Well. I don’t have time to spend several months chasing tauros, so it’s time to do what I never did back in the first gen, and use a code.

01005AD0 lets you have regular battles within the Safari Zone. The list I found it on is quite nice. A problem with looking up pokemon codes that’s been there since the beginning is that most codes are varients of the same stuff you’d get for any game – have any X, have infinite X, have all X, and different sorts of unbeatable/unkillable cheats. It can take a while to find a set by someone who has the slightest idea what’s actually important.

Let’s fill the pokedex.

Haha, got you now.

Parasect were the only pokemon in the first gen that learned spore, the only perfect accuracy sleep move at the time. Because waking up took a turn, you could sleep-lock a pokemon, knocking it out before it had another turn. This is one of the very few areas there does seem to have been some rudimentary playtesting. Parasect is extremely slow, so it’s unlikely to move first, so in order to ensure the pokemon remains asleep, you’d have to guess in advance when it’s going to wake up.

Wow, I’d forgotten this sprite. Compare this to dwebble in the most recent generation. This actually looks like a crab.
I

Psyduck and its evolution are pure water types, something I only found out in Crystal, when they appeared early on and I was trying a dark type team only to be shocked that bite did normal damage.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

VICTORY AT LAST

It’s a shame tauros were so impossible to get, because they actually look pretty cool, particularly in Blue’s colors. I’ve never used one.

Pokemon is a fun game for kids!

And my box is full. Well, the guy warned me.

It’s not really a big deal. Catching pokemon in the Safari Zone doesn’t have any impact on the steps counter, so unlike most pokemon, you can just keep trying until you get one.

I ended up catching a bunch and then sulking because you can’t do anything with the fact you have extras of an extremely rare pokemon. Even one that there’s obviously a huge demand for, given it’s a casino prize.

Looking at this, it’s kind of anticlimatic for them to be in the Safari Zone, even if it makes sense – presumably that colony was immediately captured and shipped to the Safari Zone’s breeding facilities. And in a way it’s good for the player to not be the one actually discovering everything because it makes it feel like there’s other stuff going on in the world. Still, why even bother with a pokedex entry like this? The kid’s clearly just repeating something he heard on the news. He doesn’t need to catch it for that.

This is interesting because it means there must be some even more immature version running about. If the legs were just immature, it’d be possible that it was born with them, but newly grown obviously means to bring to mind a tadpole just beginning its transformation, which requires there to be a tadpole first.

I don’t think there were ever rumors about a secret baby pre-poliwag. Probably because no one ever cared much about baby pokemon. Secret evolutions would be like the regular pokemon but more awesome. Secret earlier stages would be like the regular pokemon but suckier. Everyone became enthusiastic about the idea when we heard of baby pokemon in the next gen, but it turned out we were right the first time.

Naturally, it evolves into seaking.

Here’s an odd thing. Pokemon seem to come in waves, and nowhere is this more evident than when running around the Safari Zone. The second time I went in, I found four pinsir just walking out the first area, then couldn’t find any several times in a row. Fishing, I hit a long string of goldeen, moved over a spot, then hit a string of poliwag. Maybe there’s something wrong with whatever it uses to generate its random numbers.

And now, for the rest of Fuchsia. It’s…interestingly laid out.

See that ledge? In order to get back to the pokemon center, you have to go all the way back around.

There is no PUNCH STUPID GUY IN FACE dialogue option, sadly.

Raising a single pokemon is the easiest way to win. Past a certain disparity in level, a pokemon will always go first and always knock out its opponent in a single hit, at which point your only concern becomes PP.Virtually all of the game lets you challenge as many or a s few trainers at a time as you like, so PP only really becomes a consideration at the elite four, and if you hoard the PP restoring items you get, you’ll have far more than you could need.

It’s good to mention it here, as from here you go to Cinnabar, home of the seventh badge. There’s still a lot of game left, but the end is in sight.

It doesn’t seem to govern at all. Then again, as I’ve mentioned before the timeframe here is unclear, so it’s possible they do all sorts of things and the game just happens to take place during a short time they aren’t doing anything.

Bill’s pokemon data is apparently just pictures of four pokemon. Admittedly that’s all my own PC holds on my chickens, but I don’t go around calling that “data.

If you mean he had other data, no, he didn’t. Shows you what gratitude is worth these days…

Hello, character I totally forgot about.

How about teleporting things, coding or being a pokemon? Those more recent?

Anyway, enough flavor. Koga’s gym! As you can see, the invisible walls are rather visible. I’ve heard that’s only true in the color version for some reason.

Actually that win was totally brawn. This is one of the many points in the game where I don’t really need any strategy beyond picking the strongest move.

I imagine this all seems far less bizarre in Japan.

While several character sprites have whips, tamers stood out, probably due to their name. A lot of players got into the games from the anime, which is all about pokemon as cute friends, not animals to be controlled by force.

Yes! Among the many benefits of picking bulbasaur is that it hits its third evolution earliest, at L32.

The guy also informs me that using animals is a proud ninja tradition, another point in favor of pokemon and animals being the same thing in this universe.

Even as a child I thought this was somewhat off. If moving after sunlight was a good energy tradeoff, plants would do that.

As you can see, venusaur’s back sprite is particularly weird. It looks like it’s a crouching frog with a mane around its head. I guess maybe the idea is that the flower is angled forward…?

Oh. If you look at the Green sprite, it makes more sense.

 

So the bit hat looks like an ear up top is actually the edge of the frilled petals, and the bit that looks like a leg is its eyebrow and ear.

Huh.

Amazingly bad sprites.

Don’t try to sound profound when you end the battle saying you dropped your balls.

I think the player is pretty yang. Really, looking at my actions, I’m all light and fire and brazen power.

I took out all the trainers in one go, but I can’t quite sweep the gym like this. Gotta heal first.

It’s never clear if you’re some unusual prodigy or if this kind of this is just standard trash talk. In any case, I always found Koga rather irritating and arrogant. He’s not even strong enough to justify this sort of attitude. It’s even worse if you fight him after finishing Saffron. I remember sending out a weak pokemon and swapping it with my starter each time to split the exp and still finishing without a single loss.

Also a factor is, of course, that as in later games you can only have a single status effect going at a time, so one protects you from any other.

In my case I have too many poison pokemon, rendering them immune to his signature move, toxic.

As you can see, gym leaders still don’t have full teams. I’m not sure why the game always preferred partial teams for the trainers. It was always really weird to me because players immediately acquire a full six. Even if you’re not planning to raise all of them, it’s still useful to have them on your team just in case, like if you want to switch pokemon without one of your actual fighters taking a hit.

His pokemon are a big jump in power, but not particularly difficult. Poison is weak to bug, ground and psychic moves, and by now the player’s likely got access to at least one of those.

Also, if you switch out a pokemon hit by toxic, it stops gobbling your health.

I’ve heard that the soul and marsh badges were switched by accident which always seemed somewhat plausible to me. Even if you could say there’s some sort of soul/ninja connection, marsh/psychic seems inexplicable, while marsh going with the ninjas using bugs and gas pokemon makes at least a little sense. But this is a pink heart badge, on the other hand, and that doesn’t have much to do with marsh either.

The problem’s really with Sabrina’s badge, I suppose.

The badge boosts are kind of random, aren’t they?
 

This is actually important for the Safari Zone as well as Cinnabar- to get to the fourth area with any reasonable number of steps left, where there’s the best chance of seeing a damn tauros, you need to take the shortcut across the water in the first area.

That’s a fun TM.

Apparently, there’s a glitch where a pokemon getting hit by toxic will have the same multiplier effect for any other cumulative damage. I never noticed that myself. Probably for the best, I abused leech seed enough as it was.

But apparently not so secret that it isn’t one of the mass produced Silph TMs. Or are they? The numbering sequence certainly suggests they all come from the same place, but only a handful are available for purchase. Was Koga able to make them find a way to make a toxic TM as one of their fifty but also not sell it to anyone?

Maybe Silph is very much in the League’s pocket, and the League decides what TMs should be commonly available and what shouldn’t? And that also suggests that either the casino has its own agreement with Silph or that the League was behind the decision for a set of TMs to only be available by coin.

Which in turn suggests the possibility that the reason the elite four never move against Team Rocket is that they’re connected to the group as well. In Pokemon Special several gym leaders are members, but what if the whole of them were, if not necessarily Giovanni’s underlings, at least allies?

Unless you switch out, like I mentioned.

If you talk to him before this, it’s unintelligible mumbling. No one is bright enough to pick up a notepad for some reason.

Note the lack of any mention of cleaning them.

But really, a notepad would have worked fine. Maybe he’s illiterate.

Yup, you get two HMs here.

Strength is annoying. It’s not the best move, though it’s better than cut, and it means you’ll need two HM moves for the upcoming dungeon. If you don’t have a pokemon on your team that can use it, it also means you won’t be at full strength when traveling through the extremely long upcoming dungeons.

On the brighter side, it does lead to some of the more challenging puzzles.

I would come back here after finding the lab on Cinnabar and speculate on just how I could get those fossils. What new pokemon might be in them? What sort of asshole would just leave them as rocks?

Like I said, the designers must have assumed players would go by the western rather than eastern route.

There’s nothing here.

And no way to get here. The games are full of open areas like this, which fed the idea there must be a way of getting to areas beyond the standard map.

This is the third one I’ve met on the road of the two in his lab, so clearly the intention is that they’re moving around. It’s not clear if they’re all the same guy or what, though.

Eh. No loss.

I always assumed the idea was to help you raise a weak pokemon, but maybe it was just to ensure even leveling. Anyway, the thing is, unlike the experience share of later generations, this gives the experience points to every pokemon in your party. And it makes sure to tell you that. For each pokemon. So unless you really like having to get through five extra messages about how the rest of your party got a tiny bit of experience every time you faint a pokemon, you put it in your PC and never look at it again.

<3!

It’s weird how people seem to know about that. This guy sort of has a reason…

…as you see, but he’s still talking about it like he knows what it is rather than just that he was told to pass on a message.

Fuchsia has such a weird layout.

Oh, recover. So deliciously broken.

When I finally got my gameshark, one of the first things I did was replace my espeon’s morning sun with recover, for the PP boost. Recover was a psychic move and it was ridiculous my fragile baby didn’t get it. Then I gave it flamethrower while I was there, because why not?

Ah, Seafoam Islands. Eventually I figured out they could be skipped, but then I went back to check out them from the other side and got stuck in them anyway.

Pidgeotto’s first naturally learned flying attack. Factoring in its typed attack bonus, wing attack is slightly stronger than gust, the move it started out with.

With this, my beedrill has learned every move available to it.

I’m not sure what to do. I was planning to dump it off when it became too annoying or else when it finished up its moveset, but it’s actually been pretty good. But there’s a lot of other pokemon that don’t have evolved forms available for capture I could be raising instead, like the dratini I just caught.

I could also stick it in the daycare while I raise other things and then pull it out again for the final battles. I currently have my butterfree chilling there.

What do you guys think?