04 05 2022
Crystal: Lance has enlisted me to go help him raid the shady operation transmitting something to agitate the pokemon in the lake. It’s like if some pro baseball player saw some girl who batted well at a softball game and asked her to help him beat up some weird cult/terrorist org. Reminder, his authority is… winning. Being a champion. He trained dragons good. Thankfully instead of baseball, physical violence, or guns; Pokemon has weird monsters that fight and everyone agrees this has power. Honestly, the only reason why I haven’t completely snuffed out hope for the next pokemon games to have Legends Arceus combat is because the scale and risks of having pokemon like that makes some of these situations a little easier to believe. Some games keep me in by being fun adventures that I don’t think too hard about because it’s fun. It’s like getting cheered on. Pixel art era it mostly feels fine in the moment because that’s the fidelity that the games work with. The pixel fidelity matches the writing. I’m sure whatever couldn’t fit into the english script or was lost in localization just made the rocket NPCs feel like tokusatsu villains and minions. Which is fine. Base concept for the series is basically about battling tiny kaiju.
I fly on a pokemon and ride over on my bike to walk into a shady shop. Lance uses his Dragonite as a replacement for a baseball bat. Oh look! It’s a weird secret base under. And it’s basically Team Rocket. Sort of. GSC are my favorites so I’ve spent a lot of time in these games and their remakes. We’ll get to more Rocket stuff later. For a small hideout, it still feels a little like a pain. It’s not as prevalent as last gen, but there’s still quite a bit of status effect and randomly high damage. Could be my team, but miltank is here.
After Lance and I threaten some passwords out of some grunts, we confront a Rocket Executive. Giovanni’s been missing since disbanding Team Rocket! Yet, they still hope their leader will return! So they were doing radio experiments! And umm. We stop them. Well, after getting another password, fighting a different Rocket Executive, and blowing up the generator after me and Lance beat up some Electrodes. Well. Ok, so this part of the game has Koffing, Wheezing, Voltorb, and Electrode. They all know Explosion and Self Destruct. That’s what makes this super annoying. Just… so much running back. So much losing exp because even trainer battles have those pokemon pop early. I know GSC are not much better than GRBY for getting experience, yet the game will rob you of it when it can. So these Electrodes just blow up. I tried to catch one of them since it’s technically a limited event thing, didn’t get one. Rocket runs away cuz well… Their experiment worked? I’ll need to contemplate further what the exact stakes were, it feels like this last section was to make up for how little not-badge stuff was between the previous two badges. If I was still working on the timeframe I had as a kid, I certainly would’ve had the time and appreciated doing Mt. Mortar before lake of rage. Having played a lot more games since then, especially JRPGs, I can’t but help but find the pacing a little weird. It’ll look a little weirder after this gym.
With the rocket stuff done, I can go to the gym. So, I actually do not remember how Pryce went in Gold. I didn’t even remember Pryce. I’m sure I found it a little annoying because while this gym is Ice based, I think I had to open with something that wasn’t my Quilava/Typhlosion. This time though, I made a boo boo. I have raised nothing to directly deal with him. I never got around to raising a fire type, no rock, my fighting type is not cutting it, and my steel options are not good. So, I teach iron tail to Miltank. Just going to burn that TM. After a few resets, I get through Pryce and win. Those ice moves do so much damage to Miltank, I was relying on luck.
We get a call and wow those Rockets move quick. Their Giovanni cult has moved onto bigger acts of terrorism that now they’re not hiding. They capture the radio tower in Goldenrod. They’re going to use a more powerful radio to… well so far they actually have just used to call out to Giovanni. Definitely more a cult. All of their assigned frequencies are broadcasting a message telling Giovanni they’re more powerful and such. Wouldn’t want to piss off a regulatory body and broadcast on all frequencies! Once again, it’s up to a little girl to beat them up. I think this is why future groups got more mythical. That way even if you’re a small kid busting up some org, the reasoning is more grounded in a 80’s kid adventure movie than GSC. GSC sometimes has less of that comedic kids show that makes Gen I work. I’ll think about that more as I go through the story. As a game, I find GSC pretty fun and engaging enough so my response is usually ‘ok cool’ and move on.
Going up the tower talking to scared radio station staff while the rockets get smacked, I finally make to the director and… Oh no! It’s actually that same rocket executive!. Except he’s got a team of Koffing and a singular Weezing. Y’know. I actually appreciate that they used his team to explain how they were able to take over the tower. This dude just used pokemon as smoke grenades and a bomb threat. Also, at this point in time the typical Team Rocket Pokemon Team has annoying but easy stuff, but if not paid attention to a Ratatta can still do more than you think. Still funny watching the ones with exploding pokemon go ‘How could I lose!?’ in a dramatic fashion and the reason is they told their only pokemon to explode. Beating him up gets us the location of the actual director which is… the underground warehouse. And a key.
Down in the basement is, the whiny bully rival! Actually still a little tough despite having quite a few advantages. Really wish Xatu had a Psychic damage move. Like Magic the Gathering at this time, they wanted to compensate for how powerful their overpowered stuff was. So, It seems no new psychic types I could get were going to be as powerful as Kadabra, Hypno. Or even Jynx or Mr. Mime. Three tries and he went down. And so did I. I did a lot in this run, I thought I was going to pace more after Yellow. However, the little bits of streamlining and the positives of my messy team are actually finally making this an easier play. Still miss the better move pools and how TMs work in later gens, but also nice to be free of the weird service game stuff in the later games.
Leaf Green: I needed a break from Gen II so I sat down and burned through Mt. Moon. Got a Dome Fossil. Most importantly, I got a Clefairy and taught it Mega Punch from the tutor outside. After that, I got a few levels on Pikachu in the Gym and… remembered how much of a beast Misty’s pokemon can be. So umm… I went and got more levels and forgot there’s also a rival battle. My VC Yellow save was old, so I didn’t get a chance to mention this. As a kid, I got stuck a lot in the game and it took encouragement to continue. This was one of those points. I think I also got brickwalled when I played it a second or third time. Well, Forgetting this I walk to nugget bridge and start the battle. I hadn’t saved since I got to town so I couldn’t reset. Luckily Clefairy with new moves is pretty powerful so she made up for some team shortcomings.
