Last time,

In the transition building, the NPCs continue to try to give useful advice:

Have you noticed the bushes on the roadside? They can be cut down by a special POKéMON move.

and

Many POKéMON live only in forests and caves. You need to look everywhere to get different kinds.

This really doesn’t look like a bush. If anything, the other things look more like one. Still, you can probably work out this is what he’s talking about. So, something’s beyond here!

And of course there’s a large optional grassy area, and of course after the NPC’s bit about looking everywhere you’ll want to check that out even though there’s nothing there. He probably does it just to watch trainers wander around from a window and laugh.

Pewter! The third city.

The guy walking about asks if you know what he’s doing – apparently, this is his garden, and he’s spraying repel to keep pokemon out. Good way of hinting what repel might be used for. Less good is that there’s a giant garden in the middle of a city without even a house attached to illustrate this. The game’s design is often weird.

This is a small taste of what’s to come. If you say yes, he’ll just enthuse about how cool the museum is, and if you say no he’ll walk you over.

The paying thing really bothered me at the time, since it meant that if I went in over and over again I’d run out of money. And yes, I realize there’s no reason I’d need to do that, but at the start my funds were pretty tight and I was a really miserly player.

Another hint of a place that can’t be reached yet.

It is worth it, though. This is one of the areas that’s just here for atmosphere, and it does it well.

You know, looking at this, what exactly does that mean? Generally fossils are from the most common creatures of the era, for obvious statistical reasons. So would rare be referring to its present-day status? Yet if it’s extinct, then it’s extinct, not rare. I guess they’ve already got their pokemon revival thing going by now, maybe?

Neither of these pokemon will show up for quite some time, but this whole area will pay off really well when they do.

Also cool is that unlike nearly everything else in the game, this isn’t entirely pokemon focused. I don’t mind this obsession otherwise – it is why everyone’s playing the game – but it’s good to see glimpses of other things.

Even if you aren’t familiar with RPG tropes, this should clue you in to this “MOON STONE” being something pretty important.

The parenthetical is presumably your own thoughts, as I can’t imagine someone would write that on the display.

The other interesting thing about the space area it it’s the definite proof that the pokemon world is ours.

Odd, isn’t it? There’s a lot of references to our world elsewhere, but they can be brushed off as the pokemon world having something similar. This, though, suggests their world is identical except somehow it involves pokemon.

If it wasn’t for the floor below, I’d say the best explanation is that pokemon are recent things, as that would also fit with no one knowing how many there are yet. I suppose there’s a middle ground theory that would fit both options – pokemon were once common but were mostly wiped out long in the past. Somehow the remaining ones were reintroduced to the modern world not too long ago.

But of course as far as the game was concerned they’re just animal equivalents and we’re not supposed to overthink things.

You know, I have a spare, I could just trade you for it. Or sell you it. Or whatever.

So it wasn’t a typo last time. I’ve actually been seeing this error a lot in actual published writing, and it really disturbs me.

Well, time to leave, since no amount of talking will unlock a trade option. (I tried.)

There’s a door just beyond here, no doubt leading to that other area we saw inside. Another cursed bush thwarts me.

An outside is a POKéMON that you get in a trade. it grows fast, but it may ignore an unskilled trainer in battle!
If only we had some BADGEs…

I hadn’t remembered that this was the term the game gave for traded pokemon. As far as I know, everyone always just called them traded pokemon. In this case that’s probably because the term is a terrible one, but I have to say that people really didn’t pay much attention to game terms, what with one of the alt terms for the birds being pokegods.

Anyway. So, the game probably meant it to be obvious to me that skill = badges, because in retrospect, the player’s been told that a couple times, with the pokemon league being particularly hardline about it. But like how I originally wanted to use a charmander despite having no clue what I was doing, I naturally parsed this as meaning I’d be fine as long as I was awesome. Sure, having badges meant you were a good trainer, but you could be be a good trainer without badges.

I think a lot of the problem is that there’s never any explanation for how exactly badges work. The canon explanation seems to be that pokemon just are really impressed by badges for some reason. Fanon generally just went with mindcontrol if they used it.

That “may ignore” is also a total misrepresentation. It’ll blow you off constantly.

The game doesn’t distinguish between nidoran genders. I think it’ll start doing that in the second gen, once all pokemon have genders without anything else having such extreme differences.

My, the game is just getting worse and worse about proper article use, isn’t it?

Also, has anyone outside the dialogue writer ever written it “clefairys”? I’m going to hunt down the next person to argue with me about capitalization on the basis that it’s game canon and light them on fire.

The whole clefairy business always struck me as weird, I might add. Moonstones evolve other pokemon, so were those pokemon unknown before now? And why did clefairy appear? What’s up with that?

It’d be interesting to wonder if there’s actually pokemon living in various inhospitable environments (Deoyxs doesn’t count because it’s a legendary and also the whole DNA thing is dumb) where one wouldn’t expect life. I mean, you have lava pokemon, why not ones that can survive extremely cold environments? So the moon actually could be populated by clefairy. I guess the biggest hole in all this is that a meteor and rocks from the moon are very different. Maybe a meteor impacted the pokemon world’s moon and knocked chunks out? Still seems to require something pretty cataclysmic. I suppose it might have happened well in the past, but from how it’s talked about it seems like it must have been relatively recent.

So, remember when I said the museum guy was a hint of what’s to come?

I would argue this is less of a but-thou-must railroading tutorial hateful thing like later games and more the good kind of videogame dickery, from the same spring of cruelty that made the first gym be rock types.

Anyway, if you picked a charmander and/or don’t know what you’re doing, you will curse this. Just beyond lie more pokemon (at presumably higher levels) and probably some trainers to fight, yet you’re stuck here to keep challenging Brock until you finally win.

I really struggled with it because I was trying to play according to the rules of the show. There was the big stuff, like not understanding that electric moves weren’t merely weak against geodude and onix but in fact did no damage whatsoever (and it’s not like the game is too clear about what the difference between didn’t effect and doesn’t effect). But also, on the show they used their strongest pokemon last, a particularly bad strategy here with a geodude spamming defense curl. I tried to sneak past this guy many times.

But today I have a bulbasaur and also I’ve learned to stop doing those kind of things after it failed so very spectacularly.

But before that, let’s just take a moment to wonder at this guy, who walks away from you, clearly does not to through the door or anything, yet disappears despite that fence in the way. I always thought they should have coded it so he walks out of sight in the other direction.

Okay, in to see Brock.

In contrast to the other conversations so far, you can’t blow this guy off by saying no.

He doesn’t even give useful advice about the rock type. Instead, he explains about how you can change the order of pokemon on your team to determine who you’ll send out. True, it’s important to know about this, but not particularly relevant here – also, if someone doesn’t know, they’d have benefited from hearing about it earlier. Maybe the designers were worried people would miss the tip if it was anywhere else.

You see this? This is found in every gym, which will become important/hilarious a good while later.

Oooh, that Gary! He’s beaten me here! None of this following behind me nonsense like some recent rivals I could scream incoherently about for a few hours.

It’s really obvious you can sneak by this guy

but why would you?

Money and experience!

Stop right there, kid! You’re still light years from facing Brock!

One of the many, many infamous lines in Pokemon.

Only two pokemon, but they’re tough ones at L11.

I’m not exactly sure how accuracy works, but the accuracy lowering moves seem a bit broken.

Of course, much of the battles are.

THEN WHY DID YOU SAY THAT

Maybe the first line is from the Japanese version and the translator felt the need to add the correction here instead of just rewriting the whole thing. Maybe everyone involved is on drugs and thought this was incredibly clever. I don’t know.

As you can see, one of the few breaks the game does give you is that other people usually won’t run around with a full team.

Have I mentioned leech seed is the best move? It is the best move.

Part of my love for it comes from the whole thing where I don’t use healing items, of course. In-battle healing was rendered magical.

It was more useful than usual here. For some reason, my kakuna couldn’t connect with poison sting the whole battle.

Also, god, geodude looks fugly.

Onix, on the other hand, is looking rather spiffy.

Onix will mostly try to kill your team with bide, which is pretty easily handled by foreknowledge and leech seed.

Victory!

A surprising lot of text for the battle screen, which players will only see once.

Like the levels and traded pokemon thing, the idea badges make your pokemon stronger isn’t explained either.

That’s bide, which is not a rock move or anything. But new players probably won’t care, since this battle gives you an exaggerated view of how good a move bide is. They’ll learn.

No one could ever figure out quite what TMs were supposed to be either, or how they worked. Later games would display an image next to items, but they just showed a CD, which explained all of nothing.

There are all kinds of trainers in the world! You appear to be very gifted as a POKéMON trainer! Go to the GYM in CERULEAN and test your abilities!

Kay.

Whoever it is that adds names works fast. Also, apparently no one else has ever won here (or, as we’ll see later, any of the other gyms). The best explanation is that there’s a long list of names and your character just scrolls to the end to see Gary’s name because that’s all they care about.