Following the defeat of Bugsy and Rivalboi, I made a beeline (hah) for Goldenrod city. In my opinion, this is where the game gets good. Routes start to be more connected and accessible, there’s way more exploratory options, there’s the daycare for passively raising pokemon, what more do I want or need?

Going through Ilex Forest was fairly straight forward, and it awarded me with the HM Cut and an oddish I named Misha. I’m most excited about cut because Baxter the beedrill can have more offensive moves. I taught headbutt to Benatar the onix and kept moving so I could leave mons at the daycare. I left Misha, because I’ve already got a bellsprout in the party and can’t forsee a need for having two grass types just yet, and Ann Veal the togepi because I couldn’t bear to let that cute little egg get hurt.

As a side note, my Mother in game reminds a lot of my real life mom. I keep getting calls from her about having to pick up some things she bought for me. And I get excited thinking its a good evolution stone or held item, but no, its always berries. “Hi Sweetheart are you eating enough fruit? Well maybe you should eat more fruit.”

By the way, Goldenrod city has two options to get a pokemon. After advancing a little further, Bill the PC guy could give me an Eevee, or I could grind the Voltorb Switch minigame to get either an Abra, an Ekans, or a Dratini.

Using a process of eevee-limination, I discerned it’s not really worth it to wait it out for an eevee. The one I would want most would have been Glaceon because there is a dragon type gym and I want those ice moves. But I can’t evolve a Glaceon in this game despite it being generationally available since there aren’t any Ice Rocks. The original gen 1 eeveelutions all require an elemental stone which are not easy to get any time soon, and frankly not worth it. I already have Uma as my fire starter, water types are easy to get once I unlock surf two gyms from now, and I see electric type as a luxury I don’t really need any time soon. That leaves Espeon and Umbreon, who are admittedly pretty cool and very easy to obtain. Of the two, I’d probably go with Umbreon because I like dark type moves better than psychic, but Umbreon takes a while to learn any worthwhile moves and I’d rather have a dratini at this point.

So I grinded HOURS of Voltorb Switch. I actually really like this mini game. How it works is fairly simple. To earn coins, you need to flip panels that are worth either 2 or 3 coins which will multiply your score, but if you flip over a Voltorb its game over. The grid gives you a fraction for each row and column. The numerator (top number) represents how many points are in a column, and the denominator (bottom number, with a Voltorb next to it) represents how many dangerous Voltorb tiles there are. In the screenshot, you can see that I have flipped over all the tiles where the denominator is zero, because there is a 100% chance that the tiles are safe to click. In the top row, I have marked these tiles as being either a Voltorb or a one, because out of five tiles there is a 1/5 or 20% chance of a Voltorb, a 4/5 or 80% chance of it being a 1, and a 0% chance of being a tile that will add to my score. So I don’t need to flip any of these tiles. The red column with the fraction 4/1 will be equally fruitless, as will the blue row 3/2. The rest uses simple probability and honestly a little bit of luck. Higher levels of this game award hundreds of coins per game since they have bigger numbers and are harder to deduce safe clicks. Let me know if you want to see a more detailed write up about how to play and win this game!

In reality I think I played maybe 3 hours of this while watching TV, it didn’t take that long to earn enough points (2,100) for a dratini, and I even played a few hours extra so I can also exchange my points for TMs, because I’d eventually like to teach Ice Beam. I named my dratini Migos and did some grinding on route 34, where I missed my catch opportunity to an Abra. I would have rather had a Drowsee or even a Ditto, but nooooooo. Abra just had to go social anxiety itself away from my party.

But I was quickly ready to take on Whitney’s normal gym. It wasn’t bad at all until I got to her Miltank who would heal basically every turn. I employed the same strategy and just ate a bunch of potions until she locked herself into Rollout, which was my chance to go in for a quick but risky kill with Uma.

Normally I’d end in fan art but I’m trying to replace my tablet and won’t subject you to much more bad photoshop, but since there were no deaths and I spent most of this chapter playing a minigame, wait till you see what comes next!