Last time, into the depths of Viridian Forest.
So then. I didn’t use spearow the first time, I thought it looked like a messed-up pidgey, so with division among you, I’ll default to pidgey.
Since we were chatting about bug pokemon and moves (and since it’s not like I need a butterfree to get through the next gym), I’ll also raise a weedle. I generally try to avoid raising anything that won’t be part of my endgame team – I guess that’s my particular obsessive perfectionism thing for the game, rather than trying to get through Rock Tunnel without flash or whatever. But I also tend to get overleveled easily because I fight every wild pokemon I come across, so I can afford to raise something I’ll kick off later.
Speaking of teams, it’s time for the first wild trainer battle.
Coding back then was quite basic. People who stared straight ahead over an area you needed to walk though were almost certainly trainers, although it’s often possible to sneak by if you go far enough away – either trainers have eye problems or they’re lazy. I used to like to make them walk as far as they’d go because I was just really impressed by anything animated.
Hey! You have POKéMON!
Really, it’s a wonder early fandom got anything right, grammar-wise.
Bug catchers are our first clue where most people get their pokemon. These kids run around with giant nets for catching bugs, are called bug catchers, and have teams made up of bug pokemon. They’re obviously netting wild bug pokemon and catching them like that. It’s entirely possible that going into tall grass is actually common for kids and it’s just Oak in particular is terrified of it (he does emphasize that he knows as if from personal experience that it’s a bad idea). And we do know that if your pokemon faint, you aren’t trapped on that spot until someone else escorts you to safety.
The bug catcher’s team is a L6 weedle and caterpie. It shouldn’t be a difficult battle, but if you haven’t been raising up your pokemon or they’re weakened from battles it can get tricky. Any player who stumbled across Gary will have an idea of the level disparity between wild pokemon and trainers to expect from fights, but most people will face this guy first.
Also, near the front is one of the two hidden items in the forest.
The second one is pretty obvious and in fact works as a tutorial for the whole concept. Not sure why this one’s here, maybe they expected people to come back with the itemfinder.
There’s also
Letting you see stuff you can’t reach yet is a big thing in this game. In this case, unlike everything else we’ve been seeing, it won’t take long to get to this, but the first time you wander around Viridian Forest, it feels like it’s an eternity.
And there’s the weedle I’ll be raising next.
If you check Oak’s PC, he’s already willing to rate the pokedex.
I remember being pretty annoyed with this kind of thing. He usually tells you something after you’ve collected enough pokemon that it should be obvious you’ve figured it out yourself. In this case, given I have more than one pokemon, I’ve clearly figured out that they’re in grassy areas.
Looking back, it’s somewhat surprising that of all the stuff they accused Pokemon of doing to little kids, drug use wasn’t generally on the list. This kid is obviously hopped up on something.
As you see, it’s important to check every area to get everything.
One of the things I thought about was the actual ecosystem of the pokeworld. As you see here, weedle is clearly going to win any battles against caterpie (as well as any grass pokemon that live there), yet in my game, I saw that caterpie appeared to be the dominant species. I guessed that the poison must be extremely costly to manufacture, so that weedle couldn’t reproduce as fast. (I’d already read through D&D monster manuals by then, after which everything else appeared sane and reasonable. Do you know there’s this monster that looks like it’s a cross between a long-neck dino and a camel that has death gaze, but it has such weak neck muscles and beady eyes that it has some extremely low chance of the gaze actually connecting with a party member? My age may have been in the single digits at the time, but even I knew that natural selection would immediately start favoring the dinocamel that was better at aiming its instant-win button.)
Anyway. There’s more than just the caterpillar pokemon in the forest.
There are also giant lumps of exp!
They only know harden and are lower level than the actual evolution, something quite confusing for the early player who doesn’t get why their weedle/caterpie can be level six when there’s L4 metapod and kakuna running around. This forest is actually the point where the other two starters may be the slightly easier choice. If you have a charmander, as soon as it learns ember you can murder everything in the forest easily. Even squirtle will at least know a water attack, which, being a special move, ignores the rising defense. But a bulbasaur won’t learn a directly offensive move until later, and even when it does, the grass move will be less effective against them.
Bear in mind that while they can’t directly hurt a pokemon, they can actually do a lot to screw you over indirectly. Fighting metapod and kakuna is likely to be the introduction to PP, limits thereof. All the early moves pokemon know have extremely high PP, so in general they’ll faint before they run out. But chipping away at these exp chunks takes up a lot of moves, so if you’re lucky you’ll run out during a fight with one and if you’re unlucky, you’ll have just enough left to run out while facing a trainer.
And speaking of evolution and kakuna…
I actually really like how they flicker the two sprites together. I know it’s a really cheap way of doing it, but I found it really effective. It made me think of them struggling to transform, and the quick flashes give the illusion of movement.
Those who pay attention to stats here get their first clue that unlike other monster-raising sims, your pokemon have more or less fixed stats. Evolving doesn’t just boost their defense, it also lowers their offense.
Also, for some reason they forgot to set things so that kakuna and metapod learned harden upon leveling up. This meant that if you wanted your pokemon to know the move for some reason, you had to raise it from a wild-caught kakuna or metapod. (And, of course, they couldn’t code it to forget its other two moves that the wild versions lacked.)
I remember considering that the reason for this was related to training. Any weedle or caterpie you evolve does so after an active battle, so somehow this made them keep a degree of musculature but fail to have their shell harden properly. And presumably this was also why the wild ones were found at lower levels than they should have evolved at.
Viridian Forest is packed with tips. I quite like this one – it’s not necessary from a game mechanics standpoint since you’ll find out if you attempt it in battle, so I view it more as an in-universe public service announcement due to the fact a lot of trainers apparently need to be reminded of this.
The final trainer! The hurry, in this case, tended to be that by now your pokemon were pretty weak and possibly poisoned, and you didn’t want to have to walk all the way back to the Viridian pokecenter. He has but a single pokemon, but it’s the highest level in the forest.
Sometimes, you can find stuff on the ground! I’m looking for the stuff I dropped!
Here’s the second hidden item, which is all but handed to you. Despite this I actually struggled quite a bit to find it the first time, since I searched everywhere but the spot right in front of him. I assumed it would be somewhere he wasn’t looking.
You don’t give it back, of course.
And that’s it for the first dungeon.
Thing I didn’t know RE: Why does Oak only have three little Pokemon:
“In the Generation I games, there is unused Trainer data for Prof. Oak. This implies that it was originally going to be possible to battle him.
In the data, Oak normally has a level 66 Tauros, a level 67 Exeggutor, a level 68 Arcanine, a level 70 Gyarados, and one of the Kanto starter Pokémon at level 69. This places his strength on-par with Blue, who is the Pokémon Champion
and grandson of Professor Oak. Additionally, four of his Pokémon are
identical to the ones used by Blue, but are at higher levels, so
originally Oak may have been intended to be in the game as the Champion,
or at least another high-ranking Trainer, possibly in the same manner
as Red in Generation II. This is supported by an email on the PC in Professor Oak’s Laboratory, from the Indigo League issuing a challenge to all Trainers and specifically requesting Oak to come visit them.”
And the starter he has is the starter you and Gary didn’t pick, so if this battle had been kept in, the final starter would have seen some use.
That would tie up that loose end. I wonder what else there is that’s just the result of running out of time?
(It’s a shame this wasn’t something that could be put back in for Yellow, but I guess by then Oak’s game handling had trickled into the show that was then informing the new game, and also plot hole if Oak has any other pokemon there.)
Huh. You know what’s weird? One of the fake cheats people used to post was about being able to fight Oak at Seafoam (if you went in and out somewhere between twenty and a hundred times), and they said his team would be like Gary’s but stronger.
I wonder when that was changed and how he’d originally have been handled. From what Oak says, it doesn’t seem like it’d make much sense for him to head out and raise a new team after sending us out, and also I would have died of rage if Oak had shown up with a tauros. Tauros was the final pokemon I needed to complete the pokedex, and it took me forever to actually catch the damn thing.
(I’m not sure that email means anything, though – I always figured it was for his pokemon research, and the whole please visit thing sounds more admiring a famous person than inviting him to get his butt kicked. Although there is Agatha to consider…)
The Seafoam trick you heard was probably a slightly mangled version of the fact that if you have the compound MN character in your name in the third, fifth or seventh positions, Professor Oak would appear when you did the Missingno. trick. Although apparently he’d be using a glitch team then, with the real team only appearing if you use the Mew glitch to encounter him and lower the Ditto’s Attack.
Ah, yes, that would fit with the way rumors worked then. One thing true, ten things false.
Weird, I thought if you evolved Kakuna at level 7, it forgot Poison Sting and String Shot and learned Harden (and Metapod likewise with Tackle). That’s why it was a big thing to not let Weedle or Caterpie evolve until lv 8, because then they kept their useful attacks.
That seems like a pretty weird line of logic; it seems to be based on the fact wild Metapod/Kakuna only know Harden, but the wild Metapod/Kakuna are under level 7, so there doesn’t seem to be any basis for assuming that it applies at level 7 but not at level 8.
Yellow fixed it so that it checked for new moves just after a Pokémon evolved rather than only after a level-up, so people could have gotten the idea from there, except Pokémon have never in any game even been capable of forgetting moves upon evolution unless the player chooses to replace it by another move that it’s learning.
Something obscure that might be of interest is that if you put a metapod or kakuna that you evolved yourself (so it knows string shot and either tackle or poison sting) into the daycare in gen 1 and have it gain a level, it’ll forget the pre-evolution moves and will only know harden like a wild one.
I was so annoyed.
That’s really weird. Did it do that to any other pokemon?
I’m not sure. My kakuna was the first one I tried it with and I was afraid to put any other pokémon in daycare after that because I was afraid they would forget their moves.
Even without the fix, it would have been easy to set the cocoon pokemon to be able to learn harden every successive level. The game was set up to handle the possibility of a pokemon already knowing a move before it hit the level it’d learn fine.
(Also they could have just let caterpie and weedle learn harden, since it’s not that weird to think a pokemon first gains that ability, and then is able to evolve.)
No pokemon ever forget moves! I was actually really confused when I later played other monster-raising games and this wasn’t true, because I thought it was just how things were done.
I quite like this one – it’s not necessary from a game mechanics standpoint since you’ll find out if you attempt it in battle…
Oh the number of pokéballs I chucked at Brock’s onix on my first playthrough. ;-;
But that’s the game working as intended! You deserve to lose a pokeball if you try to steal pokemon, and you deserve to lose lots if you keep trying after you’re directly told not to be a thief in response.