Category: RPG

Pokemon Ruby [3] – The GameBoy Advance Chapter Is Over

March 8, 2013 by Nikola·1 Comment

Since last time in Pokemon Ruby, I did a lot of training. A lot!

Game Freak Is Full of Trolls

Seriously. Why would the developers decide it’s a good idea to give most Pokemon on the Victory Road, which is probably the best place to train before the Elite Four, a move which allows them to kick the player’s Pokemon out of combat.

I told you it was going to get strong.

Sure, after a while, most of my Pokemon were able to sweep through the encounters in Victory Road, but it was still annoying. There I am, hitting Hariyama three times with Ice Beam already, only to be kicked out of battle and wasting those 3 PP.

Training in Victory Road

It was annoying, but I did it anyway. Pikachu, Corphish, Glalie and Swellow eventually got easier to train, and Torkoal was a breeze right from the start, but my starter, Grovyle, wasn’t able to be effective at all. It had a type disadvantage against mos of the Pokemon in there, so I ended up going back to the overworld, fighting Tentacools for ages just go get to level 55.

After about an hour of fast-forwarding in total (gotta love GameBoy Advance emulators), I got most of all of my team members to either level 55 or 60, because I like round numbers. I decided to give it one more shot, stocked up on potions and went for it.

The Elite Four

Sidney was easy to deal with. I got rid of his Mightyena, Cacturne and Shiftry with Torkoal, switched with Pikachu for his Sharpedo and then brought back Torkoal for Absol.

I could have trained even longer, but this would have to do.

Next up was Pheobe, who used Ghost Pokemon. This time, I didn’t have any type advantage, so I ended up using mostly Torkoal and Glalie, my two most powerful Pokemon. I had one of my team members faint, but I had plenty of items in stock to heal after the battle.

It’s like she was destined to become an Ice trainer.

After that, it was time for Glacia, who used Ice types. Pikachu did some major damage here, but I had to switch him out for Growlyle, who handled the two Sealeos with Mega Leech. Overall, this member of the Elite Four was the hardest.

Finally, I fought Drake, who was, obviously, a Dragon Master. This part was the easiest. My Glalie swept through his entire team without any trouble.

The End of the GameBoy Advance Chapter

After the elite four, I went to the final room, but didn’t heal and ended up fighting Steven mostly out of PP on my most important moves. Even so, thanks to some switching around and item usage at key moments, I got through it and came out on top. I also had a type advantage against most of his Pokemon, so that helped a lot.

I don’t have to manually edit the victory screen any more.

The League was, again, won, and the GameBoy Advance chapter of my Follow Ash challenge is now over. Even though I ruined my Pikachu, this will probably be my favorite part of the challenge.

There’s a proper ending sequence.

Sadly, I now have to move on to the Nintendo DS, which means I wont be able to fast-forward as much. What’s worse is that I probably won’t be able to play the game on weekends, since my laptop isn’t really up to par for DS emulation, so I can only play it on my PC, which I don’t have access to during weekends. What I’m saying here is, I won’t be completing Diamond/Pearl or Black/White as fast as I did the first three generations.

Pokemon Ruby [2] – Getting to the Pokemon League

March 7, 2013 by Nikola·2 Comments

Last time in the GameBoy Advance part of my “Follow Ash” challenge I just beat Ruby’s dad (as Ash) and won the fifth gym badge.

Fishing for Corphish

As soon as I got the Petalburg badge and was able to use Surf, I went to Route 118 (I think), to get to Good Rod. I then spent some time fishing at Route 117 and finally got my Corphish, three gyms to late. Of course, I now had to train it until it caught up with the rest of my team, so that’s exactly what I did.

Corphish wasn’t supposed to evolve, so it wouldn’t be very strong, but Surf helps.

Once that was over with, I went past Route 118 and 119 towards Fortree City, where my next gym was waiting. On the way there, I stopped by to Weather Institute to fight with Team Magma for a while. I got a Pokemon as a reward and sent it directly to the PC, since Ash never had anything to do with Castform.

Fortree City Gym

I gotto Fortree City, but wasn’t able to enter the gym because something was blocking my way. Spoiler: It was an invisible Kecleon. I had to walk a bit past Fortree City on Route 120 to meet Steven and get an item which revealed the Kecleon and made it run away.

I love the way Fortree City looks.

The Fortree Gym was a Flying type gym, so Pikachu kicked some serious butt here. Once it was clear, I didn’t want to waste too much time, so I immediately went towards Lilycove city, where the next part of the story was waiting. Once there, I saw Team Magma stealing a submarine and entered their hidden lair nearby for a few moments, just so I could find out where to go next. The destination was Mount Pyre on Route 122. This was the graveyard area of Pokemon Ruby, but I wasn’t there for as long as in the previous games. I climbed to the top and fought the Magma Commander there, only to find out I now have to go to an underwater cave. However, to get there, I had to use Dive and I wasn’t able to use it without the next gym badge.

Mossdeep City Gym

Mossdeep City was relatively close by, so it didn’t take long to get there. This time, it was a Psychic gym, so it gave me some trouble, but thankfully, though psychic Pokemon can hit hard, they can’t take a lot of damage so I ended up sweeping through most of them. I got the badge and I was able to use Dive, but I didn’t have a Pokemon to teach it to.

And I just got rid of my first HM Slave…

Sadly, this meant I had to catch another HM Slave just for Dive and further deviate from the anime. I ended up catching a Tentacool, and using it to get to the underwater cave, where the Team Magma commander freed a legendary Pokemon. As I said, the legendary is different in the two games. For Ruby, it was Groudon and for Sapphire, it would be Kyogre.

The Pokemon disappeared and I had to go to the next city where the final showdown would happen and the final gym was at. Before going to Sootopolis, though, I remembered I have to go catch my final team member – Snorunt. For that, I went to Shoal Cave which was conveniently at low tide right now, so It didn’t take too long to find and catch a Snorunt.

Sootopolis City, The Cave of Origins and the Final Gym

Just like Fortree, Sootopolis was another cool looking city. The graphics of the Pokemon games were never top-notch, but the upgrade to Gameboy Advance really allowed the games to shine. The gym type was Water, but before I could challenge it, I had to go to the Cave of Origin and capture or defeat Groudon. I ended up just using the Master Ball and sending it straight to the PC, since Groudon has nothing to do with my challenge. I also found the final HM of the game inside the cave – HM07, Waterfall.

Not having a reason to save the Master Ball really helps.

Unlike the cave, the Sootopolis Gym gave me a lot of trouble. Technically, Pikachu would be perfect against Water but most of the Pokemon here also had secondary types and some hard hitting attacks, so my badly trained Pikachu couldn’t cope. In my next game, I’m definitely redistributing my IVs.

My Pikachu is now physically strong mainly because in the first generation, all damage was determined by the Attack stat and the Special affected defense only. Instead of duplicating the Attack IV and transferring it to Special Attack, I decided to copy the Special into both Special Attack and Special Defense which, in hindsight, makes no sense. Ash’s Pikachu is tough, but it also has extremely powerful Electric attacks, most of which are special based. In addition to this, the only way for Pikachu to learn a physical Electric type attack in Ruby is through breeding, meaning I’m stuck with what I have. In my next game, I’m giving him high Attack and Special Attack with medium Defense and low Special Defense. The only thing I got right was the speed.

I did some googling on EV training and found out the Spindas outside Fallarbor town give 1 Special Attack EV each. Since most of my Pokemon use special attacks and have high IV in those stats, I decided to spend some time training there.

It was well worth it. Torkoal became extremely powerful, Snorunt actually started to hold its own and Corphish was able to sweep a lot of its enemies thanks to Surf and the now much higher Special Attack. Still, I wasn’t able to evolve it yet, so he wasn’t to helpful against Sootopolis’ Dragon gym.

Spindas also give a decent amount of experience.

Somehow, after some persistent reloading, I managed to get through it and was able to finally go to the Pokemon League. For that,. I had to use Waterfall to get to Ever Grande City, which can’t really be called a city, since it only had a Pokemon Center and nothing else. At this point, I got rid of all of my HM slaves, but kept Strength on Torkoal and Rock Smash on my Grovyle so I could get through the Victory Road ahead.

The two lower levels of the victory road were dark, so I was tempted to use Flash, but I ended up navigating through the area without it somehow. As soon as I got to the League building, I saved my game, spent all of my money and decided to just go for it.

Suffice to say, it didn’t work. Time to train.

A GameBoy Advance of My Own?

By the way, I love the GameBoy Advance games so much, I’m actually thinking about buying a console. I’m not sure which one I should get, though. The GameBoy Advance SP supposedly has a better screen, but the regular version looks a lot sturdier. Anyone have any ideas?

Pokemon Ruby [1] – All the Way to Petalburg Gym, A Day Off

March 5, 2013 by Nikola·0 Comments

If you play a Pokemon game on an emulator, trust me when I say this, you do not want to start it up on a weekend. Well, maybe you do, depends on your priorities. I started playing Pokemon Ruby on a Saturday and I ended up playing all the way up to the Petalburg Gym in a single sitting. Just to elaborate, this is the fifth gym.

The Start of Ruby

As I sad in my previous posting, I picked Treecko, just like Ash did and then I caught a Pikachu with cheats, before genetically modifying it to resemble my Pikachu from Pokemon Crystal (i.e., I used cheats). Because of this, I didn’t train Treecko to much on my way through the first three cities.

I’ll admit it, I used an HM slave this time. It’s just to annoying without one.

Yup, the first gym you can challenge is way up in Rustoboro City, which is the fourth city of the game and also the large metropolis of Ruby. Little Root Town is the starter town of the game, while Oldale city is the next town over. Petalburg is the third city and it does contain a gym, but it’s owned by the main character’s dad and it can’t be challenged until you get four badges.

Mind Blown

This led me to a realization which, in hindsight, should have been obvious. In the anime, Petalburg is the first gym Ash challenges, but he doesn’t get a badge and also has to return to it later. The reason he doesn’t get it is because the gym leader’s son poses as a gym leader and ends up wasting everyone’s time, more or less. Basically, Ash ends up fighting and sort of defeating the main character of the third Pokemon game generation.

Catching Taillow

Overall, Pokemon Ruby allows for quite a faithful following of the anime’s story. I caught my Taillow in Petalburg Woods, just as Ash did in the anime. I also basically started with Pikachu and Treecko, just as Ash did. This means the first two gyms, Rustobro and Dewford had me in the exact same situation Ash was in.

Rustboro is the huge city of Ruby, but only in appearance. The important buildings are in later cities.

In Rustboro, I also had my first encounter with the game’s bad guys – Team Magma. Pokemon Ruby (and Sapphire) sort of mix things up when it comes to bad guys. There are actually two different teams – Team Aqua and Team Magma. While both teams have some strange ideas, in each of the two games, one of the teams is portrayed as the bad guys, while the other team fights them. This ties in nicely to each of the game’s colors, with the red Ruby going with Magma and the blue Sapphire going with Aqua. This also ties in to the two legendaries of the game.

The Rustboro gym was easy to deal with, since it was rock based. The second gym, in Dewford Town, wasn’t as easy with mostly fighting types, but overall, picking the grass starter puts you in a very favorable early position compared to Pokemon Crystal, I think.

Cheating with Everstones

Of course, by this time, I had to start cancelling evolutions, so I ended up doing some more magic with Enciclopedia Pokemon and gave an Everstone to both Treecko and Taillow. Sure, it’s cheating, but it also means I won’t be using any attack boosting items, so it’s not like I’m actually improving my odds. I’m just making the circumstances less annoying.

Taillow and its evolution, Swellow, have a good speed and attack.

The third gym was all the way in Mauville City, which means I did a half circle around the Hoenn region by now. This one was focused on the Electric type, so again, Treecko was very useful. Sadly, I had to deviate from the anime now. By this point, Ash already had a Corphish, but I can’t catch one until I get the Good Rod, which only happens after the fifth gym.

Mauville City also contained a Game Corner as well as a bike shop, which offers two types of bikes in this game – the Mach Bike and the Acro Bike. I picked the Acro Bike at random, but I didn’t really care about it, since I won’t be using bikes for anything in this challenge.

Team Magma on Mt. Chimney

Before I could get to the next gym, in Lavaridge, I had to do almost an entire circle through the Hoenn region. First, though, I went to Verdanturf Town to try my luck with a contest (Pikachu won in the cool category) and to create a shortcut through the nearby cave with Rock Smash.

After that, I went back to Mauville and then further north towards Fallarbor town and further towards Meteor Falls. This is where I met up with Team Magma again, which then lead me to Mt. Chimney, where I finally had a proper boss battle with their commander. After that, I could access the Jagged Pass and finally get to Lavaridge.

Cut scenes! A first in the series!

The Lavaridge Gym was, naturally, Fire based, so I didn’t have any type advantage. What I did have were a well-trained Pikachu and Taillow, so it wasn’t too hard. After I beat the gym, I immediately rushed back to the Fiery Path to get my next team mate – Torkoal.

Torkoal and Petalburg

Torkoal will be the heavy hitter and the tank of my team. It’s basically the first Pokemon with high level stat values I was able to get in this challenge, so I was very much looking forward to catching it. I spent some time to make him catch up in levels with the rest of my team, so now I had an amazing Fire sweeper.

This thing is amazing and it looks cool to.

It was now time to go to Petalburg to beat Ruby’s dad (remember, I’m Ash), so that’s exactly what I did. The Petalburg gym had a lot of Pokemon with varied types, but most of the trainers had only one Pokemon in their party, so I was able to go back and heal as often as I wanted. As expected, Torkoal was amazing in the final battle agains’t Ruby’s dad, being able to survive most of the hits which would one-hit any of my other Pokemon.

I had my fifth badge and I had about four or five hours of play behind me, so I finally decided to take a break here.

Grandia [7] – The Tower of Doom

March 4, 2013 by Nikola·0 Comments

As I said last time, I was about to enter the Tower of Doom in Grandia, but before that, I had to go back to the village to advance the story for a bit and, more importantly, to teach Rapp a spell element. I decided to go with Wind for now, but I’ll end up teaching him all four of the elements eventually, since Rapp is one of the final four characters.

The “monster” Rapp is talking about would be the Lainian Milda.

As soon as I got to the Tower of Doom, I got introduced to another awesome temporary character, who’s basically a replacement for Gadwin – Milda of Laine. According to Rapp, if you anger a Lainian, you’re as good as dead. Well, this one was really angry. In fact, she was so angry, she immediately attacked the party, but this time, it went a lot better than with Gadwin. She was relatively easy to defeat and she ended up joining the group, since she was there to destroy the tower to.

Milda can’t learn any spells, so I won’t be making any hard decisions about that. She also doesn’t have a lot of skills. What she does have is pure damage. Because of this, I gave her Justin’s Chain of Gems, which allows the wearer to attack three times in a single combo, basically increasing the damage output by 50%.

I’m still learning new moves, regardless of low experience gains.

The Tower of Doom wasn’t hard, probably because I’m still outleveling the area. I don’t know how exactly this happened, but since Virgin Forest, I barely get any skill or spell experience and most enemies die within a single area attack. I still gain a few skill levels thanks to generous SP and MP usage, but it slowed down to a crawl.

I had to get through several levels of the Tower of Doom and found some minor loot, but I didn’t get any mana eggs this time. That’s fine though, because it’s quite obvious I’ll get more than enough by the end of the game, so I’m in no danger of any of my characters not having all of their skills and spells.

Grandia’s story is full of “convenience”. it works! The Spirit Stone protects the group from certain doom.

Once I got to the top of the Tower of Doom (I just love saying its name), I got to enjoy the shenanigans of the three Garyle officers again, while founding out that the Garyle forces are breeding monsters. I ended up fighting one of this monsters called Gaia, right after finding out it was responsible for turning Rapp’s village to stone. It would have ended up turning the party to stone as well, but Justin’s Spirit Stone protected them.

The fight was long, but not hard at all. After it was done, the monster turned into a sprout (?) and Justin picked it up to take it back to the village. I guess I was the only one here thinking that wasn’t a good idea, because the village elder didn’t seem to have a problem with it and actually took it from Justin to examine it. Of course, the same night, with Leen leading them, the Garyle forces attacked the village to take back the sprout. At this point, a major revelation happens – Leen is an Icarian!

This raises so many questions!

How? Does that mean Leen isn’t Feena’s sister? Does it mean Feena is an Icarian to? These questions remain unanswered for now and since my memory about it is a bit hazy, I don’t want to say something that might turn out wrong later. In any case, the sprout was gone and it was time to go further east, towards Laine. For that, I had to cross the Zil desert and get to Zil Padon, Guido’s home town.

I immediately went to the desert and soon found a great new accessory for Justin, to replace the Chain of Gems I gave to Milda. The Energy Ring restores SP through normal attacks, to a greater degree than the Medal of Yore I previously used. This means Justin will be able to use his awesome moves more often, making me even stronger.

Get your finger out of there. That’s nasty!

The Zil Desert also contains the entrance to the first optional dungeon of the game – The Soldier’s Graveyard. I’m pretty sure I skipped the optional dungeons on my first playthrough, so I decided to explore it this time, just for the fun of it. I was also kind of hoping I’ll get more experience and stronger enemies in there, but the first few battles after the save point didn’t look promising. In any case, this is where I stopped playing.

Pokemon Ruby [0.5] – Generation III Save Editor

March 3, 2013 by Nikola·6 Comments

In my last post about Pokemon Ruby, I made a plan I’ll be following during this part of the challenge, so after that, I’ve spent some time figuring out how exactly I can follow this plan. The issue is, while the DS games have an excellent set of save editors, even one that’s completely online and can create ready for use and completely legitimate Pokemon out of nothing, this isn’t the case with the GameBoy Advance games. Heck, even the GameBoy generation has a large selection of tools.

It took me a while, but eventually, I found the tool for me.

Enciclopedia Pokemon – A Generation III Save Editor

I tried a couple of different editors, most of which are Japanese in origin, clearly not made for the western region and very poorly translated. The Pokemon Encyclopedia, however, is perfect. It has a nice and simple interface with a bunch of extra features as well, it works, and it does what I need it to do.

The choice of starters was much easier this time – there was no choice.

I did what I did with Pokemon Crystal. First, I started a fresh game in Ruby and picked Treecko as my starter, according to the plan. Then, I played through all the way to the point where I was able to freely roam between Littleroot and Oldale town. Then, I googled and found some Pokemon Ruby Gameshark cheats. Most importantly, the one for infinite pokeballs in the first PC slot, and the one which causes Pikachu to be the only Pokemon that appears in the wild.

The code for 99 Pokeballs in PC Slot 1:

[code]BCDEC2FB 74886C64[/code]

The code for making Pikachu appear in the wild:

[code]39E924C4 4136A9DD
9D4A1BFF 05120D39[/code]

With that, I had a brand new level 2 Pikachu in my party.

My Pikachu’s stats in Pokemon Crystal.

Next up, I opened up Pikasav and loaded my Pokemon Crystal save. I took note of Pikachu’s stats in there. The mechanics change a lot between Generations 2 and 3, so I had to do some calculations.

IV – Inherent Value

Believe me when I say I’m no expert and this might be completely wrong, but the way I understand it, Individual, or inherent value, the way I call it, means the potential a Pokemon has. In the first two games, the IV’s ranged from 0 to 15 for each stat, and the higher an IV was for a single stat, the higher that stat would be as the Pokemon gets stronger. In generation III, the IV range increases to 0-31, and the formula changes to, but instead of stressing about it to much, I just doubled all of the IV values for my “reincarnated Pikachu.

Thus, I ended up with 14 for his HP, 30 Attack, 22 Defense, 4 in both Special Attack and Defense and finally, 28 for speed. My Pikachu will end up being physically tough and extremely fast. All of this is translated from back

in Pokemon Yellow, where I assume Pikachu’s stats where the way the developers imagined them in the anime.

EV – Effort Value

Effort value, unlike inherent value, can be trained. Each wild Pokemon my Pokemon manages to defeat increases his effort value in some stat by a few points. Each Pokemon can collect a total of 510 effort value points combined, so hardcore Pokemon fans actually do EV training to maximize the strengths of their Pokemon. To maximize a single stat, you need to invest 252 points into it, so the option is to maximize two selected attributes of a Pokemon, or to spread the 510 points in some other way between the attributes.

Now, this mechanic was introduced only in generation 3 and before that, it was completely different, so I couldn’t really transfer what I had to the new game. Well, technically, I could have, but this would mean I would just end up evenly distributing all of my EVs between my Pikachu’s stats. Instead, I figured out how far along my Pikachu was in Crystal and figured out this would translate to about 427 EV points earned up to that point. I then distributed those points between my attributes based on the already existing inherent values. Basically, the more inherent value a stat had, the more effort value it would get.

Enciclopedia Pokemon - Gen III Save Editor

The final stats of my “converted” Pikachu.

This got me 58 in HP, 126 in Attack, 92 defense, 18 in Special Attack, 16 in Special Defense and finally, 117 in Speed. I had some rounding errors, so I added the final two points to Special Attack, which is why it ended up being different from Special Defense. Now at this point, I have my doubts, since Pikachu is supposed to rock with Thunder attacks, but I have my math and I’m sticking to it. I can always grind some more if Pikachu ends up to weak.

How to Edit the Pokemon Ruby Save?

Well, as I said, I opened the Pokemon Crystal save in Pikasave, saw the stats and did the math. Then I opened the Pokemon Ruby save with Enciclopedia Pokemon and edited Pikachu’s values there. It really is as simple as that. I had one minor issue after I did this, though. Loading the game with Visual Boy Advance gave me a message about my save file being corrupted and reverting to the last save, but the game loaded up fine anyway and I didn’t find any issues.

Download Enciclopedia Pokemon – A Generation III Save Editor

Pokemon Ruby [0] – The Plan

March 2, 2013 by Nikola·1 Comment

It’s been some time since my last part of the “Follow the Anime” challenge, so I think it’s time to start planning for another one. Since I’ve recently attempted a Nuzlocke Challenge in Pokemon Emerald, I decided to go with Pokemon Ruby as my third generation game of choice.

The Pokemon

In the Hoenn region, Ash manages to acquire even fewer Pokemon than in the Johto region, with me being able to count only four in total. Three of those evolve during his travels through the region, but even so, that’s a tiny number. On the other hand, this might also mean I’ll have an easier time with outleveling my enemies. We will see.

The Starters in Pokemon Ruby

The three starters of the Hoenn region are Treecko, Torchic and Mudkip. While I had a tough choice in Pokemon Crystal, what with either having to start with all three of the starters via cheats or step away from the anime by only picking one, which is what I did in Crystal, there really is no choice in Ruby.

The hoen starters have the coolest grass type, in my opinion, though as a combatant, it still sucks.

From the three starters, Ash only gets Treecko. This means my choice is simple and I actually won’t have to cheat to have my roster follow that of the anime in this game. Of course, I’ll have to cheat to transfer Pikachu over, but that’s about it.

Treecko’s Moves

Pound
Quick Attack
Bullet Seed
Leaf Blade
Solar Beam
Agility
Leaf Storm

Treecko will evolve some time between gyms number four and five – Lavaridge and Petalburg. He doesn’t evolve to its final form during the Hoenn journeys.

Taillow / Swellow

The rest of the Pokemon are also relatively easy. I probably wont be able to catch all of them at the right moment, but outside of that, all of them are available in all three of the Hoenn games, I believe.

I always need a flyer in my team.

The first of the remaining Pokemon is Taillow. I’ll have to catch him in Petalburg Woods if I want to follow the anime, though I could do it earlier in the game. This is well before the first gym, so I’ll have three Pokemon by the time I get there. Taillow will evolve into Swallow some time between gyms number five and six – Petalburg and Fortree.

Taillow/ Swellow’s Moves

Peck
Wing Attack
Quick Attack
Aerial Ace
Double Team

Of course, I’ll need a Pokemon which can learn Fly, so Taillow will have to sacrifice a move slot for that.

Corphish

Corphish will be my surfer, provided I don’t miss to Good Rod needed to catch it. Ash catches it on the way from Dewford City and gym number three, to Mauville City and gym number four. I can fish for it on routes 102 and 117, or even in Petalburg Town, but I need a good rod to do it, which I can get at route 118, so I’ll probably catch it in Petalburg, after I beat its gym, which is gym number five.

I can only get Corphish a bit later in the game, after I get the Good Rod.

Corphish’s Moves

CrabbHammer
Bubble Beam
Vice Grip
Harden

Harden will, of course be replaced with Surf the first chance I get.

Snorutn / Glalie

Snorunt is the final Pokemon Ash catches in Hoenn and this happens between gyms seven and eight – Mossdeep and Sootopolis. It evolves to Glalie only after gym 8, so if Phanty has anything to say about it, Glalie will probably be useless throughout the game. Then again, it’s an Ice type, which means it might be useful against any dragon masters, so I hope I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Snorunt / Glalie’s Moves

Icy Wind
Headbutt
Double Team
Ice Beam

With such a poor list of moves used in the anime, I’m seriously considering to abandon this “rule” I made up in the last game. I need variety in my team and it seems the team I’ll have in Ruby wont have it. We will see.

Despite the lame appearance, an Ice type might be fun.

Torkoal

Though Snorunt is the final Pokemon Ash catches in Hoenn, I decided to save the best for last while writing this. Ladies and gentlemen, we might actually have a proper powerhouse in the Ruby part of the challenge. Torkoal is a tough Pokemon which I’ll be able to raise quite well, since I get it about half way through the game. I’m looking forward to this one.

I’m looking forward to getting this one.

Torkoal’s Moves

Flamethrower
Overheat
Iron Defense
Body Slam
Heat Wave

It’s a tough Pokemon with great moves. What else is there to say? It also get’s Flamethrower very early, so it will be kicking ass throughout the game.

In any case, this is the plan for Pokemon Ruby. Right now, I need to figure out the best way to import my Pokedex and my Pikachu into a fresh Ruby save. Hopefully, it’s no harder than it was for Crystal, which I think was already hard enough.

Grandia [6] – Pirate’s Island and the Virgin Forest

February 25, 2013 by Nikola·0 Comments

Pirate’s Island

Last time on Grandia, a very nice moment with Justin and Feena was ruined by Justin being an idiot after meeting a pretty girl in peril. It was extremely obvious the girl was luring Justin into a trap, to anyone except Justin, apparently. In any case, the location to explore now was called the Pirate’s Island.

The island part was all the way at the end though. I’m not sure what I was walking on most of my time in the area, but I’m guessing it was sand, or maybe magical sea foam or something. In any case, it was a maze of white, floaty, sandy stuff with a lot of twists, turns and dead ends.

That’s a really weird beach if you ask me.

I did my best to explore all of it before finally getting to the island in the center but there’s still a strong possibility I missed something. What I’m worried the most is that I somehow missed a mana egg somewhere. I also think I’ve spent far too much time grinding in the past, because the enemies here weren’t giving a lot of experience in any category.

Eventually, I got tired of walking in circles and got to the island at the center Apparently, the pretty girl in peril has a bunch of identical siblings, because identically looking pretty girls seemed to be the islands only population. They managed to convince Justin to get inside the cave and “beat the pirates” and then the obvious thing finally happened. The cave contained the monster behind the illusion – a giant angler fish with a lure in the shape of a pretty girl.

A trap! Who knew!?

The boss took a while to beat, since I only had two people in my party, but it wasn’t hard in any sense of the word. I have to say, though, it’s a very creative-looking boss. Enemy design is one of Grandia’s strengths.

The Virgin Forest

The island sank and I soon landed on the shore of the new continent, or a new part of the old continent, to be more precise, since the sea was described as “The Inner Sea” earlier in the game. Just as with the island, the Virgin Forest contained enemies that gave me very little experience, so I actually tried avoiding some battles. Of course, I ended up just getting ambushed because of it, so the exploration probably took longer than it should have.

New enemies and a new battle theme!

I soon met up with Guido, the talking rabbit I already met in Dight, so he used the opportunity to relieve me of some of my money by offering shelter and bed and then asking for payment after it was all done.
Again, I took some time exploring, but I didn’t find any mana eggs. At this point, I’m almost certain I missed at least one in one of the last few areas, because it’s been a couple of hours since I’ve last seen one.

Eventually, I got to the third area of the forest, where I met a new playable character and one of the final four party member – Rapp. Now, I think I already mentioned Rapp in one of these posts, but I also think I called him Ralph or something like that, so I apologize for that. I’m pretty sure I also said that Rapp doesn’t start with any magical elements, but it turns out I was wrong – he starts with the Fire skill already learned. It’s at a very low level, but this still means I need one less mana egg than I thought I would.

Rapp is involved in a sort of a “lost boys” situation.

Rapp uses daggers, swords and ranged weapons, so Sue’s Bow book will boost his strength quite a bit. He also has a lot of ranged skills, so I guess that’s supposed to be his focus in the game. Of course, I still want to teach him all the spells and other weapon skills, provided there’s enough mana eggs left in the game by now.

Anyway, Rapp leads a gang of kids and he thought Justin and Feena were bad guys so he trapped them in a pit. Soon after their encounter, though, one of his “apprentices” gets attacked by a monster, so I get the chance to prove Justin’s good intentions. Rapp invites Justin and Feena to his village and soon after takes them to the Petrified Forest, the next area.

Next up – The Tower of Doom

Apparently, a tower was built next to Rapp’s old village, by some people looking a lot like Justin (i.e. humans). Right after the tower was built, the village somehow got turned to stone, which is how the Petrified Forest came to be. The survivors built the village of Cafu and Rapp promised himself to destroy the tower sometime in the future. When Justin saw what happened to Rapp’s old village and his family, he immediately offered to help Rapp destroy the village, so this takes us to our next area.

Oh, and I finally found a mana egg at the Petrified Forest. I think Rapp will learn Earth or Wind next.

Pokemon Crystal [8] – How to Get all the Pokemon Ash Caught in the Anime

February 24, 2013 by Nikola·0 Comments

This is not Pokemon Yellow. I feel like this should be said. Pokemon Yellow is the only game in the Pokemon franchise that even remotely tries to follow the plot of the anime, so it’s the only game where you can even get close to being Ash from the anime. Even there, it’s not the same. That being said, there’s always the “as close as reasonably possible” goal you can go for, so this will be the guide on how to reach that goal in Pokemon Crystal.

How to Transfer Pokemon from Generation I

To put it shortly, you can’t, not really. There is no tool which can simply transfer Pokemon or any other data on the PC. If you have the hardware, you could do some trading, but with emulation on the PC, you can’t do it.

Another part of the challenge completed.

You can do two things, however. You can edit your saves and copy the data manually, which was buggy for me, or you can use cheats to catch the same Pokemon you had in generation I and then edit the saves to copy EV and IV data, moves and PP levels. This is what I did. I tried just editing the saves with PikaSav first, but this caused the game to behave strangely. Instead, I used some Gameshark cheats in Visual Boy Advance to make Pikachu appear in the wild, caught him, and then edited the save to change his stats to the levels from Pokemon Yellow. The tools I used for this were

The important cheat here is

The cheat to catch any Pokemon – 91xx04d2

You need to replace “xx” with the number from the list on Supercheats for the Pokemon you want to catch. When you enable this cheat, the Pokemon you chose will be the only Pokemon to appear in random battles. For Pikachu, the “xx” is “19”. Once I caught him, I saved my game and loaded up Pikasav. First, I opened up the Pokemon Yellow save to write down Pikachu’s stat and move information and then opened the Pokemon Crystal save to set the information for the newly caught Pikachu to those values.

I only bothered getting Pikachu. It takes to long to transfer everyone.

I did this only with Pikachu at first and simply used Pikasav to add all the other Pokemon I caught in Yellow to the Pokedex. The procedure was simply too tedious for me to do it with all my other Pokemon. Later on in the game, I also used this method to get Kingler back into my team.
Depending on how much patience, time and willpower you have, you can do as you please.

How to Follow Ash – Violet City, Flying Gym

Route

New Bark Town -> Route 29 .> Cherrygrove City -> Route 30 -> Route 31 -> Violet City

The Anime

In the anime, Ash Catches a Heracross and a Chikorita well before the first Gym. He also tries using Chikorita in the first gym and fails.

How to Follow

Chikorita was the starter I picked, though it sucked during the first few gyms.

You should probably pick Chikorita as your starter, though the other two are also valid choices, since Ash gets them later in the anime and you won’t be able to get them any other way. Sadly, this means that you’ll have to pick between one of three Pokemon Ash eventually catches. As for Heracross, you can’t get him yet. He only drops from trees in mountain areas, so you need to get Headbutt from Illex Forest first.

How to Follow Ash – Azalea City, Bug Gym

Route

Ruins of Alph -> Route 32 -> Azalea Town

The Anime

In the anime, Ash leaves Charizard, though he’s able to call back on him later. He also catches his Cindaquil.

How to Follow

You can’t do much, really. If you picked Chikorita, you can’t get Cyndaquil, and if you went with Cyndaquil, you already have it, so you can start using it now. If you transferred Charizard, it’s time to put him in the PC, probably.

How to Follow Ash – Goldenrod City, Normal Gym

Route

Ilex Forest -> Day Care Center -> Goldenrod City

The Anime

In the anime, Ash officially gets his Totodile. He also leaves his Squirtle with the Squirtle Squad. Finally, he gets a shiny Noctowl. He’s luckier than I ever was.

How to Follow

Simple. If you picked Totodile as your starter, you have it. If you have a Squirtle in your team, leave it. Not much else to do there. However, since you got Headbut from Ilex forest, it’s time to go get your Heracross. For that, you have to walk all the way to before Azalea Town, to Route 33. I believe this is the closest mountainous route you can get to at the point where you get Headbut. You won’t be able to get Noctowl, not yet. If you want, you could catch a Hoothoot in Illex Forest and evolve it instead.

Heracross will probably be one of your strongest for a long time.

How to Follow Ash – Ecruteak City, Ghost Gym

Route

National Park -> Route 36 -> Route 37 -> Ecruteak City

The Anime

Nothing of note happens. Ash encounters a large amount of Pokemon, but doesn’t officially expand his roster. He does catch a Beedril and immediately gives it to a friend, though.

How to Follow

Do nothing, basically. You’ll just spend a lot of time cancelling the evolution of your starter, since the first one to evolve in the anime is Chikorita and that’s only after Ecruteak Gym. If you want to follow the story, catch and release a Beedril using Headbut. It definitely drops from trees back in Illex forest. I never did this. Oh, and it’s finally time to get that Noctowl, if you haven’t gotten a Hoothoot in Illex forest. You can find it on Route 37 at night.

Noctowl will be extremely valuable and you get it just in time for Fly.

How to Follow Ash – Cianwood City, Fighting Gym

Route

Route 38 -> Route 39 -> Olvine City -> Route 40 -> Route 41 -> Cianwood City

The Anime

During this time, Chikorita evolves into Bayleef. That’s about it for the anime.

How to Follow

Simple. Just follow the story and finally let Chikorita evolve. If you’re like me, this doesn’t mean you can stop cancelling its evolution, since its level will be high enough to evolve to the final form, which doesn’t happen in the anime. Note that you’ll go through Olivine City, which also has a gym, but you’ll have to return to that later, since that’s how the game story goes.
You might not have a Pokemon able to use Surf at this point, so it’s time to bring in one from your old team. I picked Kingler, but if you want to also follow the Whirl Islands part, it might be time to get Lapras. I didn’t bother.

Since you don’t have a Surf capable Pokemon unless you got Totodile, you need to bring in Kingler or Lapras.

How to Follow Ash – Olivine City, Steel Gym

Route

Route 41 -> Olivine Gym (or just fly)

The Anime

At this point, the Whirl Islands part of the anime starts and ends with the Whirpool Cup

How to Follow

I didn’t. The whirl islands are just an area in the game, not a region like in the anime. I just went back to Olivine and beat the gym.

How to Follow Ash – Mahogany Town, Ice Gym

Route

Mt. Mortar -> Route 42 -> Mahogany Town -> Route 43 -> Lake of Rage -> Mahogany Town

The Anime

Some major events happen in the anime, just like in the game and the Phanpy Egg hatches.

How to Follow

You can’t get a Phanpy yet, so you can’t really do much, other than going with the story and beating the gym.

How to Follow Ash – Blackthorn City, Dragon Gym

Route

Route 44 -> Ice Path -> Blackthorn City

The Anime

Again, not much of note happens here regarding Ash’s roster.

How to Follow

Play through it and get to Blackthorn City. You might want to catch a Phanpy on Route 45, south of Blackthorn in the morning before tackling the Gym.

Phanpy wasn’t very useful for me, sadly.

How to Follow Ash – The League

Route

Go back to your home town and Surf to the east, then go through Victory Road to get to the League.

How to Follow

At this point, you can forget about the anime. All you have to do is beat the game. None of your Pokemon will evolve further, nor will you be able to expand your team. Technically, Ash uses Larvitar for a while in the anime, but he never really catches it and you can’t get it in the game yet anyway.

Grandia [5] – To the PC and Back Again (The Twin Towers Freeze)

February 21, 2013 by Nikola·3 Comments

Last time on Grandia, I got seriously stuck. The EBOOT I’m using on my PSP turned out bugged, so it kept freezing at the Twin Towers animated cut scene. I tried using the PSP Go Pause Game feature to go around it, but it wouldn’t work. Well, I managed to navigate around it anyway, albeit in a very unconventional way.

How to Transfer saves from PSP to ePSXe?

You see, I have a PC and I’m no stranger to emulation. I dusted off my copy of ePSXe, updated it and got an ISO of Grandia with the same ID as the one I have on my PSP – SCUS94457. I know, I know, technically, this is piracy, but I paid 50€ for the German version of Grandia about 15 years ago, and that amount of money is around 8% of my current income, so sue me.

I’m kidding. Please don’t sue me. It’s totally a legal backup.

The two VMP files are the actual memory cards.

Anyway , I got the ISO, err, backup and loaded it up on ePSXe. I made sure the two memory card files in the memcard subfolder of ePSXe were created and then I connected my PSP Go to the PC. I found the original saves in PSP/SAVEDATA/SCUS94457 on my PSP Go and copied them to my PC.

Copying from the PSP Go to the ePSXe memory card is as simple as copying a file.

Then I got an awesome piece of software – MemCardRex. This tools allows you to edit different PS1 save formats, copy save slots from one memory card to another and even create new memory card files. It can edit and save a large amount of formats and read a few more. I loaded up my PSP Go save files in one tab and my ePSXe memory card file in the other and copied the Grandia saves. I was now able to continue my game on the ePSXe, so that’s what I did.

The Game

I got past the Twin Towers, since the dungeon ended as soon as the cut scene was over. What followed was the saddest part of the game and the second saddest moment in my gaming career, second only to the scene from Final Fantasy VII. The game was hinting that Sue was getting more and more exhausted since the End of The World, possibly even sooner, but it finally happened. She collapsed at the village of Dight.

I didn’t notice the hints on my first playthrough.

Justin needed a teleportation orb from the nearby Mysterious Vanishing Hill to get over the inner sea, though, so Sue did her usual grown up thing and sent him on his way. The Mysterious Vanishing Hill was a relatively short area, made even shorter with ePSXe’s ability to fast forward through battles by disabling the FPS limiter. I fought the two bosses there, got the orb and went back to Sue.

She decided to leave adventuring to Justin until she gets older. It’s hard to describe this, but it was a very touching scene and in the end, Justin decided to use the orb to help Sue get back to Parm. This means Sue wont be learning any more spells and I’m one awesome character short. On the game side, I got Sue’s skill books, so not all of it will be wasted, but story-wise, it was still a very sad moment.

Right in the feeler!

Since teleportation was out of the question, I needed a boat. Luckily, Gadwin had one, so he told me to meet him back at his house when we’re ready to leave. Getting there was a bit annoying, since the area was full of low-level enemies I couldn’t avoid.

I got to Gadwin and then it was revealed I’m gonna lose another awesome character. Gadwin challenged Justin to a duel and this time, I won. He taught me his secret Dragon Move and then said it’s time for him to go on his own Journey. Again, I got his skill books, but I still lost an awesome character.

Both battles are rigged, but it’s still a cool part of the game.

I went back to Dight and boarded Gadwin ship. Again, the game offered some touching moments during the voyage and Justin actually got serious for a bit, before a pretty girl ran into their boat, called Justin “her hero” and asked him to save her island from pirates. That’s where I stopped playing.

Justin really knows how to kill the magic.

Half way through, though, I transferred my save back to the PSP, because I prefer a bug and stutter free experience, which apparently, ePSXe is unable to offer, even after all these years.

How to transfer saves from PC to the PSP

Sadly, MemCardRex can’t save to the PSP memory card format, only read from it. In order to transfer my saves there, I had to go with a different route. I downloaded the CWCheats plugin for my PSP Go. There are different versions of the plugin out there, but not all of them work on the PSP Go, so I had to find the right one. This plugin basically allows for hex cheats in PSP and POPS games, but it can also replace entire memory cards on the fly and it also allows ePSXe save file imports.

In order to get to that point, I had to rename my ePSXe save file to the GAME_IDE-#.mcr format, which ended up being:

[code]SCUS_94457-0.mcr[/code]

I renamed it to that and then copied the file to the seplugins/cwcheat/mc folder on my PSP. Then I made sure the plugin was working and I loaded up Grandia. Once I was at the title menu, I pushed and held Select for a few seconds, which caused the cwcheat menu to appear. From there, I was able to import the ePSXe save from the Manage Memory Cards menu. If the file doesn’t appear for you, make sure you named it correctly. It needs to be named after the game ID, which you can also read from the cwcheat menu while the game is running.

Anyway, I got past the freezing bug at Twin Towers and now I’m able to keep playing my game on the PSP Go.

Pokemon Crystal [7] – The League Won!

February 17, 2013 by Nikola·2 Comments

Last time in Pokemon Crystal, I attempted the league with a level 45 party and failed horribly. It was obvious I had to train, so train I did.

As I already said, most of my Pokemon had it easy with training at the Victory Road. The cave mostly contained ground and rock Pokemon, with a couple of Golbats thrown in for good measure. My Pikachu simply destroyed everything with his Iron Tail, saving his Thunder and Thundershock for Golbat. Kingler handled it all with Surf and Crabhammer, once he finally got that awesome move. Heracross didn’t really have a super effective move to use, but thanks to his amazing power, he handled everything with regularly effective moves and the STAB bonus on his Horn Attack. Noctowl kicked ass with Confusion, but didn’t get to learn Extrasensory in time. Bayleef had it easy with Razor Leaf against the rock and ground types and a Headbutt or a Body Slam against Golbat.

The state of my final team.

The only Pokemon I had issues with was my Phanpy. It was getting more and more obvious I won’t get any use out of him in this game. He can’t evolve yet, since that only happens later in the anime. I got it late in the game, so his stats are low and none of his moves are really useful. In addition to that, his speed is low, so he usually acts after the enemy Pokemon, which means he usually doesn’t act at all. I tried giving him the Exp. Share, but that didn’t really help, since he would have to outlevel the rest of my group to be effective enough.

Kingler steals the last hit!

After about 30 minutes of grinding, I finally got most of my team (Phanpy not included) to about level 50 and then I gave it a few more attempts against the Elite Four. The first few attempts failed miserably, but this helped me learn which Pokemon the Elite Four actually have, so on my third attempt, I finally managed to get to Lance. After Karen, who used dark and ghost types mostly, Lance and his “dragon” types were easy. I say “dragon” because he used a Gyarados, a Charizard and an Aeordactyl, which Pikachu disposed of with a single hit of Thundershock. His other three Pokemon were all Dragonite, so I had some difficulty with them, but Heracross got rid of the first two and Kingler somehow managed to defeat the last one.

Champion for all eternity!

With that, Pokemon Crystal was won. As with Pokemon Yellow, I failed on my first try, just like Ash did, but then I went and won it anyway, just so I can get some closure. I know it would have probably been truer to the anime to just give up and go with the next region, but it just doesn’t feel right to leave the game at that.

The traditional Victory Screen. I think I’ll save these for later.

Technically, I could now also go through the Kanto region to beat the local gyms and then finally face Red, the trainer of the first generation, but I really don’t feel like doing that, since it has nothing to do with the anime.

Time for Generation III!