Last time,
Now, Celadon! City of cool stuff and fourth-wall-breaking.
Walk in and you see a Team Rocket guy. Yup, this place is going to be interesting.
Team Rocket has, if anything, gotten worse at subtlety.
Well, let’s go get eevee.
As you can see, this is where the game starts to get weird.
And why is this whole explanation here, hidden away, in the first place?
Then there’s this, which appears to be in-universe info, and so again begs the question of why put it here of all places? The Silph Co tag at the end is interesting, because in Celadon, the trainer tips signs are all just advertisements for in-battle stat boosters that end by saying you can get them at the department store, so why not put this flyer out in a pokecenter or something under similar reasoning?
Arg.
The box thing is not quite as stupid as it seems. The game requires you save in order to move between boxes, in what’s probably an issue of running into space limitations.
So, back to the pokecenter.
When using the item you actually do hear a melody, although technically that doesn’t mean there isn’t another sound that’s inaudible.
So I’m nearing Fuchsia, which the girl on the boat told me is where the Safari Zone is.
The NPCs are really helpful in this. You get all sorts of clues about how things work from random people’s dialogue. I think that’s yet another part of what fed the crazy theories, so much of it did end up relevant that it was hard to be sure when something was just an offhand comment.
What sort of person lives in a house that can only be accessed by water? And what sort of person then does that in the middle of a city?
See, the games totally have an anti-gambling message. Removing gambling from the game is like promoting gambling!
Just look at all this subtlety.
I suppose this does begin to explain how you can have stuff like alakazam having an IQ in the thousands – clearly, the IQ in the pokeverse is far, far lower than our own, so their scale is all off.
One can’t be too hard on whoever named the casino. At least they did better than the one who thought a building where you exchange things for prizes should be named Prize Exchange, and furthermore, that it needed a little blurb saying that also, you could exchange things for prizes there.
Of course, it’s not all negative on gambling, so clearly everything had to be cut away lest the children wager away all they own.
Porygon is the only pokemon you actually need to get here, although other things do look very tempting.
One assumes this guy doesn’t have kids, since that’s not exactly the best way to get them to leave you alone.
This is an odd little sidequest. For some reason, you can’t take coins unless you have a case for them, and no one will so much as tell you where they got theirs. In some stunningly bad business practice, even attempting to buy coins will pop up this message rather than the guy in charge giving you one or offering to sell you one.
And then he makes the terrible mistake of actually challenging me to a battle. If he hadn’t, I’d have been forever blocked from the poster.
Look! A legal raticate!
Huh. That was mysterious. On the other hand people walk off and vanish all the time, so I’m sure it’s nothing.
As you can see, the coins are horribly overpriced. In addition to the minigame aspect of this being incredibly tedious, even just acquiring the coins is. You can only buy the coins fifty at a time. The only part of this that won’t be an exercise in frustration is the hideout underneath.
I’m staring at the idiot who doesn’t realize he should take off his uniform, that’s what.
Then what good are you to me?
This sort of thing was a source of unreasonable frustration to me as a kid. I just really wanted more interaction. What does this place offer? I’ll never know because they’ve been on break for the years and years I’ve owned the game.
I wouldn’t really say “a” basement. Also, why the hell are you telling me?! Go find a police officer!
…what if this guy is actually another undercover grunt, doling out helpful hints to wannabe hero trainers to lure them in?
Why are you giving it to a little kid? Seriously, can’t you throw it away or at least find someone older to hand it off to?
Key item get!
And yet you’re all but shoving me at the slot machines.
See, the games aren’t pro-gambling. They’re pro-doping.
I always found it odd there was a sailor saying this and not another guy in uniform, but now that I think about it, he could just be disguised. Either way I think the implication is that Team Rocket is moving their stuff by boat. Legitimate enterprise!
Don’t have any idea who this guy is. To my knowledge, he didn’t show up in the anime and I don’t remember him featuring in any of the manga. Just some old mafia guy, I guess.
Is the idea that I’m overhearing him talking to the old guy, or that he’s mistaken me for someone else, because obviously eleven year old kids are so often dead ringers for Team Rocket bigwigs? Either one doesn’t make much sense.
Also, this line made me wonder if there was any way to get in on the pokemon selling business. I could easily catch a lot of the pokemon they offer.
…right.
I like the little NPC dramas you occasionally see.
That empty spot always caught my attention. Why was it empty? There can’t be anything there, it’s totally inaccessible. Is this the remnants of some landscaping? What’s up with it?
…
Yup, meowth are horned bipedal lizards.
I like that the pokemon can wander out.
Their meeting room is a bed and a computer desk?
I don’t think I like you.
Spoiler:
1) Gary
2) Mewtwo
3) a certificate.
And that’s why the sprites everything.
Honestly, for all the design of things is weird, you have to credit them for it being pretty robust. The reason people could mess with things as much as they did was because the game’s engine would just keep chugging along. There are an embarrassing number of bugs, though – the ghost/psychic thing mentioned before should have been easy to catch, and there’s also some screwups with how it reports type weaknesses on dual-type pokemon, which, considering the game revolves around knowing type interactions, is a pretty big problem.
He has a lot of no mews to hand out.
I really think the mew thing was the harbinger of a major downward trend in the games. A big premise in them is that any pokemon anyone has, you can have too, there’s no difference between boss characters and your own.
There’s something powerful in just how determinedly secret mew the actual statted beast is despite it featuring prominently in the game’s story, and I think I can see the reasoning in it only being accessible by cheating, even if I don’t really agree. But either way, all that was a one-time thing – like so much about these games, it could only have been like that at that one particular moment in time, when there was more rumor than information. Making pokemon impossible to get in later games, and also the idea of having special versions of pokemon that can only be gotten by giveaway, were and are all bad moves.
I wonder how things would have been different if you could have gotten one at the end, and the trend had been, instead, that all pokemon must be able to get within the games alone?
Another impassible barrier. Maybe he’s just really out of shape.
Also your city’s crawling with rockets. Don’t you think that might be more of a factor than a few slot machines?
And that’s what the pokemon world thinks of child safety. Stop saying they wouldn’t let ten year olds run around with friendly turtles, they let six year olds run around with angry poison spewing death balls.