![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kjorteoLast time:
I'm sorry, I will probably go through the entire rest of the game and never get over this moment. This will be one of the things that sticks with me from this game. Eusine plays it off positively, like, "Oh, wow, did you see them run! What a spectacular sight that was!" but I am positive he is silently inwardly attempting to hate me to death.
I'm a bit busier than usual this weekend, and don't know if I'll have the time to advance too much farther in the game right now. This works out, though, because I got just far enough to do some fiddling with my party, and I now have more Pokewalking to do in order to bring a certain new recruit up to speed. More on that next time. For now, let's just say I'm doing some building and leveling behind the scenes this week.
Meanwhile, in the spirit of this amazing moment, let's have a filler intermission entry and talk some more about the Legendary Beasts!
Neither game makes it clear just what scaring the Legendary Beasts away from Burned Tower does. You would be forgiven for assuming the answer is nothing, aside from being a cutscene plot event flag that will be addressed by some additional plot developments later. There is an immediate gameplay effect, though: The Legendary Beasts are now loose and active in the region.
They are the first Roaming Pokemon of the series, and one of the many, many features that we kind of take for granted now, but that the original Gold/Silver pioneered. It was part of why that generation was so successful and influential, and, more personally, part of why it blew my young mind as the best game young me had ever played. Try to read everything below in the context of a late-90s Game Boy/Game Boy Color game, because otherwise it's easy to forget just how amazing it all was.
There is some variation in the finer details between games, but the overall idea of the roaming Legendary Beasts is the same: The Beasts move from route to route, and can be fought and captured if you happen to be on the same route they're currently occupying. However, much like what happened in Burnt Tower, they flee from battle as soon as they get a turn. However, they keep the damage/status/etc. inflicted on them between battles, which means that if you damage one and then it flees, it will remain damaged upon encountering it again. The idea is to wear them down over time with repeated encounters.
There are ways to prolong the battle and get a few more hits in, rather than allowing them to flee on their first turn, but this is different between the games. In the original Gold/Silver, you could put them to sleep, which bought you at least a few rounds before they woke up again. In HeartGold/SoulSilver, you can still put them to sleep but they'll just flee anyway.
Meanwhile, moves like Mean Look (which Silver so infuriatingly demonstrated for us in the last update) can prevent Pokemon from fleeing, but the devs anticipated this and countered by adding Roar to every roaming Beast's moveset. If they can't flee, they'll just make you flee.
After doing some quick internet searching, I have concluded that trapping them in HG/SS is possible but it just requires an extra step: if you put one to sleep before it flees from your first encounter, you can then Mean Look it in the second and be set from there. They can run in their sleep now, but they still can't roar in their sleep. Which is a little backwards, if you think about it.
Of course, to battle them, one must first encounter them. In both games, roaming Beasts pick one route at a time to occupy. If the player is in a route that currently also has a Beast in it, the Beast is added to the pool of possible random encounters. (I don't know the odds of a random encounter being a Beast if you're in its route; if anyone else does, I can edit that in. Most people who are hunting for Beasts on purpose just use Repels so that they're the only fight you can get into, anyway.)
In the original games, all Beasts reshuffled their location at random every time the player changed his or her location by any means, either from walking over the border between one area and another, or using Fly, Teleport, etc. Thus, the only way to be in the same area as one was to enter an area (causing it to re-randomize its location) and have it happen to select and enter that same area at the same time you did.
Once the player has already encountered a Beast at least once and has generated a Pokedex entry for it, said Pokedex entry can show its current location. This makes it possible to track and hunt the Beast down for all subsequent encounters, though it does not change the process for encountering it at all. The player still has to go back and forth until the Beast happens to land in his or her current location. However, checking the Pokedex at least makes it possible to tell when the Beast has done so.
Before that first encounter, there is no way whatsoever to know where that Beast is. The only possible course of action is to play the rest of game as normal (the good news is there is a lot of game left to play at this point) and hope to get lucky with the Beast's travel itinerary. Perhaps some minding-your-own-business random encounter will turn out to be a Beast, which is near-Shiny levels of surprising and exciting when it happens. I am guessing that this is why the author stand-in trainer in that Awkward Zombie comic above reacted the way she did.
By contrast, when I set the Beasts loose in SoulSilver, my map screen immediately started looking like this:
There are three obvious differences apparent from this screenshot:
For that last point, I assume this game is drawing from the events of Crystal, where Suicune was promoted to box art Legendary status. We've already encountered (and ruined the life of) the Crystal-exclusive character Eusine, so I'm assuming that the plot will continue in a Suicune/Eusine-related direction. I have not played Crystal, so I'm not sure what to expect in this regard. However, at the very least, it means that Suicune will probably come later through some plot nonsense, and that I shouldn't worry about that one for now.
(Actually, I shouldn't worry about the other two for now, either. I can go hunting for them if I wanted to, since they're already on the map, but they're also level 40 and I can't touch them with my current team anyway.)
Finally, there's one more key difference: their wandering habits have been toned down. Rather than randomizing and teleporting anywhere on the map any time you change locations, I've found that you can walk between areas a good 2-3 times with them staying put before they finally move, and even then they'll only move to an adjacent area. It's entirely possible to chase them down, as they'll only have moved a few zones by the time you reach them, and you can catch up to them. That's only if you move on foot, though. I am given to understand that Flying/Teleporting/etc. still lets them teleport anywhere, but I have not tested this, as I don't have those moves yet.
I caught all three Beasts in the original Silver, and that was a huge point of pride for me. It was one of the reasons I tried (in vain, alas) to preserve my save file from that game. Yes, I beat all the gyms and beat Mt. Silver and all that, but catching all three Beasts under how the old system worked was probably the coolest and proudest accomplishment young me had. By contrast, I have... complicated feelings about the remake's changes.
On one hand, I will admit that it feels like some of the magic is missing now. That ARGRARJGHH moment that first time you encounter one is lessened a little when I can (rather easily) track them down on purpose from the beginning. Yes, they do make up for that somewhat with an all new and cool special song, which is customized (different tempo/instruments/etc) into unique themes for all three Beasts. That is awesome. However, even with that, there was something about encountering Entei in my test run, or more like there wasn't something....
The best way to explain it is to quote a YouTube comment I saw on that Entei theme linked above, which reads:
"I remember when I was a kid, I was walking around the perfectly normal fields of Leaf Green, and then suddenly ENTEI FUCKING APPEARED OUT OF NOWHERE AND I FREAKED THE FUCK OUT. Unfortunately, I didn't catch him."
That's how I felt back then, too. That is not how I felt this time.
On the other hand, thinking about it more carefully, I realize I could be speaking from a position of privilege on the matter. Yes, that feeling of lucking into a Beast in the old games was one of the absolute highlights of my entire run, but the RNG could have just as easily decided I would go the entire game without ever seeing a single one. The feeling of "Man, remember the time that happened?" is great, but maybe not so great when the answer is "No, I don't, because it actually never happened to me." The Beasts are accessible now, and I cannot in good conscience claim that is a bad thing.
Also, the day-one tracking is optional. If I want to recreate the feeling of going through the game blind with the cautious and distant optimism that any fight I get into from here on out could be a Beast--you never know!--then I can just, you know, not look at the map. This pairs nicely with the fact that they're too high level for me to worry about right now anyway. The tracking capabilities will still be there and convenient when it's more properly time to get serious about catching them. Until then, I can keep that screen closed and know they're nebulously out there, somewhere, and that's kind of exciting.
So... yeah. It's a good change, and it will be exciting to see how this plays out now that the Beasts are loose. We will definitely be keeping our eyes out from now on! ... But maybe not keeping them out too much and spoiling the fun.
I'm sorry, I will probably go through the entire rest of the game and never get over this moment. This will be one of the things that sticks with me from this game. Eusine plays it off positively, like, "Oh, wow, did you see them run! What a spectacular sight that was!" but I am positive he is silently inwardly attempting to hate me to death.
I'm a bit busier than usual this weekend, and don't know if I'll have the time to advance too much farther in the game right now. This works out, though, because I got just far enough to do some fiddling with my party, and I now have more Pokewalking to do in order to bring a certain new recruit up to speed. More on that next time. For now, let's just say I'm doing some building and leveling behind the scenes this week.
Meanwhile, in the spirit of this amazing moment, let's have a filler intermission entry and talk some more about the Legendary Beasts!
Neither game makes it clear just what scaring the Legendary Beasts away from Burned Tower does. You would be forgiven for assuming the answer is nothing, aside from being a cutscene plot event flag that will be addressed by some additional plot developments later. There is an immediate gameplay effect, though: The Legendary Beasts are now loose and active in the region.
They are the first Roaming Pokemon of the series, and one of the many, many features that we kind of take for granted now, but that the original Gold/Silver pioneered. It was part of why that generation was so successful and influential, and, more personally, part of why it blew my young mind as the best game young me had ever played. Try to read everything below in the context of a late-90s Game Boy/Game Boy Color game, because otherwise it's easy to forget just how amazing it all was.
There is some variation in the finer details between games, but the overall idea of the roaming Legendary Beasts is the same: The Beasts move from route to route, and can be fought and captured if you happen to be on the same route they're currently occupying. However, much like what happened in Burnt Tower, they flee from battle as soon as they get a turn. However, they keep the damage/status/etc. inflicted on them between battles, which means that if you damage one and then it flees, it will remain damaged upon encountering it again. The idea is to wear them down over time with repeated encounters.
There are ways to prolong the battle and get a few more hits in, rather than allowing them to flee on their first turn, but this is different between the games. In the original Gold/Silver, you could put them to sleep, which bought you at least a few rounds before they woke up again. In HeartGold/SoulSilver, you can still put them to sleep but they'll just flee anyway.
Meanwhile, moves like Mean Look (which Silver so infuriatingly demonstrated for us in the last update) can prevent Pokemon from fleeing, but the devs anticipated this and countered by adding Roar to every roaming Beast's moveset. If they can't flee, they'll just make you flee.
After doing some quick internet searching, I have concluded that trapping them in HG/SS is possible but it just requires an extra step: if you put one to sleep before it flees from your first encounter, you can then Mean Look it in the second and be set from there. They can run in their sleep now, but they still can't roar in their sleep. Which is a little backwards, if you think about it.
Of course, to battle them, one must first encounter them. In both games, roaming Beasts pick one route at a time to occupy. If the player is in a route that currently also has a Beast in it, the Beast is added to the pool of possible random encounters. (I don't know the odds of a random encounter being a Beast if you're in its route; if anyone else does, I can edit that in. Most people who are hunting for Beasts on purpose just use Repels so that they're the only fight you can get into, anyway.)
In the original games, all Beasts reshuffled their location at random every time the player changed his or her location by any means, either from walking over the border between one area and another, or using Fly, Teleport, etc. Thus, the only way to be in the same area as one was to enter an area (causing it to re-randomize its location) and have it happen to select and enter that same area at the same time you did.
Once the player has already encountered a Beast at least once and has generated a Pokedex entry for it, said Pokedex entry can show its current location. This makes it possible to track and hunt the Beast down for all subsequent encounters, though it does not change the process for encountering it at all. The player still has to go back and forth until the Beast happens to land in his or her current location. However, checking the Pokedex at least makes it possible to tell when the Beast has done so.
Before that first encounter, there is no way whatsoever to know where that Beast is. The only possible course of action is to play the rest of game as normal (the good news is there is a lot of game left to play at this point) and hope to get lucky with the Beast's travel itinerary. Perhaps some minding-your-own-business random encounter will turn out to be a Beast, which is near-Shiny levels of surprising and exciting when it happens. I am guessing that this is why the author stand-in trainer in that Awkward Zombie comic above reacted the way she did.
By contrast, when I set the Beasts loose in SoulSilver, my map screen immediately started looking like this:
There are three obvious differences apparent from this screenshot:
- I can track the Beasts' current location already, without having had to luck into their first encounter. This makes finding them significantly easier.
- I can see them both from my basic map screen, rather than having to dig through several pages of sub-menus to pull up the encounter location from their Pokedex entry. This makes tracking them much more convenient, as well.
- Wait, both? I see Entei and Raikou, but where's Suicune?
For that last point, I assume this game is drawing from the events of Crystal, where Suicune was promoted to box art Legendary status. We've already encountered (and ruined the life of) the Crystal-exclusive character Eusine, so I'm assuming that the plot will continue in a Suicune/Eusine-related direction. I have not played Crystal, so I'm not sure what to expect in this regard. However, at the very least, it means that Suicune will probably come later through some plot nonsense, and that I shouldn't worry about that one for now.
(Actually, I shouldn't worry about the other two for now, either. I can go hunting for them if I wanted to, since they're already on the map, but they're also level 40 and I can't touch them with my current team anyway.)
Finally, there's one more key difference: their wandering habits have been toned down. Rather than randomizing and teleporting anywhere on the map any time you change locations, I've found that you can walk between areas a good 2-3 times with them staying put before they finally move, and even then they'll only move to an adjacent area. It's entirely possible to chase them down, as they'll only have moved a few zones by the time you reach them, and you can catch up to them. That's only if you move on foot, though. I am given to understand that Flying/Teleporting/etc. still lets them teleport anywhere, but I have not tested this, as I don't have those moves yet.
I caught all three Beasts in the original Silver, and that was a huge point of pride for me. It was one of the reasons I tried (in vain, alas) to preserve my save file from that game. Yes, I beat all the gyms and beat Mt. Silver and all that, but catching all three Beasts under how the old system worked was probably the coolest and proudest accomplishment young me had. By contrast, I have... complicated feelings about the remake's changes.
On one hand, I will admit that it feels like some of the magic is missing now. That ARGRARJGHH moment that first time you encounter one is lessened a little when I can (rather easily) track them down on purpose from the beginning. Yes, they do make up for that somewhat with an all new and cool special song, which is customized (different tempo/instruments/etc) into unique themes for all three Beasts. That is awesome. However, even with that, there was something about encountering Entei in my test run, or more like there wasn't something....
The best way to explain it is to quote a YouTube comment I saw on that Entei theme linked above, which reads:
"I remember when I was a kid, I was walking around the perfectly normal fields of Leaf Green, and then suddenly ENTEI FUCKING APPEARED OUT OF NOWHERE AND I FREAKED THE FUCK OUT. Unfortunately, I didn't catch him."
That's how I felt back then, too. That is not how I felt this time.
On the other hand, thinking about it more carefully, I realize I could be speaking from a position of privilege on the matter. Yes, that feeling of lucking into a Beast in the old games was one of the absolute highlights of my entire run, but the RNG could have just as easily decided I would go the entire game without ever seeing a single one. The feeling of "Man, remember the time that happened?" is great, but maybe not so great when the answer is "No, I don't, because it actually never happened to me." The Beasts are accessible now, and I cannot in good conscience claim that is a bad thing.
Also, the day-one tracking is optional. If I want to recreate the feeling of going through the game blind with the cautious and distant optimism that any fight I get into from here on out could be a Beast--you never know!--then I can just, you know, not look at the map. This pairs nicely with the fact that they're too high level for me to worry about right now anyway. The tracking capabilities will still be there and convenient when it's more properly time to get serious about catching them. Until then, I can keep that screen closed and know they're nebulously out there, somewhere, and that's kind of exciting.
So... yeah. It's a good change, and it will be exciting to see how this plays out now that the Beasts are loose. We will definitely be keeping our eyes out from now on! ... But maybe not keeping them out too much and spoiling the fun.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-15 05:31 pm (UTC)(Also it notes under the comic that Katie was playing HGSS so I dunno what's up with that reaction unless she just hadn't ... looked up any info on what those map icons were or something. There is still an element of surprise if you don't KNOW what's gonna happen, I suppose!)
no subject
Date: 2017-10-15 05:41 pm (UTC)I have no idea if Katie played the original or if that was her intention, though. I would have drawn it the same way but possibly for different reasons, is all I know.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-15 08:46 pm (UTC)Aside from that, I love the lore surrounding the legendary beasts as well because I am a huge goddamn nerd and I get really excited about pokemon mythology. Supposedly, when the Brass Tower burned down three pokemon were trapped inside, and then Ho-oh resurrected them and that's why they stand in the basement all day, and also why Ho-oh left. Some have hypothesized that these original three pokemon may actually have been a Vaporeon, Jolteon and Flareon, both to coincide with the elemental typing of Entei, Raikou and Suicune, but also because of the associationg between the Burned Tower and the Kimono Girls, who all train the eeveelutions exclusively.
And that opens up so many new questions. Ho-oh can make other pokemon legendaries? Ho-oh can literally raise the dead? Does this mean there are, in fact, multiples of some legendaries, or are these the only legendary beasts? The franchise has always been super unclear about that and contradicts itself regularly.
Anyway I'll shut up before I start rambling about Sinnoh again.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-15 09:03 pm (UTC)I do love all the lore around Ecruteak City and its towers; the entire area is so reverent to them that it really fits the music and makes the whole location a great place to just stop and ponder Pokemon. I hadn't heard that theory about the Beasts' original species before, but I love it and it goes straight into the Headcanon Accepted pile. I was already kind of loving how the Kimono Girls got promoted from "That one building you can enter and fight five Eeveelutions but it doesn't really do anything" plot-irrelevant side building, and now they're the most mysterious and enigmatic yet probably important non-Pokemon figures in the game. This theory tying in with them makes it even better.
Man, if only Ho-Oh had been around in Kalos about 3,000 years ago.
Edit: Also, once again, any time you start a sentence with "Anyway I'll shut up before I start rambling about..." in this LP, you can probably assume my answer is going to be "No please this sounds really good I want to hear this (and also I wouldn't have room to talk anyway.)"
no subject
Date: 2017-10-15 09:35 pm (UTC)Once you get to Whirl Island, believe me, I will have a lot of :words: about Lugia and the roles of the Tower Duo in pokemon mythology and what the heck any of this has to do with the overarching pokemon creation myth and why the crap did Movie!Lugia apparently get Aeroblast and Hyper Beam mixed up and why is Ho-oh such a huge troll and also...
Also I will probably have a lot to say about ANIMISM but not the kind that occurs underneath the ground because templates like that are forbidden.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-15 10:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-15 10:28 pm (UTC)The third movie is GREAT. Even if most of it we spend politely ignoring that Entei is leaving dribbly crystal puddles everywhere he goes.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-16 06:13 am (UTC)Because the 'arms' were the Unown all along.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-16 10:38 am (UTC)On the other hand, though, Suicune is one of my favorite Legendaries. I'm not sure why I like it. It's just got a certain majesty to it, y'know?
no subject
Date: 2017-10-18 02:58 am (UTC)This is just what Bulbapedia says, though; I never actually made it that far in gen 6.