Last time, Celadon!

I have to admit, there is something surprisingly pleasant about the place despite all reason. You’ve got Team Rocket grunts in the streets, guys going on about how this is all just a game, gambling and gambling addicts… But it’s a big open place with lots of nice things too. Like the department store.

Five stories of building! By far the biggest building so far.




This sort of thing tells you that the pokeworld economy has some interesting stuff going on. Here we have yet another person who’s just here to tell you something you could read off a piece of paper. You can’t even ask her what’s on the different floors, she’s just there to direct you to read the list next to her.

Well, “TRAINER’S MARKET” seems self-explanatory.

As you can see, no way of knowing what a TM was until you purchased it. Of course, if you were smart you could save and then buy, but still.

Finally, some greatballs! Also, revive. That’s the only healing item I really concerned myself with. I don’t care how often my pokemon faint, only that I can keep going if I need to.

Next floor.

What, you thought the fourth wall breakage was done? It’s only just started.



Yay!

This always struck me as odd, though, because what exactly is “finishing”? How could anyone think they were done with the game and not have any need to adjust a pokemon’s moveset?

Also, I tried beating the game without ever talking to him to see if he’d say something else. He doesn’t.

That clears up nothing, and unfortunately, this is a move that required a lot of explanation:
Generation I
If the last amount of damage done before the use of Counter is greater than 0 and was dealt by a Normal-type orFighting-type attack, Counter will do twice as much damage to the opponent. Although Counter deals Fighting-type damage, its type does not alter the amount of damage it inflicts. Counter works against Ghost-types, although they are immune to Fighting-type attacks.

Counter is a decreased priority move. If the opponent does not use a decreased priority move during the round that it is used, Counter will go last regardless of the user’s or opponent’s speed. If the opponent also uses a decreased priority move during the same round, the attack order of the users will be determined normally. If the user is put to sleep or isfrozen during the round that Counter is (or attempts to be) used, Counter’s decreased speed priority will not be reset. Subsequently, it will only be reset on the turn after the user wakes up or is defrosted, or if the user switches out.

Counter can cause a critical hit, but the actual amount of damage dealt by it will not be altered by a critical hit. Counter will only counter the last hit of a multi-hit move and the last attack of a partial trapping move. Counter will always miss if called by Metronome.

Switching, full paralysis, and using a multi-turn move will not reset the last amount of damage done, allowing Counter to counter itself as well as self-inflicted recoil damage. However, if both active Pokémon use Counter during the same round, both attacks will fail. An attack absorbed by a Substitute can be countered for the amount of damage it would have done to the user had the user not had a substitute.

If an HP-restoring item is used on the opponent during the same round that Counter is used, Counter will counter the item.

In Stadium, switching, full paralysis, and using a multi-turn move reset the last amount of damage done, so Counter can’t counter itself or self-inflicted recoil damage if the opponent does not make a move on its following turn.

The kid here is holding a gameboy. Like I said, things are weird.

I’ve never been clear on why the whole OT thing was so important. The game goes to increasingly ridiculous lengths to ensure that OT numbers would never match up, and also locks the nickname in., but why? It seems like it must have some connection to the fact you can’t complete the game without trading, but I can’t figure out how this helps with that. If nothing else, the nickname thing seems to discourage rampant trading.

As you see here, the protagonist is not actually raised by a single mother, and his dad is not a mystery to him due to being too busy running a criminal empire.

At the time, I figured this was all the explanation needed for why they had all the stuff around traded pokemon, but it’s not that good of an explanation. It’s already functionally impossible to get a duplicate ID number by accident, and anyone who did would probably just think it was cool. Especially considering all the horribly broken things in this game, I have no idea why they invested so much of their time trying to make this one aspect untouchable.

Interestingly, none of these games mention that they involve pokemon. They may or may not, but no one was trying to emphasize the pokemon aspect here.

The game was very good at giving you these sorts of hints.

On the other hand, what sort of collector has never traded for one before? Weirdo.

Why are these posters here?

The next area is WISEMAN GIFTS. For some reason this made perfect sense to me back then, because they were cool things, so they made for good gifts, and they were smart gifts too. Now I can’t get past wondering why this is apparently so distinct from trainer items.

An awful lot of couples.

That’s right, you could just buy them, and they weren’t even that expensive. Why some later games decided to make this into a huge production is beyond me.

Maybe the answer to my earlier question is that the stones, like the pokedoll, aren’t actually used primarily for pokemon? Maybe the stones are like people buying geodes because they’re just pretty. So that’s why they’re here.

Of course, you can’t buy all stones. Moonstones can only be found in their various locations. But there’s five in the game and only four pokemon that evolve by one, one of which can be found in the wild.

What’s odd is that despite that rarity, the game treats moonstones as exactly as valuable as the other stones. They sell for 1050, which as you can see is half the purchase price of the other stones, the same fifty percent loss you get when selling any item.

I never really understood the point of pokedolls. I didn’t run from pokemon, and even if I could understand that there might be rare occasions where you needed to, buying one for each individual use seemed ridiculous even before considering how pricey it was for what you got.

I think I used it exactly once – I was doing the missingno cheat, my lead pokemon fainted and I happened to only have a couple low level pokemon on my team.

Really, Mr. Black Trenchcoat?

The priciest stuff in the game.

Another area where explanation was desperately needed. By my understanding, there was a max of ten each you could give your pokemon, but if you’d been raising your pokemon, they might be nearer to the max stat bonus and you wouldn’t be able to give all ten. People were really unsure about whether or they boosted stats directly or added to some underlying thing that was calculated each level – I remember hearing a lot of advice about how you should wait until the pokemon were L100, including from published guides. (And this persisted for quite some time – when I was doing my eevee team in the GSC era, I stuffed them with vitamins so that I’d be able to see stat differences sooner, and someone left a snippy comment about how I was a moron because I’d miss out on the +40 stat change you’d get if you waited.) Looking it up now, I see that actually, they had a much lower cap than the actual max points you could get, which I don’t think anyone figured out then.

These are just regular useless. They alter stats by one stage.

Lemonade heals 80 points of damage, so it’s the most bang for your buck in the game. This was one of the things I’d stock up on before the final battle. And by “stock up” I mean “missingno cheat” because even if you want to play properly, no one could sit though buying each lemonade by hand. You have to reselect “lemonade” each time and there’s no confirmation menu, so if you hit buttons at the wrong time you’ll end up buying water. I suspect no one designing this expected it to be used more than a handful of times.

When I originally played the game, this was all I got. I made sure to only give her the cheapest of the three options, since I figured there was no point wasting something pricier even when the prices were practically the same, then when she complained about thirst again I only offered her the water again. She’ll say she’s not thirsty when given anything she’s had already.

“Spook” = “flinch”. Took me a while to figure that out, since flinching moves are actually pretty rare in this game and the ones that have it, like rock slide, tend not to come up. (And, of course, even when running across a rock pokemon that does use it, the odds of it being fast enough to even have a chance at causing flinching is painfully low.)

Also, I still have no idea why she couldn’t get herself her own drink. Or why her brother didn’t step in while she was handing these out.

This was one of the many things to bug players. She’ll never stop complaining about being thirsty, she’s just programmed to only take each drink once. This is probably why she features in one of the pokegod cheats, this conversation doesn’t feel complete.

Well, time to get that eevee, then evolve some pokemon.

Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve talked about the PC interface yet. It’s awful.

Deposited pokemon go to the bottom of the box, despite the fact that at least half the time they’re pokemon from your team that you’re just depositing temporarily in order to get some space. On top of that, each time you do anything, the game starts again from the beginning – so, if you withdraw a pokemon, you then go back to the options area where you have to select withdraw again, scroll down to the bottom again, and pick the next pokemon you want. It’s the same with depositing pokemon. Oh, and depositing items, you have to scroll from the top there as well.

There’s a lot here about Blue I miss from newer games, but the interface is not it.

Not that this bothered me at the time, I just accepted it. I never found it frustrating at all because it was the only thing like this I’d encountered. Not only was this the first videogame interface I’d dealt with, I didn’t even use real world computers. When I started playing Pokemon Blue, our computer was a mysterious thing that demanded I type unknown commands into it in order for it to do anything. We had a printer with gears to pull the endless spool of printer paper along. The computers in the pokemon world were, in comparison, marvels of easy use.

Huh, its special is surprisingly high. Don’t remember that. I guess it’s because it evolves into three special types, but on evolution its stats do weird thing anyway, with flareon ending up with a higher attack than special (though not significantly so until the special split gives it an even lower special attack.) Anyway. Eevee have a very restricted moveset because any move they learn is one that any of its evolutions will have access to, so it can’t make use of that stat, but then again, who uses eevee?

Because you could only get pokemon at the level they first show up, a lot of pokemon in the first gen have these sorts of oddities in their movesets.

Speaking of terrible interfaces, I should mention that when viewing stats back then, you click on it, see the first page with the stats, then the moves, then it closes. You can’t move back again if you want a second look at the first page, and certainly can’t move up and down to see the same page for a different pokemon, making it far more difficult to compare stats.

Back to the evolution stone part.




<3

Also, doesn’t ninetales just look so cool in blue?

I’ve never been able to quite get into the fact it’s supposed to be yellow. I always figured white. White fox, you know?

Raichu always looked gigantic due to how its sprite fills up the area, which contributed to my decidedly neutral feelings on it. I liked it otherwise, but it just seemed too bulky. Also, I’d already watched all the anime by then, so my introduction to it had been the episode about how pikachu are faster and better than raichu.

Now to save and evolve my eevee several times.

I believe this is the first encounter so far with ridiculous numbers in pokedex entries. Rest assured, it will not be the last.

As you see.

Jolteon is, I believe, the only one of the bunch that’s particularly usable, or maybe it’s just that it’s the only one people happened to use a lot. I think it’s the one I first got, because my friend already had a vaporeon and eevee is basically just there to be a repeat of the starter conundrum, but a tougher one because you have to play moderately far to get it rather than being able to rapidly restart like you can to collect the starters. I never used eevee much because they were so hard to get. See, there was no way of regaining old moves back then and it was often unclear what a move did, so for a lot of pokemon I just left them to sit in my boxes rather than risk messing them up. I think eventually I had a high level version of at least jolteon and vaporeon, can’t even remember if I did anything much with a flareon. Probably. Only the jolteon ever was all that useful, and I think ended up in the high seventies, possibly low eighties by the time it was in Gold breeding me a new eevee army.

 

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