Last time,

I’ve never had the patience for it except in G/S/C where you get one handed to you, but the cost/benefit ratio is significantly lower when *I* won’t actually have to sit through endless grinding with it. >:)

ಠ_ಠ


…
Well, if it’s that great of a deal…

Note the “somewhat”, everyone, and stop writing twist fanfics about prehistoric magikarp being godly.

Ah, magikarp. That one lent itself to some unhappy nicknames. People never settled on if it should be magikrap or magicrap.

It actually isn’t as terrible a pokemon as it first appears, but it’s pretty rough if you don’t know how to deal with it.

On to Mt. Moon. Here’s a full map of the place. It’s much more complex than Viridian Forest, and has three levels. If you look closely, you’ll see it’s actually simpler than it looks – each of the stair/ladder things leading to a new area quickly hits a dead end, so you can explore each in order, ending on the final one in the northwest corner that leads out.

Of course, you don’t know that when you’re playing and can only find out by going over every inch of the place.

I’m going to raise up a jigglypuff because as I mentioned, it has a nice early game moveset and sing will be useful for catching pokemon. Sing also makes switching pokemon to raise it easier.

A just-caught jigglypuff only knows sing, so it can’t win any battles on its own. But if an opponent’s asleep when you switch your pokemon, you won’t take the damage that’d otherwise whittle your team down when doing this method. (As I mentioned, a pokemon loses an extra turn waking up from sleep, so even if it wakes up the very next turn, it still can’t attack your pokemon.)

And this jigglypuff will then help me raise the magikarp. Sleep is another overpowered status effect in this game. Pokemon usually stay asleep for several turns and because they have to waste a turn waking up, I can put them back to sleep immediately.

Plus, it’ll be interesting to compare its stats to the rest of the team.

Let’s get going.

As you can see, there’s plenty of items around.

Remember the first time you saw a zubat? Remember how excited you were to see this brand-new pokemon?

I actually don’t mind zubat. One big problem is they’re hard to run from due to their speed, but I always kill everything in my path so I rarely notice.

It’s odd, but while the initial pokemon always have two moves, once you get this far the slightly higher level pokemon have single moves instead. A smattering of L11 zubat will appear with a second move, supersonic, that can get quite annoying. Otherwise, it’s just leech life.

Leech life is a weak move with a power of only 20. Like all HP draining moves, it only heals half as much HP as it takes, and it won’t take much. Unfortunately, my team is vulnerable. In RBY, for some reason bug is strong against poison. So my nidoranF is weak to this, and my bulbasaur and beedrill have a 4x weakness. My pidgey’s resistant, though, so I can rely on it for defense.

Zubat the bat pokemon. Really?

You seem more suspicious. A bug catcher in a zubat-filled cave…

Of course, there are some bugs here.

I really like paras, but I’ve already got a grass type and bug type, plus it’d need babying to raise here and I’ve already got two pokemon like that.

See this? This is what used to happen when your pokemon was poisoned. Walking outside of battle hurts it until it runs out of HP and its PSN status turns into FNT status.

Also, look! You could sell a lot of things you probably shouldn’t sell, and in the early game it isn’t obvious yet that this is a bad idea.

The trainer types all have different sorts of pokemon.

Lass trainers favor normal types, particularly the round, cuddly kind. Youngsters tend to have rattata.

Super nerds? Urban/manmade pokemon.

In practice, this means electric and poison types, steel not existing yet. Voltob, grimer…

It’s a minor thing, but I like what it says about the characters. That lass has a single pokemon, but it’s one that can only be found here. Did she get it from a friend, or did she hang around the entrance, dodging zubat, until she had the chance to catch it? The super nerds, do they have those pokemon because they spend most of their time at home in cities, or is there something about those pokemon that appeals to them?

Consider that the lass is chilling in a cave with a single pokemon right next to a sign saying zubat will nom on your precious blood. Girl is hardcore.

One time while playing Red, I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t realize I was in a trainer battle rather than this being a wild pokemon. Terribly excited to see this bellsprout, I painstakingly whittled it down as it battered my team, then triumphantly threw the pokeball…Only to discover that no, it was in fact a trainer’s pokemon.

For some reason, fallen items are always right up against the wall, so that a player needs to stick close to those to be sure not to miss any. Maybe there’s a slight slope so items roll until they reach a corner or wall.

The jigglypuff is strong enough now to function on its own, so it’s time to work on my magikarp. Isn’t the water pokemon minisprite cute? It’s hard to be mad at magikarp when they seem so perky. They’re trying their best!

Like most of the rock pokemon in this game, geodude have a 4x weakness to grass and water as well as more generally not being able to handle special attacks (and since the endgame is all about dealing with an opponent’s mewtwo, special attacks are the most important consideration).

This is what the third level looks like. Rather brightly colored, isn’t it?

See, that’s why Team Rocket is the best team. What kind of criminal are they? The criminal kind! Not the idealist or cultist or whatever. They do bad stuff for money. You don’t reason with them, you just kick their asses and everyone showers you with praise.

Despite being criminals, for some reason they still pay out at the end of a battle like everyone else. You can mentally insert my bulbasaur using vine whip to flip him over and shake him until money comes out, though.

Here’s an interesting layout. You have the obvious item, but you don’t need to walk into his field of vision to get it. No, instead he’s blocking your way to an anomalous rock.

See, you can figure out where a lot of the hidden items are just by looking for anything odd.

So you get this water pokemon, and it only knows splash which doesn’t do anything, but then you find a water move TM…

Pictured above: magikarp can’t even learn water gun.

I assume the TM is there for people who picked charmander, as their lives will be bad enough without factoring in rock types. While my particular team only has one pokemon that can learn it, a nidorina or rattata could also learn the move. It’s also possible someone might waste it on their squirtle – squirtle initially learn the measly bubble attack, with water gun only coming a number of levels later.

Normal types largely have terrible special attack, but every rock type you see in the early game is part ground, so water gun, with its power of 40, is effectively 160.

Speaking of which. Hikers are bad news in the early game, where they’re like mini Brocks. They tend to have rock pokemon. I learned to really hate them when doing alt teams in GSC, since I had to try to beat the second gym as early as possible or else my pokemon would stop obeying me.

Hikers are also some of the oldest trainers you’ll come across, and make up an interesting element of the ongoing argument about what trainers are. They seem to be there because they just like hiking rather than much interest in being trainers, and their pokemon are ones you’d run across in rocky, barren areas. So, do they have them because they needed pokemon to defend themselves in order to hike, or did they just happen to catch some while hiking? If the pokemon are there just for practical reasons, they picked terribly – rock pokemon are good against the omnipresent zubat but little else. Yet they’ll be present all over the game world, including relatively high level areas. Maybe some areas catch the local wild pokemon and raise them for hikers to rent.

As you can see, pokemon stats diverge more and more as you go up in levels. My jigglypuff’s stats are terrible, except in HP.

HP is basically the worst stat. See, high defense, low HP? Your defense remains that high the entire time and any healing repairs a larger proportion of your total bar. Low defense, high HP? You’re basically snackfood for anything with a draining move.

No point to this. That’s more the exception than the rule, though…

In a later game, he’d probably be spinning around like a top here, but in the first gen, trainers only stared in one direction. If you do fight him, he’s actually pretty tough.

Also, rather misleading with his pokemon evolved several levels early. I was so confused when raising my rattata, especially when other pokemon evolve around L16.

And oddly philosophical as well.

That really hurt my team, but there’s only two trainers left in before Cerulean, and I don’t want to have to backtrack.

So it seems revival has been mastered. In that case, it must be what the museum meant by them being rare.

But first…I still haven’t seen a single clefairy. Clefairy are most common on this level, so rather than heading back, just wandering this area is probably best.

YES!

They’re not exactly bruisers, but they’re semi-decent – more so than jigglypuff, anyway. But I’m not going to mess with raising one.

The nice thing about hoarding healing items is that when you suddenly need some, you have plenty.

That’s great, buddy. Look, I’m just heading through, so-

Or we could do that instead.

What, you thought I wasn’t still doing that? The key to gyarados is to make sure your magikarp gets every scrap of exp you can wring from the game.

On a philosophical level, exactly how am I better than Team Rocket? I beat this guy and now I’m taking one of his fossils. Hell, there’s no sign Team Rocket is jumping trainers for their find, this guy is near one TR guy as it is, they seem to just be digging up fossils on their own.

I picked the dome fossil because I liked the name better. As it happens, I like the pokemon better as well.

He’s wiser than Oak. I was totally going to see what happened if I tried to take it.

In my first game, I failed to talk to this guy after getting this fossil, so I carted my fossil around the whole game because what if I found the place that revives them and didn’t have it with me, losing my chance forever because that’s totally how videogames work?

Anyway, once you reach there, it’s about the end.

If you look closely, you’ll see that the far side of the wall slopes, indicating that the wall itself ends there. So, all that trip through Mt. Moon was to cross a distance of four steps.

…the pokemon world really doesn’t grasp efficiency, does it?

My team is mostly fainted and my pidgey will be in short order. But my lovely magikarp is fine, so there’s no need to waste an antidote.

What’s up with this empty area?

Greatballs were magic at the early parts of the game, when you can’t buy them yet.

Also, another TM.

The area is full of ledges, and while there’s openings in most of them, you can’t get too far east.

So who is she? We don’t know and won’t for some time.

And the ledge below operates on similar principles, so once you jump it to continue, you can’t get back – unless, of course, you don’t use another pokemon center. You return to the one last used when you faint, which at this stage is the only way to regain access to Mt. Moon (and all the previous cities we’ve been to)

I seriously considered this. I just really didn’t like the idea of losing the ability to go to those places. Before hopping that final ledge, I made sure to catch multiple clefairy, just in case.

And then, Cerulean.