Brain Full of Games

I am just 2 badges shy of the full set now. I hurried a little more than was necessary to get myself to Mt Moon for the Monday night Clefairy display (which, unfortunately for me, only works in the Monday part of Monday night: if you look on Bulbapedia and other walkthroughs which all copy from each other, some explicitly say that Monday night stretching into Tuesday morning works for this event, before the time becomes ‘Morning’ and 4am. This was not my experience and I will have to come back next week. But if the Clefairy were there for you at 3:30am on Tuesday… well, let me know).

What has struck me most interesting about Kanto is that you really are encouraged to breeze through it, even though you really don’t have to. The enemy Pokémon in this region are leveled to the perfect amount to get you a little bit of that experience you desperately need while also being easy to 1HKO with your Elite Four line up. the gym leaders in Kanto are challenging without being frustrating (I admit, I needed to rematch Misty because she knocked out the group I was training the first time I went through. I needed to take that fight more seriously and bring out the big guns for her). And Pokédex-wise, there is not much to be collected except a few things that were harder to get in Johto (like Quilfish without the Super Rod, for example) and a handful of new faces like Murkrow.

Quickly completing the Kanto gym challenge makes sense in story because you are a seasoned trainer with very strong Pokémon. All the gym leaders are impressed that you have travelled so far and really seem to consider your accomplishments to be impressive. They don’t downplay the trainers of this other region; if anything, they are awed, respectful. It is an interesting direction for the game to respect you instead of neg you into training harder, which seems like something it could do just as easily. Well, Gary ‘Blue’ does, but that is completely within character for him. And even he is excited to challenge a trainer from Johto, hurrying back to his gym when you confront him on Cinnabar.

**I would like to quickly note here that I found Blaine’s banishment to the Seafoam Islands to be quite disappointing. Many of the other Kanto leaders still have their basic challenges in place, like Sabrina, and Blaine I think had an even more iconic gym challenge. It was just sad that it was removed and the entire experience was just confronting him in a cave.

Another important aspect of Kanto is because there are so many higher leveled Pokémon even in the wild, you have a great opportunity to train up other Pokémon in your party and get some of those evolutions into your Pokédex. Bill’s grandfather, who is staying up at Cerulean Cape, will give you additional evolution stones in exchange for showing him certain Pokémon. A great little way to add evolutions to the game without the need for trading yet with slightly more friction than just throwing them in the Celadon Department Store.

With most of the gyms finished, I have decided that I need to level up a bit more before fighting Gary. I think, finally, I might be ready to use the Elite Four for grinding. Although my Pokedéx is not quite complete (134 owned), I think I will probably only have two more posts for this play through. We really are coming to the end of what I think it the most rewarding and complete Pokémon journey (at least until I return to Gen 3).