Imagine this. Your name is Honey Glazed, you’re stranded on a desert island with only four Pokemon, only one of which is strong enough to be any good at battling, a bunch of Voices in your head that are terrified to use the PC to retrieve any of your other Pokemon (which aren’t particularly good at battling anyway), zero emptty Poke Balls whatsoever, and an Elite Four member who seems as TriHard as his Darkrai and only wants to fix his nice boat.

And who expects you to fight your way through a dark cave full of these guys:

In fairness to Blake, the boat is so busted up that Honey can just walk right through it. Either that, or Honey’s weird dimensional shift powers are making her through the scenery. I can’t take a screenshot of the effect because Honey vanishes instantly upon phasing through the boat, but you can watch an example incident here.

Meanwhile, in this shot, see if you can spot the four-to-six-odd pixels that represent where Honey actually is in this scene. (Hint: they’re near the shore, and pretty close to the nice boat.)



This is what the female Team Fusion grunts look like.

This is what the males look like.

While they don’t exclusively pack Fire-types, Team Fusion are fans of Fire-type starters. We’ve also seen Cyndaquil, Quilava, and Monferno.

He says, right before forcing us into a battle we can’t flee from. Mixed messages much?

Kryptonite much? If only Cyan were here to mine it.

After wandering in the dark a lot, beating and getting beaten by Fusion grunts, Honey finally got a light.



In a handy anti-frustration feature, the player automatically switches the lantern on immediately after picking it up. If only Flash worked this was in the mainline games.

We follow the light to the exit. Or, rather, the next step in our journey further into the mountain.

This guy is a friendly hiker who offers to heal our party. Just a nice guy, living in the mountains on a haunted island with Team Fusion running around, and he might well be a ghost himself for all we know.

On at least one occasion, we run back to the Pokemon Center to heal, but wander around a while and then run right back out.

Sometimes suggestions are made to use the PC, but they never succeed because the mob doesn’t want to lose Grotle.



By this point, Honey probably wonders if they’re right. (She blacks out in this fight.)

YAAAAAS–

NUUUUUU!

Spinda’s glitchy mixtapes may have helped Sap evolve into Grotle, but sadly we have no Spinda here.

This from a Delibird trainer.

This evolution doesn’t take either. It’s insulting how quickly it stops.

She sees well enough to beat us, though. With an Elekid, Magby, and Smoochum, too. It takes three tries to beat her, and if her Smoochum had had Dry Skin, we never would’ve managed the Water Pulse from MGN that took it down.

MGN, of course, fails to evolve at the end of this match.

“You’re bad guys. I’m a good guy. I’m trapped on this island with no way out, and this is the only way Blake will let me on the Nice Boat. And while Blake is better at battling than I am, he’s also the only one of us that knows how to fix boats, so right now it stinks to be me. And yes, I’m totally about to take it out on you.”



Surprisingly, we win this one. Not surprisingly, Grotle is the only one left conscious afterwards.

Not top enough to beat Sapping Turtle, as it happens. Even with his Monferno. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a Pokemon is a good guy with a Pokemon ten levels higher and absolutely zero respect for type disadvantages.

He still doesn’t evolve at the end of the battle.

We run into another healing hiker. As it happens, he’s a little odd, and talking to him eventually turns the entire mountain ablaze with color:

This lasts all over the map, even after until we run into a wild Gastly.

The encounter with the Gastly is normally colored, and thankfully resets the map.



I don’t know what the heck is up with these hikers. I wonder if any of them are fans of Spina’s mixtapes.