Episode 18: Rat Movie

I step foot into Fuschia City one time and I'm already being told lies. This guy in the Beast Center is trying to tell me that you need to train a large team of diverse Beasts to succeed, you can't just rely on one strong Beast. This is provably false by the number of children who beat any given Pokémon game by just powerleveling their starter. I will not stand for this disinformation.

I'm so mad. I'm gonna go to the zoo so I stop being mad. And I'm gonne look at this thing.

The zoo's got a couple other interesting tidbits: Malevolos is apparently revived from the Fiend Soul, which makes it a little bit less special since we've seen so many trainers with them. I'd guess that the Angel Soul probably is revived into that little angel looking Beast whose name I forget. You know the one. To me surprise, there's also a Vulturnus on display, which makes me think it might not actually be "legendary" in the Pokémon sense? Maybe it's just rare. In any case, it's apparently "The fastest Starbie in the world!" and it can "Throw one hundred punches in the blink of an eye!"

One last new Beast at the zoo, this also happens to be what the Safari Warden's friends have nicknamed him instead of Slowpoke.

Not much else to talk about in the city itself, so we might as well just head into the Safari Zone and get our Surf HM and Gold Teeth. My plan going in was to try and catch anything that I didn't already have the Stardex entry for, since the more of those we can read for free the better. Unfortunately, this didn't really work out.

Here's a list of every Safari Zone encounter I got, across both the grass and fishing: Slashopper, Inoyu, Speakeasy, Deathseer, Kurayami, Slimogg, Jelleye, Climpale, Rekall, Needolf, Pyrodon. You may notice that, besides those last three, I already own every single one of these Beasts. I just kept perfectly running into Starbies whose dex entries I already had, it was kind of astounding. And out of those last three, every single one I threw one Ball or Rock and they ran away immediately. And this was aross two attempts! On my first attempt I ran out of steps before I was able to get to the HM, because I was foolish enough to assume that a "Rest House" meant my step counter wouldn't decrease while I was inside it. Boy, that sure was worth it to get to read this guy's dialogue.

Well, whatever. We got Surf and we got the Gold Teeth to trade for Strength. Zorotl obviously learned Surf over Bubblebeam, but I was shocked how many of the rest of my team could also learn it. Tubi could, naturally, but so could both Toby Kebel and Rowsdower. Toby might as well pick it up over Bubblebeam himself, but Rowsdower really surprised me. That would be nice to smack Ground types. I ultimately decided against it, since Hurricane gives me a type I don't have much coverage for otherwise (although Falcon Punch is arguably all I really need) and Super Fang has a lot of utility against anything that's really tanky.

Strength though, was a bit of a question mark. With Cut and Flash being turned into real moves, I was wondering if Strength would become something like a Rock or Fighting move. I was really hoping for Fighting, since I think that's the one type our team could really use the most. I was going to have to teach it to something, though, and there's no move deleter in RBY so there's no take backs. Out of our current team, Tubi would be both well positioned to use a good Fighting move and also can bear the weight of a bad move if that's what it winds up with, so I decided to get rid of Recover. To my delight, it is in fact Fighting in this game, and also has a 10% chance to drop the target's Speed. These two HMs actually represent such a huge upgrade to our team.

So hey, remember those two trainers that were talking in gibberish, and we had that parenthetical flavor text about being unable to understand them? And there was another guy on that route who called them "cult members"? Well, like I suspected from the "Nepu Badge", this Gym is actually just formerly Fuschia City Gym: Now it's the Neputail Fan Club.

Inside, the Gym Fan Club seems to be a maze of narrow passages, filled with gravestones. Speako's pretty creeped out by it, and understandably so.

Every dead end is marked by a trainer, who all have something to say about Neputail. According to them, there is only a person born who can control Neputail once in a generation, which explains why all these so-called Neputail fans don't even have any of them on their team. There do seem to be multiple, from the way these NPCs talk about them ("The wizard that would become the first Neputail stole a jewel that gave it magical powers!"), but Ivy only has one. So I guess the rest are just free to roam the wilderness since there's nobody that can control them.

What kind of surprises me about this whole section of the game is how... normal? All of the NPCs seem? Like they're all big fans of Neputail, but they're not actually acting very cult-like in the traditional fantasy sense. They've even got a sense of humor about the whole thing: One NPC says "Neputail... I have failed you!" after being defeated, but talking to him again he says "I don't think Neputail cares that I failed, but it sure sounded cool, didn't it?" When I heard the dialogue back then about the "cult members", I did float the idea that maybe the guy meant it more sarcastically rather than as a serious description, and I'm kind of 50/50 on whether that's actually how you're supposed to read what's going on here. Then again, we are in a maze of gravestones, so maybe my expectations of Snakewood-level edgy nonsense were just too high.

Oh yeah and before I forget, the guy who said he failed Neuptail looked like this. I happen to know off the top of my head that this is the sprite for the unused Sprinter trainer class from the Gold and Silver Space World '97 beta, a fact that's taking up space in my brain that I could spend remembering the names of my high school classmates or the date of my parents' anniversary.

This Runner actually has unique music, just like the Officer did. In this case, it's a kind of pathetic sounding rendition of "Sonic Boom", the US opening theme of Sonic CD. I get it, the Game Boy's sound hardware is pretty famously limited, but when we've got clearly homebrewed tracks like this sitting next to tracks from the TCG game, the difference is pretty night and day. It's a good gag though, and it doesn't like. Bother me. Just hard to not notice.

Ivy the Gym Leader is hiding in the top right corner of the maze. (It wasn't that much of a maze really, it was more just a bunch of really long corridors with some dead ends.) She shares most of the same Neputail facts we heard from the rest of the trainers, like the whole Wizard bit. Nothing too special, as long as wizards turning into giant rats is normal to you.

Tubi was my lead here, I was assuming this was a Poison gym although the gym trainers had a decent variety of different Beasts. She at least led with Reekoon, a Poison type, which Tubi was able to one-shot with critical hit Falcon Punch. Funnily enough, it actually landed a second critical hit on her second Beast, but Tongoron's a bit of a tank so it only did half. It chose to capitalize on my recharge turn by using... Counter. What a cretin. It chose not to use this after I hit it with a super effective Strength (looks like it's just normal, full Lickitung expy) and two of those took it down.

Mutachin, her next Beast, seems to be the evolution of Infestin. That means it's Bug, and that means Falcon Punch is able to clean up pretty well. Hilarious, I got my third Falcon Punch crit in a row here, although I definitely didn't need it. But who cares about these random goons. She's not the Worm Queen, she's the Rat Queen. If I'm coming to the Neputail Fan Club, I'm gonna want to fight Neputail! Bring it out already!

If it looks to you suspiciously like it's got crystals growing out of its body and tail, then we had the same thought. Sure enough, it looks like it's Rock type, and one super-effective Flash Cannon led this fight to an unfortunate anticlimax. She did get a turn, but she spent it using an X Accuracy.

Sorry, Neputail fans. Your goat's washed. You guys should start a TM AI Mk. 1 fan club instead. It can even still learn this Toxic TM, which is evidently "the best way to spread the glory of Neputail!" Probably the most cult-y thing I've heard this whole time, honestly. Snuck it in right at the end. Well, we've got the Nepu Badge, there's a couple straggler areas we should do around the Kanto mainland, then all that's left is the oceans, Cinnabar Island, the Viridian Gym and then Victory Road and the endgame. Hard to believe the end is already in sight.

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