And we’re back.
Last time, we managed to beat Falkner after a fairly rough start in the early-game routes. That said, Winston proved to be quite a powerhouse once he learned a damaging move, which was a vast improvement over slugging through every fight with Mabel.
Regardless, a few things have opened up for us now that we’ve beaten Falkner. Namely, a handful of additional encounters. The first of these is the mystery egg from Professor Elm’s assistant, which will eventually hatch into a Togepi. I’m not planning to use Togepi, but hatching it is linked to a quest. As such, I thought it best to hatch the egg while our team is relatively small.
We also hadn’t tackled Sprout Tower yet because of how scuffed the run has been thus far, so I decided to check that off before heading South to Azalea Town. Though, I’m fairly certain this area is completely optional in the original Gen 2 games. Either way, Mabel quad resists just about everything in here, so she’s able to clean house.
While completing the Tower, I also remembered that Tuscany (and her menagerie of siblings) were now available, so I popped back to Route 29 briefly to obtain the Pink Bow. This further aided in Mabel’s domination of the Sprout Tower by ever so slightly buffing the damage of her otherwise soft Tackles.
As a reminder, the Pink Bow grants a 10% damage increase to all Normal type moves to whichever Pokémon is holding it. I deliberately started my run on a Tuesday so that I could scoop this item up before the first gym. However, Tuscany didn’t appear until after we cleared Falkner. Hence the momentary detour back to Route 29.
Other than that, nothing of note happens in the remainder of Sprout Tower. Though Mabel does pick up a solid lead on the rest of our party thanks to her dominant performance against the army of Bellsprout within the tower.
With Sprout Tower sorted, I believe we’ve cleared everything in Violet City. For now. So it’s time to head South along Route 32 towards Azalea Town. This also marked the point where we’d be adding a new member to our team: Vanessa the Ekans.
I’ll be perfectly honest, across my 20+ years of playing Pokémon, I don’t know that I’ve ever used an Ekans. It just sort of screams, “I’m the kind of shit that only Team Rocket Grunts catch.” That’s probably unfair, but Ekans is definitely a Pokémon that’s remained eternally typecast within the bowels of my brain.
Though, I believe the other reason for why I’ve never used it stems from how few games actually feature Ekans as a catchable Pokémon. I don’t know if it even makes an appearance outside of Johto, and Kanto. Plus, it’s one of the version exclusives I’m locked out of using in both of the Kanto games that I own.
However, that changed today as I wanted to run an Arbok on our team. It has fairly OK stats relative to the other critters that we’re allowed to run throughout this challenge. Plus, it’s a solid home for the Dig, and Sludge Bomb TMs, which both come relatively early in our journey. As such, I’m hopeful that Vanessa will serve as a strong offensive backbone to our team in much the same way as Winston.
It’s also worth noting that Poison is a fairly compelling type defensively in Silver. There are a lot of Poison type attackers littered across the game, thanks to numerous run-ins with Team Rocket. As such, having a Pokémon that resists Poison is always a solid play.
Unfortunately, Vanessa starts off rough, which seems to be a recurring trend with the bulk of the Pokémon we’ve been recruiting. Unlike Winston, Vanessa knows a damaging move, but it is the substantially nerfed Wrap. This move does far less damage than Tackle, and has a lower accuracy. In exchange, Wrap deals residual damage every turn. Though, this proves to be so inconsequential that it’d have been better if Vanessa was just tackling everything like the rest of our team.
Against my better judgment, I spent the next half-hour trying to score unassisted KOs with Vanessa against wild Pokémon. Unfortunately, this went horribly. She’s not exactly built to take hits as an Ekans, and Wrap works too slowly to score quick wins. As such, I ended up falling back on switch training, so Vanessa could siphon EXP from the rest of the team. Though, this felt quite protracted since Ekans levels up much slower than anyone else on our team.
Actually, side tangent for a second here. You know what has always bugged me? The community names for the different experience groups in Pokémon. Ekans is part of the Medium-Fast group, which requires 1 million experience points to reach level 100. This means that Vanessa would reach level 100 before Trevor who is part of the Medium-Slow group.
However, all Medium-Slow Pokémon reach level 50 before Pokémon in the Medium-Fast group. In fact, they reach level 50 about 7% faster. And that’s without accounting for how the first 20 levels of Pokémon in Medium-Slow rival Pokémon (like Mabel, and Winston) in the Fast experience group.
That’s all a really long way of saying that I hate the community names for different experience groups because it never accurately reflects my experience training these goobers.
Anyway, I continued slowly switch training Vanessa throughout the remainder of Route 32, so she could start to catch up to the rest of the team.
That aside, the only noteworthy bit of the route was that Trevor easily cleaned up the Fishermen, and their army of Water type Pokémon. That might seem like a small thing to call out, but Grass Pokémon, especially Chikorita, are often maligned by the community for how bad they are in the Johto games. That said, Trevor defied the stereotype by handing us some of our easiest wins thus far since he could swap into resisted Water attacks, and cleave through the competition with Super Effective Vine Whips.
The same proves true a little further on within Union Cave where our team otherwise didn’t have an answer to the Geodude and Onix laden Hikers. Again, I know that Grass gets a bum rap in these games, but there are plenty of smaller opportunities for the type to shine with route trainer fights. Doubly so since team options are so limited this earlier on in the game, so having an advantageous match-up into Pokémon that resist Normal attacks is kind of a big deal.
And I’m aware that the counterpoint here would be that gym leaders are the hardest fights, so they’re the only ones worth considering while evaluating a Pokémon’s overall viability. However, a solid 98% of the game isn’t boss fights, and I don’t actually think they’re that much harder than the surrounding trainers. I dunno. I guess I’m trying to say there is more to a Pokémon’s potential viability (especially in older games) aside from how well it matches into the game’s bosses.
Speaking of bosses, I forgot to mention that Falkner gave us the TM for Mud Slap upon being defeated. I’m mentioning that now because we also happened upon the TM for Swift, which would be a fairly beefy upgrade for Mabel. Plus, it never misses, which would be a nice bit of utility.
However, I ultimately decided to sit on both attacks for now because I wasn’t sure if I’d need them later on. One of the defining characteristics of most available encounters for this run is how poor their level-up learnsets are. As such, I’m a little more beholden to TMs when it comes to fleshing out a Pokémon’s attacks than I otherwise would be. This meant that I was a lot more hesitant to make use of these rare 1-time use items than I normally would be.
Ultimately, I think this proved to be the wrong call. The game is balanced around players having access to these powerful moves, so it would’ve made more sense to use them instead of hoarding them for a potentially non-existent use case in the future.
Either way, we pushed through the remainder of Union Cave, and waltzed into Azalea Town. This marks our first of several run-ins with Team Rocket. In this case, we needed to challenge them at the Slowpoke Well, which proves to be uneventful. Though Vanessa did manage to get KO’d by a Rattata during the first fight.
Honestly, Vanessa has been such a bum Pokémon so far. Ekans has nothing to work with when you’re able to catch it. That will change soon, but, for now, training Vanessa has been a Sisyphean task. She can’t even take out Pokémon of an equal level because the combination Wrap, and the newly acquired Poison Sting just do nothing for her. I pray that changes with access to Headbutt, and Dig, but for now we’re suffering.
With the Rockets sorted, Azalea’s gym opened up for us, which is a good thing because we were starting to approach the level cap of 16. I was a little surprised by this, but I suppose having 2 team members in the Fast experience group – Mabel, and Winston – has its perks.
Speaking of Winston, he absolutely smoked the majority of the gym trainers with STAB Pounds. I know he hasn’t gotten a ton of screen time yet in this post, but he’s been quietly carrying the team through any fight that doesn’t have Rock, or Fighting type Pokémon. Basically any time someone falls short of scoring a KO, Winston is there to swoop in and clean things up. He’s also just really good at slugging through tougher encounters like Bug Catcher Benny’s Beedrill, which otherwise would’ve given my team a bit of trouble.
It’s also worth noting that I attempted to torture Benny’s poor Kakuna by hitting it with Disable, which Winston picked up at level 14. This normally would’ve forced it to begin damaging itself with Struggle as I disabled its only attack, but Winston is such a beast that he was able to KO the Kakuna before it could start hitting itself.
With all of the mooks sorted, it was time to take on the gym’s leader: Bugsy. As with Falkner, I didn’t really have a strategy for the fight outside of hoping that Winston could punch holes through all opposition with STAB Pounds. Though Trevor leveraging the recently acquired Sleep Powder was my back-up plan.
Regardless, I decided to lead with Winston, and put Bugsy’s Metapod to sleep. This was followed by 3 defence raises courtesy of Defence Curl. I was really worried about Bugsy’s Ace, Scyther, so I decided it made the most sense to set up defensive boosts against his less threatening Pokémon. This proved to be correct as Winston was able to punch holes through both Bugsy’s Metapod, and Kakuna while sustaining very little damage in turn.
OK. Now it’s time for the big kahuna: Scyther.
For this point in the game, Scyther is a frankly absurd Pokémon to fight. It has a Base Stat total of 500, which is, no joke, higher than almost every single Pokémon that we’re allowed to catch throughout this challenge run. On top of that, its stats are allocated such that it hits fast, and hard. This means that Scyther has a good chance of knocking our critters out before they’ve even had a chance to do anything themselves.
On top of that, Bugsy’s Scyther packs a particularly nefarious strategy. It makes use of the attack Fury Cutter, which gets stronger with each successive use. This means that Bugsy can realistically snowball through the player’s entire team if they attempt to fight him without preparation.
It’s for both of these reasons that I decided to stack so many Defence boosts earlier in the fight. I figured it was my best shot of giving Winston room to breath while chipping down Scyther. And if that failed then I was going to pick a God and pray.
Thankfully, that wasn’t necessary because Winston is the Goat. Despite the 55% accuracy, Winston managed to land a Disable, which cut Bugsy off from using Fury Cutter. With Scyther neutered, Winston had a very easy time chipping through its HP, while it failed to meaningfully return damage. Thus, we scored our second gym badge, and a copy of Fury Cutter for ourselves.
Unfortunately, Fury Cutter is learnable by exactly 1 Pokémon that we can catch in our run: Rhydon. What makes this such a bummer is that Rhydon isn’t obtainable until just before the Pokémon League, so…I guess we can put Fury Cutter in the garbage.
Regardless, with the second badge secured, there wasn’t anything left for us to do in Azalea Town, so I decided to depart for our next destination: Ilex Forest.
There’s just one problem – Kevin ambushes us as we attempt to leave town, and challenges us to a battle. This time he’s come prepared with a few additions to his starter Pokémon who has evolved into a Quilava. Given my team’s composition, I was most worried about Quilava, but it actually turned out to be his Gastly that gave us the most problems. Recall that I leveraged Trevor quite a bit through Union Cave specifically because 90% of my damaging moves are Normal Type attacks, which do very little damage to Rock type Pokémon. By that same logic, I have almost no way to damage this stupid Gastly because Ghost types are completely immune to Normal type attacks.
All hope is not lost though: Vanessa, and Trevor both know attacks that aren’t Normal type. Unfortunately, both of them are resisted by Gastly. Oh joy. Well, let’s test the waters with Vanessa, and see how much damage a Poison Sting does:
Oh boy. That damage was after 2 defence drops by the way.
Okay. Trevor, it’s all you.
Right out the gate, Trevor gets paralyzed by a Lick, but this turns out to be a bit of a blessing. This is because Gastly knows Hypnosis. While paralysis is annoying, it doesn’t shut us down in quite the same way that sleep would.
Speaking of, we pop Sleep Powder on the following turn to lull Kevin’s Gastly to sleep before we start chunking it down with some fairly beefy Vine Whips. I was a little surprised by the damage, but Trevor is no slouch on offense and Gastly isn’t exactly known for its defensive prowess. This sees the pesky ghost going down after 3 attacks, which gives us a proper fighting chance against the remainder of Kevin’s team.
Also, it bears repeating, but Trevor is, once again, beating the Grass types are bad allegations. Yes, basically any other coverage move would’ve bailed us out here just as well, but Sleep Powder – a move that’s almost exclusively learned by Grass Pokémon – helped to level the playing field. Without it, Trevor would’ve fallen to Gastly thanks to a few nasty paralysis turns.
From there, the remainder of the fight was completely 1-sided. Winston defeated Kevin’s Quilava without breaking a sweat, and Mabel was able to best his Zubat thanks to her quad-resistance to Zubat’s only damaging move: Leech Life.
While we may have won, I will need to better prepare for Kevin’s Gastly in the future. If I’d taught Winston Mud Slap before this fight, then I would’ve had a perfect counter. It’s precisely what I was talking about earlier with regard to not using TMs. The game outright gave us a Super Effective move to counter Gastly, which most early-game Pokémon learn. I should’ve used it, so I wasn’t put in such a precarious situation while fighting Kevin.
Message received game. I will be making much more liberal use of TMs going forward, though that was always my plan with Goldenrod being just around the corner.
Regardless, it’s off to Ilex Forest where we run into a minor roadblock. The only way through the forest is with Cut, which we don’t currently possess. Thankfully, there is a quest within the forest that awards the technique. We simply need to return a lost Farfetch’d to its trainer, and we’ll receive the technique as a reward for our troubles. That’ll allow us to clear small trees, and continue through Ilex Forest to Route 34.
Small non-sequitor: I can not believe how much better this quest is in the older games compared to the newer ones. Ilex Forest is maybe a third (maybe even a quarter?) of the size that it is in the Nintendo DS remakes of the Gen 2 games. This means that the quest takes almost no time to finish as we’re able to locate, and escort the lost Pokémon in record time. Say what you will about the older games, but the smaller maps do help to keep exploration, and travel time from becoming tedious.
Either way, we received Cut for rescuing the lost Farfetch’d, which I decided to throw on Trevor. Well, I say decide, but there wasn’t much of a decision to make. He was the only Pokémon in our party who could learn Cut. In a sense, the decision was made for us.
But with Cut in tow, we were finally able to traverse to the other side of Ilex Forest.
And that is where I’m going to book-end part 3. I’ve actually written most of Part 4 already because I wanted to get through Bugsy, and Whitney in the same post. Unfortunately, covering both bosses took way more words than I originally anticipated. As such, you’ll need to tune in next time to figure out how I got on with Johto’s most infamous boss fight.
As always, thanks for reading, and I hope to see you in the next one.
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Frostilyte Writes 