Last time,

Well, time to see the captain.

One wonders how he got this far if he struggles with seasickness…

So as we see here, the protagonist is a much nicer person than his rival – or else, at least more confident in his ability to help.

The real question, of course, is why you’d carry around an HM of a move you can do yourself.

One option here is that he actually makes the HMs. It’s certainly implied here that pokemon can learn the move from him directly, and we know that somehow you can also teach them using whatever a TM/HM is. Maybe a TM is just a video recording of a move – although it must be more than that since pokemon don’t learn by seeing others use the move… Well, trying to make sense of moves is an exercise in madness, I mean, egg moves?

There doesn’t appear to be much distinction here between TMs and HMs – in fact, HMs are referred to as TMs at times. What if a HM is the whatever the hell these are equivalent of a master copy, and TMs are the degrade dupes? That might also give another explanation for why TMs are single-use other than as a cash grab – maybe activating a high quality version burns it into the pokemon’s head and makes it unforgettable, so only the disposable versions can be used safely. Then finally they figure it out and that’s why all TMs become reusable.

God, moves make no sense. There’s also the fact that without Misty’s badge my pokemon can’t use it outside of battle, because apparently it’s harder to use a move when you’re not getting beaten up, and yet if I do have the right badge my pokemon can use it when knocked out.

By this he means, of course…

In retrospect, the hints are all there that the boat’s been in dock too long. A sailor says the passengers are unusually restless, the head cook is worried they’ll be mad about the food…

This fits the theory that the pokemonified Bill is actually past Bill, unaware that he’s succeeded at his time-travel experiment and is several days in the future, with the ship now ready to take off.

Adding insult to injury, the game automatically walks you off after the ship leaves.

…

Psych!

Yeah, like hell I’m letting that happen.

My team is already pretty battered, so what’s next shouldn’t take long.

The sailors look like they actually just want to punch you to death. I’m glad they settle for pokemon battles.

Ah, blacking out. Later games switched to whiting out, which was stupid, and then a little narrative bit about how you cradle your battered pokemon and rush them back to a pokemon center, forgetting that the whole reason you get pokemon in the first place is because you can’t travel without them.

It also loses some of the fun speculation. You lose money when doing so – does your opponent loot your pockets before delivering you to the pokemon center? If you faint against a wild pokemon, does whoever drags you back take it as their cut for helping?

Anyway, by fainting instead of exiting the ship properly, it’s still there until I enter and leave it again, so I can come back later with surf.

Let’s see who can learn cut.

I’d generally teach my ivysaur cut, since I’d be carting it around the whole game. But now I have a nicely disposable beedrill.

Time to go hack open some bushes! Also, I need to get that bike.

Let’s stop off to see how my metapod is doing.

Huh. I guess I should have gone here earlier.

Nope, it didn’t get its moves replaced with harden.

As you can see, my default playstyle isn’t exactly “friendship”.

This isn’t actually my preferred way of playing. I like games where the way you treat your adorable monster friendpets has some impact. In Monster Rancher, your monster has things it likes or dislikes, asks for treats, gets tired and can be injured. It’s not a major component of the game, but I would still go along with their requests as much as possible. In Digimon World, there’s mechanical repercussions for letting your digimon get too tired or injured, which translates easily into actual concern for them, as well as a happiness gauge. And the Creatures line has no point other than caring for your creatures and poking the world they’re in, and I played that constantly.

I don’t require that the game be built so that being kind is the better mechanical choice, just that it feels like being kind matters. I will lavish attention on turtles, which are basically rocks that hate, but not on actual rocks. In the various pokemon games, there’s never the sense pokemon care more than a rock. If you’re trying for a friendship evolution, you have to avoid letting it faint or feeding it bitter stuff, but otherwise it doesn’t matter. The happiness checker was a good idea in showing some reaction from them, but the fact there’s no real way to treat pokemon well, just some minor punishments for treating them badly, means that in practice I just played and assumed they’d hit max happiness naturally. It doesn’t care if you never let the pokemon go below half health before healing them, or if you rush back to the pokecenter as soon as one faints, or if you carry medicine to cure any status ailments as soon as possible.

Yellow was the closest the games got to this, I think, as using items made you bond with Pikachu more and chucking it in the PC made it unhappy. The later games restrict the item use to vitamins and EV berries, both things with mechanical use, while in Yellow, healing Pikachu immediately with a potion or some status fixer rather than trekking back for the free healing at a pokemon center was reflected in how Pikachu responded to you.

So, that bike.

You know, it suddenly occurs to me that it’s not said if this is the same bike as he was dangling in front of me before. It’s just a bike. He must have more than one type of bike in the shop. For all I know it’s a cheap twenty dollar one that I could have paid for myself if only he’d have shut up about how the one he was offering was the one I needed.

The bike won’t be particularly useful for me in this game, as my computer already chokes occasionally with just walking speed. It’s not a particularly robust machine.

I still need to get the Vermilion badge, of course. Let’s head back…

…And be distracted.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I get it, game.

It’s weird that the second guy would ask for far less, but of course the itemfinder is optional while flash is required. You can satisfy this just by raising your team – my beedrill is three, ivysaur another two, nidorina two, pidgeotto two, meowth one, gyarados two. That’s twelve.

Thus raising the question of how you can have dungeons that aren’t dark.

I wonder if originally you were meant to have it for any cave. The badge that unlocks it is Brock’s, and the game is quite insistent you get his badge before proceeding to Mt. Moon. Currently the setup is odd, with Misty’s HM unlock coming into play before (in fact, required to get) Brock’s.

Good stuff over here.