Well it’s that time of the day again, time for more Pokémon. Today we’re taking on Misty’s gym and hopefully ending up at Vermillion City. I did all my grinding at the tail end of the last update so let’s just go and see how we fare.
Unlike Brock’s gym, Misty’s gym is identical to how it’s been in the mainline games.
We get a Fresh Water from the gym guy, and some nice advice from a sign.
Now to find out if my team is up to snuff.
I’m feeling good about the level situation at least. Shellby attempts to be a tank with Harden and Protect, but April May is quite a powerhouse now so she takes it down. Gosh I need to evolve her, she’s so ugly at the moment.
Peach one shots Eksea with Electro Ball. I remember when she was the frailest Pokémon I had.
By all rights you should be dead from electricity.
I mean… do I have a choice?
If you’re relying on Electric-types here you may be a little bit in trouble, but Grass-types have this handled easily. Cool design too, it looks like a Staryu mask.
This was from one Magnitude 6. I got extremely worried as the bar kept falling. In hindsight, keeping a part-Poison-type Pokémon out was a big mistake.
Misty: My policy is an all-out offensive with Water-type Pokémon! Misty, the world-famous beauty, is your host!
Bit full of yourself there but okay.
Misty: I’ll let you use two Pokémon for the fight. Are you ready, sweetie?
This is what we’re going with. Peach has Nasty Plot so I’m hoping I can set up a sweep on her first Pokémon with Electro Ball. She should now be Specially bulky enough to deal with water moves too.
Let’s do this.
The first round ends like this. Water Pulse doesn’t do too much damage to Peach, so I fire off a Thunder Wave and set up Nasty Plot on the next turn to effectively double my Special Attack.
A single Electro Ball takes down the cute fish.
Ah. Grass-typing will make Oddyu a bit more resistant to Electric-type moves and Grass-types both. Clever move, Misty. Also doesn’t it look freaking awesome? Super cool spritework there.
After healing Peach up with a Fresh Water the Oddyu shaves off almost half of her HP with Water Pulse. I decide to risk it and use Electro Ball, praying that I don’t get damage-ranged or crit.
She was faster than me, and that’s how much HP I was left with. That was the definition of a close one. Electro Ball hit for critical damage, and she went down in one hit.
We can breathe a sigh of relief. We’re told that we can now use Cut outside of battles and we get the Water Pulse TM for our troubles too.
Are ya sure? We almost lost Peach!
Now that we have two badges we have an expanded shop selection. I sell my Nuggets and stock up on Potions and Super Potions.
Flute Dude: I brought back this special flute from my travels. Show me this city’s badge and it is yours.
Flute Dude: This flute’s melody makes Pokémon more likely to appear. Use it to catch plenty of Pokémon. I shall go now. We might meet again!
I can’t see myself making much use of the White Flute, really. We really only need to see one Wild Pokémon per route as trainer rematches are a much more viable source of Exp grinding. This would be a lot more useful in a casual playthrough.
This person wasn’t here earlier. In addition, the underground to the right was blocked until now too. I don’t know whether it’s beating Misty or getting the S.S. Anne Ticket that allows you to travel to Vermillion, but either way it’s nice to get both tasks out of the way.
This dude warns us of the dangers of unfusing a fusion. It makes sense that there has to be some drawbacks.
Searching about in the underground proves me a little lucky.
A new route, a newly inaccessible TM, and most importantly a new Pokémon to catch! Let’s go have a look what we’re getting!
Before that we pick up two Sitrus Berries and a Chesto Berry.
Ooh here it comes!
I’m not mad about it. The surprising thing that comes from the community around this game is the discovery that Persian makes for very good fusion fodder!
I’m sure Evan will make a nice addition to the team! There is a mighty chance that the next Pokémon I catch will be from Diglett Cave, so we may be seeing that specific fusion soon.
This trainer is notable for having an annoying Butterfree that uses lots of status moves in the originals.
Ah.
This was one doozy of a battle. Clefree has Cute Charm which activated immediately, and also used Supersonic to confuse Captain Ike. What a ballache that was.
Oh look, it’s time for our first double battle! Captain Ike is 4x weak to Electric-moves, so we’re instantly swapping him out.
Peach comes out, and April May uses Sucker Punch on the Electric/Psychic Pikapoke for a 1HKO. It’s worth noting that my laptop properly starts to struggle during double battles, it’s obviously not a very optimized experience. Anyway, Pikaduck goes down to a single Hyper Fang, but not before paralysing April May with Static.
Oh look, it’s another boyfriend/girlfriend duo, but this time they’re campers.
Off-topic, was it weird to anyone else that from Gen 2 the boys were Campers but the girls were Picknickers? Like, doesn’t that seem a little bit misogynistic? Why can’t girls camp?!
Oh it’s another double battle. Despite the inflated levels of Speartle, this should be okay.
After taking out the first wave the rest of the battle is just me double-teaming a poor girl’s Pokémon roster.
A cool detail is that you can rematch these trainers individually.
In the process April May hits level 20 and Yuri hits level 15, netting us not one but two evolutions at once!
Look at these beautiful, janky-ass motherfuckers.
Just because I can, I decide to use a DNA Reverser on April May just to see what her reversed form looks like.
Oh my, that’s just… so much better. And after checking the stats on her, she’s equal in Attack and only a little bit worse off in HP and Speed. She also has the useful Normal/Ground typing instead of Poison/Normal. Having some Ground-type bonuses feels like quite the boon – she’s immune to Electric and Ghost this way. I’ll keep her around like this for a while to see how she fares. I know that she can get the move Dig from a TM in Celadon, so it may be worth shooting over there before taking on Surge just so that I know I have a good Ground-type attacker.
Just two trainers left!
The first goes down without much trouble, though Pikans proves annoying with Glare. Have I told you how much I hate enemies with Glare?
Little view of a glitch here that renders parts of the map entirely inaccessible. I don’t know what causes it, though I know the game really doesn’t like me alt-tabbing all the time to write this and deal with screenshots. Either way, a battle or just saving and reloading is enough to fix it each time.
I think this is the most cursed screenshot of the playthrough so far.
Yuri spent a precious >one< level as a Togera!
Togebra is such a fantastic name hah.
Onto Vermillion! We’ll just explore this city and have a look at the various quests we have here before moving on to the battle portions next time.
First things first of course. What’s lovely about this game is that there’s an option to always auto-save whenever you use a Pokémon Centre, which is very handy if you forget to save a lot. I sometimes do that.
Scientist: You can bring them to Pewter City’s museum. We have an experimental machine that turns fossils into living Pokémon!
Now, we do have a Helix Fossil. The thing is, we can also get rather a few other fossils in the game and we need to think strategically about what we revive – As per the rules of this Nuzlocke the fossil will count as the Pokémon acquired in that area. As far as I know that’s just one in Pewter and one in Cinnabar. I’m not sure whether an Omastar is worth more than the likes of a Rampardos or Aerodactyl.
This person stans Wonder Trading and have to say I do agree. They’ll also teach a Pokémon Wonder Room, which is a very situational move that swaps everyone’s defences around. I don’t buy it, especially since it’s 1000 dollars a pop.
This is… a very interesting proposition. Slowbro and Slowking are both very accessible in this game and are rather a lot tankier than Persian, something that will be important in a Nuzlocke. Then again, we have Electric-type and Grass-type gyms to face.
I’ll pass. I don’t think trades are conducive to the Nuzlocke vibe.
We get the Old Rod from this guy. We won’t be using it just yet as I do have some plans for Meowth. Namely, fusing it with a Diglett.
We won’t be able to get this item without Surf. Drat.
There are an absurd number of Move Tutors in this game, and it’s something I really like. They are damn expensive though.
Builder: My Pokémon are tamping the land, but I’m running out of building materials. Hey, do you think you could do me a favour and get some planks and bricks for me? You can get the bricks in Pewter City and the wooden planks in Viridian City.
Oh hey, look. A quest not acquired in a Hotel! We’ll do this in the near future.
This house has the Move Deleter and the Move Reminder. It’s expensive at 1000 dollars a pop but I’m going to have a see if any of my Pokémon have anything worth relearning.
Valefor could get Sky Attack, Captain Ike could get Thrash, and Yuri could get Magical Leaf or Kinesis, but I pass on all of those options. Instead, I replace April May’s Venoshock with Swords Dance to help her set up some sweeps more easily, and I replacee Peach’s Disarming Voice with Play Rough. Even with her quite low Attack, Play Rough is 50 attack power stronger than Disarming Voice and will wreck enemies at this point in the game.
I like this shot. But also, look at that Dive spot there! Gosh, I need a running list of places I need to return to when I get certain HM moves.
This is a decent get. It’ll be nice if we want a Bellossom from a future Gloom, or an Espeon from the Celadon gift Eevee (remember, happiness evolutions are changed in this game).
Of course we had to visit the Fan Club. We have a bike to get!
This dude has the same spiel that we’ve all seen 100 times, except a new line about preferring pure-bred Pokémon over fusions. Fair enough, dude, but that ain’t me.
Key Item Get!
Flute dude is just off to the side of the pier.
Collectables like the Balm Mushroom can be sold for a huge amount. This is our reward for keeping this with us after getting it all the way back in Pewter City.
O-oh… that is not appropriate.
We have four hapless souls to help here!
This one will potentially be annoying. She wants to see a Fire/Water Pokémon. Without luck, this will require some catching that goes outside my rules! I think I’ll leave these fusion quests until after the Elite 4 if I can’t do them normally.
This rude old man doesn’t give us a quest until we have beaten Surge.
This is a fun one. We’ll need to catch a lot of Voltorb, and we get a new prize for each one. I believe there are four prizes. We’ll do this eventually when I learn where to catch Voltorb!
A LIKELY STORY
This guy needs us to do a little timed quest once we hit the S.S. Anne up. We have 30 seconds or so to haul some leftover seafood to the hotel. It’s not hard, and a nice change of pace.
This is such a nice present that we get for completing 5 quests. We will always be in need of money to cover our healing items, DNA Splicers, Daycare fees and so on. I slap this onto Valefor as she takes part in many battles.
Before we head off, we trek back to Cerulean to get this.
And that’s all she wrote.
Post-Update Summary
We made some good progress today! We got our second badge, picked up the Bicycle and the Old Rod, and we know our next quests. Next update we’ll catch some Pokémon in the areas next to Vermillion and have a good explore of the S.S. Anne!
New Pokémon
Route 6: Evan the Meowth
New Fusions
Nidotata (Nidoqueen + Rattata) evolved into Nidoicate (Nidoqueen + Raticate)
Nidoicate (Nidoqueen + Raticate) reversed into RATQUEEN (Raticate + Nidoqueen)
Abpi (Abra + Togepi) evolved into Togera (Togetic + Abra)
Togera (Togetic + Abra) evolved into Togebra (Togetic + Kadabra)
Curated Critiques 