Welcome back.

Last time, we defeated Whitney by giving her a taste of her own medicine. She’s somewhat infamous for the overwhelming strength of her Miltank, and no small part of that perceived power is owed to how often she spams the move Rollout. Unfortunately for her, I showed up with a Rollout user of my own, Winston, and was able to cinch out a KO before Whitney could bowl over my squad of misfits.

With that victory under our belt, it was time to head north to Ecruteak for our fourth gym battle.

Though, I made sure to speak with the gardener who lives beside Whitney’s gym before I left. We’ll need the Squirtbottle that she gives us if we’re going to trigger the fight with Sudowoodo up on Route 36.

I also made 1 final trip (for now) to the Goldenrod Department Store to pick up a copy of Ice Punch for Mabel. With that, we’ve got the full complement of elemental punches, which should give our team a nice spread of attacking types to leverage in upcoming fights. Though, I don’t know if I’m married to Fire Punch on Winston, so I might swap that out for Thunder or Ice Punch in the future.

That said, as I left Goldenrod in the rear view, I realized that there isn’t a whole lot for us to do between now and the fourth gym battle against Morty. We’ve already cleared Route 35, and National Park with Pinellopi, which leaves 4 trainers and a Sudowoodo between us and Ecruteak. Perhaps we didn’t need to recruit Pinellopi so early after all…

Such is the way of things, I suppose.

Anyway, with the roadblock on Route 36 cleared and the remaining 4 trainers bested, I decided to complete the Togepi side quest. I mentioned how we hatched the egg a few posts ago, and our new shortcut back to the beginning of the game makes it a cinch to travel back to Professor Elm’s lab. Unfortunately, I was a little scatterbrained, and forgot to bring Togepi out of computer jail. This meant the whole quest took a little longer than I expected.

For our efforts we were rewarded with an Everstone…and I really wish I’d remembered that so I would’ve known not to bother. It’s been 25 years, and I still don’t know what GameFreak was cooking with this item. I’ve only ever used it to maliciously prank my friends with Haunters. And before you get too mad at me, I did properly trade them the Haunter after I had my laugh so that they could get a Gengar.

Seriously though: why Everstones? Let me know in the comments if you’ve ever used one of these in your playthrough. I’d be curious to know why.

Also, I think it bears mentioning here: travelling around on foot feels so nice in this game. The Cities and Routes are so much smaller in the original Gameboy games, which makes travelling around by walking so much faster when compared to newer titles. That whole quest down to New Bark Town didn’t even take 10 minutes to complete, which is mind blowing. The same trek in a modern game would’ve taken upwards of 30 minutes without fast travel. Say what you will, but the swiftness of travel by foot in these older titles is a huge boon. This is especially true for me since I won’t be using any of the 3 available Pokémon that can learn Fly, so I’ll be doing a lot of walking.

Having said that, it was around this time that I also remembered that I’d forgotten to pick up the goodies from several of the Weekday Siblings. Namely, Frieda on Route 32, Arthur on Route 36, and Sunny on Route 37. As such, we had some time travelling to do.

Funnily enough, I didn’t even know that it was possible to reset the clock in Silver until recently. It’s also super easy. All you need to do is press Down, Select, and B on the start screen. The game will then prompt you for a 5 digit code, and providing the correct one will reset the game clock. From there, you’ll be asked to set a new time when you resume playing your save file.

I learned all of this over on Blue Moon Falls, which has a boatload of articles and tools specifically for classic Pokémon games. One of those aforementioned tools helps to properly generate your 5 digit password reset code, which made the process of actually resetting my game’s clock a breeze. Much love, BMF. I’d have been completely up shit creek without your help.

With a few instances of time travel, I was able to meet with Frieda to grab a Poison Barb, Arthur for a Hard Stone, and Sunny for a Magnet. I couldn’t think of an immediate use for the Poison Barb, but the Hard Stone went to Pinellopi, and the Magnet to Mabel. Hopefully the damage boosts to Rock and Electric moves respectively will assist in future battles.

In fact, I can confirm that was the case as I got a chance to use Mabel’s new Magnet boosted Thunder Punch in Ecruteak during a visit to the Kimono Girl’s dance studio. This resulted in a 2-hit KO against their Vaporeon, which I’m fairly certain she’d have missed without the Magnet.

Besting the remaining sisters awards us with the HM for Surf, which I’m not able to use at present. Obviously, I need Morty’s badge to swim across bodies of water, but I also don’t have a Pokémon that can even learn Surf. That’s a bit of a shame given how it’s one of the best attacks in the game. At 95 power, Surf gives basically any Pokémon that can learn it an outstanding attacking option, especially for this point in the game.

How unfortunate that we’re not able to use it. Yet.

Also, if you were curious, Surf is the reason why almost none of the Water Pokémon that can evolve are available for this run. It is so strong that it makes basically all of them viable in some capacity. Yes – even Seaking.

Regardless, with Surf in tow, I decided it was time for our next rematch with Kevin. You’ll recall that I just about lost our previous confrontation because very few of my Pokémon could actually damage Kevin’s Ghost type Gastly. However, this time I’ve come prepared! We’ve been stockpiling all sorts of different attacking types onto our Pokémon by way of the various TMs that we’ve happened upon on our journey. As such, I’m fairly confident that we can pulverize Kevin’s entire team with ease.

The fight begins much the same as last time with me leading Winston into Kevin’s newly evolved Haunter. However, Winston is no longer saddled with attacks that can’t damage Ghost type Pokémon. Haunter, on the other hand, knows nothing that can damage Winston, save for Curse. He opts to rip that band-aid off immediately, which softens Haunter enough that Winston is able to score the KO after 2 Fire Punches.

Funnily enough, this only triggers Curse once. There’s a bit of a coding quirk in these older Pokémon games wherein the turn immediately ends once a Pokémon faints. This means that damage dealing statuses like burn, poison, and curse won’t trigger their effects as long as you continue to KO the enemy’s Pokémon. This information will become relevant later.

Next up is Kevin’s newly acquired Magnemite who eats a solid chunk of damage from Winston’s Fire Punch. Unfortunately, we missed out on the 1-hit KO, so we take another hit of residual damage. This is very bad. Winston can almost assuredly take out Kevin’s Magnemite, but he’s sustained way too much damage by this point to answer Kevin’s Quilava. That’s kind of a problem since 60% of my team is weak into Fire type attacks. I hadn’t realized this, and effectively wasted my best answer for Quilava on Pokémon that I’d otherwise have no trouble defeating with the rest of my team.

Whoops.

We push forward regardless, and take out the Magnemite, which prompts Kevin to send in his Zubat. I decided that I no longer wished to continue wasting Winston, so I swapped into Mabel who was immediately hit with a Confuse Ray.

Ah yes…confusion. Everyone’s favourite mechanic in Pokémon. And it hasn’t been nerfed yet because of the infamous Ryosuke Kosuge Thundurus incident at Worlds 2013.

…I’m sure you can all see where this is going.

Mabel spent the next 3 turns hitting herself in confusion. Thankfully, on turn 4 she snapped out, and…then she fell just short of a 1-shot with Thunder Punch.

Because we out-speed, we’re able to take out the Zubat on the following turn before it can reapply confusion, but I really don’t like our odds of making it out of this fight now. We effectively don’t have Winston because I’m not sure if he can tank a hit from Quilava, and Mabel is our only Pokémon who might out-speed Quilava. If things go particularly poorly, I think we might just lose this one.

As Quilava hits the field, I make the decision to leave Mabel in. I ultimately decided that a clean switch into Vanessa was more important than preserving Mabel because I wasn’t sure if she would actually out-speed Quilava. As it turns out, she can out-speed, and we score a flinch on our first use of Headbutt. We don’t luck out with another on the following turn, but Mabel was able to deal quite a bit of chip damage to Quilava before she went down. Hopefully, that’ll set-up Vanessa for a lay-up where she can KO the flaming hamster in a single Dig.

Unfortunately, Vanessa gets hit with a Smokescreen before she can tunnel underground. This means that we now have a 1 in 3 chance to miss our Dig. As with the confusion earlier, we’re beholden to a dice roll, and I’m quickly running out of room for mistakes.

Oh, thank God. I was genuinely worried that we were going to lose right there.

Except, we can still lose since Dig fell short of taking out the remainder of Quilava’s health.

That said, we need 1 more Dig to land in order to win this fight. Unfortunately, that means we need to go gambling again. I clicked Dig, bowed my head, and began praying to whichever God was listening.

Fuck.

Well, that puts us in a bit of a pickle.

In what can only be described as a desperate final gambit, I sent in Pinellopi after Quilava downed Vanessa. I wasn’t confident that she could live through an Ember, but I knew for sure that Selfdestruct would defeat Kevin’s stupid gerbil if she did. With baited breath, I clicked Selfdestruct, and stared – unblinking – at the screen hoping that Pinellopi could bring us to victory.

And then, this jackass, used Leer instead of Ember. Go figure.

Anyway, Pinellopi shot his Quilava out of a cannon into an erupting volcano. Selfdestruct (and Explosion) still halve the recipient’s Defence stat during the damage calculations in Silver, so I’m fairly certain that would’ve killed from full. In no uncertain terms, we have turned Kevin’s Quilava into an ash smear. And we even managed to win the battle in the process. Huzzah!

Though, I was, once again, perturbed by how difficult our rival was to defeat. I figured Kevin would be a total slam dunk now that our team has some better coverage options, but we still just about lost that fight. Evidently, I should’ve spent a little bit of time grinding beforehand, so that Vanessa could’ve evolved. That likely would’ve made the difference against Quilava since she’d have had a massive boost to her Attack, and Speed.

With that in mind, I decided to take a brief detour to Mt. Mortar to do a little bit of grinding. More specifically, I wanted to ding Trevor over to level 21, and Vanessa to 22. That’s when both Pokémon evolve, and I figured the extra stats would prove useful in the upcoming fight against Morty.

Funnily enough, while stumbling around in Mt. Mortar, I managed to find a Marill. This is the very first time that I’ve ever seen one of these in Johto since they only have a 1% chance of appearing. Plus, I don’t normally spend much time exploring this place since Mortar is a completely optional area.

That said, Marill is an eligible encounter, and we do need a Pokémon that can Surf. So…I decided to catch it.

Meet [Captain] Sbeve who will only be on the team temporarily. I already had someone else in mind for our Water type Pokémon. Also, I’ve used Marill a ton in Emerald version, and it seems much the same here in Silver. Ergo, I’d rather use something a little less familiar.

Anyway, Trevor dings over to 21 giving us our second evolution: Weepinbell. Unfortunately, Trevor will be stuck as a Weepinbell until the post-game because the only Leaf Stone is locked behind a side-quest in Kanto. That aside, he’ll likely continue to provide a ton of utility thanks to Sleep Powder. Plus, his attacking stats massively shot up, which will help to compensate for the lower power of his attacks.

I got a little impatient at this point, and decided to tackle Morty’s gym before Vanessa evolved. Thankfully, Vanessa could still 1-shot everything in here with Dig, so she too was able to evolve.

Gosh. Arbok sure is a scary looking Pokémon.

With her newfound power, Vanessa tore through the remainder of the gym trainers, which finally set us up for Morty. He’s typically a challenging foe because of his fully evolved Gengar, but I’m feeling a lot better about our odds now that we have our own menagerie of evolved Pokémon.

Unfortunately, I’d argue that we almost did too well thanks to these new evolutions. Vanessa, in particular, did such a good job that I don’t actually have anything interesting to share about how the fight went. She swept through the entirety of Morty’s team with very little pushback. In fact, she didn’t even take damage throughout the entire fight. So much for Morty’s fully evolved Gengar being a substantial threat…

Though I have to say: what a redemption for Vanessa. I know she’s been picking up speed ever since we threw Headbutt onto her back at Ilex Forest, but she absolutely dunked on Morty’s entire gym without even breaking a sweat. That’s a crazy glow-up compared to the struggle of using her in battle when we first caught her back on Route 32.

With Morty under our belt, we have a decision to make. Silver version is one of few Pokémon games where the gym leader order isn’t strictly linear. You can choose to hoof it down to Olivine City and begin the Lighthouse quest, or you can head East to Mahogany Town to begin the Lake of Rage quest. Typically, I opt to handle Lake of Rage first, though I don’t think there is a tangible benefit to tackling one questline over the other. 

That said, by doing Mahogany Town first, we can challenge Pryce, and unlock the ability to use Whirlpool before we pass the Whirl Islands. That’s of particular note given which Pokémon I’d like to run in our final team slot. Guess in the comments if you think you know who it is!

As such, we head East using Captain Sbeve to cross all of the water that sits between us and Mahogany Town.

Nothing particularly noteworthy happens during our trek up to Lake of Rage, but I am noticing that Winston feels particularly weak relative to the rest of our team. Evidently, Vanessa, Trevor, and Mabel all evolving over the last leg of our adventure has left our OG powerhouse a little behind the curve.

That said, we should get the Moon Stone as a gift from our mother soon, which we can use to evolve Winston. I was thinking about holding out for Body Slam, but I realized that we can get Return at the Goldenrod Department Store, and that’s a strictly better option. Ergo, there’s no reason to hold off on evolving Winston as soon as we’re able to do so.

Also, we put the Red Gyarados out of its misery since it is way too powerful for our team. Besides, if we caught it then it would’ve had to spend the rest of the run in computer jail, so I’d much rather take the experience from actually defeating it.

Anyway, we talk to Lance after beating the Gyarados, to trigger the quest line that’ll see us invading the Rocket Hideout in Mahogany Town. But, you’ll have to wait until next time to find out how that goes, since Ecruteak took way longer to cover than I anticipated. Hopefully, next time we’ll get through the Rocket hideout, and Pryce’s gym. I doubt we’ll make it much farther, but I suppose we’ll see when we get there.

Thank you, as always, for reading, and I’ll see you next time.

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