20 06 2022

Black: Clay’s gym is actually pretty cool. At first it seems like it’s a basic elevator maze, and it is, but it has a cool below the earth mine complete with gigantic motorized door that your little elevator car needs to wait for. Going back for the ingame trade and a Sun Stone for Lilligant paid off. Super effective, Giga Drain, sleep powder. Basically took no damage until Clay. Clay’s Excadrill is the only one not weak to grass, but Giga Drain outpaced him. Barely. Stuff can still sometimes hit hard. With him down, I have the 6th badge.

    Taking a longer break from Black/White, it really hits home how much faster the menu is than a lot of the series. It’s just so responsive. Text shows up really quickly. The game knows it’s a JRPG and it does not waste your time in menus. Tries to, anyway. Still one of the slower games to actually save. Thankfully it only has the one saving question instead of two. 

    At chargestone cave, Clay gets rid of an electric spiderweb and Plasma’s Shadow Triad leads me to N. Ninjas and intel network. Chargestone cave has a high encounter rate and I couldn’t run from enough battles to be annoying. Caught a bunch of ferroseed in the hopes one of them has good stats. N doesn’t like Prof Juniper categorizing things. The game takes its argument seriously a little but settles this encounter with the Prof. going to saying that people have perspectives. Step outside to Mistralton and it’s an air strip. Meet Juniper’s father and Skyla. 

Platinum: Got to Celestic town where once again I bump into Team Galactic. Lucily no bombs here. Kick Cyrus’s butt inside the ruins where Cynthia’s Grandmother explains the trio in this game. Cyrus basically clarifies he wants to undo the world and the lake trio hold everything together. Cynthia again shows up to remind us there is a cool goth in the game. Also to let us know that more info is in a library at Canalave. Go to Canalave and beat up our rival. Had to look up where Canalave is, having the game do even more backtracking is reminding me why I didn’t remember much. I wouldn’t wanted to have replayed this map. Starting to get less enthused about BDSP, but I may still get them if I can.

    After beating up the rival who eats real sugary cereal for breakfast, He mentions training at Iron Island. Run into Riley at the cave entrance who gives HM for Strength. Further in, he becomes another NPC for dual battles that also shows up at some later thing. Grab a protector, definitely going to try and complete all the trade item evolutions I can in GenIV. I have the guide open, so I’m going to backtrack here once I find a Regigigas. Canalave Gym wasn’t too hard since I had access to good ground types. Pulled out a Magmar for fire backup on one of the battles with a Scizor, basically everything else my existing team handled well. I have a feeling I will re-evaluate team before Elite 4. 

    After the gym get dragged to the library and have a discussion on where to go with the other main trainers and the professor, an explosion rocks the building. They blew up more lakes! Jeeze Team Galactic…. Anyway, I go to the Valor Lakefront and uhh there's a bunch of Magikarp just flopping around because there’s no more water… Ok, the absurdity of Team Galactic is making this somewhat enjoyable. I wonder if this is 1:1 with the remake, but the lake has stairs at the bottom. How convenient. Annoyingly, Croagunk is showing up in Galactic grunt battles. Poison types were annoying before but I usually don’t have something neutral or advantageous upfront against poison and fighting Beat up Saturn and find out that they’re gathering all the legends simultaneously. Fly to Lake Verity and the professor asks for help. He beat one grunt but apparently Lucas needs help. Get through some double battles and he’s lost. Oh well. Fight Mars who has a cute fit. 

Crystal: Beat the Elite Four again. A few move changes and stat bumps really helped make it a breeze. Entei Flamethrower just burns things. 

X: I started X! I don’t know why! I just got distracted and felt like starting it. Also, don’t trust Bank enough to just reset my Y file. Part of that is there is a lot of fashion money grinding in X/Y and I do not have the patience to do that again. Also, all the online features don’t really work no more so that stuff is gone. Ah, remember when 3DS games used the 3D? I forgot the whole new game intro is 3D. It even has some cool uses of it. Mirrors! Fade ins! I kinda wish more games used 3D, but I’m a stereoscopy fan. Just started it for now. I actually put effort into the fire starter before, so I’m going to proooobably choose water this time? Hmm. Maybe I’ll run all three somehow. They have fun final evo type combos. Actually, both 3DS trios have fun final evolutions.  Forgot how nice the opening areas are. I remember these games not being that polished but it’s not quite showing in the graphics. Though, Sun/Moon do look better. During the few 3D scenes in the begging, you can really see how a few affects just kill perforamnce. What if devs felt comfortable about just... not doing fake depth of field in situations where it'll tank smoothness. Please. Save our GPUs. Return to PS2 baked in and dynamic hybrid lights.