Last time, we finished the pokeball-free section.

Time to dive into the real game.

Ah, spearow. The bird who actually knows peck.

As you can see, pokeballs take on the pokemon’s color. Not sure why they then turn green when they’re on your team, but maybe it’s related to the fact it’s sharing space with the green HP bar.

Mankey’s sprite is now intelligible!

While mankey will be very useful once it learns low kick, it’s pretty crap right now. Scratch’s power is five higher than peck, which is at the same 35 as tackle, but peck has STAB behind it. On top of that, soon we’ll be in Viridian Forest where just about everything’s weak to flying.

The game’s definitely given you more options for Brock, but it’s done nothing to change that the pokemon people are most likely to be leveling based on the caterpie and metapod won’t do much good against Brock.

This entry always frustrated me. What if someone’s just caught twenty of them?

As you see here, Pikachu has no physical attacks, rendering tail whip almost totally useless – though a very tactically minded player can use it to lower a pokemon’s defense then switch to something that can actually take advantage of that. And Brock’s pokemon are as immune to thunder wave as they are thundershock. After abilities are introduced, you could hope while Pikachu’s getting mashed into the floor its static would kick in, but that’s not an option we’ll have until RS.

Pikachu has no idea of my cold calculations. The leveling and not-fainting make things look pretty good, huh Pikachu?

You no longer have the option to refuse to listen to the old guy. At the time, it doesn’t seem like a big deal.

See? Obviously it wasn’t the first step of the designer’s sinister policy to force you to stay on the rails and take away what few freedoms you have. It’s just that they made this new scene and wanted to show it off.

…just like they’ll want to show everything off.

This is the beginning of the end!

Anyway, if you try to follow him you’ll find he’s disappeared, like all NPCs you try to follow, and then teleported back to his usual location.

If you talk to him there…

It plays out like it usually does, just with rattata in place of weedle. I actually appreciate this change a lot. You can’t catch weedle in this game, so he shouldn’t be able to find them either, and also can you imagine how annoying it’d be to have finished the game and still have no weedle, and yet no matter how many times you talk to this jerk trying to trade he just mocks you by catching them in front of you and adding more and more to his enormous pile of weedle-filled pokeballs?

As you see, the weird effect that forces you to jump the ledge as soon as you realize the door is locked is still around.

Like most of the cute things Pikachu does, the cute dance is mostly a static sprite moving from side to side, so it’s hard to show in screencapture form. Go download a rom!

Remember my comment earlier about how Pikachu disappears in battle and if it has to do with if you’re facing a sprite? Apparently, sort of! In this game, Pikachu is coded so you first bump into it and then can walk through it to exchange places. I tried walking back and forth like that until it triggered a battle, and as you can see, Pikachu didn’t disappear during the battle screen when I did that.

So now I have a full team! It’s just I’m not going to actually use most of them.

As you can see, mankey’s a glass cannon, and one that can’t even use special attacks.

Let’s get a look at some stats.

I’ve found all I can in this area, and also, I really need to raise something other than Pikachu. To the forest!

As you can see, it’s not particularly viridian.

As I said, good place to raise your spearow.

What’s really weird about this girl is that for some reason she’s floating above the grass.

Also, what’s with the dialogue when my pikachu is clearly visible?

I think this is to remind players who are familiar with the previous games not to stay looking forever. Checking the pokedex would also clear things up, but if you remember the pokemon’s there, you might not bother.

I think we’ve all disappointed this didn’t feature more in the anime.

Speaking of! While pidgey is terrible compared to spearow, pidgeotto is pretty awesome thanks to being an evolved pokemon in an area where the only other evolved pokemon are metapod. They can take a while to find but they’re really worth it for being both high level and stronger than anything of comparable level.

Just about every time a pokemon’s used sand attack, my next attack misses. It is truly an amazing move.

…little too amazing.

I don’t usually care about avoiding fainting, so it’s hard to adjust and I tend to take more risks than I should.

Like I said, I’m not going to actually raise a butterfree, but they’re easy enough to level up for pokedex credit.

The trainers here are all changed around. I’m not entirely sure if they’re supposed to be easier or harder. They’re generally a bit higher level, but all their weedle are gone and replaced by caterpie. Since you also can’t run into weedle in the grass, the end result is that the forest is way easier, because you don’t have to worry about poison damage.

This guy, for example, had a L9 weedle originally.

And they’ve still got this mocking “advice” at the end.

FINALLY

Let’s go to the museum before Brock, though.

These sprites haven’t been redone, at least.

Huh, come to think of it, they match up with the RB sprites, which in turn were redrawn from the original Japanese RG, so, did that game have different skeletons?

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!

Fainting Pikachu makes its happiness go down, of course, but that’s a lot more time consuming than just sticking it in and out of the PC. Plus, being put in the PC makes Pikachu three times as angry as letting it get battered unconscious!

I can actually see the reasoning for this. Putting Pikachu in the PC is always entirely your choice, while Pikachu fainting generally happens because it’s a difficult battle and not because you’re sadistic/incompetent. Pikachu appears to like battling – it certainly likes leveling and it appreciates being used against gym leaders – and if it doesn’t like pokeballs, the PC is probably similarly hated even before getting into that sticking Pikachu there means you don’t love it.

After a bit of this…

Pikachu is now thoroughly disgruntled.

Walking around for a while causes Pikachu to simmer down to utter disdain. Well, time to finally give these people that pikachu they’ve been wanting.

But, of course, there’s no YES/NO box.

Anyway, note that it’s “untamed” and not “unfriendly” or “unhappy”. This is another issue with the mechanic, the way all three of these words tend to be swapped around.

He obviously notices that my pikachu is unhappy with me – with Pikachu’s shouting earlier, I think most of Pewter knows Pikachu’s unhappy with me – but instead of it being that Pikachu doesn’t like me, it’s just that Pikachu isn’t tame yet. They give you the ability in this game to be mean to Pikachu without there being any repercussions, which leaves the impression there’s nothing actually protecting pokemon but their trainer’s goodwill.

In practice, it’s pretty hard to get Pikachu’s happiness to tank like this, so I feel there should be some degree of repercussions. You could make a sufficiently unhappy Pikachu refuse orders like a traded pokemon, which doesn’t seem like it’d be that much harder to code. NPCs could also chastise you – it wouldn’t be difficult to add a line to the pokecenter dialogue. (And hey, why not just give us the option of handing over Pikachu here? This isn’t like the Nugget Bridge thing where it’d require coding a whole new game. Sure, it defeats the whole point of Pokemon Yellow, but the only gameplay it screws up is getting the bulbasaur later, which is just as optional.)

A more complex thing might be to have Pikachu retreat from battle, forcing you to send in a different pokemon (more complex coding, would need something for when you’re otherwise out of pokemon), having Pikachu just vanish for X numbers of steps, or something. This also has the benefit of showing Pikachu does have the option to just take off if it’s sick of you. To make it easier, you could have its happiness regenerate every time it does something like that, so it’s not so hard to get it back to baseline happiness and normal behavior.