Last time, Rustboro!
Today, Rustboro sign!
The city probing the integration of nature and science.
This seems like a good theme.
Further exploring…
In one house, I find a girl saying No, no way! I don’t want to share a room with my little brother! I’m a grown-up woman! although she is in fact tinier than me. Her brother says, My parents got a house while raising two of us. I have the highest respect for my parents.
Meanwhile the mom is doing housework.
Eventually I’ll find something positive gender-wise, right?
Outside, someone who is my size is surprised to see me with pokemon. When I’m an adult, someday I’ll go places with Pokemon, too.
Maybe this models like driving? A few kids have those drivable toy cars, many kids start driving the moment it becomes legal, most people learn by adulthood, and a couple holdouts never do. Presumably this girl doesn’t have any actual interest in pokemon, but figures it’s something she’ll get eventually for the related benefits.
With this in mind, the scientist presumably had some pokemon capable of dissuading wild pokemon (maybe something with sleep powder) but no actual battling experience.
I only have a single pokeball left (slakoth was surprisingly difficult to catch) but I have the money to buy a ten-set of pokeballs twice, so now I have twenty-three. Also, some guy gives me false swipe. That probably will be useful, random NPC who doesn’t understand you’re supposed to sell things in stores.
Oh, it’s just so hard! What’s hard? Do you even need to ask? Planning meals every day! It’s hard to come up with different ideas day after day!
Dear Japan,
For the love of god, let your programmers go home to their families, you’ve kept them chained to their desks so long all they remember that women are where delicious non-foodbar meals once came from. Or start hiring female programmers to give some variety to their fevered delusions of what normal human life looks like.
Another person sings the praises of the trainer school, saying that people who study there might one day become a Gym Leader. There’s only eight slots for that per region, so it sounds like these things work similar to acting schools. The real question is, does the school improve your chances? A child outside the school itself speculates that the school also teaches how to catch rare pokemon, Child, you catch rare pokemon by running around in grass until they appear, then throwing pokeballs at them.
Inside the school…there’s one character with a ponytail.
At the pokecenter, some guy says I have the looks of an aroma lady. I then get to pick which female character’s looks I have. After some sadness at my terrible options, I decide to go with delinquent.
Some guy gives me CUT while his daughter tells me about how awesome and important he was in making the city.
A scientist is surprised to see someone new and thinks I’m a new student at the school. This is weird since the city also has a gym and you’d expect them to be getting walk-in trainers all the time.
Exploring the Devon Employee-Family Hostage Area Housing, one kid informs me his dad is super important. Current list of important female characters: Me, Cutscene Team Magma, Roxanne. Current list of important male characters: Birch, Norman, Every Single Other Important NPC.
Another kid gives me a premier ball, saying his dad made it. Further proof Silph does not have a monopoly on pokeballs.
On the way back, the ace trainer who gave me a float stone is now a hiker commenting on how he’s gained weight, You know, it’d be fun if it actually made you float a little, and maybe let you jump up ledges for once.
Some kid says he nicknamed his pokemon something that makes people laugh at him. See, game? This is why I didn’t do that. He wants to trade for a slakoth. Sure, let’s find out how dumb the name is.
Makit the makuhita. Okay, that’s pretty eh.
Makuhita is tenacious–it will keep getting up and attacking its foe no matter how many times it is knocked down. Every time it gets back up, this Pokemon stores more energy in its body for evolving.
I really get the impression that the game writers have some sort of idea for evolution that has no connection to the game setup or how other media handles it. I mean, you had Team Galactic talking about them releasing energy somehow, you have all sorts of evolutions that are supposedly combinations of pokemon, and here you have them saying that makuhita has its own specific evolution setup. I mean, this isn’t wholly incompatible with fighting = leveling = evolution, but look at it closely. Makuhita doesn’t evolve by beating its opponents, but by getting beaten and continuing to fight. (And this sort of makes sense in another direction, because one that isn’t getting knocked down clearly doesn’t need to evolve, it’s doing fine already.)
Speaking of, there’s Route 115. The new app mocks you with the fact there’s cool pokemon here you can’t get to.
While I generally like the whole teaser area thing, because it motivates me to find a way there, I also appreciate how it means the path I find myself taking isn’t necessarily the only one. I sent my current avatar’s namesake up through here and it made for a better story. I think the games do a really good job of giving you a world that feels like there’s all sorts of things you could do in it.
But here and now, all that’s left is the badge!
Current team:
L14 surskit
L12 ralts
L11 ralts
L13 shroomish
L15 makuhita
L8 nincada
…which is not my team!
I go to kick some evolution fodder off and add in my L13 treecko and L12 poochyena because I love her. I’ll only be using them and my surskit.
My idea here is that it’s so easy to overlevel, I’ll only use one-three actual team pokemon and have the rest soaking up experience while I catch pokemon, but use the team for important battles.
Entering, Roxanne’s at the door.
Hello. You must be a new challenger. I am Roxanne, the Rustboro City Gym Leader. I became a Gym Leader so that I may apply in battle all that I’ve learned at the Pokemon Trainers’ School. If you defeat me in a Pokemon Battle, I’ll present you with a Gym badge as proof of your strength as a Trainer. Please take up the challenge. I look forward to seeing you as a challenger. Until then, farewell.
It’s interesting. This is the first game to lead with a female gym leader, and I wonder if they were intentionally trying to minimize that – we meet the character’s dad first, who’s established as a much better gym leader, and then she presents herself as more of a student than anything.
The redone gym is gorgeous, though – although as always, it’s weird to see fossils when resurrection exists. There’s also giant animated statues of fossil pokemon.
This will be a a thing of medium difficulty. I have Treecko, of course, but as fun as Surskit’s fell stinger is, it means no bubble. Same for Poochyena’s thunder fang.
Challenging Roxanne herself has another little cutscene pan with some sort of dragon fossil behind her.
Just as I expected… I knew you and your Pokémon would be able to get this far. Now, would you kindly demonstrate how you battle with your Pokémon?
Her vs sprite…
…it’s not as horrible as it could be?
But it’s worse than her original artwork, which wasn’t even good to start with.
Her original outfit is the general no-pants terribleness, but she was dressed more like a schoolteacher than a schoolgirl, and she didn’t have that horrible nagging/”spunky” love interest pose. And her dress was merely ridiculously short, not also flaring so you would see the lovingly detailed underside.
I think the best way I can articulate it is, the outfits in Pokemon just about always look stupid, and it’s sexist that they do the skirts=girl thing so consistently. BUT, the actual overt sexualization is a new and particularly disturbing thing. You could absolutely take original-Roxanne’s outfit and draw art of her bending over to make it pornographic, but in the picture, she’s not and there’s no suggestion she’s about to. There’s no suggestion it’ll come up ever.
The new picture has her dress mid-ripple to flashing her underwear.
As when I’ve brought this up before, I don’t know if this is an actual change or that as graphics improved there became more incentive to do this, but whatever the reason it’s horrible and I hate it.
…
She has a L12 geodude and L14 nosepass. Despite my efforts not to overlevel Treecko, the battle is effortless.
So…I lost.
You had two pokemon that were comparable in strength to the trainers I was already fighting!
Checking the wiki, RS had a L14 geodude and L15 nosepass, Emerald was two L12 geodude and a L15 nosepass.
So the first gym leader is made even easier than she already was, after they’d already made her even easier than she already was (and this after they gave you three different pokemon with a type advantage and another that could prey on the low special defense). This isn’t looking promising.
It seems that I still have much more to learn…
I understand. The Pokemon League’s rules state that Trainers receive this if they defeat a Gym Leader. Please accept the official Pokemon League Stone Badge.
I think the designers have a lot to learn about the fact the games are already easy and don’t need to be made more so.
I am… still uncertain as to why Pokemon doesn’t just come with multiple difficulty settings. The first gym is almost always a fight that can be won with a single pokemon, especially a starter with a favorable type advantage.
Pokemon is kind of like an MMO in that the early game tends to be super easy, the midgame is still easy but kind of a slog, and the real meat of the experience is in the endgame, with PvP and whatnot.
As far as I can tell the only reason there aren’t difficultly settings is a palpable contempt for the audience on the part of GameFreak. Like, I genuinely think that’s the reason.
Yeah, I really wouldn’t know. I only earnestly played up to the second generation. I beat the Elite Four on Ruby and stopped, and I don’t think I even got that far on Pearl.
If they were contemptible in the first two generations, I wouldn’t have known. All I knew as a kid was that it was a fuckin’ blast.
Well, it explains why the Battle Frontier doesn’t exist in ORAS. In fact, I think Game Freak said that they removed the Battle Frontier because they thought kids had too little attention spans to care.
The problem with Battle Frontier and the rest is that the game design tilts way too far to random chance and the difficulty difference is too extreme.
The general issue with all the hard mode bits is you generally can’t win with the pokemon you have, even if you’re breezing through the regular battles, and it’s not clear what you should do next when the answer to that problem in the regular game is “gain levels”. You can improve the pokemon you have with EVs, but to get the proper moves, IVs, and nature, you have to start over from scratch with massive breeding chains, and good luck using trial and error to figure out that’s the problem OR figure out how to solve it. It requires you to switch to playing an entirely different game, one that’s 99% copying the steps from someone else and which takes forever, before you can get back to the original game. And if you misjudged things and it still doesn’t work? Go do it all over again.
The baffling thing to me is what’s so damn difficult about giving everyone a +5 level gain on “hard” mode? Making the AI actually fight you is apparently the biggest chore ever and going for competitive battling-type situations in something like the Frontier can’t be a focal point of a game for the reasons you outlined, but why the hell can’t we choose a tougher levelling curve??
Well, hard mode didn’t really work as far as I could tell, because they didn’t change the exp gain. And I guess they just shrugged and gave up the idea entirely.
They really need some sort of a +1 +2 +3 +4 etc thing, and I guess that’d have taken vital time from redrawing the female models to be less threatening and more sexy.
Giving at least the important trainers more complete, well-rounded teams would go a long way as well. I’m not asking for a team of six, with comprehensive type coverage and a surprise Fire-type move to obliterate your Treecko, but even the first gym leader should have a team of four. The rest should have six, without question.
Seriously, I was so pissed that the Gen VI champion didn’t have a full team. That’s just ridiculous.
Maybe he was carrying an egg? That would actually be a really interesting story/gameplay integration thing. Like, the champion has a team of five because the egg takes up a slot, but he’s happy to give it over to you once you’ve won, and if you ever challenge the Elite Four again, he’s got a full team (with the sixth member being the strongest).
I must be reading this wrong. Who are you talking about? Both champions seen in Gen 6 have full teams.
Are you talking about that post champion fight with AZ?
Whoops, I said champion and meant elite four, the opposite thing. My bad. Fuckers had four Mon apiece, it was like spit in the eye.
It’s the Elite Four, Act. Four trainers, with four pokemon each, with four moves each.
And four levels below your average.
They are very dedicated to the theme.
They’re four levels lower unless you intentionally underlevel your pokemon, in which case they’ll be four levels higher. Unless you bring pokemon level =< 4, in which case they'll just be level 4.
They also have forty cakes waiting for the one who manages to beat them, though each cake is a lie aside from the four they’ve already ate.
And that’s terrible.
You two are my favorite thing that happens on this blog.
They’ve been doing that since Gen V (unless you’re playing BW2 on Challenge Mode, which is unlikely).
ORAS thankfully fixed that. There’s also a second run of the league you can do postgame that actually carries a fair challenge.
ORAS probably only fixed that because the original games also had 5 per elite four member.
And I believe pretty much every elite four since FRLG (except for maybe DP?) had a harder second run.
XY doesn’t. Same four-only teams with the same levels. I don’t think DP had them either.
Seriously? Like, yeah, when I was nine I didn’t have the patience for the battle frontier, so I didn’t do it. It was optional. They must know that a ton of adults play Pokemon; isn’t the ratio of child to adult players at least equal if not skewed to college age?
I really think they’ve just gotten ludicrously lazy. Which sucks and is unnecessary, considering how easy it would be to find developers with enthusiasm for the series.
Yeah, ORAS is apparently based on the original Ruby & Sapphire rather than Emerald for some reason. Those who played both RS and Emerald can tell given the gym leader battles.
Example, Tate & Liza only had Lunatone and Solrock in RS, and while they had 4 pokemon in Emeral, they went back to just those two in ORAS except with meaningless higher levels.
That seems peculiar considering how the second gen remakes were definitely based on Crystal, and also ridiculous because Emerald improved things in lots of ways.
I guess not getting stalked by Scott is a good thing.
And yeah, I remember Tate and Liza being really easy to beat in RS and the additional pokemon making a difference in Emerald. I was going to say that removing them seems counter-productive, but then I remembered that the current difficulty agenda seems to be “this game plays itself; push the A button and watch” so it’s actually exactly what they want.
Good job being terrible, Gamefreak.
In fairness, they do seem to have been trying to do it, but (and I guess this should’ve been expected given the core game shows they have no idea of balance) their attempts didn’t work well enough and they give up rather than refining them.
with PvP and whatnot.
That’d be valid if it wasn’t for the million moving parts that require you to breed millions of eggs to get the one competition-level pokemon.
Well I mean, just going by recent WoW experience from the second-latest expansion, it’s a huge slog to get gear, and once you have gear you need to assemble other like-minded and geared players to be on your team(s). Then you all need to play rated matches for more gear, and once you have that gear, you aim for higher tiers of rating and higher competitive levels.
Even then, there’s this bizarre phenomenon where you only play a certain number of games to get a specific high rating per season and then stop, because you get moved up a PvP tier to basically world-class, and on your very next game someone will immediately stomp you into the dust and then scrape you off their boots, ruining your win/loss rating for the whole season.
But you’ve just outlined why people rate WoW as “addictive” more than “legitimately enjoyable”.
Right, which is why I linked it to Pokemon in the first place, right?
The one good thing that’s been made easier in the recent games is that breeding is much less random now.
There are a couple tricks with items that, if exploited, make it possible to breed viable pokemon in under an hour, and with the horde battles they can be EV trained in minutes.
That’s less awful but still awful – it only takes about an hour per pokemon if you follow someone else’s directions precisely to get a battle-worthy pokemon to let you go back to playing the actual game?
The gyms after Norman actually get a slight level boost. With the Exp Share it’s still too easy, but they only made the first few gyms lower compared to the original game.
I guess that’s sort of promising?
Remember, using the Exp. Share does not reduce the experience your battling Pokémon get; it just gives that same experience to everyone else. If you want the game to have even the potential to be mildly challenging ever, you want to disable the Exp. Share immediately.
I know, that’s why I was keeping Treecko and Thunderyena off my team until it was battle time.
I appreciate the easiness of Pokemon, because my favourite play-style is to be much stronger than anyone else and crush all who oppose me with my outrageously over-leveled super-beasts. But you’re completely right; they don’t need to be any easier than they already were.
I always feel like the RSE games have the best selection of pokemon available during the time/areas you are likely to be using to build your team, but this may be nostalgic prejudice. Third gen wasn’t the first I played, but it was the first I ever played competently.
I love crushing everyone, but they need to be crushable first!
RSE is pretty good for team building – right from the start you’ve got flying, normal, weird normal, dark, grass, two bugs…
Imm, after reaching Dewford I’d have all six slots filled by the first stage pokemon of one of my favourite teams: torchic, ralts, seedot, aron, zubat, magikarp. I had another favourite team built around mudkip, but I don’t remember it as well and don’t think it filled quite so fast.
Really, someone would need to measure variation and strength of available pokemon for the first five games to see which objectively offers better team building, but my gut says RSE. Kalos obviously has the best pokemon availability, but alas, it gives me no nostalgia.
As a stay at home mom, I have to agree with that one NPC. THE hardest part of my day is figuring out what I’m going to be cooking that day and tomorrow. Seriously, it is super hard. D:
But yeah, I did notice that this time around the game was easier, and the gym leaders are not even level balanced to show that! By my fourth gym I was kicking butt so hard I felt kind of bad about it. =/