Last time,

So now I have a badge! And I know a place that said I couldn’t pass until I had it…

Time to backtrack.

As you can see, the poison animation seems to trigger the same red effect Dragonfree’s guessed has to do with part of the sprite being set to background. Because. I suspect looking at the code for these games would make coders sob quietly.

Also, hey look! It’s a giant chunk of exp.

You’d only get L6 versions of the more common cocoon pokemon, making this another way Blue was better. Metapod could be taken down by weedle’s poison sting and it’d only halve the damage from a bulbasaur’s grass attack, rather than fourth it the way the bug/poison mix does, so that vine whip was still a viable way to bypass its raised defense.

Yay, beedrill!

As you can see, beedrill won’t learn a new move upon leveling up. It won’t learn it next level either.

Its moveset is frankly terrible at this point. While poison sting is the better move within the forest, it’s far weaker in power than tackle, making its usefulness quite limited in regular battle.

Not that I can do anything about it yet, since bide isn’t a useful move.

(Also, note how my bag is just all my items, jumbled together, and there’s no image representing how they look, either.)

Continuing along…

Yay! I get to enter the POKéMON LEAGUE!

Or not.

I don’t believe it actually states you need all the badges to get in, although you can probably guess. I know I went back here a few other times just to see what’d happen.

Next up, Route 3.

From this, you’d get the impression no one’s supposed to take fossils. Maybe the real issue is that they’re presumably selling them? Criminal activity in this world seems to be related to using pokemon for profit.

As you can also see, the guy’s disappeared, allowing me to pass. Sort of disappointing that he doesn’t acknowledge my greatness after what a nuisance he can be, but if you’ve been stuck for a while his vanishing is likely reward enough, and if you haven’t then you probably don’t hate him enough to care either way.

As you see, the distance a trainer can see you varies.

I suppose the real idea here is that the other trainer has to assume you want to battle, and some are more prone to guess early while others want you to make it more obvious. But they’ll pounce on you even if you’re not facing them, so it clearly isn’t as narrow as eye contact either.

Anyway, she’s trying to clue you in to how trainer battles are triggered. For some reason, both the female trainers in this area reference looking at you. Presumably this is related to the assumption you’re a boy, as this also seems at play with the third female trainer on the route.

This is odd, since all the trainers should still be where you left them. I guess this is an indication that the gameworld is not intended as an accurate depiction of reality and we the player should assume that the trainers we defeated don’t stand around in that area forever but go on to raise their pokemon and travel the world just like we do.

Then in the second gen we discover that trainers do stay locked where they are and only raise their pokemon slightly before being stuck with that as well.

Also yay!

In my first playthrough, my charmander evolved in the opening to this area, and while my bulbasaur was not quite so desperately overleveled, I had an ivysaur by the time I reached Mt. Moon. Here, I haven’t been level grinding and I’ve been trying to keep levels equal, so my starter is weaker than usual.

First gen really had some lines, didn’t it?

As you can see, even evolved beedrill isn’t that great. Rattata are deceptively good in the early game, though – they have high attack combined with high speed, which adds up to some nasty critical hits.

Quick attack!

Quick attack has a power of 40, making it only marginally better than tackle (35 power, plus a 5% miss rate). Its main bonus is that it makes you go first in battle, which is particularly nice in the first gen where critical hits make it hard to be sure you’ll survive the next hit. Of course, the pokemon that learn it tend not to be the slowpokes that’d benefit most. Pidgey isn’t a slow pokemon but it’s not a particularly fast one either, so the move’s a decent one, especially here where I’m facing pokemon at around the same level.

Ah, wrap. Wrap was awesome unless it was being used on you instead of by you. Wrap is a weak attack, but the other pokemon can’t do anything until the attack ends. It’s much like multi-attack moves like fury attack but spread over various turns. Right now it’s just annoying, but combined with poison and/or leech seed… And, of course, ekans does learn poisoning moves.

Not that I’ve had much experience with it. Ekans is a Red version pokemon, so I didn’t encounter it in my first game, and it’s not in Yellow either, since it’s a pokemon used by Jesse.

Finally. As I mentioned, fury attack will hit multiple times. Its power is a mere 15, but it’ll always hit at least twice, so the minimum power is actually 30, and it can hit a maximum of five times. Also, with critical hits being such a factor, having more than one chance at them is pretty useful.

Unfortunately, to balance this it has low accuracy, which means there’s a decent chance of it not hitting at all.

There’s an almost identical move, fury swipes, with a power of 18. My nidoran will learn that eventually.

For whatever reason, evolved pokemon are rarer than you’d expect. The bug catchers all have pokemon above the level they should have evolved at. Perhaps the designers were worried the evolved bugs would be too dangerous at this stage. But, combined with the presence of metapod and kakuna at levels below when they evolve, one thing I considered is that pokemon don’t actually have a set level to evolve at. How good a trainer you are determines how early your pokemon evolve.

This guy’s a wholly optional trainer, since you can easily backtrack without going down this way.

Another batch of grass! New pokemon???

The encounter rate here is terrible. I’ll go fight that trainer instead.

Jigglypuff actually have a pretty good moveset. Sleep lasts forever in this game, plus waking up takes a whole turn (this latter bit allows you to knock pokemon out again without them ever managing a move if you have the faster pokemon) and disable is devastating in the early game, when pokemon may only have a single attacking move.

And look, a relatively high level one has appeared for capture!

The weights in his game are all over the place. That’s about the same size and weight as my stocky little nidoranF.

It’s pretty obvious at just a glance what jigglypuff’s standout stat is. With 33 hp, it has about as much as my other pokemon that are nearly twice its level.

Speaking of stats…

As everyone knows, Pokemon’s balance is terrible. Beedrill has pretty good stats at the moment, but of course that won’t last as the others start evolving, and even evolved, its defense is lower than any of the other pokemon.

But really, there’s every sign this was intentional. Even the anime originally had people say being a strong pokemon trainer was a matter of catching strong pokemon. Part of the game is to figure out what the right pokemon to use are, or, in some cases, to accept that a pokemon’s weaker and use it anyway.

My caught/seen ratio is starting to worsen as I run into more trainers.

Furthering the confusion about how the pokedex works and what it is, it’ll tell you where pokemon can be found, not simply where you’ve run into them yourself, so the data must have already been entered, and yet, will only do so if you’ve seen the pokemon somewhere first.

You can’t actually get to Mt. Moon from Cerulean, due to the setup of the ledges, although you can go around a certain way by using surf and, in theory, by just plain ordinary swimming, which people other than your character appear capable of. Possibly more determined people can also surmount ledges.

I’m more inclined to just say that the ledge thing should be considered in the same class as the unmoving trainers – Cerulean is right next to Mt. Moon and it’s a moderately sized city, you’d think they’d have people who wanted to travel through Mt. Moon without going the extra long way around just to get to the entrance.

The area leading up to Mt. Moon has these annoying ridges. I guess the game’s trying to emphasize you’re climbing uphill.

Another person who, unlike Oak, doesn’t seem particularly concerned about wild pokemon.

(Of course, it’s impossible for you to run into a geodude in this area – you’ll need to be inside the cave first.)

And as you see, there’s a pokemon center right outside Mt. Moon! That’ll be useful, particularly if there’s some pokemon you’re trying to level up by the slow and painful method of sending out, then switching in a different pokemon.

More about criminals.

As the only people connected to selling pokemon seem to be Team Rocket, we were just told they’re in the area, and we’ll shortly be running into them, it’s quite possible this guy is actually one of them.

Well? Should I try to raise a gyarados, or no?