Last time,

Seafoam Islands!

Plural, for some reason, despite the fact you can clearly see this is a single landmass.

That’s the exit. Those round whatever-they-are look little more natural than they did back in Pallet. Even if you assume that they’re just some inconveniently placed rocks, look at those signs and the fact there’s a path leading up to both entrances. Clearly, people have been here, and yet for some reason never thought to make it so you could get across the place without going through a giant cavern that also happens to contain dangerous water currents.

I mean really, this was not the best use of their time.

Here’s someone hanging out in the little walled off area. That makes sense. Whenever there’s water, I want to try out each individual area.

Plus, this particular area is probably very calm, since the barrier would break the waves. It would indeed be a nice place to float if only my lazy avatar knew how to swim.

But anyway.

Remember I mentioned I wanted to try raising a tauros, and also that my current team didn’t have any pokemon that could use strength?

So, dumped off my pidgeot for the moment. Pidgeot’s moveset is still extremely boring, and that won’t change until past L50, where it’ll learn mirror move and I’ll be too done with the game to actually get much mileage out of it.

Of course.

Actually, this cave goes quite easy on the zubat, which I appreciated. There’s some there because it’s a cave, but since the player’s quite familiar with the whole cave/zubat connection, there’s no need to make them pop up constantly.

And here’s why you need strength to get through here.

I always found this whole business odd. You need to use strength once in order for your pokemon to be able to move any boulder on that level, instead of it being always on or needing to be done per shove. The way things work make it seem like strength should be a stat booster, but in battle it’s just an attack with no other effects at all.

I’d forgotten how awful the seel sprite was.

It doesn’t look like a horn, it looks like a floating teardrop placed over the seel’s head.

Jumping into that last hole drops you into the water, at which point you’re at the mercy of the current and swept away.

And this is apparently a waterfall! I found that quite cool when I first saw it.

You can’t go back, it’ll just bounce you out again.

Indeed.

Climbing straight back up leaves you trapped. I would get stuck in this loop, not realizing that I needed to go around and find a different ladder/staircase to climb up on the bottom level.

A good clue. Most players would push the first boulder into the water all on their own, but as it requires two boulders to do anything, some people might not realize that their next goal should be to find the other boulder.

So, this area is also off-limits for the moment.

But there’s an island waiting for me if I can find the boulders for it.

This one is trickier, particularly since this is the first of these puzzles, so you may not immediately realize it is a puzzle and just start shoving around boulders. Luckily, leaving the level causes all boulders you haven’t pushed down a hole to reset.

Oooh

The rest of its sprites match the description, but for some reason the improved Blue sprite fumbled.

I was shocked by this the first time I saw it. Until now, pokemon sprites have either been pet pokemon or blocked off by fences. I hurried over to talk to it…

And it attacked!

(Isn’t it weird that it’s named now, but seeing it before didn’t give us its name?)

Articuno has an impressive special.

My venusaur was in real trouble facing it, and since I wasn’t much raising the rest of my team that made the resulting battle quite difficult, particularly since my team was already weakened by all of my wandering around the cave. I ultimately panicked and ran, ruining my chance to ever catch it.

Anyway, don’t have time to try to do this any other way, and anyway, this is how you play in Blue.

Remember that part for when we go to Cinnabar.

And now the platform is empty forever. It always bothered me how finite my interaction with things was.

One of the pokemon I tried using on my assembled L100 link battle teams was a starmie because of this move. Recover is legitimately pretty powerful, but I always thought of it as more awesome than it was, likely because of my disdain for healing items.

Huh, just realized this implies that pokemon losing limbs during battle happens with at least moderate frequency.

I feel this is one of the better caves. You have the odd rocks that happen to hide items, but you also have them as part of the puzzles, so they seem more natural.

Only the second one I’ve seen. Nice job, game.

The current is blocked!


I wondered what it would be like to swim around over there, partly just because I couldn’t but mostly because I wondered if that open bit was another waterfall that might go somewhere else.

I always have trouble getting all the pokemon here. I had to run around for a bit just to see my first shellder, while I fought long strings of nothing but psyduck. I’ll just manually evolve the other ones I missed.

And that’s all for this place!

That was actually far easier than I remembered. I spent so long wandering around there, I just couldn’t find the last boulder. One time I remember skipping it, then deciding to go in from the Cinnabar side only to get stuck and fail to find the other way out.

But then, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I actually stalled in my original game at Fuchsia, not sure how to get across that water, until a friend pointed out I had surf and just needed to use that. For some reason selecting surf just didn’t occur to me.

Ah, the other side…