The Stack

Spending some time on a train, I realized that this was exactly the sort of situation that I’ve been saying that the Gameboy was designed for, and decided to take advantage of my semi-distracted state by pursuing the elusive Kangaskhan in its habitat, the Safari Zone. This is the most tedious and frustrating region of the game, and there are several pokémon that can be found nowhere else. I’m still missing two, the Kangaskhan and the even more elusive Tauros.

The thing that makes the Safari Zone so tedious and frustrating is the change in the rules. There’s no combat — presumably your pokéballs are confiscated at the entrance or something. Instead, you get to throw bait, rocks, and special safari pokéballs in an effort to capture the pokémon you encounter. No matter what you do, there’s a chance that it’ll run away — the Kangaskhan and Tauros are particularly skittish. Throwing bait tends to make pokémon stick around longer, but it’s no guarantee that they won’t immediately run away anyway. Throwing rocks allegedly weakens their resistance to the pokéballs, but there’s no way to gauge this. It all feels very random, with no sense of progress within an encounter.

Worse, there’s no sense of progress throughout encounters either. When you’re hunting for a specific pokémon, you tend to encounter a lot of other things first. That’s true anywhere in the game, but outside the Safari Zone, you can at least beat them up for XP. If you go into the Safari Zone and don’t come out with any new pokémon, you’ve made no progress in the game whatever.

To make things even worse, entering the Safari Zone costs a bundle of money, and you can only stay there so long before you have to pay another bundle of money. (You also get only so many safari balls per visit, but that’s not a serious limitation. I don’t think I’ve ever run out of balls.) At least you can save before entering so that you don’t actually have to pay for fruitless visits.

I suppose that the designers put in the Safari Zone to provide some variety, and at least it has more to do with the game than the teleporter mazes and the like that they used for variety elements elsewhere. But on the whole, I’m thinking that it’s not really part of the game I want to deal with much. I’m going to have to see if I can get someone to trade me a Kangaskhan and a Tauros.