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👣 This Week's Guide
Make your way up through 2番道路 to reach トキワの森
Explore the area for some potions and antidotes, and fight some trainers
You can grind in トキワの森 before the first gym by fighting metapods and kakuna who can’t use any offensive moves at this level
Take a look around ニビシティ, there’s a museum you can visit for 50 yen for some extra reading
Head to the gym and get ready to face off against rock type gym leader!
📓 Pokemon Tips and Tricks
STAB moves: when a move type matches the type of a Pokemon, it will do 50% extra damage
Status conditions: Inflicting status conditions like sleep give you a greater chance to catch a pokemon
Weak Pokemon: If you want to level up a weak Pokemon in a high level area, you can send it out first in a battle then immediately switch to another Pokemon to share the EXP with both
HM moves: These moves are necessary for game progression but are worse than most moves and cannot be deleted once learned. It can be a good idea to have a pokemon on your team dedicated to carrying as many of these moves as possible
Losing Battles: Note that when you lose a battle you also lose half your money
An optional challenge for Pokemon games to shake them up a bit is to do a nuzlocke challenge which basically involves only catching one pokemon in each area. If you’re interested in trying it out you can make a little “home post”/list for a running count of who you’ve got from each area and to keep track of duplicates if you’re using that rule.
Core Rules
If a Pokemon faints you cannot use it again. (Box or release it)
You must catch the first Pokemon you find in a new area. If it flees or faints you cannot catch another in that area
You must nickname all pokemon you get
Optional Rules
If you already own the first Pokemon you encounter in a new area, you can catch the next instead to prevent duplicates
If you encounter a shiny, you can catch it no matter what, and it doesn’t count towards that area’s catch
There are many other optional rules but these are the basics from Nuzlocke university
Note: If you’re playing Let’s Go it’s a little different for 2 reasons: wild Pokemon walk around in the overworld so there’s no random encounters, and you level pokemon up by catching them. Therefore if you want to Nuzlocke Lets Go you can do the following:
Catch the Pokemon closest to you in a new area, or run around with your eyes closed and catch the first one you bump into
You’re allowed to catch extras to level up, but they must be immediately released
I always thought you needed a type Plant or Water Pokemon to defeat the Gym Leader, and at least of the same level as their Pokemon.
But you can see in the video I posted here how to defeat the Gym leader:
There’s lots of ways to beat this Gym! In particular, one way to do it with any Pokémon is by abusing stat lowering attacks and taking advantage of the Gym’s trademark move, がまん. When Onix/イワック uses がまん, he will tank hits for two (iirc) turns and then unleash a counterattack that doubles the damage he received. I remember being a kid and feeling like a genius when I noticed that the damage がまん did was lower when I used not effective moves. So I remember thinking “wait, what if I use non damaging moves?” and of course, if he hasn’t received any damage the counter attack will be 0.
In this playthrough I think I defeated him with Nidoran by spamming Growl so that his other non がまん attacks would barely do damage and then normal attacks just to see if I could lol
Stat boosting/lowering moves are HUGE in Pokémon, especially because they stack SIX times. As a kid I obviously went for “all four moves do big damage”, so now I’m having fun abusing them as much as I can.
No new Pokémon for my Poison type mono run this week. I was thinking of catching a ビードル since it’s Bug/Poison but… I have already used it a milion times in other playthroughs, I wanted to vary my team.
Anyway, lots of new Pokémon this week! But most of them have names based on random English words unfortunately, boo
キャタピー a contraction of キャタピラー (caterpillar)
トランセル, a mix of “transform” and “cell”.
ビードル, from “bee” and “needle”. (Hinting at it’s evolution)
コクーン, “cocoon”.
And let’s look at the two Pokémon used by the first Gym Leader, タケシ/Brock. (Have to say that it was funny to see that the punny name was English for once)
イシツブテ 石, いし, stone + 礫 (… Another stone, but used for throwing, I learned something new today!). Because you know. It’s a rock. With arms. That throws other rocks at you when you piss it off!
イワーク 岩, いわ (So many kanji for rocks!) + スネック, snake. Pretty self explanatory I guess.
Unique to Let’s Go there is a lady who asks you to babysit her dear ヤドンちゃん for a lot of pocket money. Hilariously nothing happens in the cutscene. ヤドン are so goofy
Thanks to this job I visited the museum with plenty of money to spare and learned about Pokemon fossils and space. The language wasn’t too complicated overall - 50円 well spent
Looks like this might be a short week for me since I got バクスピン the water turtle for the gym and haven’t figured out my second dance partner poke yet, maybe ビードル knows how to get it down? Could do a little bee boogie thing happening? Worms know how to wiggle, they got the dance shape down, you don’t need legs to cut loose. And besides, they invented the worm.
I suspect that it won’t be an issue for this week but for the future would it also be possible to have the name of the locations in nihonguese? I realize that many of this club participants are extremely familiar with the game and immediately know what we’re talking about, but I’m a pokenoob…
Punks ambushing me in the field like it’s Metal Gear. Can’t even use CQC.
The idea of having cocoon-style enemies that are functionally useless but turn into better monster is a fun idea built on top of the existing evolution system.
I don’t really like the limit on how many times you can use a move before resting. Having limits for powerful moves like ヒトカゲ’s flame thing makes sense, but I’d prefer a mana system or something like that.
I wonder if the enemy encounter tables are per patch of grass or the same for the entire location.
Moves that alter speed seem dubiously useful since you always get the same number of moves as the adversary as far as I can tell. It just dictates who moves first.
A 月の石 fell somewhere nearby. This foreshadows something, but I’m not sure what.
I paid to enter the 博物館. I wasn’t sure if it would be worth it, but it totally was for the cool pixel art:
EDIT: oh, I didn’t realize that this comment was in fact in bad taste given how this particular shuttle ended:
At the end of its final flight in February 2003, Columbia disintegrated upon reentry, killing the seven-member crew of STS-107 and destroying most of the scientific payloads aboard.
Is the only way to make money to fight other trainers? I can also sell stuff but random encounters don’t seem to ever yield any loot.
Every city has the same music so far. Disappointing. At least the gym track is a banger.
I expected the gym to be a long dungeon but there was only one (avoidable) encounter on the way to the リーダー.
My team didn’t work so well against these stone pokemons, but the AI is so bad (maybe because it’s still the tutorial phase?) that I managed to prevail through brute force. He wasted so many turns using pointless actions (although his 我慢 did manage to one-shot my ヒトカゲ).
Perhaps a silly question for me to ask, but what would the difference be?
The encounter table itself is per location, but the calculation is done per step in tall grass (not on non-grass tiles). (Or on the GBA, per direction press, even if you’re turning without taking a step, in the grass.)
There’s selling items, but other than that you’re pretty much limited to defeating trainers.
I’d say the tutorial phase ended with the formerly drunk man in トキワシティ.
The reality of it is that the developers were just really bad. I mean, they did an amazing job all things considered, but they had a lot of limitations in their ability when working on the game.
To know if different Pokemon could appear in different patches of grass from the same location. It would incentivize me to trigger fights everywhere if I had a chance to encounter something new.
Upon reaching ニビシティ, I stopped by the PokeCen and updated my trainer card. …but I didn’t take a screenshot when I had the chance, so I’ll show it off later.
I wasn’t planning on going to the museum just yet, but this random guy really wanted me to go there, so…
Easy wins may not be satisfying, but the true friends are the Japanese dialogue we read along the way.
With the Gray Badge in hand, I can use outside of battle a move my Pokemon cannot yet learn. Yay. I do find it interesting that the HM to teach Flash appears before getting the badge but cannot actually be obtained until a bit later. It feels almost like the developers originally had the Flash HM accessible early on for after getting enough dex entries, but changed their mind later without updating which badge does what.
If you’re playing FRLG and looking to get all the ボイスチェッカー dialogue possible before getting the item, be sure to:
I agree, and I feel like it’s really seamless the way they start introducing poison and bugs and rock types but nothing too complicated, I just like the volume and timing of what’s taught in Pokemon games, it feels very intricate
+1 for the city names in Japanese, I have no idea what the cities are called in English, and would be nice to try to learn and remember them in JP
About items: have you talked with the last person who wants to fight in the forest? He gives some hint about where some items are. If you don’t get the hint and don’t find the item: there are invisible items on the ground in some places!
Also one particular item can be sold for a lot of money (and doesn’t have any other purpose so you can safely do that), I guess you’ll find out which one soon enough.
Oh? Don’t think I got it, I’ll have to go back and check!
Game Club
Note: If you’re playing Let’s Go it’s a little different for 2 reasons: wild Pokemon walk around in the overworld so there’s no random encounters, and you level pokemon up by catching them. Therefore if you want to Nuzlocke Lets Go you can do the following:
Extra Resources
will have to practice now!
One more evolution and..
タジロ to learn つるのムチ.
ザシメ has learned かぜおこし. Very useful when in a bug-filled forest.
Fritz was the very first person ever to win.
from my English FireRed, I’ve gotten a couple via ものひろい (which was added in the GBA titles, not it’s not in the GB originals).