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 Art by me, hello! Hello, and welcome to my LP of Pokémon Black 2: Randomized! Randomized? Yeah! Using a tool to edit the Rom, I’ve made it so that every pokemon in the game is replaced with (probably) some other pokemon! This means that every wild pokemon will be something else, so hopefully the team selections that I have are varied and cool as well! It can also lead to some impossible things, like a level 4 Ampharos being catchable on route 1. We’ll see how that works! Also, every trainer will have a selection of random pokemon, usually following a theme. In addition to this, I’ve randomized the movelists and abilities of pokemon, but I left their stats the same so that I still have some idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the pokemon I encounter, though I won’t be able to know exactly what tricks they’ll pull on me. Okay, why? To put it simply, I loving love Pokémon. It is my second favorite game series ever, and it’s the series that I have been a fan of longer than any other. Despite this, I was never able to get through Black 2 or White 2, mostly because I had just played through both Black and White when I started playing the sequels, and I just sort of burned out. I’m hoping that playing with the randomizer, and trying to do an LP will help push me through it! This does mean that eventually the LP is going to be “blind.” I’ve seen up to the 5th gym, and I’ve gathered a lot of the plot through cultural osmosis, so it’s not totally so, but fair warning. What’s the LP going to be like then? Okay, first thing’s first: This is not going to be an in-character LP, at least insofar as I’m not going to be writing as the character in the game. My online persona is a bit of a character, but whose isn’t? Regardless, I’m just gonna be me, and I’m gonna be reacting to and commenting on the story and game as me, the way it comes natural. Maybe I’ll be funny, I’ll try to be informative because I know a lot of poo poo about Pokémon, but I’m not gonna try to be anything other than me, just someone who likes Pokémon a whole lot. Second, this is going to be primarily a screenshot LP, with videos for neat stuff that I think deserve videos, gifs for other neat stuff, and (eventually) commentated videos on interesting battles that happen! I’ll need to figure out video editing to do that, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Thirdly, there’s gonna be reader participation! I love basically every Pokémon, so I’m cool with using whoever, which means that once we get more than six, I’ll let the thread vote on team composition, with one exception: Our starter never leaves our party. She’s special and my friend. Oh, also I’m playing on Challenge Mode, which means that the trainer pokemon that I encounter are going to be anywhere between 1 and 5 levels higher than they would be in the base game, and also some trainers (mostly gym leaders). Plus I’m probably gonna end up doing some dumb drawings because I like to do them, but they probably won’t be parts of the updates proper. Also, this game is something weird for a Pokémon game, it’s a sequel! I’m probably gonna talk about Black and White a lot throughout the LP, and I’ll try to make what I’m referencing clear when I do it, but if you want the full context of the game and don’t wanna play it, you can go read this LP by Chorocojo! I’m not gonna have votes for nicknames or anything, but if you have any suggestions for nicknames of pokémon we might see feel free to throw them out and I might use them! Lastly, I’m gonna be aiming for 2 update posts a week, but I make no promises. These updates take about 4 hours total to put together, so it’s not a huge time investment, but I’m an Undergrad Junior so things may come up.  Hey, I haven't had problems with this yet, but this is a partially blind playthrough! Talk about pokemon or the other games as much as you like, but please no plot spoilers for this one!The Updates! Update 1.1: Jolyne Jolyne, Jolyne Jolyyyyne… Update 1.2: Hast du etwas Zeit für mich? Update 2.1: Old Man and Me Update 2.2: Captured Effortlessly Update 3: House of Gold and Bones Update 4.1: Just Can't Sleep Tonight Ubdate 4.2: How Does That Grab You? Jolyne Cujoh fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Mar 31, 2016 |
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Mar 10, 2016 22:15
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The Current Team:      The Active Roster:                           This post will also contain whatever drawings and stuff I do for the thread, and any fanart I might or might not get! Jolyne Cujoh fucked around with this message at 09:41 on Mar 30, 2016 |
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Mar 10, 2016 22:16
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Update 1.1: Jolyne Jolyne, Jolyne Jolyyyyne… (Just as a warning, these first few updates will be a little more gif and video heavy than the usual. There’s lots of neat stuff at the beginning of this game! Also the program I was using to cap the screenshots stretched them weirdly. I tried to fix them as best as I could, but image quality should improve starting with update 2.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLu5Ta19lFk The start screen/eyecatch/whatever is pretty neat, so check it out! From there, we get this menu!  It’s just a menu that you won’t look at much, but it’s got some stuff in it that’s cool and/or relevant. Mystery Gift has been a thing since Gen II and you use it to get event pokemon or items which maybe I’ll show off but who knows how the randomize will affect those, and Unova Link has a bunch of stuff.  Memory Link lets you sync your game with your save of Black or White and gets you some cutscenes and special battles that I will find some way to show off. The Key System lets you access easy mode and Challenge Mode, and the Nintendo 3DS link lets you get the pokemon that you captured in Pokémon Dream Radar, an app for the 3DS. Anyway, let’s start a new game!  When we do, we’re immediately greeted by this lady! If you’ve played a Pokémon game before, you know immediately that this lady is a Professor, and that she’s probably gonna end up giving you your first pokemon.  And this is how they always start the conversation! Followed by this:  They send out a pokemon! Starting with Black and White, the sprites are fully animated and are constantly in motion, while before they just had an animation when they first entered battle. Some of them are pretty good, and I will try to show them off! After sending out the pokemon (this one is a Cincinno, they’re chinchillas with fluffy tails that love to clean things and they’re awesome)  : “That's right! This world is widely inhabited by mysterious creatures called Pokémon! Pokémon have mysterious powers. They come in many shapes and live in many different places.”Professor Juniper tells us that it is a pokemon, and that there are also many other kinds of pokemon! I assume you’re aware of this if you’re reading these words, but who knows! : “We humans live happily with Pokémon! Living and working together, we complement each other. We help each other out to accomplish difficult tasks.”This is another one of those things that is said in every game, but it’s something important so I’m keeping it in. Pokemon and people have a symbiotic relationship on Pokearth, pokemon want to be strong and fight good, people like pokemon fighting and also their companionship and utility, so they work together! It’s cool and the Black and White addressed it in their main plot.   Professor Juniper is a rad lady and agrees with me.  Oh, well...   Yes to both!  Hell yeah it is. She also asks us about :  This guy! His name is:  … Nah, his name’s Hugh. Also, the first screenshot in the LP to feature both screens! This’ll happen sometimes, it’s a DS game, after all.   Yes! Awesome! We will be great friends with our pokebuddies! : “The moment you choose the Pokémon that will accompany you on your journey, your story will truly begin. During your journey, you will meet many Pokémon and people with different personalities and points of view. I really hope you learn what is important to you as a result of your travels... That's right! Befriend new people and Pokémon and grow as a person! That's the most important goal of your journey!”Yeah! Now let’s-  That! After we leave Professor Juniper, we’re greeted with a nice, pretty cutscene! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcWdYGEc4Js (I had to rerecord the opening cutscene, so a few things are very slightly different in the video from how they were in the actual LP.)  It’s summer!! Seasons are a thing in this game and the previous, and they have some neat effects that I’ll go into later, when they become relevant.   This game takes place in the Unova region, which is pretty unique as far as regions are concerned. Instead of being based on a province, a state or a country like the other regions, Unova is just based on one city: New York! This gives it a really unique aesthetic in the Pokémon world, as almost every place you visit is very urban and, well, city-like, whereas there are a lot of forests and oceans and stuff in the other games.   Some of the people in these screenshots are gonna be important! Can you guess which ones? Also, whoah, the camera moving made those guys look squished.   This is one of them! Sort of. It’s our mom! She stops to look at some leaves blowing in the wind, and then her phone rings!    : “Aurea Juniper! It's been far too long! What can I do for you? ... Wow! A Pokédex... For my child? Why, that's great! I think a journey would be a wonderful experience! What now? She's already here? Oh, for Pete's sake. You never change. Once you've decided on something, you just start going. OK! Bianca, right? A big, green hat. Got it. OK! No worries!"Apparently our mom knows Professor Juniper! And also her first name is Aurea! She also tells us basically exactly what the next ten minutes of gameplay (and, like, three hours of typing and screenshotting for me) will consist of.   Finally, after this line, we get control!  It’s us! For some reason, the hair’s off but whatever, let’s check out our room a little bit.   A new bed, even though we’ve lived in this town for quite a while, since everyone knows us and we have friends here. Guess we just needed a bed. Anyway, we start to go out the door and…  Our mom walks up to us and starts a conversation! : “Do you know Professor Juniper? She's a famous Pokémon researcher. Actually, she's an old friend of mine, and she called me today for the first time in ages! This is out of the blue, but Jolyne...” I didn’t even think to check what happens when you say no here, because duh, of course I want a pokemon!   A Pokédex (or Pokémon Index) is basically an encyclopedia of pokémon, but it’s an encyclopedia written by 12 year olds so there’s some pretty dumb stuff in there. I’ll be posting the entries as we fill them out.   Ah, so the girl in the big green hat gets namedropped! Bianca was one of your two friends who traveled sort of with you in the first game, and now she’s Juniper’s assistant apparently. : “I was told to simply look for a big, green hat! That's right! You're going to go look for Bianca. And then you'll get a Pokédex and a Pokémon to be your partner!”Heck yeah!  Xtransceivers are just smart watches with Skype, basically. We can call our mom or our friends with it. I’ll try to remember to do so.   So far, repetition has been one of the big problems with the game’s writing. Girl in the big green hat, the name you choose, stuff like that has been repeated a lot. I’ll try to cut it out as much as I can to make it flow better, but I wanted to show how it normally is here. This is the end of momtalk, and she moves out of our way so we can leave. If you talk to her again, though… : "The girl's name is Bianca. I was told you should look for a big, green hat! She might be lost because this is her first time here. Go look for her!"Yeah.   Oops went too far, perils of using fast-forward.  And we’re off!  Outside our house (the one on the right), there are some people to talk to and other buildings we can explore! So let’s do that!  I really like this line, he follows it up with stuff about DS wireless communication and wifi, which is pretty amazing actually!   Inside this building are some more people to talk to!   These old people apparently know us pretty well, and are maybe Hugh’s grandparents or something? It’s not really important, but it’s nice for the protagonist to have a hometown where they actually know people and people act familiar with them.  Upstairs, there are more people to talk to, as you can see from the top of the tiny boy’s head in this screenshot.  Me too, tiny boy.   NPC’s keep expressing basically my thoughts on pokemon which makes my job easy, but a bit predictable!   Back outside, someone’s calling our name!  Hey, it’s Hugh and Hugh’s little sister!   This game does the “silent” protagonist thing where the protagonist does say things sometimes, it’s just not spelled out exactly what they say. Usually these little emoticons represent us saying something, and the NPC’s reaction to it.  Yeah, really.   Aww, I definitely will, Hugh’s unnamed Little Sister.   I actually really like this little moment. It implies that there’s something going on without flat out saying it, and it’s really nice!  That moment just happens, is nice, and then Hugh brings the subject back! It’s super good!  : “There's something I have to do! And to do that, I need someone I can trust besides my partner Pokémon. A person I can trust! That's right! I'm talking about you! You seem like you've got good instincts!"Yeah, that’s us! My instincts (by which I mean my 16 years of experience playing pokemon) are top notch!   Yeah, let’s find the little chipmunk!  And now Hugh is following us! This happens with a few NPCs throughout the game, and normally comes with some special mechanics, but we won’t run into those right now, so I won’t talk about them!   We head north, to Hugh’s house, and I really like the fade-in effect that the game has when you transition from outside to inside or vice-versa. It’s way more interesting than a cut to black.  On the inside, we find Hugh’s parents! Neither have much of interest to say, his dad says that Hugh and I should have a battle, and Hugh’s mom says that we’re about to go on a journey.  Upstairs we find Hugh’s little sister, who asks if we’ve found Bianca yet. I actually find it pretty cute that the little girl calls Bianca a lady, even though there's no way the little girl know that Bianca's only 16.  Back outside.   ]To the north, we find the trainer school, a regular fixture in Pokémon games, but apparently it’s a gym as well this time, which is neat.    We go east past the Pokémon center, talk to a total goon and read a sign. Aspertia is the city we’re in, and I guess the name is based on Aspirations, from that tagline.   We head north from there and into another house.   Inside this house is a rad dog, Lillipup, who we would normally be able to get one of very soon, but the randomizer changes that!  Upstairs there are more people and they’re, uhh...   They’re sort of weirdos.   Back outside, we make our way up to what that sign would have told us is the lookout, one of Aspertia’s most iconic areas.  : "Oh, I get it! The outlook is Aspertia's most famous spot! I'll bet Bianca is up there looking at the scenery! C'mon! Go get your Pokémon already!"Oh, I guess it’s actually called the outlook, thanks Hugh! It probably would have been more useful if you said this before we were basically all the way up, though.  Oh, can’t see the hat yet but I’d recognize that hair anywhere.  And there’s the hat, and a pretty nice view. I’m gonna end this part of the update here, because it’s getting kind of long and this is a nice image to end things on! Next time, we’ll talk to Bianca and get our first pokemon! And then, shortly after, our second and third! Keep reading to find out what the heck they’ll be! (Update 1.2 is right here!) Jolyne Cujoh fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Mar 12, 2016 |
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Mar 10, 2016 22:17
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Update 1.2: Hast du etwas Zeit für mich? Hey, welcome back! Last time we were looking out at the outlook next to Big Green Hat, now let’s actually talk to her.   Yeah, it totally is! Probably would be even prettier if it was one of the cool seasons like Autumn or Winter, but the chips fall where they may.   And the big, green truth comes out! This is Bianca! I’m gonna talk about Bianca for just a little bit, because she’s cool and I like her a lot!   The left is what she looks like now, and the right is what she looked like in the first games! Bianca was one of the three characters in Black and White that sort of served as the rival character, ala Gary Oak (or Blue) from the very first games. The other two are named Cheren and Natural Harmonia Gropius (long story), but we’ll get to them later! For now, Bianca! In Black and White, Bianca was the childhood friend of the protagonist, and she, Cheren and the protagonist got their starter Pokémon all at the same time. Whatever Pokémon the player chooses, she will choose the one whose type is weak against them, which means that the battles you have against her are generally easier than the ones against Cheren. This was reflected in Bianca’s story in Black and White. She was a little bit shy and insecure, and she wanted to go on her journey basically just to be with her friends and be able to come out of her shell a little bit more. Over the course of the game she realizes that she loves pokemon, but doesn’t really like battling all that much, so you only actually battle her three times, whereas you can battle the other rivals seven or eight times. She is, however, a constant companion and presence throughout the game, and she becomes a pretty formidable trainer in her own right. And now, two years later, she’s Professor Juniper’s assistant, which is a pretty good place for her! She gets to make friends with a bunch of pokemans without having to battle, and she gets to travel around meeting new people as well! It’s nice to see her again so soon, and to see how she’s changed. Back to the conversation!   Yep, that’s us.   Cool as hell and rad as gently caress? Yeah, that’s me.  Bianca does this little animation where she pulls her hat down. It’s cute!  : “Nice to meet you! I have a really important request to ask you!” Yeah! : “Oh, wow, thanks! Your support will help Professor Juniper's research move forward! Anyway, filling up the Pokédex is totally fun!”...   Huh. The game actually boots you out of the conversation at this point and you have to talk to Bianca again to advance, which is sort of weird. Oh well!   I can’t wait! Let’s finally see a little bit of what the randomizer does!  This animation actually plays out on the bottom screen! It’s good and shows Bianca’s character and I like it a lot! Let’s look at our choices!  First up is Lotad, this little lillypad dude who evolves into a kappa and then into a veritable party unto itself! Let’s check out its stats   The first screen tells us Lotad’s type--he’s water/grass, which is a type combination unique to his evolutionary line--and also that he’s a boy and his nature is Jolly! That means that his speed is increased, but his special attack is decreased. The second screen is the much more interesting one, as it’s where things have changed a whole bunch. Lotad has 4 moves, which most pokemon would not have at level 5, and the ability Bad Dreams, which is normally exclusive to the legendary pokemon Darkrai and causes an opposing pokemon to lose 1/8th of their health each turn if they are asleep. This could be pretty good if Lotad ends up learning a move which causes sleep, but who knows if that would happen. Lotad and his line’s stats are basically average across the board, with good Special Defense and slightly above average Special Attack, which would be hampered by his Jolly nature if we were to take it. As for the moves he has, wrap is nearly useless, and withdraw could be useful to bring his defense up to the same level as his special defense, but it’s also mostly useless. Water Pulse and Muddy Water, on the other hand, are both pretty darn good. Water Pulse is an accurate move with good power for this part of the game that confuses the opponent 20% of the time, and Muddy Water is as strong as the definitive water type special attack, though it only hits 85% of the time, and it has a 30% chance to lower the opponent’s accuracy by one stage. Stat stages are something that I’ll talk about later, because they’re sort of weird. Overall, Lotad would be a pretty good starter!  Our next choice is Gothita! They’re a tiny poke in a pretty dress who grows into a larger poke in a dress with a bunch of bows!   His stats! He’s also Jolly, because the nature of your starter is decided as soon as you can make the decision, and he’s a psychic type! Once again, four moves and a different ability than normal. Sand Veil is an ability that is just random enough to be super annoying to fight against but unreliable when it’s on your side. When there is a sandstorm, the pokemon’s evasion stat is boosted by 25%, which normally means that one out of four attacks will miss. It also makes it so that Gothita wouldn't take damage in a sandstorm. Overall, not too useful. As far as stats are concerned, they’re fairly similar to the lotad line! A little more specialized, with lower attack, speed and HP and higher defense, special attack and special defense. A fairly solid defensive pokemon. For his moves, Gothita’s got a sort of weird line, way more random than Lotad’s. Slash, Power Whip and Rock Tomb are all pretty good physical attacks, and Power Split is weird. Slash is an accurate move with slightly below-average damage, but it gets critical hits twice as often as most other moves, which come with some cool benefits. Power Whip is a very strong move that is only 85% accurate, which is a fairly normal template for moves. Rock Tomb is.. Uhh, actually pretty bad in this gen. It’s got terrible power and is only 80% accurate (both of these were boosted in the next games, which is why I was confused) but it lowers the opponent’s speed by one stage when it hits, which can be useful. Power Split, on the other hand, is a move that averages the attack and special attack of the user and their target, which could actually be useful for Gothita, especially this one with its tanked Special Attack, making the target worse at attacking while Gothita gets stronger. Overall, he’s usable for this part of the game, and could become good based on what moves he gets.  Last up is Nidoran! She’s a bit of a relic of her time, since she was introduced in Gen I, before every Pokémon had a gender, but she is still cool and will evolve into a very Tough Mom.   This Nidoran is a Jolly lady (duh), and she’s a poison type! Little poisonous rabbit. Once she evolves all the way, she will also be ground type! Poison/Ground is a type combination which only the Nidoran lines can have, which is neat, though it won’t be nearly as powerful until the next generation. This Nidoran’s ability is Effect Spore, which can randomly cause poison, sleep or paralysis when she’s hit by a move that makes contact (this mostly means physical moves, though there are some exceptions.) This is actually pretty close to her normal ability, Poison Point, which does the same thing but only with poison. As for her stats, well, they’re basically average all around! Slightly above average HP and defenses, slightly below average speed and special attack. Jolly actually helps her out, since she’s more geared to be a physical attacker stats-wise than the other starters. Her attacks are a mixed bag. Crush Grip is normally a move exclusive to a legendary pokemon, Regigigas, and it does more damage the more health the opponent has. This makes it absolutely poo poo for trainer battles (at least when it’s on a pokemon that doesn’t have enough attack to just straight up kill with it), but useful for weakening wild pokemon without killing them to make them easier to catch. Last resort is weird, it’s very powerful and accurate, but you can only use it if you have used every other move the pokemon knows, so it’s usually useless. Clear Smog is okay, and is gonna be Nidoran’s bread and butter until she learns something better. Clear Smog never misses and has middling power, but enough for the early game. It also gets rid of any stat changes that the target has undergone, positive or negative. Poison Sting is the most basic-rear end poison move, accurate but almost as weak as an attack can possibly be, with a 30% chance to poison the target. It’s pretty bad. Anyway, which of these monsters are we gonna choose? Well, I ran a poll in the sandcastle and the winner was pretty decisive!  In the epic battle of lillypads, bows and moms, moms were the victor! Give it up for moms!   Heck yeah! I love moms, and this baby mom needs a good name.  There we go! A good, appropriate name that follows the dumb naming scheme I’ve had for my pokes for like the last 5 years.   Cool! I forgot to check Nidoran’s pokedex entry this time, so I’ll make sure to do it at the beginning of the next update! : “You want to know what it does? The Pokédex is a high-tech device that automatically records the Pokémon you encounter! So Professor Juniper wants you to carry this Pokédex, visit a lot of places, and meet all the Pokémon in the Unova region!"Do the cool, fun thing that I would do anyway. Got it.  :"The normal thing to do is to get an OK before sending someone clear out here, right?"Professor Juniper is apparently pretty impulsive, judging from this conversation! I don’t really remember much about her from Black and White, so I can’t really saa! Maybe I should refresh myself at some point. Anyway, we’re done talking with Bianca so let’s go see what Hugh’s been doing this whole time.   I know I’m long-winded, but I had to talk about the pokemon dude. It’s, like, my thing. : "Hey! What's that? So that's your partner, huh? That's great! My sister already said so, but take really, really good care of your Pokémon! Got it?”Yeah, of course I’m gonna. I’m the best, and this little lady is special.   Since we have a lot of stuff on us, it’s nice that Bianca tells us what he’s actually talking about. : "Please give me a Pokédex, too! I want to get stronger! If I have a Pokédex, I can learn more about Pokémon... That'll make me tougher, right?"This is a neat line, because it shows that even if Hugh’s a goof, he sort of understands how the world works, and that knowing pokemon and being their friend is the best way to get ahead.  And this line makes me laugh, because of course Bianca doesn’t know who the heck Hugh is.     The kid’s got a good heart, and Bianca can see that! I like to imagine that she didn’t actually have a spare, and instead just gave Hugh her pokedex. It would be a nice little gesture, and absolutely in character for Bianca. :”It looks like Pokémon distribution has really changed compared to two years ago, so the more, the merrier!”Oh boy, you have no idea, Bianca. If we talk to her again after this...  She has this suggestion for us! Yes, finally a battle. Let’s go! (There are a few minor hiccups in the video due to it being my first time actually recording gameplay. Also, like the opening cutscene, I had to rerecord so there are a few differences!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cva5pwSF5VU  Back in this reality, the battle happens too! I think Hugh’ll find that no matter the reality, Jolyne’s the best.   Because Nena replaced Oshawott, Hugh got the Lotad that replaced Snivy! It’s a neat little touch, and because of the randomizer settings I chose he’ll have this guy for the rest of the game! Hopefully he evolves at some point, I’m not actually sure how that works.  We also have a battle sprite! It’s neat.   This is what the battle screen looks like! Pokemon on top, move selection and stuff on bottom. I normally won’t be showing but screens, but I figure y’all should be able to see it at least once. You may notice that Lotad is level 6 while Nena is only level 5, that’s Challenge Mode at work.   Nena actually has a type advantage against Lotad, which is rare because in this generation, Grass is the only type that Poison is super-effective against, though it has some nice resistances. This is super basic stuff, but in case anyone doesn’t know, super-effective moves do twice as much damage and resisted moves do half as much damage. This is multiplicative, so pokemon with two types can have their weaknesses and resistances nullify each other or double up, making them take 4x or 1/4th damage. Using a move that is of the same type as your pokemon will multiply its power by 1.5x. All of this means that until she’s fully-evolved, Nena will be a little weak on the offensive but pretty good at taking a hit. Speaking of taking a hit…   Ow. Yeah. Critical hits do double damage and they ignore any status changes that would make them do less damage. They’re scary! Luckily Nena is tough and was able to survive it, plus we didn’t get confused by Water Pulse.  Uhh, Hugh, ours got hurt way worse.   For most of these first rival fights, the rivals are actually programmed to prioritize moves that won’t k/o your pokémon, because some of them would be basically impossible otherwise. This doesn’t mean that they’re impossible to lose, as a mistimed critical can still knock you out, but it makes it pretty unlikely. After that, I use Clear Smog once again, and because it never misses that means the fight is over!   Oh. Of course it crits now.   Neat!   Buddy, with the way these games go you’re gonna learn this frustration over and over and over again. Also, hey, we got some cash! That happens when you win trainer battles. The amount that you get depends on two things: The level of the final pokemon you defeated, and the type of trainer you were fighting. Your rival and most Gym Leaders, for example, will give you 100*their last pokemon’s level Pokédollars, while Rich Boys will give you 200 and Youngsters will give you 16. After the fight, Hugh has some more to say: : "I lost... This is different than battling with wild Pokémon! Well, whatever. I'm just happy to know you're a Trainer I can count on! Cool. I'm heading off first! Get stronger!"And then he walks off!   And we jump-cut over to do just that!   We could have headed inside earlier, but since the game forces us to do it now I figured I’d wait, and I’ll let Bianca explain how Pokémon Centers work!  Yep, that’s basically it! Glorious socialized healthcare. Pokemon centers also have PCs where you can store your pokemon and, in this generation, they have Pokemarts where you can buy stuff! But most importantly…  Anyone who has ever played a pokemon game knows the jingle that comes with healing your pokemon, and it’s great.  Bianca shows us around and then gives us ten pokeballs! I proceed to buy 10 potions and 3 more pokeballs, because boy howdy I’m going to need them.   Outside, Bianca notices something!  It’s our mom and Hugh’s little sister!   Our mom wishes us luck and gives us the running shoes! Hold a button, go twice as fast! Since I’m on an emulator I can hold two buttons and go 4 times as fast! Wow! Also, some NPC’s dialogue thinks that we have Oshawott since that’s who our Nidoran replaced, which is sort of strange.   Hugh’s sister carries on a proud Pokémon tradition of the Rival’s sister giving you a town map!  Oh, two town maps apparently!  Ah, that makes sense. Hugh did just sort of run off with no warning.  : “C'mon, we're headed for Route 19! I'll teach you how to catch a Pokémon!”Okay! Goodbye mom and nameless relative of our impulsive friend!  Route 19 is just through this gate at the north of town.   Another little sign that we are an actual person who has lived in this town, the gatekeeper knows us! It’s a nice feeling.  For some reason, she can identify what our pokemon actually is? It’s weird because it’s inconsistent.   Oh, nice! Now I’ve got 11.  Also in the tunnels are these tickers, which I think are pretty neat. Check it out!  Lots of cool stuff, foreshadowing and interesting information! (I had to shrink it a little bit to get it on Lpix, hopefully I can find a workaround for this at some point)   Well, okay, let’s go!   Now we see the traditional “how to catch pokemon” tutorial...   And the eternal battle between catte and pupper. These are normally two of the basic pokemon you’ll encounter in the early game, but, well…  Bianca gets the catte! :"What a relief! I caught a Pokémon! Oh! Um... Right. I'll go over the important stuff. First, go find a healthy Pokémon to catch! You need to remember this next bit! It's best to lower the Pokémon's HP before you try to catch it. Use your Pokémon's moves to lower the HP of the Pokémon you want to catch.”  : “Continue straight this way to get to Floccesy Town! Bye now! Meet lots of Pokémon and catch a lot of them, OK?"' Bye Bianca! It was good seeing you. Now let’s go see what we’ve got to catch!  Oh, neat! I guess we can show this to our Mom so that she can learn what an Oshawott actually looks like.   Fairly basic stuff! Some smog and some bubbles are exchanged.   A pokeball is thrown.   Ah, it didn’t work. No big d-wait what  Oh. Hydro Cannon is water-type Hyper beam, which means that it’s just a giant fuckoff laser, but the user then has to skip their next turn. Which means that we’ve got a free turn to try to catch this Oshawott again!   Nice!  When you catch a pokemon instead of being given it, you are treated to its Pokédex entry! Oshawott’s a crafty little dude.  And a fitting nickname! Who’s next?  Oh, sweet! I’ve always really liked Qwilfish, though this does mean that for now our party is very water and poison heavy (oh, spoilers, we’re gonna catch her).   And Nena gets a chance to show off why Crush Grip is nice to have! The first one did more than half of this Qwilfish’s health, but the second one...   Just puts her in the red, where she can then be caught! On the second try, but still!  Balloons: Not good at swimming. Regardless, her name is Hootie!   Exploring further down the route, I find an item! I get into a battle trying to get it though and, well...        Used a potion because drat it would be embarrassing to die to a wild pokemon like 20 yards out of the starting town.  Very nice.  Oh, well that was not really worth it. gently caress it, let’s go home, it’s late.     Oh, hey, Bianca’s here!   Apparently they’re pretty close! Neat.   Yeah, that’s a good idea. Moms are magic, and can heal your pokemon by tucking you in. It’s great!  That’s the end of the update! Let’s take a look at our current team to wrap things up.  Nena is the same as she was when we got her! She’s pretty solid for this point of the game, and is gonna be our constant companion and friend.  Da Ba Dee is very… Focused. He’s an Oshawott, which means that he’s gonna stay pure water type. His nature is a neutral one, which means that it raises and lowers the same stat. His ability is weird and mostly gonna be not useful, since double/triple battles are fairly rare in the main story. He is another fairly balanced pokemon, with both attack and special attack being pretty good but his speed and special defense are a little below average. His moves though are sort of silly. Bubble is a weak but accurate water type move that has a very small (10%) chance to lower the opponent’s speed. Clamp is a little stronger than bubble, but only 85% accurate. If it hits, it will prevent the opponent from switching out and do 1/16th of their health in damage at the end of each turn for 4-5 turns. It’s not great. Crabhammer, on the other hand, is pretty good! Good power, workable accuracy (90%) and it has an increased crit chance. This’ll be Da Ba Dee’s bread and butter for now. Hydro Cannon I’ve already talked about, and it will mostly be a last-resort if I absolutely need something knocked out.  Hootie, on the other hand, is pretty neat! Qwilfish don’t evolve, so this is how she’ll be forever (Well, the stat ratios and ability will be the same. Moves will change, obviously.) Motor Drive is a really neat ability for her to have, because it makes her immune to electric type attacks, which means that she is only weak against Psychic and Ground and resists a whole bunch of stuff! As for her stats, her Attack and Speed are above average, but everything else is sort of weak. Her nature makes her Attack higher and her Special Defense lower, which is pretty good! Her moves are… not so much. Clear Smog I’ve talked about already, sort of weak but good for now. Smog is, honestly, worse than Poison Sting. It’s got more power and a higher chance to poison, but is only 70% accurate, which means that it is on average worse for both things. Gastro Acid is a weird move that essentially shuts down the target’s ability, which is far too situational to be useful. Secret Power is a decently damaging physical attack that has a 30% chance to inflict some secondary effect depending on the environment it’s used in. In grass, for instance, it will put pokemon to sleep, whereas it will paralyze them if used in a building. Secret Power's the one we'll be using most often. Thanks for reading, and be sure to tune in next time for men jumping off cliffs, rocks, and a frankly startling increase in the number of available pokemon! Jolyne Cujoh fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Mar 13, 2016 |
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Mar 10, 2016 23:31
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Rigged Death Trap posted:MY SUPER SAIYAN RAGE I actually really like Hugh! He's dumb as a box of rocks but he's dumb in a way that's charming to me. Kemix posted:Oooh, this is looking good so far. Also, I love Minccino and Cinccino, they are just so loving cute I could sperg on about them. Unfortunately, because of the randomizer, Mincinno and Cincinno will almost certainly not have Skill Link, let alone the moves to use them with. Sweeps is still a p. good name for one, though. And thanks for the heads up on the broken image! Crosspeice posted:Really makes the Gen 6 entries really, really lacking... Gen 6 is actually my favorite! All of the qol improvements and the huge selection of cool pokes outweighed the mediocre story for me. Plus I could pet my pokemons and it made them better at fighting, which was the best. Blaze Dragon posted:Randomizers are always fun as hell. I did a B2 randomizer like last year and I got a Kingdra as my starter, she carried me through the game like a boss. I got a bunch of other cool mons afterwards but seriously, Kingdra as starter, so cool. I'm surprised you only got first stage starters, did you select that yourself? Yeah, I selected the option that makes it so that the starters all follow the normal starter pattern of being the baby form of a 3-stage line, just to make sure that the battle with Hugh didn't become basically unwinnable because I wanted to go with, like, an oddish while he got a Ho-Oh. Similarly, I've got a lot of other settings that I ticked for simplicity's sake. Levels will always match up to the normal levels of things, stats are unchanged, I used area 1-1 mapping so that I wouldn't end up having to spend like 2 hours searching for all 10 pokemon that can happen to appear in each route's wild grass, come up with names for all of them and do writeups on them all at once. Similarly... Lazaruise posted:How is the randomizer pulling moves? Just at random and you got really really lucky with STAB or is it pulling form moves thats make sense of the type? I checked the option on the randomizer that makes it so that every pokemon starts with four moves, at least one of them is an attacking move and 50% of the moves each pokemon learn are of their types. This still leads to a ton of variance, like if we compare Da Ba De with his 4 water moves to that Gothita with his strange grab-bag of physical attacks, but it means that no pokemon should ever be completely unusable out of the gate.
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Mar 11, 2016 01:13
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well, I just recorded the next update and huh. Things are about to go a little off the rails. Aiming to have it all screenshotted and ready by Saturday.
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Mar 11, 2016 04:43
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All I know is that the last time I tried this, the first gym leader had a pure power regigigas. yeah. I'm using a different seed now, but yeah, that's the sort of stuff we might have to look forward to!
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Mar 11, 2016 06:12
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I'm actually not sure about when pokemon learn moves, I'll have to check with check the moves they learn next update versus their normal movelists. As for TM's, we'll get our first at the end of the next update, and I'll talk about how the randomizer handles those then.
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Mar 11, 2016 20:55
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I just checked the footage and Nena tried to learn moves at levels seven and nine and Hootie learned 2 moves at 9, so it looks like pokemon get new moves when they normally would, they're just replaced with different ones.
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Mar 11, 2016 21:38
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Update 2.1: Old Man and Me (Hey, I just realized that I accidentally uploaded the uncompressed images for all of update 1! I've gone back and fixed those so hopefully the page loads better now! Also I'm really bad at judging the ratio of gameplay to update size, so this update is gonna be split in two again. Second part should be up tomorrow.)  When you start the game up again after a save, it reminds you where you are and what the season is! I think that's pretty useful, as someone who often forgets about games for weeks or months at a time before picking them back up.  This is what our mom says after resting our Pokémon! Anyway, we're rested up so let's head to Floccesy town!   Oh it's Autumn now btw, we slept for a long time. On route 19 we get into a random encounter, and then this happens!   Haha, no. This does tell us something about how the randomizer works, though. Our pokemon will learn moves at the levels that they would normally learn moves, which adds another (small) level of predictability to the randomization. Continuing on...   We get yelled at by someone off-screen!  Oh, it's Alder! He was the Pokémon League Champion in Black and White, and a pretty tough fight! Because of Plot Stuff, you didn't fight him when you would normally fight the champion, so he was more of a post-game superboss with a pretty good team that were all at least level 75. He is also a champion who specializes in bug types, which is rad as gently caress. Also, he moves around a lot so be prepared for GIFS!   : "I'm a Trainer with a keen interest in the world. One of my goals is to tell people about how wonderful it is to walk toward the future together with Pokémon. And you are? ... ... Hmph! So you're Jolyne from Aspertia City!" This isn't actually him misidentifying Nena, I switched Da Ba De to the front of my party to get him a little experience. : "Your Oshawott is a fine-looking Pokémon! But, you're not exactly a seasoned Trainer yet... Indeed! I'll train you a little! Follow me!"  Oh. Floccesy town was... right there. That probably would have been both faster and safer than going home.  : "Oh, that's right! Jolyne, are your Pokémon well? Your Pokémon are always doing their best for you, the Trainer, so you must always be kind to them! My house is just a little farther! Stop by the Pokémon Center first if you'd like!"Eh, we don't really need it, but we might as well check it out, see if there are any cool people to talk to.  Pokémon centers often have, at the very least, some people with good advice, if not people who will give you free stuff.   Like this guy! It may seem like common sense, but reminding the kids that this game was made for that they should stock up is good! Especially considering what we're going to be encountering later in the update.   This person, on the other hand... Nah, she's cool too, we just have one of two pokemon that make her look sorta ditzy. She's here to tell people that, hey, some pokemon have gender differences! Usually they're small things, like female Pikachu having heart-shaped tails, but they're neat either way.  This guy's just sort of there, though. Hey, let's check out the upstairs too!   Oh. As is traditional, the upstairs of a Pokémon Center is where you go for multiplayer. For obvious reasons, I won't be able to show that stuff off. After getting told to stuff it, we head outside.   Hey, don't forget to save! Don't be like little me who would often lose hours of progress.   In this house, we see another pokemon that would normally be super common around here, but that we may not see until the postgame for all I know! Patrat is a cute squirrel thing.  It's even trying to say squirrel.   Oh, hey, that reminds me! We've got a map, maybe we should check that out.  Remember how I said that Unova was based on New York? Well, actually right now we're in Jersey, as evidenced by this map.   Here's out hometown and the route that we took to get here!   And here's where we're going, and the city where we can finally escape from New Jersey. Apparently Route 20 has some stuff that goes on in Autumn, which is pretty convenient! That's the map! I'll periodically check it to see the flavor text for the places we've been/are going. Some of it's neat! Back to talking to strangers in their own homes.   Oh, cool, talking to strangers totally pays. Let's call our mom and tell her how she was totally wrong for all of these years.  Just use the Xtransceiver and you can call people! Right now it's just mom, but she's got some stuff to say.  Yeah, just got some drugs for free from a stranger. But, back to being more serious, the Xtransceiver is pretty neat!  Whenever you call someone, you've got the option to just chat or ask them about the place where you are. I'll do both whenever I remember to use this thing.  : "I'd like to talk.": "There are many different Pokémon, and even the same kind of Pokémon have individuals with completely different natures. I wonder what kind of Pokémon is a perfect match for you?": "Floccesy Town?": "You're in Floccesy Town for a spell? Did you visit Alder's house? A long time ago, Alder taught me about Pokémon! Boy, that takes me back!": "Good bye." Wow, apparently our mom is pretty cool. She knows both the Professor and the Champion from this region, and knows them pretty well from the sound of things. Anyway, that's this episode's dose of Momtalk, it was neat!   While talking to our mom, we ended up wandering into the house next door. This lady is amazed by our three whole pokémon. They're full of poison and bubbles, though, so they actually are pretty amazing. Her dog is pretty cool too though.    "This ranch used to be a grassy meadow. It's now become a place where people and Pokémon have homes together!" ... Ranch? Anyway, let's actually follow Alder finally!  "But the great time we're spending with Pokémon is right now!"        "The Pokémon at the top left of your party is the one who will be sent out first in battle! So it's best to put a Pokémon that you want to train or one that's already tough in that spot!" After we talk to four people, read a sign and dig through some garbage of course.   Oh, right, the reason we came here in the first place. : "... Oh ho! It's your friend's Town Map, is it? Your friend is the one with the Snivy, isn't he? It just so happens, he was training his Pokémon on Route 20... Well, if that's the case, you should go give him the Town Map first!"... Well, it's not a Snivy, but it's closer than Nena is to an Oshawott.  Okie dokie!   Uhh, old dude? That happens on Route 19 too. I suppose this could be a bit of a warning that Floccesy Ranch is sort of the "first dungeon" of this game, but it's not super clear.   Good to know. Also, look, leaves!!  (Leaves kept at original size because twice the leaves is just too dang pretty for Lpix.) After that fun romp, let's talk to this little kid because hey, we're the big dog here.   Yeah, the eyes are where you can see their Dark Determination.   Oh, hey, cool! Wynaut is the baby form of Wobbuffet, who was something of a mascot for the series for a while. Like Wobbuffet, he's got high HP and okay defenses, but his offensive stats are abysmal, which means that Da Ba De shouldn't be in too much trouble!   Or he could do moves like that that don't do damage anyway. Miracle Eye Blaze Dragon posted:A small correction, Miracle Eye does not make the next attack unable to miss. It returns evasion to normal, like Foresight and Odor Sleuth.   We bonk him again, and he actually retaliates this time!  It doesn't do much, despite the level advantage and the fact that Slash is a pretty strong move for this part of the game. We go one more round, and then...   Cool, that's a nice chunk!   Enough to get Da Ba De 2 levels!   And he forgets Clamp to learn Avalanche. Avalanche is a move with slightly below-average power, but if the user takes damage before they attack that turn the attack deals double damage. It's also ice type, which is one of the best offensive types, hitting 4 other types (among them being Grass and Dragon, which resist Da Ba De's water moves) for super-effective damage while only being resisted by 2 types. Ice moves are very nice to have, especially for a water type.   Apparently I got the formula for youngsters wrong, as they give $16 per level of their last pokemon, not 12 like I said last update.   Across the bridge, we get to see what happens when you actually walk into a trainer's line of sight!   Oh, hey, Numel is pretty cute! Unfortunately for Isabel, it's also a Fire/Ground type which means that it's 4x weak to water.   Yeah.   Two more levels again, dang. Da Ba De is already caught up to Nena.  Pffffffffft.   Not a Purrloin, but Numel is cuter imo.   Find some more drugs and then WHOAH RANDOM ENCOUNTER!  Oh, nice! Something that is not made of bubbles or poison.   ... Also something that can push our water types' faces in if he got good moves from the randomizer.   Well, Hootie, it was nice knowing you. :salute:  Oh. Right, Motor Drive. I forgot! Actually Hootie's probably in pretty good shape because of that. Gonna try to soften this guy up a little more before catching him with Smog.  ... Huh. Well, hope I get him in one.  Which I did, of course, because I'm cool as hell and rad as gently caress.  This is one kitty you don't want makin' biscuits. Let's check him out (and see what name I gave him)!   This is Star Me! He's serious, which is another neutral nature, and is a physical-attack oriented electric type. His bulk is average, his attack is phenomenal, special attack isn't too bad. The thing that holds him back most is his sub-par speed. That ability probably isn't gonna do much for him offensively, but it makes him immune to fire-type attacks. If he gets one of the few physical fire moves it could become something seriously threatening. For his moves though, they're absolutely phenomenal. Thunder has high power but low accuracy (unless it's raining, then it never misses). Thunderbolt has above-average power and perfect accuracy. Fusion Bolt is the real star of this set, though, usually being a move that only 2 Legendary pokemon can use, it's a physical attack with perfect accuracy and great power. Its low PP hurts it a little bit, though. Sky Drop is a weird move that has fairly low power, but it prevents the opponent from acting for a turn while it's happening. Not too useful, but serviceable for now, and it lets Star Me hit the grass types that would resist its electric attacks for some pretty good damage. Overall, Star Me is a powerhouse.   Back in the game (after heading to the Center to heal Star Me's poison) we're getting in another fight! I'll try to cool it with the "lol they don't know what their pokemon are" jokes, because I have a feeling those will get old fast.  This little guy's got a dragon! Sweet!   Oh. How unfortunate for that dragon.   Good job, Hootie.   Man, I actually sort of feel bad for this kid. As soon as the battle's done...   Oh, huh. Someone in the thread was just talking about how they got a Kingdra as their starter in a randomized run of this game, and here we have a Seadra ripe for the pickin!   Or not. Hootie's bloodthirst knows no bounds.  Oh. I guess this guy isn't a trainer. Let's talk to him!   Ah. The ol' "Guy blocks your path until you've done the stuff you're supposed to." Got it.  Across the bridge, we find a Pokéball that wouldn't be accessible if it wasn't Autumn! Free stuff is good.   And in this corner that would be inaccessible if not for the leaves, we find a potion!   Oh, this must be the ranch that old guy was talking about earlier! I think I see some grass over there, so let's check it out!   Apparently this is some sort of Bikini Bottom Jellyfish Ranch. I can dig it.  These jellyfish are apparently psychic! They have the ability Forewarn, which tells you the move that the opponent has with the highest base power. It's sort of useful!   Well, let's just go through the usual capture routine an-Oh, come on! Again?   Nice hanging in there, Hootie!  Aww, that's actually sort of sad. Let's check this lady out!   LL is Impish, which means her defense is higher but her special attack is lower. This is a mixed bag, because Tentacool is another tanky pokemon and the increased defense helps make it better at that, but Special Attack is also its better attacking stat, though not by that much. I already talked about Forewarn, it's not great. Water/Poison is a pretty good type combination, though, with 3 weaknesses and 7 resistances. What about her moves, though? Well, we already know about Hydro Cannon and Crabhammer, but Sludge Bomb and Acid Armor are new! Sludge Bomb is the special poison attack of choice, above average power and perfect accuracy, with a 30% chance to poison. Pretty good! Acid Armor raises defense by two stages, and this is as good a time as any to talk about stat stages. Raising a stat's stage is actually pretty simple, each stage it goes up raises it by 50% additively, to a maximum of +300% at 6 stages. Lowering the stage, though, is a little more complicated. Stat stages, in general, can be represented by the Fraction 2/2. When you raise the stage, you make the top number bigger, but when you lower the stage you make the bottom number bigger. This means that the first time you lower a pokemon's stat, it drops by 1/3rd, the second time it drops to 1/2, and then to 2/5, 2/6, 2/7 and finally to 2/8. This means that lowering a stat has diminishing returns, while raising a stat is a flat bonus. It's weird! Stages also cancel each other out, so if you used Acid Armor while your defense was at -4 (or 2/6) and you used Acid Armor, it would go to -2 (or 2/4) not 4/6 (which would be -1). Also, you can totally only half-press a button. Let's go check out the farm!   Oh, hey Hugh. : "All right! Let's see how much stronger you've become! Come at me!"Oh, I guess we're doing this!   There's no video for this one because, well, it's almost exactly the same as the last one. Hugh doesn't have any now pokemon, Lotad's just a little stronger.    : "Come on, partner! Shrug it off! You're stronger than that!"Yeah. I literally cannot not ko him next turn.   Clamp is not very good.   And now Hootie is caught up with Nena and Da Ba De!   : "You're thinking about how to bring out your Pokémon's strength. I should be able to count on you for backup! What are you doing here anyway? Huh? A Town Map?" : "Tch... She didn't have to do that... Thanks to you, too. We just left, and you've already helped me out."And our mission is complete! Also, aww, Hugh appreciates us. Maybe the mountain man will have moved by now...   Or the owners of the ranch are gonna kick us off their property.   "I'm the owner of this ranch! And this is my wife!"  Yeah, but the center's all the way back in town.   Oh, she meant free stuff. And some for Hugh too! Cool.   "Our two Herdier are always together, and this is the first time one has wandered off. I'm a little worried."  This sets Hugh off something fierce, and he immediately runs off-screen.  I dunno either, guy.   Neat! This is where this part of the update ends! Next time: We find a dog. And a king. And a cow. And a tree. And a meme. And more! Jolyne Cujoh fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Mar 12, 2016 |
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Mar 12, 2016 11:51
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Amppelix posted:The Xtransreceiver (pronounced crosstransreceiver (jesus christ, what a name)) is actually a neat little help menu in addition to allowing you to just randomly have a chat with characters. It's one of the many feature I wish didn't disappear unto nothingness in the sequels. Yeah, basically every game has a cool tutorial gadget/help function. My favorite is the Poketch from DPP because it was just always there and easy to use. I never used the Xtransceiver much in the first games, but I'll try to use it often in the LP since it has a bunch of neat conversations that, well, characterize the characters as well as hints at mechanics that I can springboard off of. AlphaKretin posted:You've got duplicated images of "Flocessy ranch has wild pokemon" guy and Hugh's freakout. Thanks! I fixed those. Blaze Dragon posted:A small correction, Miracle Eye does not make the next attack unable to miss. It returns evasion to normal, like Foresight and Odor Sleuth. I went and added your correction to the update! Even though I know a ton about Pokémon, I don't know everything, and I've been trying to double-check stuff like that but whoops! Also, I'm mostly doing this as a low-ish randomization run for my own sake, as trying to make sense of a MAX RANDOM run in screenshots and be informative on top of that for an entire LP seems,well, basically impossible. Probably gonna do bonus updates some time in the future showing off what a MAX RANDOM run looks like, though, because yeah it can get crazy. I'm happy with this level of randomization for the main LP, though. It still keeps things unpredictable without getting to the level of "my Nidoran just evolved into a Diglett with the stats of a shuckle and water/fire typing."
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Mar 12, 2016 16:50
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Since people seem to be so interested, here's a link to the randomizer if you want to check it out! It can work on any of the games up to the DS era, and it's pretty neat! I'm gonna go back and edit this link into the op since I probably should have done that in the first place. Edit: Also, I'm getting the screenshots for the next update right now! It's mostly battling and catching pokemon, so expect a lot of words about new buddies and get your ballots ready. Jolyne Cujoh fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Mar 12, 2016 |
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Mar 12, 2016 23:39
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Gridlocked posted:Randomizers are neat. I'm totally doing a randomizer run of Ruby/Sapphire now, thanks OP! I was thinking of posting the actual seed that the LP uses, but I don't want anybody accidentally spoiling anything! Instead, here's the settings that I used, so you can create your own seed that uses the same rules but may come out totally different! (the starters will be the same if you don't mess with it because I had to rerecord once I realized that oh god having the wild encounters be totally randomized means that I would have to spend 2-3 hours hunting out all 20 pokemon that can be in every type of encounter-tile on every route)
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Mar 13, 2016 00:45
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What random settings did you use OP?
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Either one will work! The first will give you any pokemon as a starter, the second is the one that I used, ensuring that your starter will be like starters always have been, the baby of a 3-stage line. I'd recommend the second for the reasons I stated earlier, sometimes you want to take a cute pokemon or one that's unusual but if you do you're gonna end up fighting against, like, Rayquaza every time you fight Hugh.
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Mar 13, 2016 00:59
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Yeah, that happens sometimes. I've been lucky so far that there hasn't been anything too insanely strong that I've run into, but I'm sure it'll happen eventually. The best advice I can gibe is probably to ge a new seed and try again since it was on route 1, if you really liked your starter you can pick it for yourself like I did even!
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Mar 13, 2016 01:38
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Regigigas would be one of the most powerful pokemon in the main games if it didn't have an ability designed to make it terrible, so that stanky regigigas with Slash would tear everything apart. Insane attack and speed with pretty good bulk. Munna is not a legendary, just a fairly rare poke that some of the plot of the last game revolved around. She's a baby and will evolve! Venipede and Volcarona are both really rad bugs that were introduced in Gen V. They're good! Piplup is my 2nd favorite starter ever though so I'm sort of sad you didn't go with him! Also, finished screenshotting and resizing and recording all the GIFs for the update, so now it's just a matter of writing the darn thing! ETA 2-3 hours, depending on if I make food or order it.
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Mar 13, 2016 03:06
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Oh, just as a heads up. when a pokemon with stench is at the front of the party it makes wild pokemon battles half as likely to happen, so if you want to be catching pokemon and stuff it's best to not have him at the front.
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Mar 13, 2016 03:11
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Update 2.2: Captured Effortlessly Welcome back! Last time we were informed of a missing dog, so let's get to searching!   Heading West we see Hugh searching a completely open clearing in plain sight of the main farm for the dog. The boy's not too bright.  He's got a big heart, though. Also, what's that I spot in the corner?   Sheeps!! Mareep is one of my favorite pokemon, so cute and fluffy. Gonna go frolic in some grass to celebrate sheeps.  Oh. That's not a sheep.   Oh, cool!   It's a very Strong Boy. Let's check him out!   Nat is a gentle boy! This, for some reason, means his Defense is worse and his Special Defense is better. Nidoking is a lot like Nidoqueen, but he trades a bit of bulk for higher attacking stats. Static is like Effect Spore, but it can only paralyze. It's an okay ability for him to have, nothing detrimental or totally useless at least. His moves, though, are pretty dang good! Sludge is just a weaker Sludge Bomb, but still serviceable. Poison Jab is the cookie-cutter physical poison attack. Average power, perfect accuracy, 30% chance to poison. Because it's a TM in the normal games, it is the stick by which other physical poison moves are measured, and it's a nice stick. Fissure is an OHKO move, which is gimmicky and mostly bad. Fissure just straight cannot hit pokemon that are a higher level than the user, and its accuracy is dependent on the comparative levels of the user and the target. The accuracy starts at 30% against a pokemon of equal level, and goes up 1% for ever level higher than the target the user is. You may realize that this means that by the time you can use it reliably, you can just use any other move to kill the target as well. Earthquake, on the other hand, is one of the absolute best moves in the game. Great power, perfect accuracy, and it's ground type which is one of the best offensive types in the game. Ground is 2x effective against 5 types while only being resisted by 2 (though flying is immune). Earthquake is real good! Now that we have this new friend, let's explore south!   Well, mine are almost exclusively incredibly poisonous, which isn't really all that admirable. What's yours though?   Oh!!! It's my second favorite pokemon!! Look at her she's a cute little ice cream!    Look at her she dances in her sleep! ... Ahem. The Vanillite goes off to take a nice nap and I most definitely do not knock her out.   I'm not entirely sure why I sent Star Me out here, he's not really a good matchup for Snover.  Oh neat, Snover make it rain in the randomizer when they normally make it snow. Rain, however, means that Star Me can do this!  Yeah! Well, Snover's part grass type so it didn't do much, but it still looked cool. Actually, a ton of Star Me's moves are super flashy, like this one he uses after dodging an attack.  Hell yeah! Doesn't quite ko her, though, so she gets a counterattack.   Oh, dang!   Oh. Dang. Poor thing.   Camouflage is an interesting move, it changes the type of the user based on their environment, but it's not really a useful move, so I skip it. And then he gains another two levels! Everyone's catching up really fast!  I think so too, Molly.   Some of my guys are getting a little beaten up, so let's visit the farm owner's wife!  She apparently also is able to harness the magical healing power of A Mom. It's handy! Let's go check out the rest of the field where we fought Molly.   We find some more free stuff, and get into a battle on the way back!  Oh, that's gonna be annoying.   Good exp though.   And she learns two moves! Gunk shot is a physical, poison version of Thunder, high power, low accuracy, 30% chance to poison. Not ideal, but a good move for Hootie to have. In Gen 6 it was made better with an accuracy buff, but I am not using the option in the randomizer that applies Gen 6 changes to move accuracy/power. Octazooka is not a great move, low-ish power and 85% accuracy with a 30% chance to lower the target's accuracy. It's a water type move, though, and Hootie needs one of those. We replace Smog and Gastro Acid for these.   Oh, hey, a very strong Nidoking.   Oh. Sorry, LL.   Did not want to deal with his poo poo after that.   Hey, you might notice that even though this Nidoking was less than twice the level of the level 4 one that Hootie beat, it gave nearly 3 times as much experience. What's up with that? Well, a whole lot of things that I'm not gonna go into right now, but the simple answer is that experience scales with the level of the pokemon gaining it starting in Gen 5. The formula is very complicated, but basically all you need to know is that it's multiplicative, so the difference between a level 5 beating a level 4 is way bigger than the difference between a level 51 and a level 50. Anyway, below where we picked up that pokeball...  Sheep! Continuing north from where Hugh is...   : "Let's have a look!"That's what I was doing!   ... Hugh, going ten yards north isn't looking very hard.   Oh, cool! That's actually a pretty appropriate move for a Tauros to have, and it's one that they haven't actually been able to know since Gen 1! With the rerelease and the ability to put those pokemon in the bank, though, Tauros can use Skull Bash in the normal games again! A lot of the weird TM moves being able to be transferred up is gonna lead to cool and unique stuff.   Oh, he also knows Yawn! Yawn is one of 2 100% accurate moves which cause sleep, though unlike the other one it does have a drawback. It doesn't put the target to sleep until the end of the turn after it hits, which isn't really that much of a drawback when you're using it to catch Pokémon. Tauros will be a good pokemon to have once we catch him! So let's do that.   Switching LL out because I don't want her to fall asleep, I'm sending out Nat on the off chance that the Tauros paralyzes himself by hitting him.  Skull Bash is the first charge move that we've encountered in the game (well, Sky Drop is sort of a charge move), meaning that it takes 2 turns to use. This cuts its effective power in half, which means that it isn't all that great a move. It, like a lot of moves, got buffed in the next games and made way more usable. It also raises the user's defense on the charge turn, so you're not spending a turn doing literally nothing at least.   At this point in the game, though, it's still pretty threatening! (Also failed capture count: 1)   Okay, this isn't going too well. Failed capture count: 2. I'll save y'all the seven more minutes it took me to catch this guy, and just give you the abridged version.   Nat gets fainted, LL comes in to tank, and he finally gets caught on the fifth try.  There are two pokemon from Gen I have basically this same description. Sometimes Pokémon can be lazy.   Move It is pretty simple! His nature is serious, so it doesn't effect his stats. He's got good attack, great speed and good defense, with passable HP and Special Defense. His ability is pretty self-explanatory and fairly useful, since poison is sometimes hard to deal with. His moves are also pretty good! Skull Bash and Yawn I have already talked about. Headbutt is good, slightly below-average power but accurate and it has a 30% chance to cause the opponent to lose their turn if Move It hits first, which is likely with his high speed. Weather ball is a weird move that changes type and gets stronger in different weather conditions. All-in-all, pretty good pokemon, would catch 30. Or at least head straight back to the Pokémon center to put him in my party. After that is said and done, I continue on!   I am almost immediately accosted by this old man. Apparently the randomizer decided that the people in this area are ice themed!   After I yawn him, I switch out for LL because I figure Move It's gonna get plenty of exp from wild battles and catching pokemon (I forgot that experience for catching pokemon started with the next games, not this one. Oops)  Freeze Shock is the signature move of a legendary pokemon! It's another charge move, but it's almost 50% stronger than Skull Bash and has a 30% chance to paralyze the target, so it's way better.       Good job, LL! No level since she was splitting the exp with Move It.  Oh! Another Vanillite! This one is just so sweet and nice that it gives LL a hug and tells her she's great.   And that gets her a level! Neat! And the nice old man just accepts that, yessiree, his pokemon did not want to fight us.   Oh, cool!  Yeah, even I, Ms. "These games are for babies and hand-holding is okay" think that maybe telling them that Paralyze Heal heals Paralysis is a little much. : "Still, Pokémon don't just wander off on their own. In a worst-case scenario, it might be involved in some trouble!"I'm sure he's fine! This area is just infested with Jellyfish, Cows and giant Rhino Rabbits. Nothing is more powerful than A Dog.   Off to the right, we get in another battle! Spheal is an adorable orb and is great.   Lookit that face. He's so happy and squishy that he doesn't even feel the cow headbutting him.    And he's so chill that he doesn't even fight back. Pokemon are great.  Oh, a bird huh? Star Me, you're up.  Man, that's good.   Thunder wave is simple, it just paralyzes the target! I forgot Thunder for it because Thunderbolt is better in basically every way.  Yeah, probably. To the south!  X Attack is an item that raises a pokemon's attack by one stage when used. It's not great, but it can be sold to buy a pokeball at least!   Oh I guess there was no way back from that cliff. I guess I can talk to the farm lady to get my pokes healed, at least.   Pup! It's too bad we have no idea what direction the noise is coming from.   Yeah I did! I dunno from where though.   Hugh once again chooses to search a completely open area for this 3 foot tall dog.  We find a potion at least! And the observant among you may also find the dog! Let's head down the path that hopefully leads there.     Whoah, poo poo, a ghost. Despite being a normal type move, Yawn can hit ghosts. Normal type status moves bypass the Ghost immunity for some reason. Regardless, none of Move It's other moves can hit this guy, so let's switch him out.   Destiny Bond is another super weird move. Essentially, if the pokemon that used it is knocked out before they use another move, Destiny Bond will take the attacker down with it. Not that useful, but interesting.   Got him!  Oh, a trickster ghost. Cool.   Kennedy is a sassy ghost, which improves his Special Defense and lowers his speed. He's already pretty slow, so that works out fine. He is also Ghost/Dark, which in this game is the only type combination with no weaknesses! Well, normally it has no weaknesses, it can technically be hit super-effectively by fighting moves after being identified or by a pokemon with the ability scrappy. He has good defenses and above-average attacking stats, but terrible HP and Speed. He also loves the sun, apparently, and moves twice as fast when it's sunny! That's not all that useful, but it is cute so I'm for it. His moves are... serviceable. After You is nearly useless, especially for a slow Pokémon like Spiritomb. After You causes the target to go immediately after the user, which can sometimes be useful in Double Battles to let a slow but strong pokemon hit a pokemon faster than it, but even in double battles that's a super niche use. Destiny bond I've already talked about. Assurance is another move that's more useful in double battles, but at least it does something outside of them. It's a weak but accurate Dark Type move that does double damage if the target has already taken damage this turn. In single battles, this means that it'll only ever do double damage against a pokemon who is confused or uses a move that does recoil damage, or if you give the pokemon using it a Rocky Helmet, which damages pokemon that use contact moves on the holder. Ominous Wind is a special attack with fairly low power that has a 10% chance to raise every one of the user's stats by one stage, which can turn the tide of a battle when it activates. Overall, not terrible, could definitely get better. Now let's go save a dog!   : "That cry! You found it! What a relief! OK, I'll go call its Trainer, so you stay here with it!"Uhh, okay, but there's some sort of... Secret Agent here?   : "I'm a member of the group that strikes fear into the hearts of those who stand before it: Team Plasma!" Uhh, yeah. You're the guys who didn't realize that pokemon like fighting and become friends with their trainers who were actually being brainwashed by some nutbar who abused his Jesus Child. Who hasn't heard of you? : "That's right! We're the righteous group that tried to conquer Unova two years back in order to liberate pokemon! Whatever... Fools will never understand us. Still... First I got lost chasing Herdier... and now some nosy kid caught me!" Uhh... Okay, dude? Thanks for the free stuff and the dog! (In the base game, this makes a little more sense, because the TM he throws at you is Frustration, an almost useless move.)   "Well, at any rate, I'm really grateful for your help, you two!" Some dude in Spec Ops cosplay is the reason he's back here, by the way.  : "Your Pokémon might have been gone for good! Take better care of it!" And Hugh storms off!      There's a fade to black, and we find ourselves alone in this clearing. Let's rub a disc on our jellyfish.  This is our first TM! In Gen 5, TM's (Technical Machines) are infinitely usable, making them really, really good to have! This one will teach Blue Flare (a move only learnable by Reshiram and Victini, two legendaty pokemon) to any pokemon able to learn it! That is to say, to 90% of fire types that we catch and 25% of every other pokemon. Blue Flare is a strong but slightly inaccurate move that has a 20% chance to burn. It will also double the power of Fusion Bolt if used immediately before it on the same turn, so it could turn Star Me into even more of a shitwrecker in double battles. Can any of our pokemon learn it?  LL Can! But I decide not to have her learn it because it doesn't really do that much for her, because it doesn't cover any resistances that her poison type doesn't already hit for at least neutral damage, and 5 pp moves run out real quick. Maybe someone else will be able to make use of it, though! Now, you might think we're done here, but honestly we're not even close. I've got like 30 minutes of footage left in this episode, because we still have 3 more pokemon to catch in this area and one of them just wouldn't show up. How do I know this? Well, I chose area 1:1 mapping as my setting for wild pokemon randomization in this playthrough, which means that each pokemon that appears in an area will be replaced by a different one. This area has 7 different pokémon which can appear, and we've only caught 4! So let's get catching!   Tiny cocoon worm! More mysteries!   Slowpoke! A lovable idiot! (...25 minutes later)       A weird, wiggly tree! Let's check all of these pokes out!   AllTiedUp is a strange pokemon. I might have to go back and catch 2 more of him, because he can actually evolve into what are essentially 3 completely different pokemon! They have three different type combinations and three different stat spreads, but they're all counted as the same pokemon. They also all serve similar functions, being pokemon with pretty good defenses, a decent attacking stat and not much else. Regardless of whether or not I go catch more Burmy, AllTiedUp is here and he's... well, he's here! His ability is useless and his stats are subpar right now, but he's got two serviceable moves at least. Pin Missile is a multi-hit attack that... oh, once again I should have checked up before typing. Right now, Pin Missile is trash. It hits between 2 and 5 times for piddly damage each time, and hits a little over three times on average, giving it really bad power, and it's only got 85% accuracy. Its power was nearly doubled and its accuracy was raised to 95% in the next games, which made it way better. Trump Card is a weird move that does more damage the less PP it has, reaching average power when it has 1 PP and going up to double the power of earthquake on its last move. It's also one of the few special moves that makes contact. It's mostly bad! Flamethrower is The Fire Type Attack, good power, perfect accuracy, 10% chance to burn. Synchronoise is... weird. It's not very strong, and it can only hit pokemon that share a type with the user. In the next games, it's way more powerful which makes its restriction more sensible, but here it's just sort of baffling. AllTiedUp is in a bad place right now, but who knows what could happen if we used him? He's not unusable at the very least, thanks to Flamethrower.   Honey is apparently pretty fast for a Slowpoke! Hasty makes her speed go up and her defense go down. Right now, she has high attack, Defense and HP, but when she evolves she'll either have high Special Attack and high Defense or high Special Attack and high Special Defense, with good health and average everything else but speed either way. Since her defense is lowered, Slowking is probably the better evolution for Honey to go for. Break those gender norms! Marvel Scale is a useful ability, it multiplies a pokemon's defense by 50% when they have a status condition, which helps ease the sting a little bit. Her moves are pretty okay too! Soak is a neat little gimmick, changing the target's type to water until the battle ends or they're switched out. Aqua Tail is crabhammer without the increased crit chance, which is still pretty good. Psychic is The Psychic Attack, strong and accurate with a 10% chance to lower the target's Special Defense, making it even stronger. Lunar Dance is normally the signature move of Cresselia, a legendary pokemon. It causes the user to faint, but fully heals the pokemon that comes in to replace them. It's useful for a tanky pokemon like Slowpoke, since you can use it once the opponent has come close to chipping down your defenses and fainting is inevitable anyway to give the next pokemon you send in an edge. Honey is a pretty sweet pokemon overall!   Slipknot is not actually a tree, she's just a rock that plays one on TV! She is also impish, which is good for him because he's a physical attacker with great defense! Everything else is either terrible or below average, but those two main stats are pretty good! Her ability is also really good, doubling the chances of secondary effects (like the slow chance on Rock Tomb or the paralyze chance on Bolt Strike. Speaking of which, her moves are pretty decent! We already know about Sludge Bomb and Rock Tomb. Bolt Strike is electric, physical Blue Flare which is good for those pesky water types that Slipknot is afraid of, and it has a 40% chance to paralyze because of Serene Grace. Leaf Tornado is sort of like Grass type Octazooka, but better in basically every way. It's a little more accurate and has a 20% higher chance to lower accuracy, which means that it's a 100% in Slipknot's branches. Slipknot's a tree I would wiggle with any day. And that's all the pokemon that we can get on Floccesy Ranch! Let's head back and see how Alder's doing.  : "Hrm... You were only gone a moment, but you and your Pokémon have grown. Why, I could almost mistake you for someone else! Well then. Instead of training you, I would like you and your Pokémon to give me a hand!"  Yeah, cool, we can help this dude out, but next time! Poll is super over! Head to the next update to see the team! Jolyne Cujoh fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Mar 31, 2016 |
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Mar 13, 2016 07:44
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(hey, if you hit to go to the last post, go back a post! That's the update!) So, now that we've got enough pokemon to fill out our party, it's the thread's choice who the pokes that aren't Nena are gonna be! Vote here if you missed the link at the end of the update! You can vote for as many pokemon as you like! All of them are in the second post with their stats and abilities if you have trouble remembering which names are which pokes! I'm gonna run this poll until Monday Night at 11:59 PST. At that point, the five pokemon with the most votes will be our party! I've got a cross-country plane ride on Tuesday, so I'll record the next update then and then either post it on Wednesday or Thursday. One thing that I'll say about how these polls are gonna work: If a pokemon is not voted into the party for two polls in a row, it will be removed from the poll until we reach an area with pokemon around the level where it would evolve. At that point, I'll train it up, evolve it and add it back to the rotation! For pokemon with multiple evolutions I'll probably run smaller polls asking which form people would want to see, or go catch a few of them and get them all depending on how much work that would be! We'll see! For now, get to voting, and I'm very glad to see that this LP is inspiring people to go back and play pokémon! Edit: Oh and don't think that because the voting is on strawpoll you can't post your votes in the thread or talk about why you voted the way you did! Try to campaign for your favorite pokes, sway people's opinions, please don't argue, but I love seeing people get excited about pokemon! Jolyne Cujoh fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Mar 13, 2016 |
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Mar 13, 2016 07:51
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Star Me is electric, though!! Also I added a list of all of the "active" pokemon into the second post, just in case you have trouble remembering who these pokemon all are! It's not so much of a problem now, but next poll will have... somewhere between 22 and 26 choices, which is... yeah. This game has a lot of pokemon.
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Mar 13, 2016 08:33
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So long as you don't post any specifics about the plot or later areas (like if you were to namedrop the first gym leader or something), I'm cool with people sharing their own randomizer stuff! Also holy poo poo that Simisear
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Mar 13, 2016 09:30
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You said you like metal boys so you should definitely hold on to that prinplup
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Mar 13, 2016 11:21
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Amppelix posted:In future polls, I'd recommend you append the pokemon's species to its name. I had to go crossreference the posts to remember what half of these guys were because I'm terrible with names. mandatory lesbian posted:this, please Yeah, I sort of realized that, which is why I went and put the stat screens for all of the pokes up for vote (and also Nena for completeness' sake) in the 2nd post. I'll try to remember to point out the species in the future, though, and include a link to the 2nd post in the votepost. Lady Naga posted:Abridging the game via screenshots can be pretty funny, like all the narcoleptic pokemon you seem to find, or the Snorunt that kills itself by using Ice Fang Yeah, these pokemons just seem to fall asleep all around me for some reason! I guess I'm just really calming.
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Mar 13, 2016 23:27
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oh jeeze you went max random. Good luck! Oh, also, since I didn't mention it, in the case of a tie for 5th (like we have now) I will be exercising my executive power and just picking who to drop. Probably mostly gonna be following the rule of "Do they evolve? If so, I'll drop them since they'll be back in the running once they evolve."
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Mar 14, 2016 08:39
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Hello, it is 12:01 AM PST on Tuesday, which means that voting is closed! Our team for the next few updates is going to be 1. Nena, our Baby Mom 2. Star Me, the shitwrecker lion 3. Slipknot, the Tree?? 4. Honey, the... 5. Hootie the Blowfish 6. Move it, the Cow Next update (which should be everything up to the first gym battle) on Wednesday or Thursday!! slowpoke
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Mar 15, 2016 08:04
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If the randomizer does mess with movies, it's really not that hard for me to get another save file or play up to the point where I can start with movies, or, yeah, to import this save to the base game at the points where movies unlock. Also, yeah, I've noticed Fastest Text screwing things up when text autoscrolls. Is there any way that I can just, like, modify the seed to get rid of that or will I have to reroll a seed with the same settings and go back to see what's different on Route 19 and Floccesy and make the next vote have like 35 pokemon instead of 25
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Mar 15, 2016 21:51
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So, I did the first Gym on my flight like I said, but I realized that Area 1:1 mapping makes gyms (or the early ones at least), well, just as predictable and boring as they are in the base game. To this end, I'm gonna make another randomized Rom with totally random trainer pokemon to use for gym battles and other places with tons of trainers and no wild pokemon and rerecord. I'll just transfer over the saves so our team should be the same between them (though learned moves and some small stuff will change between the gym file and the normal file because of the different randomization.) This shouldn't delay the update or anything, just keeping y'all up to date on my plans
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Mar 16, 2016 05:00
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Gridlocked posted:What's wrong with 1:1 mapping on Gyms? Mostly that they have the same 2 or 3 pokemon over and over again because of the way that the pokemon are in the gym notmally, which makes them really boring and samey compared to everywhere else in the randomizer where there's a half a dozen new wild pokemon and a bunch of trainers with cool pokemon and then the gyms, which are supposed to be a big thing, end up being 3 croagunks, 3 meditites with truant and a makuhita, which is sort of hard to try to make interesting.
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Mar 16, 2016 05:38
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Yeah, it just picks from all the pokemon of that type instead of replacing every patrat with a Pikachu or whatever
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Mar 16, 2016 05:46
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Huh, apparently I actually just got sort of really unlucky with randomization because I had it set to use pokemon of similar strength with trainers, so it chose meditite and croagunk a bunch of times. In a scrapped file that I was experimenting with, the first gym leader had a Serene Grace Palkia with Scald and an Insomnia Giratina, and then a surprise Axew that almost managed to kill my whole team once I figured out a way to not get wiped by the legendaries. The file that I actually used for recording was pretty cool as well, though it was a much more manageable form of nail-biting than "Well, poo poo, how do I deal with two different box-legendaries." I actually really like this little setup that I've stumbled into, where I do most of the game with trainers being not-too powerful and then teleport myself to a world where everything is bonkers and my guys who are fairly low-level are now not only facing ridiculous monsters, but ridiculous monsters that are 2-3 levels higher than them, so I think I'm gonna keep doing this! Playing through, capturing and training Pokémon on this file and then teleporting them to this weird world where legendaries and pseudolegendaries and surprisingly strong babies lurk around every corner when there's gyms and team hideouts (there's probably team hideouts in this game, though I'm not exactly sure) and stuff like that. Makes things exciting! Update almost certainly coming on Thursday, not tomorrow, though because of the extra recording and experimenting I've been doing today
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Mar 16, 2016 08:07
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While this is technically true, you can at least save pokeballs in the early game when money actually matters by savestating then doing something different if the capture fails
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Mar 18, 2016 00:31
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Hey guys, my D&D session tonight ran longer than I expected so I won't actually be able to finish writing the update tonight. I've got it most of the way done, so it'll be finished and posted by tomorrow!
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Mar 18, 2016 06:03
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Only bad people use HM slaves Update in a bit! Eating dinner right now.
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Mar 19, 2016 02:46
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Update 3: House of Gold and Bones Welcome back everyone! Last time, Alder invited us into his house! But first...   Let's steal 2 bucks from his lawn!   Oh, schoolchildren and desks! I guess Alder's house doubles as a school of some sort, which makes sense I guess. This could also just be one room instead of the whole thing, with video game abstractions. Who knows?   You bet I am!  : "but you can learn from losing as well. More importantly, haven't I been telling you just to enjoy Pokémon battles?" School these children, got it boss.   Oh, cool, I get it. Since Alder told us too, I guess we'll actually fight this vanillite.   Move it starts by yawning at it, and then gets punched by stubby little arms in return.   I will never tire of that specific frame of headbutt, and this Vanillite apparently generates electricity!   And then he falls asleep and is summarily dispatched. Pretty simple battle!   I can help teach you! Lesson number 1: Have more than one pokemon.  : "Well, next we have Cassie! But first, let's heal your pokemon."Uhh, he didn't really need it, but thanks!   Oh, that poor little psychic baby is going to be crushed by my cow no matter the types, girlie.  Especially if that's the only move you're using. Psywave is a weird move that isn't affected by STAB or type advantages/disadvantages (immunity still works) and does anywhere between .5x and 1.5x the user's level in damage, rounding down. It is both too random and too weak to really be counted on.   My cow is way stronger than your baby and your baby only knew how to be random.  : "I could tell that all of the Pokémon were enjoying themselves as well!" : "Pokémon types are very important in battle, aren't they? Water is strong against Fire... Fire is strong against Grass... Grass is strong against Water... Type matchups don't decide everything, though!"Nope! Sometimes pokemon are just stronger, or cooler, or they've got nice coverage moves or a bunch of other stuff! (Cassie interrupted Alder here to talk about STAB but I've already explained that.)  : "Meeting Pokémon and people you never would have met otherwise is truly one of the great things about traveling!"Heck yeah it is! So let's travel.   Oh! We're already meeting new people.  : "Now, don't say anything. Just take this!"  Oh! Uhh, thanks?  : "And people call me Mr. Medal."  Uhhh, not really.  : "The Meal Rally is an event that evaluates various activities of Trainers. So... In commemoration of your participation, please take this medal!"  Neat! Is it worth anything? : "And here's some help for the Medal Rally! I'll give you Hint Medals, too!" : "For your information, you can get Medals if you meet their conditions. Go to a Pokémon Center and you can get medals from me one after another! First, please use your medal box and check the inside!"Okay! Do they actually do anything?  Well. Since apparently he's not interested in telling us, I will: No, the Medals have no actual use. They are purely an Achievement system which is full of mostly pointless achievements like "Save ten times" or "Take a million steps." It's sorta dumb, but I guess I'll go talk to Mr. Medal every once in a while to get some medals.   : "As for the newly opened Pokémon Gym in Aspertia City, I heard a new Gym Leader has arrived there. You should go and test how strong you've become!"Finally someone says something useful! Thanks Alder.  He goes back to his... House? School? Something, and we can go back to our hometown for our first gym (after we go to Floccesy Ranch and get all of our party members up to level 9, which seems like a good level to face the first gym at).   Oh! Someone else wants to talk to us!   Oh, it's Alder again. Less impressive the second time.  : "First, take these!"  : "If you give one to your pokemon, its HP will be restored. What's more! You can give your Pokémon a Berry to hold. Like this Oran Berry, for instance. When a Pokémon holds this Berry, it can eat the berry if it gets hurt in the heat of battle to restore its HP."Oh, that sounds useful! (I forget to use these.)  : "Well... I just told you to challenge the Gym Leader. Aspertia's Gym Leader is a very strong Pokémon Trainer! But you have nothing to worry about! If you think hard about what the Pokémon at your side can do, and what you should do as a Trainer, victory will be yours!Yeah, it's just the first gym. How hard could it be?  : : "Actually, take on the Gym Leaders of each city! Working together with your Pokémon is what makes you grow as a Trainer. As you and your Pokémon grow stronger, your world will get broader!"I was already planning on it! I mean, it would be nice if there was something else to do in these games, but as it is I've really got no other choice.  And Alder walks off, never to be seen again (until his inevitable postgame battles),   To the gym!  ... Huh, this doesn't really look like a gym. Maybe a locker room, but usually those aren't the place you enter. Pokémon Gyms look sort of weird sometimes, though, so maybe these are trainers?   Or they're just people! Okay. Let's keep going!  In the next room, this guy gives us some free stuff!   A lot of the time, items are unnecessary but they can come in handy. Most of the time it's just healing items, though.   "like potions." Oh! Something I forgot to point out, one of our pokemon has had a held item for the whole time we've had her! Hootie is holding a poison barb, which makes poison type attacks do 20% more damage when held. It's useful!   This is pretty good advice for someone playing an unrandomized run, because Riolu is both a really good pokemon (that becomes even better when he evolves) and, yeah, fighting is the only type that is super-effective against normal. If nothing else, you could just run around for a while to raise its friendship and have it evolve into Lucario, who would have no problem with anything in this gym. Whether you actually need a fighting type to beat this gym? Ehhhh.   "when it's trying to evolve!" This is something that has been in the games since the very beginning, though it's never exactly been necessary to know. Could be useful if we don't find the item to evolve Honey for a while, though. In any case, that's all the people in this part of the building, let's check out the other part!   Oh, hey, I guess this is the actual gym! The guy thanks us for coming here and then gives us some water! Something feels different about this gym, though...   Oh, I'm sure this will be quite the challenge.   Yeah, that's me.  Oh! It's Cheren! He was a main character in Black and White, and now he's a gym leader! Sorta like Blue/Gary/Green in Gold and Silver, but at the beginning of the game instead of near the end.  : "Hm? Well, maybe I'd better say that I just became the Gym Leader! More importantly, we need to prepare before welcoming you to the Gym."Oh! I guess we got here just as fast as it seemed, though it's sort of weird that alder would know who the gym leader is and tell us to go fight him before the gym was actually ready.   Ah, okay! In a lot of the games, the first gym (and most gyms) had a bunch of trainers in them, but they were in some way optional. Apparently you've got to fight the trainers here, though. I guess they wanted you to have a little more experience on your pokes before fighting Cheren, since there have been relatively few trainer battles so far.   Cheren walks off, and we talk to his first subordinate! After we talk, this happens:  It makes us walk away, and then approach each other! It's a neat little thing, I think, makes everything seem more official.   ... Oh. This would probably be very bad for any of our other pokemon, but Honey at least has a super-effective attack that works pretty well with her stats to try to take care of this guy with.   That's not good.  Okay, that was too close for comfort. Bonemerang is normally one of the signature moves of the Cubone line, and it's pretty good! It has 90% accuracy but it hits twice and both hits together are as strong as earthquake. This makes it worse than Earthquake in a lot of situations because of the worse accuracy, but there are some situations we might encounter where hitting multiple times can be useful.   Regardless, Honey hung on by the skin of her teeth, and one more aqua tail takes care of Excadrill.   Oh, hey, it's my second favorite starter ever! And he's got a drat powerful ability. Hopefully Star Me can handle him!   Oh, shoot. Rain boosts the power of water moves by 50% (and halves the power of fire moves), so this is going to hurt.   Oh, dang. Well, Hootie should be faster than Empoleon at least.   And she was! If not for the rain, Octozooka might not have been enough to take him out.   Man, I don't know what it is about these two lines, but they make me really dislike this kid. Let's get away from him ASAP.   The same thing with the stepping back and approaching each other happens here too! It's still neat.   Oh, wow, that is a really bad ability for a Ferroseed to have. Fire is already his biggest weakness, and sun makes fire moves stronger just like rain does with water. It does mean, however, that Honey has no business being here.  Move It comes in and gets hit by some inexplicable feathers.   Oh. Well, Honey got some more experience at least! And because Move It got ko'd by that, I didn't get to know what the next pokemon I would be facing was going to be!  I made a poor choice.   A very poor choice.   Slipknot gives a valiant effort, but she is defeated.   I have no idea why I sent Nena out here, since the only move she has which can actually damage a steel type is Crush Grip, and steel resists normal on top of all of the other problems Crush Grip has. Plus he's raising his defense even higher!   Hootie, our little ringer, comes in to clean up the mess, because Honey is almost fainted and Nena and Move It can't do much with him boosting his defense super high.     Octozooka pulls its weight.   Our lil' sacks of poison both level up! Neat.   Yeah, let's go take on Cheren! After we make a quick trip to the Pokémon Center, of course, because half of our team is fainted or nearly there.  : "as a Gym Leader! Let's both do our best and have a battle we can be proud of!" Yeah!! (There will be a video of this battle here at some point, still figuring out video editing stuff that's not just "redo battle but capture it in OBS"!)   Oh, well, this isn't good. Metagross is a Pseudolegendary pokemon (meaning that his stats are as high as a pokemon's stats can be without being a legendary or a gimmick pokemon), and he's Steel/Psychic which is a type that I have no real ways of dealing with in this party. Right now, his only weaknesses are Ground and Fire. Really wishing that one of my pokemon had been able to learn Blue Flare at this point. I've got a plan, though.   Good, step one of the plan goes off without a hitch. Soak turns Metagross from a Psychic/Steel type to a Water type, which I do have some way of dealing with!     Oh, right, he still has massive stats. Hmm. Well, time for step two of the plan!   Star Me takes a licking from Metagross, but he should be able to survive another hit, and with Metagross at half health Fusion Bolt should be able to take him out.   Or he can outspeed Star Me and crit. Star Me's destiny is to be owned, I guess.     I'm having Slipknot weaken Metagross with Leaf Tornado because Bolt Strike paralyzing him and activating Marvel Scale (which he stole from Honey earlier) could lead to Bad Times, especially since Cheren, like most gym leaders, will use a potion on his pokemon if they're knocked below 20% health.     And there we go, worked like a charm and in hindsight I am very glad that Metagross didn't have any steel moves, because Slipknot would have been very much in trouble.   Not... entirely sure why I sent Honey out against Magnemite, this could end very poorly.    The Magnemite throws feathers (???) and bites (  ) Honey to great effect, while Sunny soaks it and then I yet again do something that I cannot explain.  Yeah, I used Lunar Dance. Not sure why, but I did.   And then I sent out Slipknot, because I remembered that Lunar Dance can't bring back a fainted pokemon. That's why I did it, I was trying to bring Star Me back to capitalize on the soaked Magnemite.  A bolt strike does the job.   Move it starts with his standard opener.   And then things get weird. Trick Room is a weird gimmick, it makes slow pokemon fast and fast pokemon slow.  I send out Slipknotand then this happens.   Yeah. Bronzor somehow manages to take out half of my team despite spending multiple turns asleep. Gear Grind is essentially steel type bonemerang, so it's pretty powerful, but still. After that debacle, though...       Well, that gym as a whole was way more threatening than it should have been. Still manageable, though. Hey! If you aren't reading the thread, you might not know what's actually going on here. See, this whole gym has taken place on a different file than the main LP, and most gyms in the future will too! If you want to know what happened on the normal file, well, here you go! It was a whole lot of this:         Also, Star Me got owned, because Star Me getting owned is a multiversal constant.  : "That battle has made me feel really glad you were my first challenger as a Gym Leader… I give you this in honor of the strength you and your Pokémon showed!" Cool, we got a shiny book! : "Here is your first Gym Badge, the Basic Badge! This is an important milestone! With this Badge, Pokémon up to Lv. 20 will obey you, including traded Pokémon."Neat, though irrelevant for this LP.  Ooh, cool! Crunch is a pretty powerful, physical dark type move with a 10% chance to lower the target's defense. Dark is a nice coverage type for a lot of pokemon, hitting psychic and ghosts super-effectively.  I think I've mentioned this before, but yeah, from Black and White forward, TMs can be used however many times you want, making them (and a whole lot of pokemon that relied on TM Moves to be good) way more useful! : "In the Unova region, there are eight Pokémon Gyms and eight Gym Badges! If you're a Trainer, you could collect all of them! That will make it easier to fill the pages of the Pokédex as well! Yes, two years ago, Pokédex in hand, I left on a journey with my friends."Two years ago... That's gonna be it for this update! It was nice seeing Cheren again, though it's too bad that since he's a gym leader he's never going to be relevant again. Tune in next time for Majin Buu, Deceit and a very tired Jolyne! Jolyne Cujoh fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Mar 19, 2016 |
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Mar 19, 2016 08:34
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Dareon posted:My current party is: I hope you turned on the option to make late evolutions happen earlier, because Mienfoo suffers from a problem that a lot of Gen V pokemon suffered from, in that they were designed only with Black and White in mind, where they were acquired at a super high level and didn't evolve until an even higher level as a result. Mienfoo evolves at level 50 normally, which is just stupid. Also, hoping this post knocks the update post out of The Phantom Zone.
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Mar 19, 2016 08:38
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Blaze Dragon posted:Steel as the first Gym? Pokemon games sure have gotten hard! some day I will stop making these mistakes, and that day will probably be when I stop finishing updates at 3 in the morning. Lady Naga posted:I seriously can't believe it took them so long to make TMs infinite-use. Yeah, it was really a no-brainer, and is one of the main reasons why I can't really go back and play the pre-gen-V games. Infinite TMs was such a good QoL improvement that I didn't even realize I needed until it happened. Roro posted:I got Cheren with Landorus and Staraptor, the latter of which had Sky Attack and Brave Bird. He took out three of my team alone Lazaruise posted:Cheren in my game ended up having a Mewtwo as his first pokemon. I got my poo poo wrecked cause I didn't have anything besides kakuna that could hit super effective against it. And it killed him in the first turn. I had to go power level to get through him. Like I said, in another file where I was experimenting to see what settings were causing such a boring gym, Cheren had both Palkia and Giratina, both of which had some pretty devastating moves. The randomizer can be unfairly difficult sometimes, which is why I now have 4 randomized files that I can stick Jolyne into until I get a gym that is exciting but not insurmountable without resorting to grinding.
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Mar 20, 2016 00:21
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Hey the update is here for anyone who might have missed it!! Also I was curious as to whether my guess about how to evolve Honey in that update was correct and nope, I was totally wrong! She will apparently just evolve with a water stone, which is available way more easily than a King's Rock. Jolyne Cujoh fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Mar 20, 2016 |
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Mar 20, 2016 03:57
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Not necessarily! The randomizer can either shuffle stats around, redistribute stats randomly while keeping the same BST or just give the pokemon completely random stats
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Mar 21, 2016 11:24
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Update 4.1: Just Can't Sleep Tonight Hey! Welcome back! Last time we got our first badge from an old friend, this time we'll go shove it into that Hiker who thought we weren't cool enough's face! But first!  Hey Bianca!  : "How did your Pokémon battle with the Gym Leader go? Oh! If it isn't the Basic Badge! Wow! Amazing! And you just set off on your journey with your Pokémon! You definitely have potential as a Trainer! I'm sure of it!"I've got more than potential, I've got talent, way too much free time and access to the internet to fill me in on the stuff that I don't know!   Oh, well that's a bit of a disappointment after the first two TMs. Kinesis is a move that only Kadabra and Alakazam can learn normally, and it's just a worse version of one of the basic status moves, Sand Attack. It's got an 80% chance to lower the target's accuracy by one stage. Woo.    : "It’s been two years, hasn’t it?"Oh, right, that thing last update about Cheren no longer being relevant after his gym battle? I lied.  : "Wh-what's up?": "I thought it would be a good idea to register‘ each other in the Xtransceiver!"Oh, right, smartwatch!   : "I registered Professor Juniper for you, too!"Cool, the number of people we can call just got 300% bigger!   And we immediately get thrown into a group call with 3/4ths of our social circle. : "Bianca told me you accepted the Pokédex! Thank you so much! Thanks to you, we will all know more about Pokémon and be able to get along with them even better!"I'm learning a ton doing this and actually paying attention to the Pokédex for once as well! Learning is great.  : "There are sooo many Pokémon we couldn't prove were here two years ago!"And this is how you can tell who's talking in these multi-person Xtransceiver conversations! In addition to there being lip flaps, it displays a little audio notification next to the person talking. The rest of this conversation is just gonna be transcription, though, because my portraits do that just as well! : "Thank you for going so far for this errand, Bianca. And Cheren, how are you enjoying being a Gym Leader?": "Professor Juniper, it's been a long time. I'm glad you're doing so well. The Gym Leader position is very tough… If I had my usual partners…": "Oh, Cheren… Having battles that come down to the wire will make you a Gym Leader who depends the bonds between your challengers and their Pokémon, right?": "It'll be fine! Cheren's a new Gym Leader, I'm an Assistant Pokémon Professor, and Jolyne is a new Trainer, but we always have Pokémon by our sides!": "That's right, Bianca! Our world is a world where we live with Pokémon. Everyone! Keep that in mind as you pursue your dreams with your Pokémon! Particularly you, Jolyne! The Pokédex may be important, but… First, enjoy your journey with your Pokémon to your heart's content! "That's the plan, but the way I enjoy my journeys is making as many friends as possible, so those two goals go hand-in-hand!   : "If you talk to her on the Xtransceiver, she'll evaluate the completeness of your Pokédex or tell you a lot about how Pokémon evolve! And you can call us, too, of course! I'll tell you how well you and your Pokémon are getting along, OK?!"Well, both of Juniper's services are a little bit irrelevant to this LP (because a bunch of the obscure evolution stuff has been changed and our pokedex completeness is gonna be all sorts of hosed up since we don't have the national dex yet) but Bianca might be helpful since friendship mechanics are unchanged!  : "I'll tell you what I know about Pokémon Abilities and Pokémon type matchups."And Cheren will still be just as useful as ever! Cheren removes a layer of obfuscation from ability descriptions, plus tells you about some of their effects which are never mentioned at all! It's cool.   Oh, hey, it's Hugh! Wonder why it took him so long to get back here, since we had our little tutoring session with Alder to keep us from getting back immediately. Maybe he took a little while to cool off after getting real mad over at the ranch.   : "Understood. Please come into my Pokémon Gym!"  ... Hugh.  Yeah, you gotta deal with doofs constantly. And they're not even the cute, beavery kind.  : "The C-Gear is a cool device for communications, such as Infrared Connection or Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection."Oh, right, that means it's totally useless for the purposes of this LP! Whomp-womp.   I was afraid that turning the C-gear on might cause problems somehow, but it doesn't. Regardless, it'll be in sleep mode for most of this update.  This is what the bottom screen will look like out of battle from now on! Holy dang look at the time, it's way too late to be playing pokemans. : "Like, what are you going to do now? You know, there's another Pokémon Gym in Virbank City, which is just past Floccesy Town."Ehh, I was gonna stop playing here, but sure, I'll keep going for a couple minutes so we can end this in the next town.     Wait, what, I thought I got all the pokemon on this route. Wait... Oh no. Well, my job just got a little bit more tedious. Why? Well, I'll show you! First I'll have to run back and forth for like 20 seconds, and then this happens!  Did you spot what was special about that encounter? The wiggly grass. Now that we have our first gym badge, there's a chance for this rustling grass to appear whenever we're moving around near tall grass, and this rustling grass usually has rare pokemon in it! This means that there are more pokemon to catch at each of the places we've been to before, but that doesn't seem too bad. What is bad is that (almost) every area has a normal rustling grass encounter, and then another encounter (or two) with an even more rare pokemon! The chance to get this other encounter? 5-10%. So, yeah, that "run around for 20 seconds and then go do a battle" thing? Gonna have to do it around ten or twenty times in basically every area I can catch pokemon in from now on. Sure, that'll only take an extra ten minutes or so in every area, but that'll add up. Gotta do it, though, wanna catch all the pokes. Anyway, let's catch this Medicham!   Dunno why I was using Star Me over Move It here, but it worked!   Oh, hey, aura! That sure was a thing for a movie and like three episodes of the anime. (Also, like, in real life beliefs but pffffff, the real world.)   Aww, Emma C.'s bashful. This does nothing to her stats, which are... unremarkable. Medicham is a pokemon that is normally remarkable primarily for its ability, Pure Power, which doubles its attack. This counts for more than you would think, because it also doubles the bonus from a positive nature, IV's and EV's, which I should probably talk about at some point. Without that ability, Medicham as a whole is sort of disappointing for a fully evolved pokemon that isn't a single stage. About average defenses and speed, fairly bad HP and attacking stats. Better overall than a 1st-stage pokemon (usually), of course, but still sort of disappointing! Her ability here also doesn't do much, since I don't have any reliable way to cause rain. Her moves are also just sort of mediocre. Power Trick I talked about way back in episode 1, it averages the attack stats of the user and the target and is pretty bad except in one very specific case. Detect always goes first and makes the user invulnerable for a turn, but has `a chance to fail which increases by 50% every time you use it consecutively (or use it consecutively with a few other moves). This means that on the second turn you try to use it it has a 50% chance to work, on the third it has a 25% chance and so on and so on. Drain punch is a decent move, below-average power but it heals the user for 50% of the damage dealt. Extrasensory is a special psychic attack with average power and a 10% chance to cause the target to flinch. Weirdly, it was the signature move of a grass type when it was introduced. Overall, Emma C. isn't exactly a bad pokemon, especially for this point of the game, but she's just kind of disappointing compared to how a Medicham is in the normal games. Anyway, let's continue on!   Healing up my pokes and doing some shopping! Hey, we can buy great balls now! I buy 5 pokeballs, sell some stuff and then buy 4 great balls. Great balls have a 50% higher chance to catch a pokmon than pokeballs, though they cost more than twice as much, which means it's way more a convenience thing than a cost thing to buy them instead.  After shopping, I decide to check out our new TMs and see who can learn them! Hootie and Honey can learn crunch, and it's a pretty good move, so I teach it to them! Honey forgets Lunar Dance, and Hootie forgets Clear Smog.   Oh! Bianca has more to say to us, okay!  : "I forgot to upgrade the Pokédex that I gave you! I'm going to add the Habitat List! It's an amazing feature! I'm just going to borrow your Pokédex for a second!" : "With the Habitat List, you can check which Pokémon are in the area! It's a mode in the Pokédex! To use it, open up the Pokédex and tap the Habitat List button on the lower left of the Touch Screen! Next, pick the area you want to see! You can see all the Pokémon that live in that area. It even tells you which ones you've already caught!"Oh, neat! I wonder if that actually works with the randomizer, or if it's a preprogrammed thing that won't change. I'll have to check next time.  : "I have a tip for you! When you're walking down a path, you'll sometimes see rustling grass! If you go to that spot... Well, I'll let the rest be a surprise!"Way ahead of you, B.   : "So go to many different places and meet many different Pokémon, OK? See you!" See you, Bianca! I'll probably call you at some point to show off the weird pokes I catch.   Over on Route 20, I notice this group of rocks and my RPG sense starts tingling. Neat! I'm not looking at a guide to find these hidden items (maybe I should?), so it's a nice surprise when I find them!    : "But don't get a swelled head! It's a rough world out there! Here, I'll show you!"Uhh, okay dude.  Oh! Well, at least we know what we're in store for.   ... The AI choosing a move that does literally nothing.   Oh, huh! Apparently that's the other ability that Oshawott can have. Even with that, though, the rest of the fight is pretty simple.   Oh, right. Our pokemon got way less experience in the normal universe, so they're all level 10 now instead of being into their teens.   : "With dependable Pokémon like that, even a kid like you can hold your own against an adult. Yup!" Man, that guy was sort of an rear end in a top hat. I make a stop over at Flocessy to heal up Move It since it's there, and then I continue on!   ... Holy poo poo, the place that was far too dangerous for anyone without a gym badge was a literal preeschool. Uuuugh, what an absolute rear end in a top hat. Let's just beat up these preschoolers and then get to Virbank so I can feel like I've made some actual progress in this update.   bonk   Oh holy hell. More hyper beams!   It wasn't really all that threatening though.   "of sleep if I want to be a big kid!" That's some pretty good advice, as a certified big kid I sure do wish I could get more sleep.   Oh, hey Cheren, Hugh. Sure, I'll let you explain something so that I don't have to.   : "It's rare, but sometimes two Pokémon pop out at the same time. Also, the Pokémon that hide in dark grass are slightly stronger. So be careful if you walk through."In addition to that, there are some pokemon that will only appear in dark grass in some areas, and some pokemon that won't appear there. Luckily, since I'm using Area 1-1 mapping, this doesn't essentially double the amount of pokemon I have to capture on these routes, just adds a couple more. It also makes grinding a little easier on those routes since it has stronger pokemon! It's cool.  : "These might help!"  Pecha berries cure poison! They normally would be a huge help, but, you know, randomizer. Who knows, though, there's a 1/17 chance that the randomizer could choose the same type that the gym already is! Possibly 1/16 if it chooses different types for every gym. : "Both of you, do your best! If you need anything, call me on the Xtransceiver." : "And he fought those Team Plasma thugs, too..."Oh, hey, Hugh knows about that, somehow. You know, maybe we should have told literally anybody that we met someone who claimed to be a member of the terrorist group that almost took over the country 2 years ago.  : "You should... Do your best! Fill up the Pokédex and have my back. Got it?"Sure.   Ugh, I really wanna just get to Virbank and be done for the night, but... Item in the grass! Gotta get it! Maybe I can get in and get out without a wild pokemon encounter. Oh, also, if we talk to Hugh he has this to say: : "I have to get stronger than Team Plasma!"Apparently Team Plasma is pretty important to Hugh, and since we're his best friend then yeah, we definitely should have told him about the guy what threw that TM at us. Anyway.   Neat! That brings me up to 5, and no encounter so far! Looking go-  gently caress.   ... At least it's adorable.   Adorable and loving terrifying, wow. Seed Flare is (again) a move that's normally only available to a legendary pokemon. It's really powerful and fairly accurate (85%) and has a 40% chance to lower the target's special defense by two stages, which is insane. Terrifying little cotton bird.   Yeesh. At least she falls asleep after that   Well, that pokeball didn't work, and she woke up. Great ball time, I guess.   Good.  omg.    PinkMatter is a calm lil' birdhat, which ups her special defense but lowers her Attack. This isn't bad, because in this generation she is a passable special wall with average speed and HP, above average Defense and below-average attacking stats, with types that sort of favor special-attacking over physical. Next gen this would be a different story, but that's a tale for another day. Her ability is Arena Trap, which is sort of weird but okay for a defensive pokemon to have. You know, if it weren't for the fact that the only time the AI will switch is when it has literally no moves that can do anything to the pokemon you have out. Her moves are pretty dang good, though. Air Cutter is a move that I constantly confuse with a much better move, Air Slash. It's decent, though, with mediocre power and 95% accuracy, but an increased crit chance. Chatter is a move that becomes one of the best moves in the game in the next generation (in my opinion), but right now it's only, well, okay. Mediocre power, perfect accuracy and a 10% chance to confuse if I do some bullshit with the microphone. Conversion changes the user's type to match one of their moves (so it would make Pink Matter's type flying 2/3rds of the time or grass 1/3rd of the time right now) and is not reliable enough to be useful right now. In the next generation it could be used to reliably get her STAB on Seed Flare, but, once again, I didn't use the option to apply gen VI balance changes to moves, which I'm sort of regretting at this point, honestly. Overall, PinkMatter is pretty good and super cute and fluffy. A cutie birb.   Well, we get out of the grass without another encounter at least, and hey, more small children to antagonize!   That is a pretty awesome pokemon!  And it's covered in bees! Dang, what a cool toddler.   Clear smog smokes off the bees, but I forgot that ground resists poison, so it doesn't do much damage. I should probably get Nena out of here just in case this rad piggy's got an actual ground move.  So I send in my... other poison sack. Well, she's also full of bubbles, but still.     No problem.   Let me teach you some wisdom that I've gained as a certified Big Kid: Insisting that you aren't something makes you seem like you are that thing.   Oh, hey, another adult! At least these children aren't running around completely unsupervised.  Oh, sweet, an Audino! Audino are a pokemon that can be found basically everywhere in the base game of Black and White or the sequels, usually in the shaking grass. They are a pokemon that is designed entirely to be not much of a threat, but they've got very good help and they give more experience than most legendaries when they're defeated, so seeing a trainer with one is a nice treat! Looks like Move It's gonna get a couple levels before I pass out, at least.  ... Oh.   Okay, as I was saying, Slipknot's gonna get a couple levels before I pass out!   Okay, yeah, Slipknot's got this.  Poor thing.   Four levels from one fight, drat. (Slipknot tried to learn Rage in the middle of these levels, but Rage is a terrible move so she did not. It has miniscule power but raises the user's attack by one stage if they are hit after using it and before using another move. Bad, and a better move which serves the same purpose will be added in the next games.)  No, lady, you're a great example! Teach your kids to use Audinos and also to fight me whenever I want to fight them, please.  Dire Hit is another one of the "X" items, it raises critical hit chance. Still not great!   Okay, I can see the gate and these kids are pretty cute, I can pull through this and finish up the update. Plus, it's our first double battle so I have stuff to talk about.   Double battles were introduced in Generation 3 (that is, Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald) and they're pretty neat! There are a lot of strategies that work super well in double battles, and a lot of abilities and moves and stuff that are designed to only work in them. Double Battles are also a good way to train up weaker pokemon, and are generally a much faster sort of battle than single battles! They put a neat spin on the whole strategy of pokemon, and they are the format that all of the official pokemon tournament stuff happens in because of their speed and the deeper strategy involved in them compared to single battles. The console games (Colosseum and Gale of Darkness) were really neat because every battle (except for the first couple in Gale of Darkness) was a double battle, which was a refreshing spin on the series. How they work, though, is really pretty simple. It's 2v2 and mostly works the same as a single battle mechanically, with the turn order being decided by speed and stuff like that. The only thing that really changes is how moves behave. Most moves remain single-target, and you choose which opponent (or your other pokemon, which can be relevant for some niche strategies) you target. Some moves, however, like Air Cutter will hit both opponents for 75% of their normal damage, others (like Earthquake, or Surf after Gen 3) will hit every other pokemon in the match, including your partner, still for 75% damage. And, really, that's all there is to say! Just this added complexity of choosing targets and stuff, though, deepens battles a whole hell of a lot, and it's really cool! I like double battles. This also gives me the chance to try out my favorite strategy again, I'm gonna soak one of these Bagon and then hit them with Fusion Bolt for super effective damage! Can you see the flaw in this plan?   There's flaw number 1, Star Me is way faster than Honey, so he'll go first.     And there's flaw number 2, the "Star Me must get owned" constant.  Another interesting thing about double battles: You don't get to replace your fainted pokemon until the end of a round. This means that if there are any moves targetting your fainted pokemon remaining after they have fainted, they will be redirected at your pokemon that is still standing, or they will fail outright if they came from your still standing pokemon. Anyway, I send in Star Me's understudy, Slipknot, to complete the combination.     Okay, one down. Here's one of the flaws with most double battles in the base pokemon games: The trainers you're facing will only ever have 2 pokemon, which makes them short and not all that interesting. There are exceptions to this rule, but it's still a shame.   And there we go.   They'll be fine! A teacher is like a Mom, so I'm sure she'll be able to heal your little dragons. Into the tunnel!  Yep, right down to the 15 minute hunt for the last one that just won't come out of their hiding spot.  Another ticker, some more neat flavor text and the information that I recorded this update more than a week ago!   Oh, me! Me am tired, please let me pass and don't make me go get you some tea or something.   I mean, I've got a bunch more in the PC already.   Oh, that explains why it feels like it took so long to get here once Hugh showed up. Petty jabs aside, we're finally in Virbank! Now we just gotta head to the center, heal our pokes and find a couch to crash on.   Oh, hi Mom. You can't sleep either? : "Wow, Virbank City! There's a complex there, right? Have you been there yet? The way it looks at night is really quite nice! And you can also train your Pokémon there! You know, your Pokémon can do some things and you can do others. I hope you can all work together and accomplish amazing things!"Cool, good to know! Me and my crazy monsters are gonna go accomplish the amazing thing of going to sleep for like a week.  Oh god more NPC's. Maybe I can sneak by.  Or not.  : "I'm off to Pokéstar Studios to live up to my true potential! My dream is to be a ship captain and a movie star!"  : "If that ship doesn't move, you're going to cause lots of trouble!"Oh, well, if you didn't already know because, well, we're seeing this happen, we're gonna have to deal with this friction if we wanna escape from New Jersey.  : "You split your time between your responsibilities as a Gym Leader and with your band, right? I can do that, too!"Dude, you don't get to condescend to your daughter when she's both a rockstar and, like, the mayor. That's basically what a gym leader is, right?     : "Keeping people from getting where they're going because of sheer selfishness is unforgivable! I've HAD it! I'm going to the Gym!" Roxie is a raucous and radical rockstar and her reverence for repeating reverberations and adding alliteration is actually amazing. Man, she's cool.   Now, finally, at the pokemon center. This table is now my bed. Next time: Backtracking to round up all the pokes we've missed and I guess we'll solve some family drama! Jolyne Cujoh fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Mar 24, 2016 |
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Mar 24, 2016 10:01
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Mega-Altaria is my second favorite mega evolution and is pretty dang great. Also I just realized that I forgot to post this here, the most relevant place for it, but I recently commissioned this and am using it as an avatar basically everywhere but here on SA and I love it so much. 
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Mar 24, 2016 14:01
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