. Gust didn’t hit that hard but I had to heal twice! Weirdly, he used Whirlwind to drag Peregrine out, and instead of devastating him with Gust while I gave April May a Potion, he simply used Whirlwind again, bringing out April May with no accuracy debuffs. He went down to a final Hyper Fang.
Mantata was powerful, but I managed to take it down with two super effective Pecks. Its Hyper Fang packed a huge punch though.
Here you see my healing up April May again. I am being extremely cautious here. Squirtmeleon is also quite a danger. Not counting the annoyance of Scary Face, he can fish for critical hits with Slash and potentially burn a team mate with Ember. Water Gun is also there, I guess.
So here’s something interesting.
Teleport is now a damaging move. It works like Fly or Dig – the user teleports away and then I assume teleports back for a strike. It’s not too devastating but makes Abra a surprise for lax players. When I get access to the move myself I’ll have a closer look at what’s changed.
Sleep Powder and Leech Seed were deemed necessary. Luckily with Teleport’s rework, I can heal on the off-turns so this is a won battle.
Hah, suck it Rhys.
He really just states this immediately after losing. Someone must be sore.
Of course. And that’s the end of the update! Well, in the words of Rhys, smell ya later!
Post-Update Summary
Captain Ike has already been boosted a few levels, and everyone is close to some pretty important evolutions! How exciting! I’m going to be focusing on Valefore and Peregrine for a while, as they’re probably my best chance of succeeding in the next Gym.
New Pokémon
Route 4: Urbain the Hoppip
Route 5: Archer the Pidgey, and two mystery eggs!
New Fusions
Pidgey + Hoppip = Pidpip
Curated Critiques 