Rock Tunnel! The tunnel that is for some reason dark despite other similarly enclosed places not being so!

Actually, flash isn’t necessary with my emulator. You can see the walls, people and stairs in the blackness. It’s actually pretty cool looking.

…

But it makes for some hard to read dialogue boxes, so let’s light this place up.

I always thought blinding flash was an interesting way of putting things. That doesn’t sound like an improvement.

Rock Tunnel is actually simpler than the other areas so far. What it does is present you with a branching path, and if you pick wrong you’ll have to backtrack while fending off zubat. (Of course, it’s easy to tell which path is the right one, it’s the one guarded by a trainer.) It’s really the length of the slog that make this challenging.

Machop has one of the worst sprites. And I could never figure out why a fighting type apparently had gills on its sides.

Hello again, zubat! Haven’t seen you in some time.

Cubone start appearing now.

This was also where I first discovered one of the weirder type interactions. If you send out a flying type, when the cubone attempts to smack it with its bone, you’ll discover it does no damage. Flying types are immune to ground, and ground covers getting hit in the face with a femur. (But getting hit in the face with a rock? Completely different, that’s double damage for you.)

I can see where the whole flying is immune to ground idea came from, but in execution it’s very, very weird.

This area is our introduction to non-Bill pokemaniacs. They look like unbalanced teenage mad scientists.

Their pokemon selection is weird. There’s another one with a charmander too. Maybe this is a hint that professors are just pokemaniacs with a degree.

I wonder what the translator thought of this.

And that’s why in later games…

…you get these abominations.

The nido line learns moves in a terrible order. They’re hardly the only ones, though – a lot of pokemon will have some issues where they’ll learn an extremely powerful move very early and/or a pathetically weak one very late.

Nothing changes when talking to him after you’ve completed it, or completed it plus mew. I tried.

Finally!

I was right at the exit before I saw the first onix of the trip. Usually I see one almost immediately.

I cheated here. My ivysaur was out of actual moves and most of my team was out of commission, so I used poisonpowder and leech life to weaken it instead. Then I had to save and retry because it kept breaking out of the pokeball while it was at its last sliver.

And that was the seed of the idea onix could turn into something made of diamond.

Of course, it wasn’t as vitally necessary to catch it as it would be with a clefairy in this position.

Unlike Mt. Moon, you can go down to Lavender, heal, and walk back up normally, rather than just having to either give up or trek all the way back to the start.

Of course, also unlike Mt. Moon, this area’s full of trainers. If you aren’t expecting that and talk to the girl here, it can go badly.

Like it would have for me, so I didn’t do that.

Luckily, you can avoid the trainers by going east instead.

And find another hidden item as well.

I figure the pokemon world either has a lot of pedophiles or absolutely none.