Last time on Blue,

I forgot you could get spearow here.

As you can see, spearow know a typed move right off the bat, which makes them practically godly to the newbie player – see, gust? It’s normal type for some unknown reason. As I recall, in later games they remove gust from pidgey’s initial moveset because they felt a typed move in the initial pokemon was overpowered, a feeling they clearly don’t have here. Indeed, peck is a pretty strong move for the early game.

Well, time to finish the tour of Viridian City. Drunken coffee man is now coffeed up and pacified. You can walk right by without so much as conversing. And should you converse?

Ahh, I’ve had my coffee now and I feel great! Sure you can go through! Are you in a hurry?

As far as you’re concerned? Yes.

Yup, that is me blowing off the bit where he decides to teach me about catching pokemon, which is totally a thing you can do should you bother to talk at all, because the game let you decide. (But Farla, what if you wanted to learn? Then you can talk to him. There’s a reason you’re advised to talk to everyone you see. You shouldn’t need the game to take over and drag you to everyone halfway important.) He does a terrible (and somewhat baffling) job of it anyway:

Note the “a”.

And now the “a” is gone.

Also mysterious is how the pokedex could be so well know a random guy is explaining it to us when Oak apparently just invented it. More subtly, how can this guy even see it? Is the character doing something with it when he’s just walking around Viridian?

As you can barely make out, the coding treats this as if I’ve been challenged to a battle. It probably has to – the way the game is set up, when a battle starts everyone unrelated to it disappears, and it’d have been odd for the screen to flash and the guy to vanish in front of our eyes.

The mysteriously appearing red looks even weirder on him.

Continuing the game being surprisingly well-designed on a story standfront, instead of a pokemon we’ve seen already it’s an upcoming one to entice us.

He’s evidently of the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do type.

His granddaughter is also of interest in a more fanfic-related bent.

When I go shop in PEWTER CITY, I have to take the winding trail in VIRIDIAN FOREST.

She’s clearly just there to hint at what new, exciting places you’ll experience next, but it’s interesting to think about how people actually travel in this world. As I pointed out, there’s no way to walk in or out of Pallet without going through that grass, and to get to Pewter you have to get through the whole pokemon-ridden forest. We know that it isn’t safe to go into tall grass at all without a pokemon, so she must be a trainer, and at least one of baseline competence to manage the extended grassy trip through Viridian Forest.

Anyway. Let’s see the last thing of interest now that we’re past him.

Yup, it’s that gym. Viridian really is a very well done area – there isn’t much to do here initially but no one notices because you’re busy being amazed at the game itself, but it’s full of things promising to later pay off.

You may notice in this picture that for some reason I’m speaking to the guy from the left side, rather than going around to the door and then chatting with him on my way back. This is because you can’t talk to the guy from the right.

Do you see how the character isn’t facing the door? That’s because I didn’t press a button to get that message, it pops up as soon as you walk in front. The game then, for some reason, forces you to jump the ledge. I haven’t a clue why. I can guess that the popup message was in case someone tried to walk in, found it blocked, and didn’t think to examine the door because they really wanted you to know about the fact the gym was mysterious and locked, but the reason for making you jump the ledge is still beyond me.

The game is actually amazingly cagey about who the gym leader is. It’s listed as unknown in the booklet. It’s listed as unknown when you pull up your status screen. Everyone you talk to will have no idea. Of course, the game doesn’t go quite far enough, but that’s hilarity far in the future. Right now? Total mystery.

Who could they be? Interestingly, going by the pattern we see here, “they” should be a “she”.

But that’s all there is in Viridian for the moment.

There’s more open areas we can’t reach. Here there’s a clear sign that’s temporary, though – an object that looks like a pokeball lies just out of reach. By now you should be guessing that we’ll eventually find some way to get through these little trees, because they’ve cropped up several times at places where you want to get to the other side.

Heading into Viridian Forest, one girl warns us that the place ahead is a maze. It kind of is, actually, so the warning’s appreciated. While it seems relatively straightforward if you look at it, you only see very small pieces while playing, it all looks very similar, and the maze qualities are worsened by the fact most players aren’t just trying to stumble across the end but to find what’s in all branches, so if you pick the right path to leave, you’ll probably just end up backtracking to see what’s down the other branch and taking even longer.

When we enter, another person says his friends are around looking for pokemon fights. I wasn’t really aware of it at the time, but the NPCs do a pretty good job coaching the player along without pinning you into a tutorial. He’s warning us that there’s trainers around and to go back and heal our pokemon. If we can’t figure out what he means, after running into one trainer and finding out we’ll at least know for sure there’s more in the forest because he said as much.

And now the discovery that the pokeball things are not actually free pokemon lying around for us.

Our first item ball is/holds a pokeball. There’s nothing really impressive in the forest, but it makes sense for things people dropped. The whole itemball business is interesting, though – it seems like the idea that there’s no real difference between pokemon and anything else you want to stuff into a ball, which might explain why you can fit a bike in your backpack. But they can’t be the exact same thing, because there’s clearly no crossover between the itemballs you find and the pokeballs you use. To confuse the issue further, in the anime they accidentally catch a riceball in a pokeball at one point.

It’s also unclear what the distinction with hidden items is – ones that fell without being in itemballs? But it seems it’d defeat the purpose of an itemball for the ball to be more obtrusive than the item.

I was so disappointed to learn from a friend that no, you couldn’t actually make anything like this happen even if you had a team of six pikachu. (Other surprises included that none of my pokemon would have any opinions about being inside a pokeball, not even a pikachu.) The first episode of Pokemon I ever watched was the aftermath on the SS Anne, which gave me a grossly inflated view of how much pokemon were supposed to impact the environment at large.

I run into two pikachu in short succession despite the fact they’re pretty rare and I normally have to spend quite a while wandering around before one shows up. The game is clearly mocking me, since I’m not planning to use one on my team.

Admittedly, I’m not quite sure what that should be. I’m thinking I’ll raise the nidoranF – it’ll mean two poison types on the same team, but whatever, balance won’t be much of an issue. I’m not trying for a perfect team here. I may even grab a muk for the elite four like I used to.

To continue what arose in the comments, I’ll take a minute to go over what I can expect out of picking a nidoranF rather than nidoranM. Back in the day this would just be a nasty little surprise for the player. Here’s what she’ll be learning as she levels up:

This is in addition to the stat divide, where nidoranM has higher attack and speed while nidoranF has higher defense and HP in a game where attack and speed are, fittingly enough, king. Do not try to tell me you liked high defense pokemon back in the day. No one liked high defense pokemon back in the day

I imagine the way this ends up shaking out was not at all the designers’ intention – this is a game where no one caught the fact they’d miscoded the ghost/psychic type interactions and accidentally made psychics unbeatable. (spoiler alert: psychics are unbeatable)

Anyway, point is my nidoranF is a pretty solidly usable pokemon with nothing to recommend using her over a nidoranM, the all-round better pokemon.

Let’s consider my current “team”, actually.

Yup, back in the day they didn’t give pokemon an individual minisprite. Or even try that hard to make the minisprites particularly broad. The only one the plant option resembles is bellsprout. It’s particularly weird because you’d think the starters would be on their mind when considering what’s the best representative image for a group. Then there’s my nidoran, apparently a bipedal dino already, and pikachu as impersonated by a clefairy.

At any rate, I was planning to go with pidgey, but spearow have an interesting moveset in the early game. I’m also not sure if I should raise a bug or not.  Thoughts?