On Playing Through Alpha Sapphire: Delta Episode 2: Electric Boogaloo

Holy $#!t

Just… so much holy $#!t

All of the things happening

I should… like… talk about it all. I warn you, this one just kept getting longer and longer and at some point I just lost control of it, because there were just so many things I had to comment on and I didn’t want to split up the events of Delta Episode any further. If even half of the things I’m reading into these events are true, my views about the history of the Pokémon world and the relationship between humans and Pokémon need serious revision; I mean, I’m seriously beginning to think Archie might have been right to waken Kyogre, and to hell with the risks. Some of the ideas I’m starting to have will  probably crystallise in the article I’m supposed to be writing soon about Mega Evolution (and by the way, I am so glad I didn’t try to write that before playing this game), but the rest… hard to say. May have to write something else to deal with the history of Hoenn in detail. I’ll think about it. In the meantime, here are my reactions to the final plot sequence of Alpha Sapphire…

Continue reading “On Playing Through Alpha Sapphire: Delta Episode 2: Electric Boogaloo” →

On Playing Through Alpha Sapphire: Delta Episode 1

This damn plot extension is making my head spin in at least three major ways, and I haven’t even finished it yet. So much to talk about, so much to think about! Not going to bother listing the team at this point; you know who they are if you’ve been reading these. Let’s just talk about what’s happening…

Continue reading “On Playing Through Alpha Sapphire: Delta Episode 1” →

Gen 2 introduced the idea of pokemon that ar extremely rare or impossible to catch until a herd on some days. This adds an exciting factor to the hunt when you have a small window of opportunity to find a certain pokemon, but all of these pokemon were bad. Azumarill got buffed over the years, yanma evolved, and dunsparce got niche uses, but back then they stank, and quilfish is still unusable. Gen 1’s safari zone rewarded your effort with good mons, so what gives here?

We-ell, I don’t know if it’s entirely fair to generation II to draw such a sharp distinction – generation I has its share of pretty useless Pokémon that are hidden away in frustrating places.  I mean, you mention that Azumarill and Yanma were much weaker originally than they are now, but the same is true of Scyther and Pinsir, who are some of the Safari Zone’s rarest Pokémon; Pinsir is rubbish in generation I (indeed, Pinsir is sub-par in everything up to and including generation V), and Scyther’s not great either.  And need I even bring up Porygon?  Meanwhile, one of the swarming Pokémon available in generation II is Tauros, who was amazing in generation I.  I think the main problem is that what makes a Pokémon ‘good’ is often kinda difficult to anticipate without actually using the damn thing for quite a while, and particularly in the beginning Game Freak a) didn’t have a whole lot of experience with that and b) didn’t really care all that much either.

Do you know about the “Pokedex- Extended Fanon Edition” ? Any thoughts on their interpretation of the Pokémon universe or how they depicted various Pokémon species?

I think I might have seen it before?  It’s not really something I’d want to spend much time looking at, partly because it would probably suck me in, partly because it’s the sort of thing that I keep thinking I might want to do myself someday (not sure I ever actually will, because it’d be such a horrendously massive project, but it’s something I would do if I had unlimited time), and I don’t really want a whole lot of other people’s ideas floating around in my head if I ever do.  It looks like a solid effort, for the most part.

Could we maybe just once have a Tumblr update that doesn’t remove features and make the interface less intuitive?  One time?  Is that too much to ask?

I was looking at the old official type chart and I noticed something intriguing. The first five types on the chart are NORMAL, FIRE, WATER, ELECTRIC, GRASS. I expected grass to come before electric with grass and fire in the order, but electric precedes it (the 6th element is ICE). Do you think this means they intended to have an electric type starter in the trio, with fire SE against electric? It’s curious, because the megaman games have electic and fire robots trump each other sometimes.

Well… to be honest I kinda feel like that’s just reading way too much into it… and it’s also probably worth noting that there are no three-stage Electric-types in generation one (although whether that would necessarily have mattered in the formative stages of the game is hard to say)… but… oh, what the hell, let’s go look at the damn hex numbers and see if that says anything.

(Obligatory explanation for anyone reading this who doesn’t know what these are: every Pokémon has a unique hexadecimal (base-16) number that identifies it within the games’ coding; from Ruby and Sapphire onward these ID numbers follow Pokédex order, but in the games from the first two generations they’re all over the place, and we think they represent the order in which Pokémon were created, since Rhydon is 01 and we know independently that he was the first design ever.  It’s therefore possible – if you’re sufficiently credulous – to mine this list for patterns that tell us things about the design process of the original Pokémon games.)

So, I’m pretty sure the establishment of Grass/Water/Fire as the standard starter trio actually did happen very late.  This is because Squirtle, Wartortle, Charmander, Charmeleon and Charizard turn up all together at B0 to B4, near the very end of the list, and I think this represents the moment they decided on a selection of three three-stage starters.  Bulbasaur and Venusaur come in a little while before that; Ivysaur and Blastoise have both been around for ages by this point.  So, on the one hand, there is good reason for thinking that the mechanism by which players received their first Pokémon was fluid for a long time during the game’s development, but on the other hand it’s the Fire and Water starters who are late to the party, not the Grass-type.  It’s sort of difficult to come up with anything more solid than that… although you can, I suppose, look for places in the list where Grass, Water and Fire types seem like they could have been designed all together – there aren’t any – or for places where Water, Fire and Electric types seem like they could have been designed all together… and there are, interestingly, two of those.  One is the set of Pikachu, Vulpix, and a Pokémon that was actually rejected from Red and Blue but ultimately resurfaced in Gold and Silver as Remoraid (EDIT: take this with a grain of salt – see comments section).  The other… the other is Eevee and her evolutions, and Eevee’s role in Yellow Version does make it awfully tempting to suggest that maybe she was intended as the starter Pokémon up until Charmander and Squirtle were designed.  Total conjecture, of course.  Can’t prove a word of it.  But it’s interesting to speculate.

I think Victreebel should get a Mega Evolution. What do you think it would be like?

Eh… hmm… that’s a tricky one.  Victreebel’s a pitcher plant, yeah?  Well… maybe it would be neat if… hmm… there’s a kind of pitcher plant called a ‘cobra lily,’ because its leaves look sort of like the hood of a rearing cobra.  What if that long vine that on Victreebel’s head that it uses for attacks like Vine Whip and Slam actually took on a life of its own and grew a little serpent head on the end?  It’s used to lure prey into Victreebel’s ravenous maw, and can attack on its own as well.  Eh… I don’t know if I like the idea of giving a mega evolution features that are most interesting in terms of how they’d work in the wild, though, since wild Pokémon don’t do that.  Mrrm.  Dunno.