Victory at last. Pikachu, celebrate?

Right, right.

NO I DON’T I DON’T

Venonat is amazingly terrible.

Way too close there.

But I made it, and that’s what’s important.

I feel this was a wasted opportunity. It’s kind of funny in the next gen that he’s still there, but here it’s just oh, they didn’t bother updating anything. They didn’t have to invent some new special building, it could just be his house. Or they could’ve shown it partway built.

Didn’t manage to get all the shots here – this seems like more frames than any other of Pikachu’s expressions.

Talking to Pikachu again produces a similar face.

I just think it’s cool how the sprites are colored. It’s odd they didn’t just tie all versions of the sprites to the colors during battle, but what interesting effects it has.

Unreliable seems a poor word choice, since it’s pretty reliably terrible.

This one’s very well done for such a rarely seen animation – Pikachu stays under that bucket a while before popping out, exactly like it’s trying to surprise you.

But I am not that good trainer, yet.This one’s pretty reasonable – it doesn’t feel like taunting since a squirtle’s not going to be useful against Surge, and of all people you’d expect the police to have standards about which strangers they handle troublemaking magic monsters off to.

Though like guns, you can just get plenty of those magic monsters on your own if you want to.

Let’s get one now.

This would suggest they don’t actually destroy the dreams but just stockpile them – though, come to think of it, the very move stockpile works by swallowing and then consuming, so perhaps it’s not the eaten dreams it shows you but the ones swallowed without being digested yet. I like the idea they’re not being destroyed at all, though. It’s weirder, since that’s how metabolism usually works, and you could spin some interesting things from it. What if drowzee mostly grow by incorporating dreamstuff into their own minds? And what if the types of dreams create their personalities?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

They’re pretty solid combatants, really – though they’re slow and of course the higher levels are defined around who gets the first move.

I wonder how the game dynamic would change if you doubled HP for everyone and gave them leftovers?

They’re still called gamblers. The change is not yet upon us.

VENONAT FINALLY KNOWS A HALFWAY DECENT MOVE.

The biggest issue with the older games is the movesets. A lot of pokemon just aren’t meant to be used until they’re higher level. The addition of eggs in the next generation changes this a lot, although it didn’t have to – they could have just made people rely on inherited moves, which would’ve been frustrating and made actually raising them naturally just as much of a chore. As I found when I tried breeding perfect movesets, a lot of the best moves have too limited PP for normal use, and they make what few battles you can have boring as you either beat everything in a single hit or go up against something far tougher in which case it’s probably faster too and beats you in its own first hit.

This is just hilarious.