Sakuya it is! Seems kinda fitting, too, since she's on the title screen. I decide to name this one Cold Steel
, though I can just drop by Lavendar Town if anyone wants to suggest a different nickname.
The rival takes Reimu.
Even though Sakuya is fairly defensive, this will still be an uphill battle because of that STAB Pound. Winning basically means using that Potion I grabbed or getting lucky.
Cold Steel has 21 hp, as you can see in that first screenshot, and that CReimu does 6 damage per Pound. Ow. On top of that, our speed appears to be tied. In spite of using my potion, I still lose
as it came down to both of us in the red and Reimu winning the speed tie. Gary taunts me
for the loss, though the professor pays out
the reward so I don't lose any money for this. Before playing these ROM hacks, I honestly never noticed that.
Make my way to Viridian now, battling a wild chibi Mystia along the way and getting a free potion. Free potions feel more meaningful at this early stage of the game, where cash can actually be a bit tight if you're capturing a lot of mons or having trouble with Brock. I even pick up a second free potion in Viridian.
As usual, we grab Oak's Parcel
at this point and then make a break for Pallet. I do a brief bit of level grinding so Sakuya picks up Knife Throw
. 40 base power steel-type attack with 95 accuracy. Concentrate makes up for that 5% loss in accuracy. Aside from the rare case where we might hit for super effective damage, though, it's hardly any better than scratch. Until she evolves, Sakuya doesn't get STAB on it.
Deliver the parcel
, get the Touhoudex. Some day, there will be a hack that will actually remove this fetch quest and just have Oak give you the pokedex at the start so you DON'T have to make a trip back to Pallet Town. The five free Toho Orbs are nice at least.
On the way back to Viridian, I grab a CChen.
I'll be needing this. I name it ScaredyCat. You'll see why soon enough.
Also run into a cKanako
and catch it just because it's actually a fairly rare encounter on route 1. Kanako is electric/grass and, if I end up using her, would make the early game a breeze.
After stopping by the pokecenter, I try to make my way north and get stopped by a forced tutorial.
This is something else ROM hackers really need to consider removing. The wording is especially stupid. Seriously. I've already caught a few touhous, thank you very much. Thankfully I can just speed past this.
Head straight for Viridian Forest and speed my way through it, avoiding the trainer battles. That was the plan at least, but I get a bit careless after losing to the one trainer that's non-optional. He had a level 10 CSunnymilk with Ember, I had a level 9 CSakuya. That kinda sucked. After a bit of grinding I blow past him and into freedom with a level 12 CSakuya that picked up Double Kick. NOW things start to get interesting!
Notice anything missing here?
Yep, no fence between us and Yamame's Cave. We can actually go through this cave to do some serious sequence breaking. This is where ScaredyCat comes into play.
Run into a wild CRin
at level 17. The wild touhou levels haven't changed and the cave is basically home to all the SA characters. There's no way I can run from this without either a lot of luck... or a puppet with Run Away for an ability.
Now we're in Vermillion City! And I don't have a single badge! Haven't even fought Gary again yet! Just picked up the VsSeeker!
We're not done sequence breaking yet, though!
Take a trip through Route 11, avoiding getting spotted by any of the trainers, to get to Route 12. Normally, this is blocked off by a Snorlax or equivalent mon. Here? Well, Genji is here as usual.
Just not blocking anything.
Might as well pick up the Super Rod while I'm in the area!
This is where things really get interesting.
Basically, all these battles are optional now as the trainers that we might have been forced to fight before have either been rearranged or now wander around at random. So now we basically just need to avoid getting spotted and we're home free. Welcome to Fuschia city!
Now, you might be thinking, "Nice job getting to Fuschia, but how the hell you getting to Cinnabar? You still need to Surf to get there!" Not so, my friend! For this hack has a new area!
If you haven't already figured it out from the name alone, the Undersea Cave will actually take you straight to Cinnabar without any need to use Surf. It's literally a cave under the sea. We also run into evolved puppets
here as the levels are pretty much appropriate for the area. Run Away still applies, though.
There's not much to this cave, but there's a lot of water
and areas you can't get to unless you have Surf. Even though HM's are now completely optional, you still need to use them to get to some hidden places and what not. At least it's not a dark, one-tile-wide-corridors maze.
And now... we're in Cinnabar!
In fact, we can access pretty much any city already. Getting to Cerulean is probably the only truly tricky one, requiring us to either defeat a trainer near Vermillion or go through Mount Moon. Aside from that, we've got complete freedom to roam the Kanto region from the start. And that just begs the question... what the heck do we do next?
Basically we can go after any gym leader, catch just about any touhou... heck, I can even access the Safari Zone since I still have the money to do so.
So, any suggestions on what to do now? Should we do the gyms completely out of sequence, or go back and take the gym mostly in order? And if you have any favorite Touhou characters you'd like to see me catch/use, now would be a good time to speak up! We've got access to most of the map, and I could get to the few areas we can't access fairly easily. Any PC-98 characters aren't going to be easy to get to, though, and I think Byakuren isn't actually in this particular hack at all. The hacker wanted to save her for "Touhoumon Green" apparently.
What's Touhoumon Green? Well, the hacker's promised a lot of things for that one. Essentially a remake of G/S/C from the ground up as a Touhoumon game. I hear Duke Nukem will even make an appearance!
...
Guess that joke doesn't quite work anymore, huh?
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