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Pokemon SoulSilver Special Aside 3: Here you got your hero, slicing up your ecstasy
Now that we have conquered the Johto League, the entire Kanto league is upon us. This something between "postgame content" and "an entire additional game tacked onto the first game." Kanto is an entire region, you see--the region in which the generation 1 games took place, to be precise. Much like Johto, there's even an entire questline to get all eight gym badges before facing the ultimate challenge. On the other hand, Johto was clearly the "main story" of this game. The entire character arcs with both Team Rocket and Silver played out here. The ending was a suitably climactic showdown against the Elite Four and the Champion. There were even end credits. We saved and quit before this happened, technically, but very shortly (like, within the first few minutes of starting up) next time, we can expect to unlock the National Dex, which is usually around the point when most Pokemon games have declared it to be postgame time. "Yeah, you beat the main game with the regional roster, so now it's time to just open everything up and let you play with whatever at this point."
The end result of all of these mixed signals: We still have an entire region to go, but all of the safety locks are now disabled, or at least they will be once we get that National Dex. Our team options have already drastically increased, and we can expect them to increase even further very shortly after we start the next session. (I know using the Pokewalker already let us have certain Pokemon far earlier than it would be possible to obtain them within the actual game--ahem, hi Murkrow--but even by those standards the roster is about to explode. The National Dex acquisition will unlock about a zillion new Pokewalker courses, for one thing.)
This leads us to the point of this Special Aside entry, along with the next few that we intend to follow it. We're going to be getting a lot of new recruits in a very short amount of time, with potentially as much as half the team or more replaced either by next session or the one after. So that these all-new characters can better fit in with the established team whose heartfelt journey was built over the course of everything they've been to up to this point, I feel like the new recruits need... you know... an introduction. Who are these people, and what brings them to our team? Why should you care about them when the Neverending Six already have your heart? Hopefully by the end of this series, the expanded team won't feel as out of place compared to the ones who have been here from the beginning.
That said, the perfect example for what I mean and what I'm going for, the perfect introduction to this topic, comes with our first new addition. This is a Pokemon whose debut I've been planning and waiting for with excitement since early on in this LP, one with almost as much nostalgia and backstory to it as Empress Moonchild herself (even if for completely different, almost polar opposite reasons,) even if I was able to go without mentioning it and keep that fact a surprise all the way until now.
In this entry: Meet a science project searching for meaning. An engineered monster of sorts, born out of frustration and bred solely to be a weapon, now freed and left to learn how to live and love.
As I've mentioned before both in the written portions of this LP and in the Part 20 stream, I used to have a bad case of Smogonitis. The tail end of my Diamond postgame experience, along with my first attempt to play SoulSilver, mostly saw me chain-breeding and hatching scores and scores of eggs until I put both games down because that was about as much of an un-fun slog as it sounds. The magic was gone. I had seen the numberwang behind the veil and tried to create The Perfect Specimen until I burned myself out. I still have an old spreadsheet lying around that has something like ten or fifteen entries each of a particular mons I was breeding for, an exhaustive list of all of their IVs, and a "Notes" field with comments like:
"Def is great, otherwise fairly sad. SpA unacceptable"
"#3 from new batch. Good Spe, all else awful"
"Max SpD... otherwise useless"
And so on. There are pages of this. See, I actually get where Silver is coming from, because I was Silver for the longest time. And like Silver, that made me utterly miserable. I eventually walked away from Pokemon entirely. It was only with the start of this LP those four years ago that I was finally able to return, and that's why the dressing down I gave him in part 15 remains my favorite piece of writing from the original era.
So, where does that leave us now? It leaves us in a position to do address something I've been aware of yet afraid to touch this entire time.
Those Pokemon are all still there, you see.
I wanted a perfect Breloom back in the day. In addition to beinghot adorable both hot and adorable (I guess I had some sentimentality even back then, even if that was about it,) Breloom has good stats and a unique typing that covers two elements with a ton of power behind them, much like a physical Grass/Fighting version of what Auryn can do with Psychic, Water, and its Special Attack. If I could get an Adamant one (a nature that further boosts Attack at the cost of its utterly unused Special Attack, for full minmaxing) with the Poison Heal nature and a poison-inflicting held item, thus guaranteeing it free Leftovers-like regeneration, then I'd have an absolute powerhouse.
To that end, there is still a box that's overflowing with freshly hatched level 1 Shroomish, all of them lined up and ready to be evaluated with all the compassion and human touch of meat animals in a factory farm. I never did create that perfect max-all-31-IVs perfect-nature shiny chosen one, because the pursuit of doing so was such a slog that it killed my entire love of Pokemon before I could. Nor will that goal ever be achieved; I'm only back now because I've learned a better way from Ethan, the wisest trainer ever to grace a Pokemon game, and I no longer care about such things. Instead, I'm going to take the one that was about as close as I got--whatever happened to be the best, good-enough-est one that's sitting in that box--and there, there's our new Pokemon. (I should add that "as close as I was able to get before giving up in frustration" was still pretty dang good, by the way; I think the one we're going with has IVs like 22/30/27/22/16/31 or something. All the more proof about the sheer size of the stick I used to have lodged in me that that wasn't considered good enough at the time.)
Instead, the point of this Shroomish and eventually Breloom's journey will be to redicover the simple joys of being out and about, of being part of our team... part of our family. The chosen one was never to so much as see combat without an EV spreadsheet close by; its every interaction with the outside world was to be carefully curated so as to preserve its pristine and closely planned development. This Shroomish/Breloom will walk with us and bump heads with whomever he happens to encounter; we may buy him some vitamins but we're not going to keep track of encounter EVs. He will play in the mud instead of living in a sterile preservation chamber. He will find love, if not from someone who has fully 100% been able to shake bad habits and become Ethan (I did still pick the best one of the batch, after all,) then at least someone who's no longer Silver. And it is our hope that he will learn to embrace its freedom, though I imagine that might be a long adjustment for him. He was born and raised in a lab, his every movement planned and chosen for him, and now he gets to go... outside? What does one even do outside...? We hope he'll learn how to be happy instead of optimal, with time.
So, now that our Shroomish has been rescued from cold storage and a colder heart, all he needs is a name.
Let's see. Back in the day, I used and reused the name "Badger" for my favorite Brelooms--I had a Badger as part of my team in Ruby, and this was all an attempt to breed another Badger--the perfect Badger--in Diamond. Naming a Breloom "Badger," of course, was a reference to the hottest memes of the day.
But now? Hmm....
A Pokemon born raised in a test tube and raised in a preservation chamber, created as part of an unethical science project. A Pokemon birthed from the DNA of an original mythical progenitor and enhanced, in hopes of creating something stronger, more powerful. A weapon. One who has now escaped that fate and must come to terms with its upbringing, with who and what he is and what he wants to do with his new life.
Meet Badgertwo.
And... be patient with him, when you do. He's learning. Adjusting.
And there you have it; our first new recruit. More new faces to meet next time, perhaps?
The end result of all of these mixed signals: We still have an entire region to go, but all of the safety locks are now disabled, or at least they will be once we get that National Dex. Our team options have already drastically increased, and we can expect them to increase even further very shortly after we start the next session. (I know using the Pokewalker already let us have certain Pokemon far earlier than it would be possible to obtain them within the actual game--ahem, hi Murkrow--but even by those standards the roster is about to explode. The National Dex acquisition will unlock about a zillion new Pokewalker courses, for one thing.)
This leads us to the point of this Special Aside entry, along with the next few that we intend to follow it. We're going to be getting a lot of new recruits in a very short amount of time, with potentially as much as half the team or more replaced either by next session or the one after. So that these all-new characters can better fit in with the established team whose heartfelt journey was built over the course of everything they've been to up to this point, I feel like the new recruits need... you know... an introduction. Who are these people, and what brings them to our team? Why should you care about them when the Neverending Six already have your heart? Hopefully by the end of this series, the expanded team won't feel as out of place compared to the ones who have been here from the beginning.
That said, the perfect example for what I mean and what I'm going for, the perfect introduction to this topic, comes with our first new addition. This is a Pokemon whose debut I've been planning and waiting for with excitement since early on in this LP, one with almost as much nostalgia and backstory to it as Empress Moonchild herself (even if for completely different, almost polar opposite reasons,) even if I was able to go without mentioning it and keep that fact a surprise all the way until now.
In this entry: Meet a science project searching for meaning. An engineered monster of sorts, born out of frustration and bred solely to be a weapon, now freed and left to learn how to live and love.
As I've mentioned before both in the written portions of this LP and in the Part 20 stream, I used to have a bad case of Smogonitis. The tail end of my Diamond postgame experience, along with my first attempt to play SoulSilver, mostly saw me chain-breeding and hatching scores and scores of eggs until I put both games down because that was about as much of an un-fun slog as it sounds. The magic was gone. I had seen the numberwang behind the veil and tried to create The Perfect Specimen until I burned myself out. I still have an old spreadsheet lying around that has something like ten or fifteen entries each of a particular mons I was breeding for, an exhaustive list of all of their IVs, and a "Notes" field with comments like:
"Def is great, otherwise fairly sad. SpA unacceptable"
"#3 from new batch. Good Spe, all else awful"
"Max SpD... otherwise useless"
And so on. There are pages of this. See, I actually get where Silver is coming from, because I was Silver for the longest time. And like Silver, that made me utterly miserable. I eventually walked away from Pokemon entirely. It was only with the start of this LP those four years ago that I was finally able to return, and that's why the dressing down I gave him in part 15 remains my favorite piece of writing from the original era.
So, where does that leave us now? It leaves us in a position to do address something I've been aware of yet afraid to touch this entire time.
Those Pokemon are all still there, you see.
I wanted a perfect Breloom back in the day. In addition to being
To that end, there is still a box that's overflowing with freshly hatched level 1 Shroomish, all of them lined up and ready to be evaluated with all the compassion and human touch of meat animals in a factory farm. I never did create that perfect max-all-31-IVs perfect-nature shiny chosen one, because the pursuit of doing so was such a slog that it killed my entire love of Pokemon before I could. Nor will that goal ever be achieved; I'm only back now because I've learned a better way from Ethan, the wisest trainer ever to grace a Pokemon game, and I no longer care about such things. Instead, I'm going to take the one that was about as close as I got--whatever happened to be the best, good-enough-est one that's sitting in that box--and there, there's our new Pokemon. (I should add that "as close as I was able to get before giving up in frustration" was still pretty dang good, by the way; I think the one we're going with has IVs like 22/30/27/22/16/31 or something. All the more proof about the sheer size of the stick I used to have lodged in me that that wasn't considered good enough at the time.)
Instead, the point of this Shroomish and eventually Breloom's journey will be to redicover the simple joys of being out and about, of being part of our team... part of our family. The chosen one was never to so much as see combat without an EV spreadsheet close by; its every interaction with the outside world was to be carefully curated so as to preserve its pristine and closely planned development. This Shroomish/Breloom will walk with us and bump heads with whomever he happens to encounter; we may buy him some vitamins but we're not going to keep track of encounter EVs. He will play in the mud instead of living in a sterile preservation chamber. He will find love, if not from someone who has fully 100% been able to shake bad habits and become Ethan (I did still pick the best one of the batch, after all,) then at least someone who's no longer Silver. And it is our hope that he will learn to embrace its freedom, though I imagine that might be a long adjustment for him. He was born and raised in a lab, his every movement planned and chosen for him, and now he gets to go... outside? What does one even do outside...? We hope he'll learn how to be happy instead of optimal, with time.
So, now that our Shroomish has been rescued from cold storage and a colder heart, all he needs is a name.
Let's see. Back in the day, I used and reused the name "Badger" for my favorite Brelooms--I had a Badger as part of my team in Ruby, and this was all an attempt to breed another Badger--the perfect Badger--in Diamond. Naming a Breloom "Badger," of course, was a reference to the hottest memes of the day.
But now? Hmm....
A Pokemon born raised in a test tube and raised in a preservation chamber, created as part of an unethical science project. A Pokemon birthed from the DNA of an original mythical progenitor and enhanced, in hopes of creating something stronger, more powerful. A weapon. One who has now escaped that fate and must come to terms with its upbringing, with who and what he is and what he wants to do with his new life.
Meet Badgertwo.
And... be patient with him, when you do. He's learning. Adjusting.
And there you have it; our first new recruit. More new faces to meet next time, perhaps?