The Stack

There’s an item in Pokémon called “Full Heal”. You can buy it at several of the stores in the game. What would you guess it does? If you said “Restores all of a pokémon’s lost hit points”, then you think like me. You’re also wrong. That’s what “Max Potion” does. “Full Heal” is Pokémon‘s equivalent of the Final Fantasy “Esuna” spell: it removes all status effects (such as “poisoned” and “paralyzed”) from a single pokémon. And this made me realize something: I have a strong preference about the terminology for these things. Wounds are “healed”, status effects are “cured”. Doing it the other way around sounds wrong to me, even though the words are almost completely interchangeable in normal English usage.

Even in the context of games, my preferences aren’t completely industry-standard: consider the “Cure Light Wounds” family of spells in D&D, and all the games that have similarly-named spells in imitation. Are my terminological expectations completely groundless? I don’t think so; the various Pokémon FAQs and hint sheets I’ve been looking at tend to favor my usage, even if the game itself doesn’t. Still, this is something worth bearing in mind as I look at other games.

My pokédex ¹My in-game pokédex, that is, not the “pokédex” page on this site, which is just a list of my current pokémon inventory. currently lists 108 types as “owned”. This doesn’t mean I currently own them all, just that I’ve owned each of them at some point. Some have been traded away or evolved.

The 42 remaining ²Mew still doesn’t count. unowned types can be divided into four categories. First, there are those that I can only obtain by trading. There are 13 species like this (including one obtainable through NPC trade I haven’t been able to make yet), although 5 of them are evolved forms of other things I could trade for, so I could potentially obtain them all by trading with other players only 7 times. I have purchased a second GBA from a reader of this blog, who has my thanks and can take credit here if he wishes, so trading will be within the realm of possibility again once I have that in hand.

Second, there are those that I can catch, if I go to the right places. There are 9 species like this, including the elusive Kangaskhan and Tauros. The remaining types, I held off on catching because they’re evolved forms of things that I have, and a pokémon that has been evolved by hand is generally superior to one that’s caught in its evolved form.

Third, there are things that I can evolve from pokémon I have by using special stones on them. (The game does not specify how the stone is applied, and perhaps it’s better not to know.) There are 15 species like this, including the three evolutions of the Eevee, a unique pokémon. I’ve been putting off evolving the Eevee for flexibility in trading: I don’t want to turn it into a Flareon and then find out that someone else wants a Jolteon that I can no longer produce. I’ve been putting off evolving the rest of them because the evolved forms generally have limited opportunities for advancement: they have better stats than their unevolved forms, but they can’t learn all the attacks that their unevolved forms can. As long as there was a possibility that I’d keep using them, and thus levelling them up, it seemed a good idea to keep them unevolved. But I’ll probably abandon this by and by.

That means I currently have only 5 pokémon that I have any real reason to level up. The maximum party size is 6, so I could take all five of them out to the depths of the Unknown Dungeon at once, with Adrian in the lead. But in one case, I’m hesitant to evolve it, lest I repeat a mistake.

At the very start of the game, the player is given the choice between three pokémon: a Charmander, a Bulbasaur, or a Squirtle — basic fire, grass, and water types. This is the only point in the game where you have the opportunity to obtain any of these types. Assuming that all players want as complete a pokédex as they can get, the smart thing to do is for players to trade their initial choices with each other immediately, then level them up until they evolve and trade them again. Since I didn’t know what I was doing, I did not do this. Evolution only goes one way. Consequently, my Squirtle (Godwin) is now in its final evolution, and an unfair trade for anyone with the Charmander and Bulbasaur I sorely need.

Later in the game, the player gets another similar choice between an Omanyte and a Kabuto, two fossilized pokémon that can be revived by the scientists on Cinnabar Island. As with the initial pokémon, both of these species can evolve through experience. If I evolve my Kabuto, what will I have that’s as valuable as an Omanyte?

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.

Years ago, when I was playing Pokémon for the first time, a friend of mine, another grown-up gamer, asked me if I thought that this game was a bad thing to give to children on the grounds that it promotes slavery. I’ve pointed out before how the practice of capturing pokémon is pretty abominable: you beat them up and lock them away, and in the process they become your friends.

It’s more of an issue in the cartoons, where pokémon seem to have human-like minds, and the relationship between Ash and Pikachu is indeed one of loyal friendship. In the game, pokémon are more like animals, and are treated no worse than many domesticated animals in real life, and better than some. (If there are any types of pokémon that are routinely slaughtered for their meat, the game makes no mention of it.) Still, the game anthropomorphizes them somewhat. Some are literally anthropomorphic — the Mr. Mime pokémon is basically human in appearance, and the psychic Kadabra is a caricature of Uri Geller, complete with spoon. There’s also a plot event concerning “the ghost of Cubone’s mother”, a pokémon murdered by Team Rocket. By calling it “murder”, the game implicitly grants Cubone’s mother human status.

Even so, I can’t agree that Pokémon can be blamed for introducing children to the idea of slavery, because the idea is already all around them. The model for the master/slave relationship is the parent/child relationship. Just look at the rhetoric used to justify slavery when it was legal: “It’s really for their benefit. They’re like children. They need a firm guiding hand.” Pokémon is at least far enough removed from reality, blatantly bizarre enough, that it’s hard to imagine taking an explicit “They’re like pokémon” seriously.

I haven’t even mentioned my problems with trading. There are still several pokémon that I won’t be able to get any other way, either because they’re not available in the Blue version, or because the game forced me to choose a single pokémon out of two or three options. Since I started playing again, I’ve gotten together with one friend who had an old Gameboy and the red version, both untouched for years. We were all set to trade (or, more accurately, he was all set to charitably give me what he no longer had any interest in), but we hit a snag: he had a Gameboy Pocket, and I had a Gameboy Advance. And Nintendo, for whatever reason, saw fit to make the cables incompatible.

Now, for all I know there may be sound technical reasons for this. Maybe the two devices transfer data at different speeds or something. Or maybe the only difference is in the shape of the plug. It’s been difficult to get information about this. All I can say with any certainty is that, although Nintendo has made a “universal” Game Link adapter before the GBA, they never made an adapter for connecting the GBA to earlier versions. I’ve seen mention of a third-party adapter that might work, something billed as allowing you to use your old Gameboy cables with a GBA, but (a) it requires an old cable to plug into it and (b) it’s described in such vague terms that I don’t know for sure that it’ll do what I want anyway.

At this point, I’m thinking that the most cost-effective solution might actually be to buy a second GBA off ebay. That way I’d have everything necessary to consummate trades regardless of what hardware the other party has — indeed, all the other party would need to provide is the cartridge. It may even be cheaper than the adapters I’d otherwise need. My only hesitation is that doing trades between two Gameboys that are both mine, possibly by myself in the privacy of my room, is awfully close to “trading pokémon with myself”, which I’ve already gone on record as calling sad. (If I hadn’t made such a comment, I could probably do it without embarassment, of course. Heck, just playing Pokémon Blue at all in 2007 is something a lot of people would consider embarassing.)

I have to admit there’s something of an oversight in my last post. Given that I was facing opponents stronger than my own pokémon, why don’t I just catch some of them? Then I’d have pokémon just as powerful as what I was facing.

Mainly it’s just habit. Throughout the game, I’ve been trying to raise the strongest pokémon I could, and that means catching them at low levels and raising them by hand.

Also, my ultimate goal wasn’t just to successfully face the random encounters in the Unknown Dungeon, but rather, to face and capture Mewtwo, the single most powerful pokémon in the game. I didn’t really know if I could face him. Sure, I had the Master Ball, but would it be enough? What if I threw it and missed? Maybe I would have to put him to sleep first, like I did for the Legendary Birds.

Anticlimactically, this turned out not to be the case. When I finally reached the end of the dungeon, the fight was over with a single lob. Huzzah! Mewtwo is mine, and is now named Adrian. As a result, there is nothing left in the game that poses any difficulty. Completing my pokédex to the extent that I can is just a matter of spending the time to fill in the gaps.

Some of the remaining types can be caught, but a few must be evolved. The strange thing is, even in the cases where I can just stride into the Unknown Dungeon and catch an evolved form, I have some inclination to evolve a pokémon that I already have. And I think this is because I’m playing it on a Gameboy.

You see, as I see it, there are two basic modes in which you can play a game. (You can certainly cut it finer, but generally speaking, regardless of what else you’re doing, you’re operating in one of these two modes.) Either you’re playing the game for a particular experience, or you’re playing it just to pass the time. I’d compare these two modes to seeing a movie and going for a walk: one can complain that a movie is too long, has too much “padding” or “filler” material in it, but it’s hard to imagine saying that about a walk through the woods, where spending time is the whole point. These modes correspond roughly to “core” and “casual” games, and also to what I’ve termed “challenges” and “activities”, but not absolutely: you can have a goal-oriented game with challenges in it that’s still played mainly in the pastime mode. In fact, that’s what I’d argue that Pokémon is. And it fits into that role mainly just by being played on a Gameboy, the archetypal pastime platform.

Away from my usual devices until January, I devote some attention to the Unknown Dungeon, haunt of Mewtwo. This is a mazelike area with frequent encounters with wild pokémon of about level 50 and up — approximately as strong as my strongest pokémon, but more numerous and, unlike the champion trainers, not divided up into predictable themes. It’s clear that I’m going to be doing some leveling up before I make much progress.

Naturally, I’m seeing the whole thing in terms of my recent experiences with Final Fantasy V. It’s similar in a way: where FF5 makes you choose which jobs you want to level up, Pokémon makes you choose which individual pokémon to advance. But in FF5, there’s character XP on top of job Ability Points. No matter what jobs you exercise, you’re going to wind up with more powerful characters, with more hit points and magic points. Whereas in Pokémon, when you put your Rhydon into storage and replace it with a Staryu, you just lose all the benefit of the effort you put into leveling the Rhydon.

There are basically two ways to level up a particular pokémon quickly. First, you can put it in front of the stack, so that it comes up first whenever you go into combat. Even if you immediately switch to a different pokémon, this counts as participating in combat and gets it a share of the XP. The problem is that switching away like that loses the initiative. The best way to win combat is always with a single devastating blow right at the beginning; if you can’t do that, the enemy is likely to do a move that raises its defense, or lowers your ability to attack, or paralyzes you, or even just damages you, making you go back to the Poké Center for healing earlier than you otherwise would. So this is approach is best taken when the pokémon you’re trying to level has at least some chance of winning fights on its own.

The other way is to equip the “Experience All” item, which shares a fraction of the XP from a fight with everyone in the party, even if they didn’t participate. The pokémon who participate still get the bulk of the XP, but a low-level pokémon is still going to get more from the cast-off scraps of a battle between champions than from fighting someone his own size.

The real problem, then, is what to do when the other pokémon are only slightly more powerful than you. You can’t earn disproportionate XP by sitting in the back with “Experience All”, and you can’t fight them all by yourself. Mostly what you can do is go out in short sallies and retreat to the Poké Center a lot.

Well, I’ve won. The endgame consists of a sequence of elite trainer battles in which all of the opponent pokémon were substantially higher level than mine. Between battles, you get to apply any healing items you’ve brought with you, but you can’t alter your team. Fortunately, the elite trainers make the same mistake as all the other bosses: specializing. Lack of diversity makes your team weak. My final team consisted of Blenkinsop the Alakazam, Ellington the Dragonair, Stirbridge the Gyarados, and the three Legendary Birds: Loolah, Hoagie, and Brenda. That’s Psychic, Dragon, Water, Ice, Electric, and Fire types covered; despite the level gap, most of the enemies could be dispensed with in one or two hits from the right one. Ellington is pretty much the only one who didn’t pull his weight. Loolah actually gained a level and learned a new attack in the middle of one of the battles. It’s a good ending: it shows off how powerful you’ve become without actually being all that difficult.

After you win, Professor Oak, who sent you on the whole adventure in the first place, informs you that the reason you won is that you treat your pokémon with care and respect, or something like that. I suppose there’s some basis to this: in gameplay terms, it translates to training pokémon by hand, rather than taking shortcuts like catching them at high levels, or using Rare Candy or the Day Care Center to raise their level without combat. Doing things the hard way results in more powerful pokémon at a given level.

Not long ago, I mentioned how collection elements are shoehorned into games where they don’t really belong in order to provide “replay value”. Pokémon really stands in contrast to this. The collection is a natural part of the game; if anything, it’s “winning” that’s grafted on artificially. From a collector’s point of view, though, there’s still a point to finishing the story: it grants access to the Unknown Dungeon.

I had found the entrance to the Unknown Dungeon during my revisitng-everything phase. At the time, there was a guard standing in front of it saying that only the reigning Pokémon League champion was allowed in. Well, that’s me now. I’ve only explored the dungeon a little, but it’s full of high-level wild pokémon, including evolved forms of things that I had only seen unevolved in the wild previously. So suddenly there’s the option of completing my pokédex (to the extent possible) by catch-and-release means rather than through the level grind. After all, it’s “gotta catch ’em all”, not “gotta keep ’em all”.

At any rate, I’m going to take a break from this game for a while, but I don’t consider it to be off the Stack yet, even though I’ve won. I’ve still got a Master Ball with Mewtwo’s name on it. I haven’t decided yet what that name is, but there’s plenty of time for that later.

Coincidentally, the ever-popular Penny Arcade has been doing a whole lot of Pokémon-related strips lately. I note in particular that the latest strip makes a joke about a player trading pokemon with himself. This is something that reads differently if you’re familiar with the game. As I’ve pointed out, there are legitimate reasons in the game to prefer a traded to an untraded pokémon, and there are probably people who really do buy two gameboys and two Pokémon cartridges in order to take advantage of this. To one who doesn’t know the game, trading with yourself seems pointless. To one who is, it just seems sad.

They’re presumably into it because of the recent release of the “Diamond” and “Pearl” editions for the Nintendo DS. From what they say, it’s clear that the complexity has been kicked up several notches from the original: they talk about things like breeding pokémon. In the version I know, pokémon are just generated spontaneously from grassy areas by the friction generated when you walk through them. There’s a variety that comes in what are identified male and female forms, but there’s no real reason to believe that they do anything about it. But apparently nowadays breeding your own pokémon is an essential way to get specimens with certain special properties. I remember a sub-game like this in Final Fantasy VII, breeding chocobos in order to get ones that can win races more easily, but also to get special ones that can fly over mountains and oceans. But that was a minor aside in a larger game, whereas Pokémon is all about acquiring special creatures, so it sounds like this is a core part of the game mechanic now. The whole idea seems daunting, but it’s probably more intellectually involving than the level grind.

It also raises the interesting possibility that chocobos might be a lost tribe of pokémon. Must investigate further.

To expand on the last thing I said in the previous post: Pretty much all CRPGs reward repetitive activity to some degree, allowing the player to get by on effort alone if they can’t work out the efficient way to do things. This is an important part of the genre: it’s the thing that makes it possible to still make progress in every play session even if you’re stuck in the plot and puzzles (if there are any).

But few games are repetitive in the way that Pokémon is. In most games with a level grind, there’s an expectation that you’ll pass through each level only once. You go hunting for gnolls in Blackburrow or whatever, and eventually you’ve got enough experience that you can take on something stronger than gnolls, and so you leave Blackburrow behind. But in Pokémon, there’s a separate grind for each pokémon you capture. You can have everything in your party up to level 30, and then suddenly catch a new guy who’s level 15 and evolves at level 28. You can put him in a party with a bunch of strong guys, have him never actually participate in combat and just leech XP off the others, but he’s going to level faster if he can win fights by himself. Eventually, you’ll want to take him off to an area that’s appropriate to his level.

(Come to think of it, this is kind of what Wizardry was like. Except there, the reason you kept having to level up new characters was to replace the ones who died.)

Or consider the case of Georgeson the Sandslash. Georgeson is one of the first pokémon I caught, back when he was just a sandshrew. I levelled him up to the point of evolving, then just stuck him in storage and forgot about him. It was only when searching for a team to take on Zapdos that I found a new use for him. See, part of my plan (as detailed in the last post) was to use an accuracy-reduction attack, such as Sand Attack, to keep the fearsome avian from knocking out my guys in a single hit. I had used McNaughton the Pidgeotto for this purpose in the battle with Articuno, but flying pokémon are really vulnerable to electrical attacks. Whereas ground pokémon seem to be completely immune to them. Georgeson was the only ground-type I had that knew this attack — his time to shine! Except he was only level 22, hardly capable of hitting a level 50 flying opponent. I took him out, intending to level him up to 30 or so.

I still think this would have worked, too, if I hadn’t been so impatient. I got him as far as level 23, then threw caution to the wind. It all worked out well — Georgeson was taken out with a single non-electrical attack (Drill Peck), and without his protection, a couple of other members of the team went down as well. But I had brought a certain amount of redundancy along, two pokémon with sleep attacks, two with wrap, so it all came off regardless.

I’m still impatient, though. And I still have a lot of pokémon to evolve. I’m thinking that I’ll spend maybe a day or two more on this and then give it a break regardless of whether I’ve found Leader #8 by then or not.