Episode 17: ACAB Includes Lorelei

Our journey towards Fuschia City wound up being quite eventful, although it didn't start that way. The bridge with the Fishermen is about the same as it always was, although fighting them has really drawn attention to the fact that Sillish is the only actual fish in the game. After getting the Super Rod I was able to confirm, most of what I found while fishing were coffee monsters, clams, and.. water spirits? Whatever Splashee is supposed to be. One of the fishermen did have one new interesting Beast though: Judging by the name showing up as a Game Corner prize and it looking very Dragon-like, I'd wager good money that this is our Dragonite expy.

Slobbix is blocking our path to proceed further, but luckily we have a Beast Flute to wake it up. After a Super Fang and a Hurricane from Rowsdower and a Thunder Wave from Tubi put it into perfect capture range, we catch the big man in our first ball.

While I fight through more repetitive fishermen, I get a chance to use Sludge Bomb on Toby Kebel and admire its animation. Something I really admire about this game is its attention to detail on little elements of presentation like this. I think a lot of ROM hackers would've just given it the animation of Sludge and called that good enough (I've seen a lot of reused animations in other hacks), but this team put in the effort to give these moves unique animation, to the extent that if I didn't know better I'd assume Sludge Bomb was in the original game. It's great!

I'm gonna have a lot of praise of this game on this route, actually. We'll get there though, first we fight a Cue Ball who has all Electric type Beasts. After the battle, we suggest he use his bald head as a solar panel. That's pretty good. I guess me thinking that gag is pretty funny is also praise, but not what I was getting at.

Most of the other NPCs on the bridge area aren't particularly notable. There's a Fisherman who gives us a couple spots where you can catch wild Jelleye, evidently in addition to the Safari Zone they can also be found fishing in certain routes with the Super Rod. There's also a patch of grass behind a cut tree with nothing really new in it, but I did happen to catch a glimpse of another new cave entrance. Can't get back there from here, but presumably we'll be able to go around later.

From this point on, it seems like just about every trainer on this route has new dialogue, since there's a new little story beat going on here. Our first hint of that comes from this NPC, who says her friend can't stop fawning over a police officer.

They're standing just nearby, and they're both trainers who we have to fight. The cop is none too pleased about having to deal with this girl, and is thankful for us showing up just to have something to do.

Oddly, the Officers have their own unique battle theme. It took me a second to recognize the tune, but it seems to be an arrangement of Flash Man's theme from Mega Man 2. It's slowed down, and played in a more straight rhythm, but it's recognizably the same song. I'll grant them that, when slowed down like this, it does sound like the theme song for a cop show. But it's a little odd they felt the need to give them their own song at all. I guess they are a pretty big part of this little section of the game though, as we'll see.

The two Beauties in the maze-like section of the route from the original game have some new dialogue that gives a hint about what's going on here. One of them says that Officers are hot and that her friend who likes Bikers has no taste, with the other saying the opposite. The one who liked the cops has a Norhorse though, so I know who I'd call lacking in taste.

Indeed, this route sounds like it's normally teeming with Bikers, but with the Shayton situation, there's been a massively increased police presence to try and keep them from causing any more trouble. The Bikers who are still around are bemoaning the presence of all the cops and calling Shayton a dumbass, meanwhile most of the cops seem to be incredibly bored since none of the Bikers are actually doing anything illegal.

Oh one of the cops who says he's "bored out of his mind" after his battle starts the battle by quoting the Sans fight intro from Undertale to you, word for word, except for changing the last bit. I was gonna do an edit of a cop wearing a shirt that said like "I'd Rather Be Playing The Classic 2015 Indie RPG Undertale Right Now" but I didn't want to give him too much credit.

I absolutely adore what they did with this area in this game. Something I've always kind of felt about the early Pokémon games is that most of the areas don't feel very connected to what's around them. There's a bunch of NPCs doing their own thing, and maybe they'll drop a line like "hey have you fought this Gym Leader?" or something like that. But it never really feels like the things you do in one area really affect the areas around it, and almost none of the side characters have any impact on the world of anyone in it outside of the very small area you encounter them in. Parallel to that, a lot of generic "Routes" in the games can struggle to have much of their own identity. There's plenty of memorable locations to be sure, but it generally comes from geography rather than the people and dialogue, who often times feel a bit disconnected. With both of these problems combined, it feels like most of the dialogue you're reading in a Pokémon game doesn't feel like characters in a world, it just feels like they had to write some random words to put in front of some RPG battles. I wonder if this is why so many people just skip through all the dialogue in these games all the time, 9 times out of 10 it just adds nothing.

In general, Star Beasts has done a great job making random NPC trainers actually have worthwhile things to say. Sometimes they're alluding to future events or characters, sometimes they're giving you gameplay hints like where to find or how to evolve various Beasts, sometimes they're just pretty entertaining jokes. But it feels like it lets a lot less of its text go to waste, and this area is a perfect example. I could've have told you what anyone in this area was talking about in the original game, but here there's not only a little mini-story unfolding, but it's also directly related to something that we saw happen in a different area. It goes such a long way to making the world feel more genuinely lived in.

We haven't actually seen the final beat of this story yet, although we do have this cop alluding to there being an "Ice Queen" that's stopping them from leaving. But before we deal with that, there's still one more matter to attend to on this route.

So the cave is actually a forest. Alright, whatever. There's some grass here with nothing really newsworthy, but a couple other things that are pretty notable. One is just some old lady, who stands here offering an in-game trade with the normal default dialogue. I have no idea why she's here in this secret forest, but she's looking for a Slaymore and offering to trade an Auraklos, so it seems like you'll be able to get the other Dojo prize through a trade for completion's sake.

This forest is pretty small, there's a branching path right at the start, with the left side leading to the old lady and the right side leading down a slightly more winding path to the main attraction: What seems to be a Legendary Beast! (Not to be confused with the Legendary Beasts from Pokémon).

The full quote here is "Before you stands a Vulturnus, one of the legendary guardians of the winds. In the time it takes you to process its presence, it has already attacked you! It feels like a typhoon!" I did drop a save before the fight, not really so much because I was worried about accidentally KOing it, but mostly because I only have like 3 regular Star Balls in my inventory and nothing else. So I'm probably just going to come back for this thing later, maybe in some sort of big roundup of all the legendary locations near the end of the game.

It seems to be a Fighting/Flying type, which would be an appealing replacement for Tubi that can deal with Steel types nicely. But I didn't catch it in my balls that I had, my team was pretty beat up from all the trainers, and I didn't feel like just resetting over and over again until it got caught. So we'll leave it until later.

Going back out to the route for more battles, just a couple other things to note. Rekall can learn Transform apparently, so that's cool. Also I actually got to use the Beast Flute to wake up something that was asleep, I'm glad I remembered it can actually do that, lol. There is one more new Beast on an Officer's team that we hadn't seen before, although its name has showed up a couple of times.

Like I briefly mentioned earlier, my team was pretty well beat after fighting all the trainers on this route. Luckily, if you know the layout of this route, there's a ledge you can walk on top of until just before the Fuschia City gate, so I could just sneak past the rest, heal in the city, and then come back. Unfortunately, there's still an "Ice Queen" to deal with.

It's Lorelei! This is kind of the perfect capstone to talking about how side characters in early Pokémon games feel pretty flat. For the longest time, the Elite 4 were the thing the whole game was leading up to, but you had no idea who they were. And not in like a "building up a mystery" sort of way, they were just a bunch of randos. If these are gonna be our final bosses, they should have some personality! In RBY, all we really got was Agatha potentially having some history with Oak. Having Lorelei here, acting as a police chief and being a boss of this little side story, is a really cool choice!

What I'm less of a big fan of is my team being beat to shit before this fight. I'm gonna need to get creative if I'm gonna take down a boss with a team of 5. Oh, and fittingly with the Gym Leaders having the Club Leader battle music, Lorelei (and presumably the Elite 4 as a whole) has the Grandmaster battle theme.

Her first Beast out was a Tinieddi wih was able to paralyze Zorotl with a Body Slam on its first attack. It went down to two Bubblebeams either way, but that set me up for a frustrating matchup against her second Beast.

On its first turn out, Hellbrand proceeded to outspeed Zorotl and hit him with a Confuse Ray. Every turn after that, it went for Headbutt, making for a 3-way "you can't move this turn" combo with paraflinchfusion. If that wasn't enough, The Peeker, who came out next, caught a Burn off its Ember (it seems to be Ice/Fire since Bubblebeam was super effective), so that throws a pretty big wrench in our Wrap game plan, and I've also only got 1 PP of Crunch left, which I spent to knock this little stinker into next week. The Peeker hit the next Beast in with a Thunder Wave, but I had to tag out after that.

Under normal circumstances, Rocky Dan and Tubi's Flash Cannons would be able to make quick work of a team full of Ice Starbies. Unfortunately, Tubi's out of comission, and Rocky Dan's paralyzed, has less than a quarter of his HP left, and only has two PP of Flash Cannon left. Still, that's enough to take down Swiftile and Mandolin, who came in afterwards. Only one Beast now stands between us and finally getting a chance to heal.

Here, I was pretty sure Rock Throw would either be a one or two shot, but full paralysis makes things tricky. I decided to go for a Sing, which I thought would give me more turns to try and land two Rock Throws. I did land it, but in hindsight I was just as likely to land Sing as I was a Rock Throw so I probably should've just gone for that. I was not rewarded for this, I did get six turns of sleep, but in those turns I got one hit, two full paralysis, and three misses, and I was knocked out by Crunch. (I barely survived the first Crunch on the turn I used Sing). Luckily, Rowsdower is busted and his Thunderbolt is able to easily take down Big Ed over here.

Lorelei apologizes for accosting us, and explains in more detail that "after what happened to Sabrina" they've been trying to crack down on Shayton's goons. They're still in that Gym, for the record, so you might want to go and try kicking them out instead of just camping out here on this largely unrelated route. Whatever, I'm not here to tell you how to do your job. I just need to heal.

I made a point to not look at or talk to anyone in Fuschia City yet, I just poked me head into the Star Beast center and then came back and dealt with the rest of the trainers. Just a couple more entertaining pieces of dialogue before we're done here: Another Lass says she wants to talk to Lorelei but she's too nervous, and asks me if I "know how to talk to girls." If there's one person who definitely doesn't know how to talk to girls, it's this police officer, whose text in the encounter is "Oh great, another woman."

This is the last guy I actually fought out here, so I will leave you all with the rest of his legendary dialogue.

Comments