Recently in Pokemon Pearl Journal Category
Unlike last year's Mew Day, this Pokemon Event was a piece of cake.
As hoped, the whole affair was run by WiFi download. Although most people showed up expecting a line, so they didn't know where to go. The largest clusters formed around this instructional sign and over by the RZone checkout (where they were handing out the $5 coupons.) Follow the Mystery Gift instructions and bammo, everybody gets a Manaphy. Then we all run right home and breed a Phione.
Obviously most of the people there did not have Battle Revolution (and Nintendo must know it, because there was Battle Rev signage EVERYWHERE) because the Mystery Gift menu was totally unknown. The whole Wonder Card thing is woefully under-reported. Where's the Nintendo Power two page spread explaining how you download, what kinds of gifts you can download, and where you have to go to download? Nowhere, that's where... because it would absolutely kill Nintendo to have to admit that they have all kinds of secret things hidden in these games, to be revealed only at special events to be named later. Or never.
Eh, I'm still bitter about Animal Crossing, leave me alone.
The Geoffrey birthday party stuff kicked off at noon. Yeah, Nickelodeon! Bend that air!
Free instruments for the kids. Clark picked the same kind as last year.
Here's the big bonus.
If you've ever been to any kind of organized Pokemon event, you've probably seen the little Pokemon Fan magazines they give away. They're cute little adver-mags, occasionally about selected Poke-fans, mostly about tips and tricks for the games (video and TCG), and always about the latest merchandise for sale.
The mag's article on Battle Revolution has a secret code in it to transfer an Electivire into your Pearl/Diamond. It's the same code that's on the official website, as if you check there with any regularity. I imagine this will show up in Nintendo Power as well. Since Battle Rev doesn't have any kind of obvious "ENTER SECRIT CODEZ HERE" screen, you have to input the code on your profile page.
And by the way, you can find the dash on the WXYZ button. Thanks again for not including a real bloody soft keyboard, Nintendo!
As with the Surfing Pikachu and Manaphy itself, the Electivire comes through as a Wonder Card, meaning that I now have the maximum of three. I assume I can just dump one of them, now that I have all of those guys in my game.
Can Battle Rev generate Surfing Pikachus and Electivires for other copies of Diamond/Pearl, other than the one that is paired to the game? I would bet not - why would Nintendo allow everyWii to become a Surfing Pikachu generator - but I'm definitely going to test it out.
Hilariously, both the website and Pokemon Fan promise to have a new code "next month"... and it's purportedly "hot." Guess what that will be. COUGH*magmortar.
Anyway, this sure is easier than finding those stupid rare items that evolve Electabuzz and Magmar. I figured that you'd have to play Battle Rev for a million days to generate enough in-game money to buy them.
This totally validates my Battle Revolution purchase, by the way.
So what are they going to give away at next year's event (assuming there is one)? Darkrai? Ho-oh/Lugia? Raikou/Entei/Suicune? Deoxys?
Since beating the League, I've been doing a lot of critter collecting. Bringing old favorites over via Pal Park, slowly working through the little post-game sidequests and the weird new evolutions (Tangela evolves now? Tangela?) More on that later.
My sister has been continuing with her game as well and tonight we exchanged the final few types required so that we could both complete the Sinnoh Pokedex. Then I hustled back to the Game Designer at that hotel to collect my prize for finding all 150...
(That's my sister coming over and pointing out that the smegging background is even identical to the one you get for simply seeing all 150, as opposed to actually catching all 150. Cheap!)
Honestly, I didn't expect anything more, after experiencing the highly similar disappointment back in Pokemon Sapphire. And to be fair, catching all 150 is easier than ever thanks to the GTS...
But still.
That sucks.
Give us a rare egg, a unique item, some stupid ribbon or contest gear. Anything. You don't even get a nugget. Instead, you get a dippy certificate that you'll never see again. It's not even one of the accomplishments that adds a star to your trainer card. It really pisses me off that the game even has the nerve to play the "You Found Something!" sound when the guy says he has a (non) award to give you.
For something that is ostensibly the whole purpose of the series, Nintendo sure doesn't give a crap when you do it.
I decided that I wanted everybody right around level 60 before going after the League Championship, so I've been doing a lot of mindless training... initially up around Snowpeak and more recently just west of Sunyshore. Then I stocked up on Revives and HP healers. Although I bought a ton of Super Potions, I also picked up lots of those drinks cans you get at the top floor of the shopping mall. They're a better value.
I haven't necessarily been looking forward to this, which is why it took me so long to work up to actually sitting down and doing. I mean, the battle junk is the least interesting part of the game for me (well, second least since Nintendo bungled the Super Contest thing.) I'm more into catching all of the different types and uncovering all of the games little secrets.
Which is why I bought both Prima strategy guides and kept them by my side as I prepared for the Elite Four. I'm just going to waste time starting and restarting to get this done. I wanted to walk in at a very fat level, have a good idea of what I could do to maximize my team's type advantages, and barrel through all five matches without saving inbetween.
And of course I shot movies of each bout.
Elite Four #1 - Aaron
He's a bug trainer, but he throws in a Drapion just to screw with you. The Drapion looks like it might be a bug, but it's not. Allowing for that little problem, this was all Staraptor's show.
I had tried the Elite Four a couple weeks ago when my guys were all high-40's, and I couldn't even get a toehold against Aaron. Having a flying-type getting its ass kicked by the first bug-type in the queue is humiliating, so that should explain why I wanted to do this solid. My high-50's Staraptor had no such problems, as you can see.
Elite Four #2 - Bertha
She's all ground-type. I love when they stick to one type.
My Torterra - already the tank of the team - just went to town here. Didn't even switch anybody else in. Absolutely no thought went into this battle. Razor Leaf, Razor Leaf, Giga Drain. Razor Leaf, Razor Leaf, Giga Drain.
Elite Four #3 - Flint
This was the first battle that gave me pause, so it went longer than ten minutes (which meant I had to break the movie in two to upload to YouTube). As fun as it is to just have one dude in there swatting down all comers, there's something to be said for a longish battle where you have to switch your team around so as to take advantage of the type match-ups.
Starting Empoleon against Rapidash and Infernape was a no-brainer... although I had expected to keep Empoleon around a little longer, so the fall against Infernape was not appreciated. Look at that guy's HP; my Surf should have killed him. And then Flint had the nerve to Full Restore the Infernape! God that pisses me off.
In the second half of the battle, I get really lucky on getting past a Cute Charm to score a killing hit on Flint's Lopunny. But my Gengar becomes the team's weak link, shot down by the Drifblim and my Toxicroak has to finish the job. I REALLY should have trained the Gengar up more. I figured his coolass ghostiness would lower his handicap in comparison to my other fighters, but I was wrong.
Elite Four #4 - Lucian
I was dreading this one... the psychic specialist. I started Gengar for his Dark Pulse attack but like I said, he just wasn't up to it. He took out Mr. Mime on a lucky flinch, but was assassinated by the Alakazam. Then I jumped in Toxicroak who finished off Alakazam but then was slaughtered by the Girafarig.
At that point, I'm sweating, until I remembered that my Torterra also has a dark-type attack, Crunch. Then it became easy... Torterra > Girafarig, Staraptor > Medicham, Infernape > Bronzong.
League Champion Cynthia
Another two parter because this was a long battle and I included the big victory celebration at the end.
My big scare here was the weakness-less Spiritomb. So I started with Staraptor, figuring I couldn't go wrong with the Intimidate ability. Staraptor almost killed the Spiritomb with a couple Aerial Aces, but Torterra had to do the finisher.
Milotic was the big problem. First he Ice Beams Torterra to death, and then Surfs Gengar out the door (there's an edit there because I literally sat and thought for a minute about who to drag out next). Toxicroak gets a laugh because you can't Surf against him, but even that doesn't help much and it is neck and neck between the two for quite a few turns.
I revived Torterra because I needed his grass-type moves against the Gastrodon, so that was no trouble. Similarly, Empoleon had an easy match against the Garchomp... but only because I taught him Ice Beam just before the bout started. Then it came down to Infernape against Lucario (easy) and Infernape against Roserade (yeah).
I think my Infernape really lived up to her nickname. And it is super cool that the one that ended the battle is the very pokemon that I chose at the start of the game!
Here is my winning team... and now I'm off to explore all of the funky post-game stuff.
 Staraptor level 60 |  Toxicroak level 60 |  Empoleon level 60 |  Gengar level 56 |  Infernape level 60 |  Torterra level 63 |
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I get these email surveys from Nintendo quite a bit, and I always make a point to fill them out. You don't get anything for it, other than your chance to bake them over bad games. Like Pokemon Battle Revolution. Here's some screens of the survey (I skipped the dull(er) questions, like Are You Male Or Female) along with some additional commentary.
Sigh.
Boom! This assures they will pay attention to me, 'cause I'm a Power Buyer.
Hell yeah, son.
They seem to have forgotten about Pokemon Snap and the Puzzle League series, all of which are fantastic Pokemon tie-in games. I guess they're trying to narrow this survey down to the adventurey games.
The real story here is that Circuit City had the game on an unexpected discount. $40. Knowing what I know about Nintendo's history with console Pokemon games, I was really close to not even bothering with Battle Rev, but saving $10 pushed me over into a grudging "OK." That list gives you an idea how Nintendo would like to focus their advertising efforts. How about "Wii Preview Channel," guys?
Because they did something.
Because they didn't do enough.
The DS game integration was the big draw, and then that turned out to mostly suck. You would have to play Battle Rev for days to generate enough Poke Coupons to buy anything. You can't even buy crappy stuff for cheap; it's all expensive. I just beat the game tonight (first time through) and I have about 4,000 Coupons. The least expensive item on the shop list is King's Rock or Leftovers for around 7,000.
At least they made it nice and easy to sync up your entire DS pokemon collection with Battle Rev... although of course your team gains no experience for it.
"Accuracy of stylus"?
Some very mediocre ratings in the key areas. The endless parade of battles just sucks, as much as it did on the N64 games. To make matters worse, the few change-up Colosseums that they added are even more obnoxious. Seriously, randomizing your team? The hell?
Friend Codes for individual Wii games are lame. No voice chat. No trading. The only upside is that Battle Rev allows for random match-ups, which is very nice and isn't even possible in Diamond/Pearl.
What's up with this question? You tap menu choices on your DS. How could they have screwed that up?
To elaborate more on my last point: I can't even describe how disappointed I was when I saw that the entire game runs out of one crappy main menu. So much for the immersion of actually being inside a big awesome Pokemon amusement park. All you get is one boring virtual lobby.
If you're dying to see pokemon battles with cool special effects, here you go. (Gengar's Dark Pulse is especially awesome, by the way.) And coupled with the DS games, you get a couple of middling bonuses.
Other than that, it's a non-event. Again.
Now that I've had my Wii dose of pokemon fighting, I'm going to need some serious evidence before I go this way again.
I know I'm getting close to tackling the Elite Four, but my team isn't ready. Out of the eight or so that I'm considering placing on the team, half of them are only in the high 40s, which just will not do. So lately I've been doing some training, mostly up in the snowy region where it's an easy 600-1200 XP no matter what stupid critter jumps you.
I also focused on catching those three legendary floating alien cat things, which cost me a lot of money and a lot of time.
I needed 30+ balls to capture Uxie, mostly wasted Ultra Balls although it was a Dusk Ball that did the job. Same story with Azelf.
Those two idiots at least have the decency to stay where you find them. The third one, Mesprit, vanishes as soon as you activate him, and you have to track him down using one of the Poketch's map screens. It's awful. You can see his current location, but if you Fly there, he moves. If you take too long to walk there, he moves. If you cross into a city, he moves. I headquartered myself in Jubilife and walked in and out of town until he flitted within a short walk. (I did like how the background music changed when you start a battle with Mesprit.)
You need to have somebody with a blocking move in your party, or else he escapes from the battle as soon as you find him (I used Gengar and his Mean Look move.) The only boon you get during this whole mess is that any damage done to him is permanent, so you can whittle his butt down to nothing and then concentrate solely on catching him.
Again, I went in armed with tons of heals, Ultra Balls and Dusk Balls... but I restarted after each unsuccessful battle that ended with either the Mesprit dead or my entire team dead. Read the following three screens a hundred times in a row, and you'll see what it was like.
Then I gave up for a week. When I tried it again, I was considering recording it for YouTube, as an example of how obnoxious it was to catch this freak.
And then I nabbed him on the first Dusk Ball thrown.
I really wish I had recorded that, because it would have been hilarious. And NSFW.
In other news, I finished off the Iron Island sidequest, using that trek to bring Gengar up to level 50. Already hatched the Riolu egg and evolved up to Lucario. CHECK CHECK.
Turned off battle animations. I'll turn them back on once I go after the League Championship.
Did some more breeding... three more male Chimchars for trading fodder, and currently working on mating a female Piplup and a male Glameow.
Tried out the honey-baiting technique and instantly added it to my Most Hated Ways To Catch Pokemon. You have to spread honey on one of a dozen special trees, then come back in twelve hours. And MAYBE the honey will have attracted a rarish pokemon. The first five times I tried it, I got NOTHING. Then I got a Wurmple. F.
Got a Munchlax, a Heracross, a Mantyke, a Skorupi, a Feebas and a Goldeen on the GTS.
Traded types back and forth with my sister. We're both working on filling out the Sinnoh 150 'dex, although she has already beaten her Elite and has already gathered plenty of National 'dex types. She is also breeding Eevees so we can try for all the crazy Eevee evolutions.
Also bought the first volume of that Prima strategy guide I mentioned last time. It's been worth it.
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What's up with finding a Pokemon Center that you can't Fly to?
I'm speaking, of course, about the Center that you find north of Route 223, the waterway that connects Sunyshore with Victory Road. Surfing is always a drag, since you're prone to getting jumped by Tentacools and such, so after finishing the route and healing up, I flew back to Sunyshore to buy some Repels and Potions... and then realized that I could not Fly back. Nonsense.
So I used one of those Repels on my surf back.
I also was pretty liberal with the Repels inside Victory Road, which, again, ought to be called Victory Big-Ass Cave. This edition seemed less obnoxously twisty than in previous games, but I'm sure the Repels made it more bearable. And once you clear it, THEN you find a spot you can Fly to, so you'll never have to do the Route 223/Victory Road trek ever again.
So anyway, here's the fight against my rival. It's blurry because I was testing one of those little mini-tripods and it sucked.
I've put some time trying to get a love connection going for both my female Turtwig and my female Piplup (both recent GTS acquisitions), but no luck as of yet. At least, I'm assuming that they will not breed based on what the old man outside the daycare tells me. So I defaulted back to breeding more chimchars... my Empoleon and Infernape REALLY like each other. They create a baby Chimchar egg every five minutes.
I bought the Prima Strategy Guide Volume Two... the one that has the complete Pokedex and "post-game" guide. It's the Pokedex stuff that interests me, because, aside from hunting and pecking on the internet, there's NO WAY you'd decode the complexities necessary to catch some of these guys. For example, Spiritomb.
As commonly reported, in order to get a Spiritomb to appear, you need to have chucked the Old Keystone into that ruined dirt pillar thing, east of Eterna. Then you have to go talk to 32 people in the Underground! 32! Not NPCs, either! Real people!
Thankfully, we discovered a trick - and yes, I did not read this part online and no, the strategy guide does not spell this out. My sister and I noticed that our "people met" count kept going up as we kept greeting each other in the Underground. So you can artificially inflate your count by talking to the same person 32 times. You just have to keep going inside your base or wherever each time; you can't just stand in the same hallway and Greet. So, after about half an hour of Greeting, walking inside, Greeting, walking outside, etc, we both had counts higher than 32... and when I ventured back upstairs to that pile of dirt and clicked on it, the Spiritomb appeared. Easy catch.
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