Last time, reaching Cerulean City!

Whatever that means? Maybe it’s a reference to the mysterious endgame cave that’s right next to the place.

Well, first off, back out of Cerulean City to that fresh grassy patch to see if there’s any pokemon of interest.

If you don’t want a flying type but do want to enjoy playing attack roulette with sand attack, sandshrew fills that niche. I’m fond of the little mouse, it’s just so cute looking.

…amusing?

Okay, you probably just think I’m a dumb kid who won’t get anywhere with it. But still!

Well that’s great and all, but I’m talking to you and not him here.

Your first in-game trade, and it’s a pokemon you won’t have for a while. Another dangling-out-of-reach bit of game design.

Look! This guy has a back door!

I always felt there must be something really important about this place because all the other houses didn’t have back doors. There’s other oddness here – the tiling is different, the house itself is both larger and more sparsely decorated…

He just tells you about badges, which can be exciting at first because you don’t know about them, but doesn’t live up to the uniqueness markers he’s oozing.

I never did figure out quite what the badges did. So they do something to the stats, but how much of a difference are we talking about here? Will this matter for link battles? Is it a flat boost? Are gym leader pokemon treated like they have their respective badge? What about the undertrainers in the gym?

It also raises all sorts of questions, like, how does this even work? Does whatever it is stack, so that if you had a dozen boulderbadges you’d be that much stronger? Why isn’t Team Rocket stealing shipments of badges and handing them out to their grunts – or are they doing that?

(The mystical nature of badges is why I thought Special’s initial plot revolving around getting them made a lot of sense, even if the badges themselves didn’t.)

But back to that back door. You can go through it and appreciate his yard.

And by appreciate…

I mean rare candy. My second rare candy, in fact.

I believe there’s only six rare candies in the game, not that it matters once you get to Cinnabar. The two you get in the early game give you a false impression these are just relatively rare instead of painfully so. I actually sold mine originally, since they were worth over a thousand yen and my pokemon were leveling up so fast anyway.

This is about the last point money will be tight for a while – I had trouble mostly because I was buying lots of pokeballs to catch multiple copies of the pokemon that appeared. After this, smooth sailing until Celadon rears its head, and if you avoid that, you’d good until the elite four fight.

You know what else is cute? That this is a heinous crime.

In the games, Team Rocket are just thieves that use pokemon. That’s what makes them evil. They aren’t accused of beating their pokemon or mugging people here – sure, they attack you in the cave, but so does everyone.

Later on they will get a bit eviler, of course, to make taking them out more righteous.

Game. Capitalize it POLICE FORCE or don’t capitalize it at all. Please.

Also, about Team Rocket, I just got done fighting some in Mt. Moon where apparently they’re doing something about stealing fossils, you want to look into that…?

No? Just want to stand outside the house and chatter on about a crime that’s already happened?

I can see why the police struggles so much.

Stupid bush…

You’re not just cut off from Mt. Moon once you hop the ledge, you’re trapped specifically in Cerulean. There’s the one patch of grass to fight pokemon in and that’s it. The only way forward is blocked by a relatively tough rival battle – if you haven’t been raising pokemon evenly, you’ll have trouble getting by him without addressing the level cap issue first.

To be honest, it’s not really much different than the other towns – first Viridian has drunk coffee guy blocking your way, then Pewter has gym cheerleader guy. The reason it feels so oppressive is because the areas unlocked previously have been lost.

There was unanimous consensus that this advice, and indeed the mechanic itself, was pointless because no one ever didn’t want to evolve a pokemon. If you ever felt like using the B button, there was something wrong with you. Horribly.

Anyway, this is at a decent midpoint to tell people about it. By now, they’re been through the pokemon evolution tutorial with a butterfree and/or beedrill, the disposable training wheel pokemon, and other real pokemon are getting near the levels they evolve.

This is a total lie, you still get jumped by pokemon all the time. The real draw is just speed. Let’s get one!

One day, bicycle man, I will return with an unholy scientific abomination and I will kill you for your insolence.

What’s really annoying is that the people in the shop are discussing different bike models and how some are cheaper than other. But Sir Jerkaround here won’t let me buy those, because he’s sure this other model is perfect for me. This other model that is more money than there is in the game.

Oh yeah, Mewtwo’s gonna kill you first.

Let’s go back out so my rage can die down to a respectable boil.

This is a snapshot into what your life will be like if you levelgrind too much in the early stages.

Oddly, the game doesn’t take this time to remind you this is why you need to hurry up and get that badge. It wouldn’t do her any good, anyway – slowbro evolves at L37, so this pokemon is at minimum seven levels past the point the cascade badge would do her any good. Likely she does, in fact, possess it – and, come to think of it, the L50 badge requires defeating grass types…

Huh. Never realized that. Sometimes the game can be rather clever.

Speaking of that gym…

All the gyms look the same, of course.

Presumably one can’t put those things up without the gym leader accepting the title, just on the basis that it generally ends badly to annoy someone packing superpowered magical animals. This does encapsulate show-Misty’s seeming tension and ambivalence about her feminine side.

He’s all you guys can talk about, so yes.

Poor Bill, constantly gossiped about.

Is there meant to be some connection between Bill and the fact Team Rocket guys are thick on the ground here? Dunno. Could also just be unsubstantiated rumor, where one person says he sure is obsessed and the next person speculates on how far someone obsessed might go, and before long everyone’s heard Bill is murdering children every full moon for new pokemon.

I got sent back to the beginning of Mt. Moon several times in the game because I’d fail to heal my pokemon before charging into the gym or something. And my very first game, I made the mistake of deciding to explore Cerulean before doing anything else. After all, there weren’t any trainers in the city, and I’d notice anyone before walking into their path…

Ooh, that Gary!

Always ahead of me. Always ambushing me when I’m just trying to walk around!

Say something to make me hate you more, Gary!

Best rival.

(Sidenote: interesting he specifies smart as one of the important characteristics, isn’t it? Gary may be a smugface jerkhole to you, but he never seems like he’s a poor trainer. I sure don’t consider intelligence with my team.)

This is not actually a battle I want to face yet, though. Perhaps because of sing, I got through Mt. Moon surprisingly fast, and my pokemon are a lot lower level than they usually are by now. I might be able to win, but not with gratuitous switching to level up my magikarp.

Nope, gonna go to the gym first.

Misty’s gym is pretty cool.

As you can see, it’s easy to avoid a trainer again, but impossible to avoid both trainers – at least, not without skipping the gym and coming back much later with surf.

But why would anyone ever want to avoid a trainer anyway?

…well, there is that horrific image.

For some reason, the overland swimming sprite looks female to me (despite, admittedly, being just a floating head), making this all the more jarring.

Someone’s defensive!

As you can see, this is no demure lass. Instead, like most of the trainers, she’s standing in an aggressive attack posture.

And she’s got the pokemon to back it up. Goldeen knows peck, likely due to the horn but I always thought the mouth itself looked like a beak. So while my poor pidgey is still restricted to normal-type moves, this goldeen can maul grass types at its leisure.

Trainers who want to turn pro have to have a policy about POKéMON! What is your approach when you catch POKéMON? My policy is an all-out offensive with water-type POKéMON!

I like Misty’s aggressiveness. Also look! The game didn’t even capitalize type there. Stop doing that in your fanfics.

Anyway, you can see why Misty ended up a good fit in that one manga to lecture the character about how hard it is to be a pro trainer, and why in the early anime she was there to tell Ash how he was doing things wrong.

The staryu’s levels are intimidating, but it lacks the moveset to back them up. It’ll just tackle.

Starmie is what she blew all her TMs on. Luckily it doesn’t just annihilate your team with psychic moves, but it’s still pretty tough.

Also, in-battle item use rears its head here. These are not particularly useful, but the game would rather trainers used those than healing items, likely because healing items are more frustrating.

The animation looks so terrible when caught midframe.

It’s always bugged me that the sprite for ivysaur shows rearing while bulbasaur is on all fours, yet the the text says it should be the opposite. It depends on how you read it, of course – is the bit about the bulb getting larger a description of the evolution that just took place, or an ongoing process that starts happening upon evolution? It could even be that upon evolution ivysaur temporarily gains the ability to stand on two legs, and the picture is of your ivysaur trying this new rearing thing out.

Game, just give up on this whole “outsiders” thing.

There’s more, you can now use CUT any time! You can CUT down small bushes to open new paths! You can also have my favorite HM! TM11 teaches BUBBLEBEAM!

Well, that’s it for Misty. Really, this gym is even more of a cakewalk than Brock’s with a bulbasaur – with Brock, you have to at least raise it high enough to get to vine whip for an easy fight, while you really should already have the move by now.

The CASCADEBADGE makes all POKéMON up to L30 obey!

Yay!

I’ve only occasionally run to near the L20 limit where pokemon start disobeying you without this, but it’s still nice to have. Now I’ll be able to actually use that gyarados I’ll have.

Right, then. Time to take out that Gary.

Gary’s team isn’t cheating on levels like that raticate guy. What was up with that? Evil TR experiments?

As with his team before, his opening pokemon is the real danger. Then you have this abra that’s just there as free exp, as it can only use teleport.

And a rattata – remember this one, it’ll come up later.

Finally, his inexplicably unevolved starter. I guess the game felt that’d be too much for you, but they could have had it a level lower and evolved instead, or something. Or made it the big tough evolved pokemon and let pidgeotto be a lower-level pidgey instead. Charmeleon are awesome and should appear every chance they get.

One wonders how I’m actually acting. Am I all but frothing at the mouth, or is this just him saying to calm down out of dickery? Did my pokemon brutalize his? Did they do so at my order? Am I a monster?

You never feel bad about beating Gary because he never seems to mind.

So I heard.

The “SOMEONE’S PC” business always struck me as weird. I guess the PCs are all unnamed and the names are just the character’s viewpoint, so until he learns who the PC guy is, it’s just somebody’s PC. Maybe it’s actually more like his bookmarks folder, so this is what you’d see if you looked over his shoulder. Regardless, weird he’d be so chill about storing pokemon there – I mean, by what we’re told, you and everyone else are literally sticking your pokemon in Bill’s PC, not running a PC of your own using his program.

Gary: always concerned about etiquette.

I’m suddenly curious what this was originally in Japanese. Am I getting kisamaed here? Gary seems too mellow about my inferiority for that. Maybe one of the excessively familiar terms? I don’t really remember those ones. And I wonder what pronoun he’s using for himself.

Anyway, current team:

I’ve been doing a lot less grinding than usual, and it shows.

Tomorrow: trainers trainers trainers trainers ABRA.