06 04 2022

Emerald: Sky Pillar sucks. Ok, so after I got the optional Regis, I went to Sky Pillar. Popped a Repel to dodge the now severely underleveled surf wild pokemon battles and just run up the tower. Easy. Tiny sprite animation has Rayquaza fly off to Sootopolis to quell the fighting legends. A quick menuing later and I’m in Sootopolis and a cutscene plays. It’s actually kinda nice for the GBA, but still feels rough. Rayquaza pierces the dark clouds ahead and… the legends fly off. Kyogre and Groudon are nowhere near. Rayquaza is back at the tower.  I quickly defeat Juan. I forgot the other trainers in the gym only show up if you fail the puzzle and just did the puzzle. Didn’t need the exp though, so it’s fine I guess. The puzzle is a grid walking puzzle where an ice floor cracks when you walk over it. There are rocks that force you to figure out the route. Stepping on an already cracked tile drops you to the floor with trainers. There’s actually a lot of trainers, but the puzzle is too easy. I can now use Waterfall.

One super quick gym badge later I’m back at Sky Pillar because now I can catch Rayquaza. Well, apparently all the shaking from the cataclysmic events and Rayquaza’s return has ruined the floor and now there’s more cracked floor puzzle stuff! This time though… I need to use the mach bike. At max speed. It takes a runway of three tiles to hit maximum speed. If you are not at max speed, bam! Down a floor. The game actually scrolls fast enough to make it hard to track what’s going on, especially on the LCDs. Darker grey area makes it hard to parse on a GBA SP and original. GBA Micro, Original DS are better but the ever so slight ghosting still makes it a little unclear. The DS’s dpad can get in the way, but also the mushier ones on the original GBA would cause issues. I have a GameCube and GBA player, but the input lag on the original play disc and gamecube controller actually makes this also similarly difficult.

See, suddenly a RPG where you can menu to do things and has very little timing or action based inputs now requires you to do what in comparison feels like learning to do 1 frame link combos in Street Fighter IV after playing basically any newer fighter. Suddenly you’re expected to do really precise inputs. When you get to max speed, if you bump into an object you fall. You can keep max speed during turns Each floor on sky pillar is a square with an inner square to separate the four sides. Rocks block out paths and now with this falling floor puzzle, force the player to thread the needle. First turn is on a falling panel and must be done to turn at a specific tile so as to not hit any rocks that would stop momentum on a “safe” tile but give no runway to get max speed. The next turn is at a rock. If not input fast enough, character will bump the rock and then change direction but still move and fall. Failing at any point also means falling in some way so far. The next part after the rock turn actually lets you recover if you bump a rock at the end but it’s difficult to get back to full speed. Need to do even more inputs. The final part of the puzzle is there are four cracked tiles in a one, space, two, space, one pattern. The bike needs to stop on those two. This means you have to let go of the dpad at the right time so the poor trainer who now has pelvic injuries will fall through the right tiles to be in the right spot to take the stairs to the next floor. After that, a surprisingly easy catch for a level 70 legendary. I used around 15 max repels on floor 4, which isn’t as bad as some people’s time but is still pretty high. 250 steps each, so around 3750 steps. I’m not going to do distance counts, but in-game that sounds like the distance between multiple cities. Forget the weird difficulty spikes in places and other battle tuning that feels weird to deal with after coming from the early game high damage in later games, this is the most dated, out of place puzzle in the whole game. I’ll probably be less sour on it next time but wow was that a weird frustration to have in a pokemon game.

I leveled some pokes, overleveled others, filled the fighting type hole in my team with an overleveled tradeback breloom and now I’m the champion. I have played Ruby and Sapphire in the past, Omega Ruby when it was new, and other games that probably referenced Hoenn and it’s characters. When I wasn’t playing those games and not shortly after, I could not tell you who was Hoenn Elite Four. Maybe if I struggled more I would remember. I also couldn’t remember the champion, Wallace. I know they swapped with Steven in this one, but even then most days I also forget Steven. Just less so than other characters. Every other region has been more memorable. He’s a former gym leader so maybe his design is too gym-leader-ish and I forget. I sometimes recognize Phoebe and Drake as “ah, that’s a pokemon character!” but never “ah, they’re from Hoenn.” or “They’re from the Elite 4.” 

As for now, Emerald was when a lot of post-game appeared that would define the series. Like the True Arena type challenges in Kirby, I rarely do them. I only do them if I love the game. I don’t love this game but I might try it. Or bring in… ‘borrowed’ trained up teams to try it. I do want more team challenging stuff, but I do remember Battle Frontier not being my kind of gameplay. There’s a lot of unique post-game stuff here and I may just take a look. I know there are characters here that get used later. Oh and I need to remember to train a team up for the post-game Steven battle. Definitely can’t kick his butt yet. Speaking of things that showed up in the later games; Fire Red, Leaf Green, and Emerald also supported the GBA wireless adapter and were supposed to get Mystery Gift distribution like we did for the DS era games! The events were never used!

There’s optional areas I never did to beeline through the game. The later surf maps and the overall design of the game don’t do much for me so I will forget if I take too much of a break. (This journal is helping, but not as much as one would think.) I still have to try this game’s roaming pokemon, catching the previous two box legendaries, and maybe getting some of the other gift pokemon. Maybe even a fossil pokemon. I have Sapphire if I really want to have an OT I would have used in the past on a gen III pokemon that I can’t get in Emerald. 

Going to take a break to make sure I catch up in Pokemon Black and make better Progress in Platinum. I’m in a part of Platinum that feels like parts of this game where “if I take a break I won’t remember where I was.” As much as this report is helping, I only remember parts of the back half of Diamond and Platinum mixes up a lot more than Emerald. I really want to dig in and explore why I lose pokemon games at these points. It’s easier when I’m playing them as shiny new games, but revisiting some of the older ones is so difficult. It’s not even always that I’m too familiar still and feel like I’m getting bored with something I already did, it’s like the game isn’t motivating me at specific points.