One lunatic's love-hate relationship with the Pokémon franchise, and his addled musings on its rights, wrongs, ins and outs. Come one, come all, and indulge my delusions of grandeur as I inflict my opinions on anyone within shouting distance.
Big rules here, little rules down there, let’s go.
So – last time I’d just finished training a moderately competent team on Iron Island out of the Pokémon assigned to me by the Devil (look, this is just the kind of phrase you wind up using in this run; deal with it), only to draw the Five of Pentacles when I entered the gym and learn that I won’t be allowed to use any female Pokémon.
Well, first things first: Judy, Sunfire and Gran Nite have to get back in the kitchen, along with all my other female Pokémon.
More importantly, Justice is still in play, and some slots just opened up in my party, so guess who’s coming back?
Big rules here, little rules down there, let’s go.
Look, I know everyone was eager to see me take on Canalave City with only a drastically underlevelled Blissey and Girafarig, an Unown and a Blizzard/Slam Quagsire, but I felt like I had to do just a teensy bit of off-screen grinding, maybe not quite enough to get Du Fromage and Anna up to the levels of the old team, but enough for them to be… well, competent.
Big rules here, little rules down there, let’s go.
We now have access to Surf, which lets us go to not just Canalave City but several other side paths and hidden areas throughout Sinnoh, including one or two that are big enough to be worth drawing cards for. So let’s have a little exploration episode with no dumb plot $#!t.
Big rules here, little rules down there, let’s go.
So there’s a Team Galactic goon here being a goon and doing goon things. Maybe Cynthia knew all about this and realised someone had to go and deal with it, but didn’t want to have to speak to her grandmother, so she engineered a bull$#!t pretext for the player to go to Celestic Town instead.
Last time, we’d just drawn the Ten of Wands, giving the first commenter a chance to change the rules. Let’s see what we got…
So, commenter and esteemed Patreon supporter hugh_donnetono has chosen the path of chaos.
Perhaps the meaning of this comment and rule change is not immediately clear to you. Hugh_donnetono has mostly just removed several rules I had to follow – is this not good? But observe.
Big rules here, little rules down there, let’s go.
(Also, I’ve just remembered that the Eight of Cups should have actually been put up on the board when I drew it a couple of episodes ago, to remind us that Andi has to stay in the Mate Crate and that there should currently be only three Eights in the deck; I’ll add it next time)
Big rules here, little rules down there, let’s go.
Something really funny about Diamond and Pearl is that they come at a point in the Pokémon series before anyone had actually made Game Freak stop putting fµ¢£ing casinos in all their games for small children, but after Nintendo had kinda figured out they should probably tone down the gambling references, at least for the international market (and, y’know, also long before the emerging mobile games industry would totally normalise the idea of designing video games to get children to gamble). Thus, we have the PI (Private Investigator) trainer class. These guys are shown tossing coins in their sprites and their dialogue is all about luck, chance and guessing, which makes them seem like pretty rubbish private investigators. They also use a lot of very luck-heavy moves – Carlos here has three Goldeen, all of whom know Horn Drill. This is because, in the original Japanese, they’re not investigators. They’re gamblers – a trainer class that appears in the Kanto games, both original and remakes, and returns in Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee renamed “gamers.” The generation IV gambler just happened to have this noir-style sprite with the long coat and fedora that could believably be renamed “PI” in translations – not a switch you could easily pull with the generation III gambler, who is an old man with threadbare clothes and a dice cup.
This has nothing to do with the challenge run; I just thought it was important knowledge to share.
Big rules here, little rules down there, let’s go.
So, most of route 215 – pretty uneventful. Divine soloed most of the trainers without even taking damage (to be fair, a lot of them are Black Belts with Fighting Pokémon who don’t really know how to deal with a Ghost-type), which is good because I’m still not allowed to switch in battle or reorder my party.
These two at the end are a lot trickier – a double battle with a Gyarados and a Kadabra, both very strong mid-game Pokémon, strategically positioned at the entrance to Veilstone City to ensure that players fight them. They really stick out in my memory as a surprisingly difficult fight for a pair of random trainers; I think I might even have wiped to them once, back in the day. Both trainers open with less frightening Pokémon though – Glameow and Monferno – which means you can focus on taking them out one at a time.
Big rules here, little rules down there, let’s go.
DID YOU JUST IMPLY THAT TEAM GALACTIC MURDERED YOUR POKÉMON???
I mean yes the obvious reading is that Team Galactic literally “took” his Pokémon, that they stole them from him, but then why would he be in the graveyard tower?
Pokémaniacal 