Before we begin the next leg of the journey, we must first take a few steps back in time. There was a brief detour before we reached Cianwood that I deliberately omitted from the previous entry of this series because the whole thing flowed better by simply focusing on the 2 back-to-back gym fights.
That said, we must now address how I came into possession of our team’s 6th, and final member: Daisy Jr.
Previously, I had mentioned that there were 2 reasons for why I tend to tackle the Rocket Hideout ahead of the Lighthouse. Those reasons were as follows:
- Doing the Rocket Hideout first makes the Rocket related plot points flow better across the game’s story since they aren’t smashed back-to-back
- I like having EXP Share earlier in my playthrough
However, there was also a secret third reason, specific to this playthrough, for why I wanted to tackle Pryce before Chuck, or Jasmine: earlier access to the Whirl Islands. Taking on Pryce as our fifth gym meant that I’d both have the HM for Whirlpool, and the ability to use it much earlier in my playthrough. Ergo, a few additional encounters would become open to us at a much earlier stage in the game.
Well…I say encounters, but it should really just be encounter. Singular. Horsea. And a big congratulations to anyone who figured that out ahead of time.
Though, I’m only now realizing as I write this that it was incredibly obvious which Pokémon I was gunning for. If you reference that image I shared in Part 1 then you can plainly see Seadra is the only new encounter available after we obtain 5 badges. So…there wasn’t much of a mystery to unravel there.
As far as why I narrowed in on Seadra for my Water type of choice, the reason is simple: I needed another Dragonite killer. Mabel’s Ice Punches are great, but I don’t want to burden her with the responsibility of having to take out Lance’s entire army of mythical chuds. Thankfully, Seadra packs a Speed stat that’ll see it outrunning all of Lance’s Dragons, and it also learns Aurora Beam. This combination of attributes should give it a leg (fin?) up in battle when we’re finally facing down Lance’s team.
However, I’ll fully admit that Seadra’s inclusion as an available encounter for this challenge confuses me. I think the logic was that it can’t fully evolve into Kingdra (without trading), so it’s considered…bad?
I would like for the record to show that Seaking is not considered an eligible encounter for this run.
Neither is Kingler, Qwilfish, or Lanturn.
That’s not to say that any of the above Pokémon should be included as eligible encounters. Rather, I’m a little surprised Seadra made the cut when all of those aforementioned Pokémon are at, or (arguably) below the power-level of Seadra itself.
I dunno. Maybe the list’s author was cooking something I’m too pea-brained to understand, but I don’t think being cut-off from Kingdra necessitates a bottom-tier placement. At least, I don’t think it does in this game.
That aside, if we want to use Aurora Beam on Seadra we have a little extra legwork to put in before we add it to the team. That’s because Seadra doesn’t learn Aurora Beam naturally via level-up. Instead, it learns it via egg moves. So you know what that means: we get to talk about breeding in Generation 2.
Oh boy. Where do I even begin?
I suppose for starters, I can explain how egg moves even function for those of you who aren’t familiar with Pokémon breeding whatsoever.
The short version is that every Pokémon learns a subset of moves, referred to as egg moves, which can only be obtained through breeding. This is done by pairing a male Pokémon who knows the egg move with a female Pokémon of the species that you wish to inherit the egg move.
So, what we’re trying to do here is teach Aurora Beam to Horsea. As such, we need a female Horsea, which we can capture at Whirl Islands, and we’ll need to pair her with a male Pokémon that knows Aurora Beam. Then we’ll receive an egg that contains a Horsea that knows Aurora Beam.
Thankfully, our male Pokémon that knows Aurora Beam can also be found in the Whirl Islands too: Seel. Even better, Seel can be caught between levels 22 and 26, so it’ll always know Aurora Beam. That means we won’t pervert the sanctity of our run by (briefly) training an invalid Pokémon. We can simply catch our casanova, and subject him to terrible forced eugenics in pursuit of the perfect Horsea.
That said, I’m putting the cart ahead of the horse here because we haven’t caught either of the Pokémon that we need to pull this off.
To start, I decided it’d be easier to go after Horsea. In the basement of the islands, it can be found with a 90% encounter rate while surfing, so it didn’t take long to bag and tag an appropriate candidate. I decided to call her Daisy, which is why her daughter is named Daisy Jr.
Then we just had to find a male Seel. Holy mother of God did this take some doing. Seel only has a 15% encounter rate, which isn’t bad on its face. However, when you factor in that we’re looking for a male Seel specifically, the odds for encountering are reduced to 7.5%, which is…kinda poopy.
Worse yet, the game seemed to be against me during this entire stretch. Across 30 minutes of searching, almost every Seel that I found was female. And the 1 male Seel was KO’d immediately by a Critical Hit. Talk about unlucky. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have sworn that the game had a grudge, but that’s obviously not the case. Though, it certainly felt that way.
Regardless, I eventually found a male Seel, named him Broof, and shuffled over to Route 34 to deposit both he, and Daisy at the Daycare.
Now, this is where I made, yet another, of the critical mistakes that’ve continued to season my run. You see, I naively assumed that the odds of creating an egg had remained static throughout Pokémon’s entire history. Unfortunately, that is not the case. In fact, GameFreak has tweaked the numbers on breeding several times throughout the series’ lifetime.
That can mean 1 of 2 things. Either, breeding was significantly over-tuned in its first iteration and needed to be nerfed, or it was under-tuned and needed to be buffed.
Can you guess which it was?
It was the bad one.
The easiest way that I can articulate this is with numbers. In modern games, you have a 50% chance of receiving an egg after you take 256 steps provided both Pokémon that you left in the Daycare are the same species. This 50% chance is knocked down to 20% if they’re different species.
This is what I erroneously assumed we’d be working with. 1 in 5 odds ain’t great, but they’re workable.
So what exactly are we working with in Silver?
4%.
Technically 3.9% because it’s a 10 in 256 chance. We have higher odds of scoring a Critical Hit in battle than we do of getting an egg from a mismatched breeding pair. These are absolutely cursed odds. It’s no wonder why I was permanently traumatized into thinking Pokémon breeding was terrible until I started using the mechanic again in Generations 5 and 6 where the odds of producing an egg are significantly higher.
Anyway, I only realized that we were on a doomed expedition after I’d committed to breeding this Horsea, so I turned on some Youtube videos, and locked in.
If you’re at all curious, I was listening to Jason Schreier the entire time. I’ve read a couple of his books (all but the most recent – I’m still waiting on my local library for Play Nice), and found out that he recently started a Youtube channel. On it, Schreier breaks down topics that relate to video game production, and the logic behind certain financial decisions within the industry. For example, while I was filming the footage for this post, I was listening to his videos about GTA VI, the end of game discs, and Double Fine’s exodus from Microsoft. Basically anything he puts out is incredibly insightful, especially given how much of a black box the game’s industry still is.
Plus, Schreier usually includes gift links to his articles over on Bloomberg, so you can read otherwise pay-walled articles for free too.
Editor’s notes: after writing, and rewriting this section, I will never again need to Google how to spell this man’s name…
Anyway, after several videos, we finally got our 4% egg, and could begin the mind-numbing process of hatching it. Unfortunately, Pokémon abilities aren’t yet a thing, so there’s no way to speed up egg hatching, but at least we know with absolute certainty when the egg will hatch. That sure beats the random flailing that we’ve otherwise been doing for the past half hour.
I also feel obligated to say that Horsea eggs hatch mercifully fast. Well…they’re not the fastest egg, but I was expecting they’d take as long to hatch as a Dragonite egg. Thankfully, that was not the case, and Daisy Jr popped out about 15 minutes later.
Now, here’s the real moment ot truth: did I actually do everything correctly so that she’d be born with Aurora Beam. Survey says…?
Okay. Thank God. I was genuinely worried that I might have screwed something up (it wouldn’t be the first time), and I’d have to redo this whole process to get another egg. Luckily, Daisy Jr has Aurora Beam so I slapped EXP Share onto her, and resumed my travels.
Fast-forward, and we’re back to the present where I landed in Olivine City after defeating Chuck. Daisy Jr was present for that fight, but she was a little too far behind the rest of the party to properly participate. I’m fairly certain the same will be true for Jasmine, though DJ is a lot closer to party level now thanks to the Swimmers that were littered throughout Routes 47, and 48. Mabel, and Trevor had an absolute field day with the deluge of Water types, and the EXP Share has been doing wonders for DJ.
Now we just need to deliver the Secret Potion to Jasmine, and then we can fight her in her gym.
…why…isn’t the quest resolving?
Did…did I forget the potion in Cianwood?
Apparently I did. Evidently, I was so focused on removing the level-cap that I went straight to Chuck’s gym without first stopping in at the pharmacist’s shop. And I didn’t think to stop by his place on my way out of Cianwood because 20 years of visiting him before I’ve dealt with Cianwood’s gym caused me to erroneously assume that I’d already done the needful.
And we can’t just fly back to Cianwood because our team doesn’t have anyone that can learn Fly.
Well…I guess this is just more experience for Daisy Jr to siphon away from Mabel, and Trevor.
After a brief detour back to Cianwood, I have actually obtained the Secret Potion. Then another trip back to Olivine sees us deliver the medicine, Jasmine gives it to Amphy, and all is right with the world. Huzzah!
With that, we can now take on our 7th gym leader: Jasmine.
She’s the first Steel type specialist in the series, which should make this an exciting fight. However, I’ve always found her a little underwhelming compared to the rest of Johto’s gym leaders (Sorry, William).
The reason for that is simple: Jasmine doesn’t really have a strategy. She sort of just relies on Steelix to punch holes through her opponent’s team with high powered Iron Tails. That’s…not very exciting to overcome if I’m being honest. Not when we’ve had to overcome far more interesting challenges throughout our journey thus far like Bugsy’s Critical Hit spamming Scyther, Whitney’s momentum stealing Milktank, or Chuck’s 1-2 combo of Hypnosis and Dynamic Punch. By comparison, Jasmine just sort of feels like a weaker version of our Rival Kevin.
Her team also leaves a bit to be desired. Steelix is fine, but why 2 Magnemites? Chuck had 2 fully evolved Pokémon, and so did Pryce. Why can’t Jasmine have a Magneton?
Part of me thinks the logic for how toned down Jasmine feels in comparison to the other 2 leaders from this stretch stems from 2 facets. The first is that GameFreak was likely hesitant to make the gym leader with the newly added type too powerful. They probably didn’t want to overwhelm (younger) players, so they intentionally threw them a softball since Steel was a wholly new challenge to overcome.
Though, our Rival Kevin has a Magnemite, and so do a few optional NPC fights so it isn’t like Jasmine is the first appearance of the type that players will need to overcome.
That said, I think the bigger reason for Jasmine’s team being a little on the weaker side is simply a bit of mechanical story-telling. Jasmine is one of the few gym leaders who we actively see step away from her post to help out a Pokémon in distress. The fact that her team is a relatively gentle challenge compared to Pryce, or Chuck might be an additional layer to that story-telling – one illustrated through Pokémon’s mechanics.
Who’s to say.
Regardless, Vanessa punched a hole through both of Jasmine’s Magnemites. She outsped both of the magnetic metal balls, and hit them with a quad effective Dig. Frankly, this almost felt unfair because it was such an easy W, but Magnemite will get its revenge 2 years from now by terrorizing millions of children during Wattson’s gym battle.
That just leaves us in a 5 (kind of 6) versus 1 against Jasmine’s Steelix. While it is absolutely true that I could throw here, we’ve got pretty good odds of closing this one out.
I decided that I didn’t want to leave Vanessa in here since Dig won’t do as much damage to Steelix. It has a frankly monstrous Defence stat, so I’m a lot more keen to target Steelix’s much lower Special Defence if I can. Doubly so since we have Pryce’s badge already so our Special Attacks are receiving a hefty 12.5% damage boost.
As such, I swapped over to Trevor, so that I could put Steelix to sleep, and maybe score a few soft Vine Whips. Unfortunately, I didn’t anticipate exactly how much damage Iron Tail was going to do here, so I just about lost Trevor on the switch.
I don’t typically think of Steel as being an offensive type since the defensive properties of the type well surpass its offensive capabilities. As such, I have a hard time remembering that there are some really strong Steel type attacks like the aforementioned Iron Tail. Evidently, I need to be a little more careful while closing out the remainder of this fight otherwise I might find myself in a position where Jasmine has KO’d all of my best attackers.
Thankfully, Trevor retaliates with Sleep Powder on the following turn, so I have a couple of free turns to work something out. I figured my best shot was with Winston, since he can increase his Defence with Defence Curls. From there, I can hopefully close out the fight using Charcoal boosted Fire Punches. If nothing else, this should help to lower Steelix down to where Trevor, Vanessa, Mabel, or DJ can score the win with a single attack.
However, the Defence boosts prove totally unnecessary as sleep, once again, prevails. Steelix never actually managed to wake up from its nap before Winston finished cleaving through it with Fire Punch. Admittedly, Steelix didn’t have a ton of opportunities to fight back since Winston managed to 2-shot it, which I was a little surprised about. Though, I really shouldn’t have been all that surprised since Winston has been clowning on the overwhelming majority of the gyms thus far in our challenge.
Regardless, with Jasmine’s sleepy, steel snake bested, we’ve secured our 7th gym badge. This also rounds out the final Badge Boosts with Jasmine giving us a 12.5% boost to our Defence stat. Hopefully, that’ll help to prevent future incidents where a stray hit almost downs a member of our team before they get a chance to act.
Though, you’ll have to tune in next time to hear about that because I’m out of recorded footage.
Here’s hoping that the Rocket takeover of Goldenrod City goes smoothly, and Daisy Jr slowly comes into her own. Lord knows I could use a counter to Fire type Pokémon before our next run-in with Kevin, which will happen during the Rocket takeover.
There’s also the matter of finally evolving Pinellopi who’s just never quite had a moment to shine across this entire playthrough. Though, I still think that additional Steel typing will do her some good.
Either way, that’s all a problem for future Steve to tackle.
For now, I’d like to thank you if you managed to read to the end. Things have been a little chaotic this month, so I haven’t been able to make as much progress with this series. We’re getting closer to the end though, so we’ll hopefully have things sorted in October.
Until then, stay safe out there, and I’ll see you in the next one.
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