It’s time to go through route 3, which means a lot of trash trainers challenging me to basically walk up and murder their best friends for XP. Don’t you love permadeath?
As you’ll remember from playing any Kanto-region Pokemon title, the trainers on route 3 are all astoundingly weak. This carries over into the Touhou version, and I only wind up ever having to head back to town for free heals once before I get to the point where I’m capturing newbies and using the Center right outside Mount Moon.
Speaking of new puppets, I ran into Sylvester here
◊ on Route 3, and plan on letting him sit in the back slots of my party until such time as I have a replacement. He’s kind of redundant when Minnie is already way more awesome than a Com Mon has any business being.
Similarly doomed to irrelevance
◊ is Frida
, a Satori who I purchased from that shady salesman in the Mount Moon medical center. She takes the place of Magikarp, which is actually kind of appropriate because her only initially known move is Recollection. Which is Transform, from the original game, with a new name attached. Yeah, she starts as a Ditto without the useful factor – even if I hadn’t banned breeding, the omni-breeding trait is reserved for Kedama. I’ll still slap a few levels on her, but she won’t actually fight anything until she learns a useful move. Which, for some suspicious reason, happens at exactly level 20.
A direct stroll into Mt. Moon rapidly lands me in a battle against Nanoka, who fills out the sixth slot in my team
◊, and also happens to be extremely useful for navigating Mt. Moon itself. See, she comes equipped with…
- Ghost-type attack moves, allowing her to easily dispose of less-common dungeon dwellers Koakuma and Kogasa;
- the Dark type, making her immune to the infinite number of wild Rumia with the exact same attack set as her; and
- More than enough speed to flee from the extremely sluggish Kisume when I don’t feel the need to switch in my Wind-type to knock ‘em down.
The Team Rocket goons down here are a little more hazardous than your average random Trainer… actually, no, no, they’re not. They’re weaklings easily swept aside by the hyperleveled Minnie-Lewis-Endymion trio. I don’t even have to exploit weaknesses; as long as I don’t try to cherry-tap them to death, their girls are easily brute-forced through.
After blindly selecting one of the fossils, whose names and descriptions are completely unaltered from the baseline Fire Red ROM, I proceed out to the other end of Route 4 and pick up
◊ Birdo. He starts off seeming weak thanks to the atrocious unreliability of Sing and the junkiness of his other moves, but grows useful quickly as I stack on more levels and cause him to learn Wing Attack. 30% flinch rate, hoooooo! (Also, Gust is now Wind-type, giving a little bit of variety in attack types.)
Much grinding occurs, and then I set foot northward from Cerulean City. Rival fight time!
And she winds up not posing any trouble to speak of. Her opening Shizuha is Nature type, and thus gets curbstomped by Birdo. Nitori’s Water type lets Endy wreck it with ease. Medicine’s Miasma type lets Lewis safely engage her with mind bullets, and Reisen simply has poor enough defenses that Minnie is able to bite the bunny’s head off in a couple of turns without even needing to hit a weakness.
The Nugget Bridge trainers are so screwed when I roll up there.
