Pokémon has become a big part of my life again in my 30s, and so I’ve been making my way through the series and am up to season…8, I think. Anyway, Brock should have gotten with Lucy sometime later down the line. I mean come on Brock as a Pokémon doctor and married to Lucy who he has two kids with and they run a Pokémon orphanage out of their home.
I guess I could ask some questions too, Anime or manga, favorite games, scarlet or violet? Favorite character and or Pokémon in the show or the game series?
Started playing Crystal not too long ago. It’s not just my imagination when I think the new games lack challenge and pizzazz. Caves in Crystal feel like caves and strike a good balance between challenging and doable - and no I’m not saying that because I nailed the big Ice Path puzzle in one try. Galar Mines 1 and 2 in Sword/Shield are barely corridors, let alone dungeons. Crystal is linear but provides for quite a bit of narrative freedom because you are able to tackle gyms 5-7 and some story elements in any order you wish.
Here’s a video of Galar Mine 1. I’m not kidding when I say it’s basically a corridor.
The trade-off for that is an absolutely whacked out level curve - for reference, I knew going in that experience would be sparse so I did the glitch where I got all three starters. Ended up picking up Geodude, Gastly, and then later on got a shiny Elekid. Bayleef wasn’t cutting it so I subbed it out for Espeon after the seventh badge, but Espeon doesn’t get any good moves until 36 so I activated the event and picked up a Celebi instead. Made it shiny while I was at it because there’s no other way to get a shiny legit Celebi. Also subbed out Feraligatr for the red Gyarados at the Lake of Rage. Those are literally all the substitutions I made before fighting Clair, and I was still ten levels underleveled and she almost beat me. I had a bee’s dick of health on my last fighter by the time I was done.
Explain to me why there’s a trainer on Route 46 - which you can’t access until you reach Blackthorn anyway - who has a team of five level 13 Geodudes? At first I thought “well it’s because he’s in close proximity to the bottom of the route so they lumped him in with early game levels” but that doesn’t make sense because a) he’s completely inaccessible until at least after the 3rd badge and b) even if you could reach him early game he’s too powerful because he’s level 13 and everything in the grass is level 2. You would have to go out of your way to reach them at the earliest possible time and by then you’re already 20-23. Everything in the grass before him ranges from 20-23, and that’s too low for me to grind right now. Clair’s strongest is 40. I’m 30. The Elite 4 has nothing but 40-45…I gotta figure something out.
This is the trainer I’m referring to (and there’s two others too, but one is actually important and gives you items so I got her number). It’s in the remake too, so this is a conscious choice that I don’t get, and it seems small and inconsequential but it robs me of precious experience I already lack.
This is also the team. I’m not rushing through the game but I’m not grinding levels in the grass either. I have eight badges and I don’t even have my starter’s final form yet. I have a Joey Jr. so I can move the save between cart and emulator, but I evolved Graveler and Haunter by trading with myself between two emulators.
I might have to concede defeat and go grind and as much as I don’t want to, I think that’s what I want out of the new games too. Just a bit of difficulty, maybe not through experience deprivation but maybe with challenging AI like the Totem Fights from Gen 7 mixed with a few ways to approach the main story, and then also them letting the Experience Share be optional. Or, you could go back to the Gen 5 thing and give us actual difficulty modes, but don’t lock it behind that bullshit “Key Code” system or I’m gonna have words with someone. The games are piss-easy now - so easy that the exploration isn’t satisfying because the game puts you on a treadmill sprinkled with cutscenes the whole time. The first iteration of Gen 7 is the biggest offender for this - not only does the whole game feel like a tutorial no one asked for, it puts almost all the story and character development into a 30 minute unskippable cutscene after the defeat of the Champion, a 5-7 minute cutscene, and then a battle with Tapu Koko (and at no point does the game allow you to save). I didn’t need to be coddled this hard when I was 6 and I still figured out how to beat the game, so the thing I want the most from Gen 9 is to stop with the hand holding and let us figure out the game. We all know how to catch a Pokemon.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
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I can’t stand dealing with the trade stuff so I always get a custom rom for all evolutions when it comes to the older games.
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@xxxx I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of it, but I came across a ROM hack of Pokemon Crystal called Pokemon Crystal Clear and it’s a compelling enough improvement on the original game while still keeping the essence of that generation that I put the OG Crystal on pause and started a new one.
Those with keen eyes will notice that I’m playing the ROM Hack on a Game Boy Advance. That’s real hardware with a replacement speaker and a back light mod (essentials). The file is sitting on an SD Card on an Everdrive Mini. I managed to snag one when a friend alerted me to new stock. The problem is that it’s coming from Ukraine, so right now that’s a logistical nightmare.
Crystal Clear being on a Mini and not an X3/X5/X7 is what makes this so impressive, because the Mini does not have the functionality to support RTC (Real Time Clocks) in GBC games like Pokemon G/S/C. Everywhere you look you’ll read posts saying that Crystal won’t work on the Everdrive mini. I spent an hour confirming that’s still true, and I did things like install RTC patches and break the game down into assembly to apply machine level patches. It doesn’t work.
Turns out the problem isn’t just the Everdrive mini - it’s also Goomba, which is the emulator running on the Everdrive Mini OS. Goomba is written to prioritize using less resources over being accurate, and from what I’ve read one of the steps involves lazily initializing and maintaining DMA, such that specific actions that happen on hardware during HBlank and VBlank don’t have matching routines on Goomba. The result is severe graphical corruption, to the point where the game is unplayable. You can patch out clock issues, but not this.
Not mine, but you get the idea.
Enter Crystal Clear. If you have version 1.1 of the Crystal ROM (I dumped mine straight from the cart using a Joey Jr.) and the Crystal Clear 2.5.2 BPS patch, there’s a website here that will patch them for you into a new ROM. You need 2.5.0+ in order to be able to use the “Enable Goomba Mode” feature, which is what gets around that graphical corruption issue that plagues the hack because anything based on Crystal doesn’t work in Goomba. RTC issues aren’t a problem because the game itself handles time differently. The BPS patch can be taken freely from the Discord. Further conversion using Goomba Frontend is not required.
As for the game itself…let’s just say I was extremely impressed with all the customization options before I loaded into my room. First, you can choose to start in any city in either Johto or Kanto. I chose to start in Pallet Town because I’m a hopeless Genwunner, but the city chosen to start in is also a proxy for difficulty.
These are all your starters. You can choose one:
You can customize your character avatar, your character’s gender, color palette (down to RGB!), bag design (at least 30), time, menu colors, the music, and the clock. Then, you get put through a tutorial that actually matters because there’s quite a lot that’s changed up and they’re letting you know they’ve added optional areas and made the game more open-world in some aspects (more free roam). Then they dropped me into my room in Pallet Town, I got my Eevee, Running Shoes, Five Pokeballs, a Pokedex, and I saved with 0:01 on the clock.
Also other enticing factoids I learned so far:
- Levels scale with badges.
- I’m pretty sure you can tackle gyms in a slightly more flexible order. I went downstairs and talked to my mother and the first thing she did was challenge me to a battle. It’s so real, she asks you to confirm if you want the sauce because she said “Not even Oak has beaten me”. This hack gets down like that.
- Optional new areas to explore, including some areas like the Safari Zone that I suspect were added back in.
- A revised Pokedex with functions I would kill for in the actual game - like the ability to see what route a 'mon is on and what else is on the route, level up moves and egg moves, etc.
- All 251 Pokemon are accessible in some way.
- I’m sure the game is trade and battle compatible as well since there’s a focus on being able to be competitive - as you can see the game has a menu for DVs and Hidden Power Type!
- You can make anyone follow you by holding SELECT at the Pokemon menu!
Yeah, I’m going down the sink hole man. I hope you join me! 
NOTE: Save in-game, then L+R, Exit the emulator to flush save to SD.
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Hello-hello! Pokemon revisits are exciting!
I prefer the anime. My favorite games are Crystal and Emerald. Currently mid-Emerald replay on my OG GBA SP, as a matter of fact. I evolved my Wailmer into Wailord and stopped to just bask in the glow of my big buddy’s arrival.
I’m mildly intrigued by Violet coming out. Keeping one eye on developments and release info about it, but only one. The other is looking lovingly at Pidgeot, my favorite, 4ever.
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GBA SP picture tax pls. I don’t care if it’s old and battle-hardened or some new modded shit.
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Here’s my tax payment featuring the aforementioned Crystal and Emerald, plus my Red and Pinball, since Pokémon in this thread. The system and all games but Emerald are my originals from first release in the 90s and 00s.
Survived many small children over the years, so I kept the stickers on it as battle scars. They spared the inside, clearly!
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My friend scooped these from a retro gaming store around our way. He kept Silver and I took Red. It’s super mint.
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Blue was my very first my mom got at a sale at a church back in idk 97-98 when I was 7-8 and my girlfriend’s first was blue as well and she was born in 96 and we found her original cartridge of it when we went through the stuff her aunt gave her when we visited last month. It’s a little roughed up, but it’s the nostalgia of it all.
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I used to own Silver too, as well as somehow ending up with someone else’s Yellow, prolly a family member, cousin or something. Both cartridges went missing after a move, but I ended up finding a ROM and emulator to play most of Yellow anyway until the tablet I had it on needed to be factory reset. I enjoyed checking in on Pikachu from time to time in our journey!
Leavany is the stuff of nightmares at least in the anime.
After buying scarlet and violet…I would like my money back
The performance issues are horrific, but I finished up the main campaign (minus the last area) in Scarlet last night & found it to be the most engaging main series Pokemon game to go through in a long time. I usually slog through the campaign to get to competitive team-building, but I had a lot of fun with this one. It could have used scaling gyms, but taking on a few tougher gyms early was a great time. It would also be nice if there were buildings you could enter that aren’t related to making sandwiches.
The games could have been much better with less crunch, but I actually had more fun with it than I thought. The performance almost put me off of it in the first hour - and it’s totally understandable if that or its other shortcomings are dealbreakers - but I’m happy I stuck with it.
I watched a video where a guy explained you just hold down one of the back buttons on your switch and you can just literally fall through the world and see everything from the bottom. He thought one of the cliffs looked weird because there was sand at the bottom of it so he used the same hold-the-button technique and found Gamefreak had actually made a second mountain and covered it up.
He went to one of the shops and did the same hold-the-button and found he could go inside the building that was pretty much an empty shell actually the entire world is a literal empty shell.
the sandwich and any of the eating is just…weird it’s a single JPG image and your character just goes “NOM”
I get that Gamefreak had to make 2 pokemon games within a year and had a tight deadline after Arceus but this game is basically a shell. I know with each pokemon game release means new anime season means new merch and higher new merch sells but, I feel like the pokemon community would have been alright with waiting a while for the new anime season/premiere if Scarlet and Violet had came out better then Arceus.
It’s not like Pokemon is hurting for sales they can survive a longer wait period and hey, more hype for the game and the series cause people waited so long and there expecting it to be good cause of how long they waited
Pokemon fans absolutely would have been fine, but I don’t think they were really considered on any level with how The Pokemon Company plotted this. They’ve married their development cycle to a multimedia marketing cycle, and that’s where pretty much all of the issues stem from.
It’s pretty much impossible to feel entirely good about the game, even when IMO the improvements to the main gameplay loop are substantial. Another year in the oven would have done wonders for it. I encountered one slightly-bugged fight, and one instance of frame rate negatively impacting gameplay. Not awful, but definitely disappointing.
Pokemon CEO: I would like two pokemon games out this year, ending of Ash’s journey, new pokemon team to focus on and a mountain of merch!
Gamefreak: yes sir!
Pokemon marketing: yes sir!
It would be shocking how different Pokemon sword & shield compared to Arceus then how Scarlet and Violet was and a lot of people would be hyping Pokemon and saying “the games are getting good. Gamefreak has turned the corner we may cheer for them!”
I haven’t encountered any bugs so far but, some of the ones I’ve seen there are both hilarious and horrible