Back at it again with another pokemon playthrough, this time going all the way back to gen 1 and playing yellow! I had been playing this on and off again for a few years now, but finally wrapped things up a couple months ago. Those old sprites are fascinating. Similarly, I thought it would be fun to shake up the usual team drawing doing this in the original Game Boy colors!
Team stats and general gameplay info under the cut:
"Sunnie", Pikachu, Thunderbolt - Quick Attack - Double Team - Body Slam
Gameplay total settled at nearly 20 hours! One of the shorter ones, I'd say; though, then again, there isn't really much to do in this game aside from the gyms and Team Rocket stuff.
We went in to the E4 with the whole team at level 45! Something that didn't go well in my old LeafGreen playthrough, but was perfectly fine here. The E4 wasn't that bad at all, honestly.
Kanto is not nearly good enough to deserve all the times I've played through it. I am so tired of Kanto and I'm not even done with it yet (I'm midway through a SoulSilver randomized apocalocke which, of course, has Kanto in the postgame, and I'm doing another LeafGreen run for some reason).
Okay okay so look you can see the mew on my team, I thought it'd be fun to have a mew! I missed the spots you're ideally supposed to perform the glitch in. I had just finished Cerulean City and then realized that the trainers I needed for the glitch were in that city! And I had already beaten them! I ended up using a dugtrio in diglett cave instead. It wasn't very consistent, took me a few tries, but eventually I got it.
Fun fact! At one point I was going to do a yellow nuzlocke! I ended up getting bored and realized I just wanted to play through yellow regularly, so here we are. In that run I caught Frumky though, which is actually what won me over enough to want to use her again in my actual yellow playthrough. It was actually that save where I traded with myself to get an alakazam back in my gold playthrough.
Gen 1 is so funny with how broken it is. I got so much joy in describing to my roommate all the fucked up things that were happening in-game.
Hey. Come here. Listen closely: I don't think parasect is as bad as everyone says it is. Even with the multiple x4 weaknesses in gen 1. Spesk was the mvp in a lot of fights, they packed a punch. Lovely little critter.
...Wish I could speak high praises for gen 1 flareon though. I enjoyed using Beast! But they really just don't get access to a lot of good moves. Beast had their moments, but ultimately didn't get as much screen time as I had hoped.
Similarly, dewgong? Not as good as I hoped. It really isn't quite as beefy as I had in mind. Poor thing. Again, still had fun with them on the team!
Having pikachu following me around and checking in with them whenever will never not be cute. We've been robbed of quality following pokemon in the modern games.
I was thinking about symbolism in storytelling, particularly about rain. I think when asked to remember a scene in a story that had rain, many people first mention funeral scenes. The heavy downpour that reflects a heavy heart.
But I like to think of balance in symbolism, so when considering this I tried to think of the flip side, of positive rain symbolism.
I thought of scenes where a character runs out smiling in to the rain and the story says "this is a new beginning, they're finally happy". I think of at the end of the Lion King where it begins to rain during the big climatic battle at the end, and continues to rain as Simba steps up to roar and reclaim the throne.
What those all have in common is the idea of change, of rebirth, in a sense. Rain represents change, for better or for worse to the characters. It rains when a character slowly trudges home after an argument with a close friend. It rains as two acquaintances run under a shared jacket for shelter and laugh together as they learn to understand each other more. Rain washes in the old and awaits the new. Characters are scared of change, characters embrace the change, characters are washed away with it.
Let your stories have rain. Let the characters laugh in it, cry in it, scream into it, and let them grow because of it.
Back in October 2020, my good friend @tikki-tok (i.e @tikki-makes-art ) decided to start a Platinum playthrough together! We got into the Hall of Frame on March 12th, 2021, and after exploring some of the post game, we decided to follow my long standing tradition of drawing my team after beating a pokemon game, by collaborating on the art piece together. I did the sketch, Tikki did the lineart, I did the coloring, and then Tikki finished it off with the background and lighting effects!
We had tons of fun playing the game and coming up with this drawing, so now without further ado, some team info and playthrough commentary under the cut!
Team Tikki, in the order they were caught (Name, Species, Sex, Moveset):
“Paprika”, Infernape, ♀, Close Combat - Mach Punch - Fire Blast - Grass Knot
We played every Tuesday evening until we beat the game and explored as much as the post game as we could (I’ll get back to that in a moment) Which for me brings us to the in-game time of nearly 39 hours. I believe that Tikki’s in-game time was about ten hours more than mine because she spent a lot of time, among other things, actually doing honey tree shenanigans and catching extra pokemon (which had to be trained up).
Speaking of, the final team they used for the Elite Four was not all the pokemon used by Tikki during the playthrough! It was just the team that he felt was best suited for tackling the league with. Some other honorable mentions of teammates for her are: “Syrup” the Bibarel, “Titanium” the Heracross, “Majesty” the Vespiquen, and “Lancer” the Roselia.
Actually funny story, while Tikki was off using several pokemon at once and just switching the roster every now and again, I sat with a party of five for most of the game! I told myself I’d only use glaceon if I didn’t have a full team by then, because I love glaceon but you can only get it by the seventh gym, which in most instances would be way too late in the game to be adding new team members, but for me? I never found a different pokemon I wanted to round the team out, so Tempest got to come along after all!
Okay back to the post game, turns out Platinum’s post game is really weird?? You have to fill out the regional dex to access certain bits, which for a game that just seeing each pokemon fills out the dex slot, is reasonable, except that manaphy is part of that dex and you cannot see a manaphy in Platinum without trading or having Pokemon Rangers. Unless we were both missing something, we were forced to miss out on some of the cool bits of that whole northern island of Sinnoh.
When we fought the E4, we had trained both our teams up to at least level 45 (though half my team was at least level 50), which is still quite a bit low for Cynthia, but we made it work.
Tikki, however, tried going through the game without using healing items, and this extended to the E4. The E4 was so difficult for her with that rule that they had to reload the save and ditch the rule last minute.
Everyone in Sinnoh has ADHD. Sorry we don’t make the rules.
Because I was playing on an emulator and sometimes experienced lag, and Tikki was playing on an actual DS but sometimes knocked the cartridge out of place and had to reload saves, we started making the semi-joking headcanon that we were connected to space/Palkia and time/Dialga respectively, which then escalated to our rivals being connected to Arceus and Giratina.
Speaking of, because I was playing the female trainer and Tikki chose the male trainer, our Professor’s assistant rivals were swapped, so to make things easier in conversation, we started calling Lucas/Dawn “Sapling” instead.
Also! We came up with the headcanon that the in-game mother character, Johanna, kinda looks after trainers who are away from home and helps support them on their journey. Since she also gives you the costume outfits and I am not a fan of dresses but Tikki liked how the dress looked, we like to imagine that she meant to give me the suit and them the dress but accidentally gave me the dress and them the suit, so we just swapped.
Why were there so many npcs that talked about being starving while standing next to berry trees? Is this a Sinnoh thing? Why is no one eating?
The seventh gym was really funny because I just swept with Zest using earthquake, and due to a flinch on the steelix with the kings rock, I never saw a single one of the gym leader’s attacks. I finished it so fast, in fact, that Tikki hadn’t even started, so I just said “I’d give you advice on how to beat the gym but I didn’t even see what it had to offer”
All in all, we both had a really fun time and I would highly recommend the Platinum experience! The AI is the best I think it ever has been for pokemon so it even poses a good enough challenge on top of just being a really fun time.
Anyone else ever think about why Belos brought the basilisks back from extinction? It obviously isn’t for any environmental reasons, he really isn’t that kind of guy, and besides, he’s just been hiding them in his basement doing experiments. He wants to use them for something, but what?
I propose that evidence of a possible motivation can be seen all the way back in the first time we get to see a basilisk in the show, back when it attacks Hexside. There we see that witches using only one kind of magic cannot stand a chance against a basilisk, however a witch using even just one other kind of magic causes the basilisk to struggle.
Belos has all witches divided into covens where they are limited to only one kind of magic, aside from his own coven, which can use any kind.
You can probably see where I’m going with this.
By Belos having his own mini army of basilisks, any time a witch in a coven tries stepping out of line, he can have a basilisk eat all their magic, eliminating the problem. Of course there’s still the Emperor’s Coven itself and wild witches, but the former he can keep a closer eye on anyway and the latter are the minority and constantly being hunted down even before basilisks are taken into the equation.
Emperor Belos has brought back the basilisks to use as a weapon against other witches, because they can’t fight back against basilisks with only one kind of magic.
(Alternatively, he wants to study them to extract some of their abilities. The magic eating especially, but the shapeshifting is something that could also be handy to Belos.)
Consider: Movie or book or other story with a genie where the human who owns the lamp is really smart and plans their wishes ahead. They spend a bunch of time writing out their wishes one at a time to be specific enough to avoid any malicious loopholes, and then wait up to a couple weeks in between wishes to make sure that things turn out exactly how they had hoped.
Except that the genie isn’t actually malicious, and is hurt that the human distrusts them so much. They’re really just a friendly genie who likes helping people! They don’t want the human to feel so worried about them, so they start trying to learn non-wish ways to help out a bit and show that they’re friendly.
Cue awhile of the genie learning new human customs, while the human themself is just confused, wondering at first if the genie is just trying to get their guard down, but eventually realizing that the genie really is just trying to be kind.
And then maybe for a cute ending, the genie gets really attached to human life and the human trusts them enough to consider them a friend, so for the last wish they write out one last hyper-specific wish, this time for the purpose of allowing the genie to stick around as a human (but probably still with magic powers because why not) without any strings attached so they can remain friends together.
Yes!! The fact that the only reason she never got one is because the Erins could not think of one at the time is such a rip off. I think it could have been neat to explore a dynamic where one sibling doesn’t have a power but the others do, kind of like what happened with Dovewing and Ivypool, but that didn’t happen at all with Hollyleaf, they just wrote her out completely and it’s very disappointing.
The “Hollyleaf should have had a power” argument has been made a lot and there’s a lot better explanations as to why online elsewhere that anyone could probably find, but I will put my vote in that the fan idea of Hollyleaf’s power having to do with making people speak the truth is very cool.
However, I will add to the argument that regardless of whatever Hollyleaf’s power could have been, it would have been better than Dovewing having a power. Nothing against Dovewing as a character, but she is too many “kins” estranged from the “kin of your kin” part of the prophecy to fit. “But the specific number doesn’t matter!” you may say, but everything else suggests that it matters a lot! So many times whenever the prophecy is mentioned it specifies how the three will be related to Firestar.
Cloudtail is actually the other relative of Firestar that fits “kin of your kin” (Cloudtail is Princess’s kin who is Firestar’s kin), not Dovewing (Dovewing is Whitewing’s kin who is Cloudtail’s kin who is Princess’s kin who is Firestar’s kin).
Anyway, Hollyleaf should have had a power, or at the very least I think that an AU where Cloudtail is the third would be incredibly funny.
Okay so I realized something about warriors that I haven't really seen anyone else bring up and that's that the protags never have big families.
Firestar has siblings but Princess is only interacted with a bit during the first series and no one else, Brambleclaw only really talked to Hawkfrost and didn't (still doesn't) do much with either of his sisters, Squirrelflight and Leafpool are just the both of them, Leafpool only had a litter of three, Ivypool and Dovewing don't have any other siblings, Alderheart just has Sparkpelt, etc etc you get the idea.
Realistically, cats can have more kits, and sure asking for realism is warriors is a bit silly, and I can see why they never give characters large litters since we already have so many characters as it is, but I think it could be really interesting for the story to have a protag with like five siblings or something.
Protag feels like they need to stand out because they have so many siblings and it's hard to be noticed as an individual, maybe one of the parents unintentionally favors one kit over the the rest and protag feels left out, you could even have moments where protag feels like they don't really know their siblings much at all and feels guilty about it.
Also, a lot of people (rightfully) complain about how families never seem to care about each other or other clanmates and really interact like a community, so this could be a way to explore that idea where the protag finds it hard to talk to anyone and gets mistaken for one of their siblings a bunch and whatnot.
Maybe if the Erins wanted to cut down the characters afterwards, you could have something happen and all of protags siblings are killed, leaving the protag with some internal conflict about maybe secretly feeling happy to be the only child but feeling guilty about thinking that way, and/or they have trouble adjusting to not having such a large family anymore where camp feels just a little bit quieter and they wish they had spent more time getting to know their siblings.
Idk! I doubt this would ever happen in canon because that would be too many major (or at least major minor) characters for the Erins to want to keep track of, but at the same time it feels like such a missed opportunity to explore, especially back when the clans weren't 50+ cats each. Could be fun to explore in fics at least.
Here’s my minesona with the lovely template by @blocky-blaze!! This was really fun to use, I don’t use templates like this often but I really enjoyed this.
I’m unfortunately stuck using pocket edition most of the time so I haven’t really honed any battling skills, or that much parkour. Backstory is actually a lot longer because I spent awhile making up Minecraft world history and character backstories, but there wasn’t enough room here so I’m happy leaving it simple like that! Also I love endermen and creepers but when actually playing creepers always spook me too much, so enders are my fav mob.
