Pokémon: Plans
Comments(2) I’m in a bit of a hurry to get today’s post up, so I’ll be brief. I have already had several acquaintances on the east coast say that I should have picked Pokémon up again before moving, that they would have been willing to trade with me at that point. Unfortunately, I was saving Pokémon as something to play during the move — something I could play while my other gaming devices were packed up. But as it turned out, moving occupies enough of one’s attention that I didn’t do any gaming at all until I had the PS2 set up, so that was futile.
Well, I do intend to come back east once in a while. I have parents out there, and will probably come back sometime around Christmas, if not sooner. Will I still want to trade pokémon then? Quite possibly; I’m seeing this as something of a long-term project. Catching ’em all can’t be done all at once. If you try, you’ll be bored to tears.
Beating the eight Pokémon Leaders and completing the plot of the game is another matter. I’ll probably make a run for that soon — I think I have the fighting power to do it, and just need to find the rest of the HMs to get past the obstacles on the way. (HM stands for Hidden Machine; they’re a variant of the TM, or Technical Machine. Both varieties are used to teach special moves, but HMs teach skills that can be used outside of combat, such as cutting through brush or lifting heavy rocks.) I could be wrong about having the power, of course, but my toughest contender, a level 42 alakazam 1 Blenkinsop, as you may remember from the previous post , is currently defeating everything he meets with a single blow of his psychically-endowed brain.
So, my plan right now is to get through the story, become the ultimate trainer or whatever, and then put Pokémon on the back burner for a while. When I have a chance, I’ll post my list here to facilitate arranging trades. It’s probably going to be tricky to get unevolved charmander and bulbasaur, which can only be gotten once, at the very beginning of the game — there’s an initial choice of three, and I chose the squirtle. The point being, if you haven’t turned yours into a charmeleon and/or ivysaur yet, you probably aren’t into the game enough to dig your cartridge out of storage and arrange a time and place to meet. But hey, maybe you saw someone playing the DS version and got nostalgic for your first Pokémon experience. Maybe you want to start over, classic-style. And if you do, maybe you want to start over with a golem or a gengar or a level 42 alakazam instead of that wimpy bulbasaur.
| ↑1 | Blenkinsop, as you may remember from the previous post |
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If you need some extra pure winning power, I highly recommend that you go for the ghost – Ghastly and Gengar and whatever the name of the in-between evolved stage is. Sleep is one of the most powerful skills in the game – in fact it’s overpowered enough that in official pokemon tournaments, they limited you to sleeping only one of your opponent’s three pokemon during a battle. And Gengar has an attack which drains out massive amounts of HP from a sleeping enemy. So basically it’s sleep-drain-drain done, repeat twice more.
Aside from Sleep, I found very few of the more unusual special-effect powers to be useful in a fight. I rarely if ever saw a debuff or self-buff effect that was powerful enough to offset the damage that could have been done with a direct attack for that round. Life draining attacks are a nice bonus, but ultimately it’s the damage that counts. Oh, and speed – near the end you’ll probably be going up against other pokemon who can one-hit kill you, so attacking first is all important. (This is another reason why the sleep-inducing ghosts were amazing – I don’t remember if there were ways to improve their speed or if they just started fast, but as long as you can put that uber-powerful enemy pokemon to sleep in the first turn, you can avoid the one-hit kill and take a few rounds to finish it off.)
I’ve been in battles where other special effects were useful: protracted battles where neither side can do a whole lot of damage in one attack. Spend three or four turns doing Sand-Attack or Growl and it just shuts off the enemy’s ability to hurt you at all. Mainly this is useful when I’m trying to level up a weak pokémon, and don’t want to split the XP by bringing out a heavy hitter.