Part 1: Pokemon HQ Lab through Kaminko Manor

I just got out my first introductory statistics class and all I know is, I've been playing Pokemon for twelve years without stemplots and I think I'm going to keep it that way.

The default name for Gale of Darkness' protagonist is Michael, Ryuuto in Japan. He is a silent protagonist and I am a firm believer in assuming the silent protagonist as oneself. Most directors have a specific goal in mind when planning a protagonist and establishing his character, and I'm curious to see on this run if Michael is silent for narrative purposes or because it's an established convention of the franchise.

XD opens with a SIM battle, giving you a Salamence and telling you to take down a Metagross. It's basically a trick question on how much you know about typing; Salamence would get a 1.5x damage bonus from using either Dragon Dance or Dragon Claw because she's of the same type as those moves, but Metagross is a Steel-type so it resists Dragon-type moves and would take half damage. So you'd think to use Brick Break, a Fighting-type move that Steel is weak against, except that Metagross is also a Psychic-type in addition to Steel so it takes half damage from Fighting as well.

The answer is actually the first move Salamence has, Earthquake, since Metagross as Steel/Psychic takes 2x and 1x damage respectively with those matchups, so with two double damage hits from Earthquake Metagross is out for the count. Meta also has lower Speed than Salamence of the same level, so Salamence always attacks first in this matchup. This means that Metagross can't actually KO Salamence when you battle this way, because the worst it can do is score a critical hit with Toxic and inflict Poison as its lone attack of the battle, neither of which are super effective but will take Salamence down to critical HP.

I had to reset and sit through this battle eight times in the course of writing this, so I'm...familiar with it.

This is XD's actual starter Pokemon, and fortunately the first core member of my team. I have plans for this girl, although we won't see them start to come to fruition until she's in her low 30s. She has the dubious award of the least used ability in XD, Run Away, since there are no wild Pokemon in this particular game that the player is not deliberately encountering, but it will come to be replaced by something much more valuable on evolution. Mainly this Eevee is notable for coming in at 5 levels higher than a standard starter and for having already learned Bite at an unnaturally low level, but all this is child's play compared to the level 25 monsters you could start Colosseum with.

We come out of the SIM battle to this smiling face. While most moms in the franchise tend to worry about their sons going out into the big world with a level 5 water squirrel/fire cucumber/lightning mouse, Lily is a change of pace because she's not only endorsing her son's career as a Pokemon trainer, she's also a total stage mom who's actively trying to get him a suitable training regimen and make him the best trainer in town. The game doesn't really dwell on it because of how quickly the plot takes root, but I find it interesting because really, Michael is one of the only protagonists that isn't leaving his home. He just happens to have the entire state of Arizona as his back yard.

I won't be talking about the story too often especially because of how it slows down the early parts of XD, but there are some cool points that I think deserve focus. To summarize the basic situation, the Pokemon HQ Lab is researching the purification of Pokemon that have been conditioned into fighting machines, "Shadow Pokemon" and Lily has asked us to find our little sister. This means a lot of walking around the Lab talking to people.

The environments are half of XD. Each has a very specific mood, and there's clearly a lot of care put into them despite this being the Super Nintendo 64 in terms of graphical power. While this game obviously doesn't have the same impact, a comparison to Final Fantasy VII is accurate because the areas are characters in and of themselves. For starters, it's a pretty interesting touch that Michael has a basketball hoop in his room. XD came out in 2005, at a time when basketball was low key to compared to other sports in Japan, so this is one of those establishing features that gives the game a more American feel.

That stands out since on the whole, the HQ Lab that he lives in is a very run-of-the-mill Pokemonesque, blending space-age technology with green environments that would do Ghibli proud, and that's a more Japanese ideal on the whole than the strictly-divided American concepts of either green Amish utopia or overgrown Carina supercapitalist technology dictatorships. Because of all that, I tend to see the Orre region as America filtered through a Japanese lens. It's an outsider's perception of the country.

One of the major problems with writing sequels is that you have to build on the original work in a meaningful way while also providing a stand-alone piece for those that didn't read the original. Otherwise, the sequel becomes derivative and falls flat. XD achieves this through parallels that call back to the first game while showing how the situation in Orre has evolved in five years, so that existing fans can find a meaningful connection and new ones will have something waiting for them when they decide to try Colosseum afterward. Both games are kicked off by important, destructive events related to the game's antagonists that the reader sees in full, but that the characters are properly introduced to by way of a news broadcast. However, Colosseum's news network was lacking and the media was being gradually overtaken by the influence of the game's criminal organization, Cipher, while XD's show is being run by the ONBS network that a group of secondary characters from the first game established to create a free press. Not bad for a game with a target audience of ten.


This one's very easy to miss--I didn't know about it until one of my readers pointed it out after this update first went up--but the first possible battle of the game is optional. If you talk to this Supertrainer after getting the items from your room but before going to the next area, you can engage him in one of XD's only one-on-one battles.

Supertrainer Aferd sends out a Normal-type Sentret, but I actually don't know what it does because Eevee got a critical hit on a Tackle that was getting a 1.5x damage bonus, which because of the crit went up to 3x damage and took out the Sentret before it could attack. I had to start a new game for this but didn't feel like trying to force all of the other things to come in this update, so this battle technically never happened.

It takes all of nine minutes to unlock the first new map location.

See what I meant about the HQ Lab? This could be like, Keiji Kinebuchi artwork. The lab is incredibly idealistic, it's a throne of high technology that's at home with the nature around it. Absolutely Japanese. You could see a building project like this, maybe in San Fransisco. And it would be much rainier.

Anyway, about that little sister...

Kaminko's manor has a feel of its own. There's a lot of thunder and a lot of ambient noise in the soundtrack, but it doesn't seem to have a consistent melody of its own, which when taken with the constantly-changing lighting and stormy weather over the aging architectures evokes a haunted house feel. A place of mad science. Ever since I was a kid, I figured that it was a tribute of sorts to Luigi's Mansion.

There's no heavy physical similarities that I can think of, but there aren't that many mansions on the GameCube. And well, same company.

The first (or second, give or take a save file) real fight of the game comes at the front door. You can't level up from the little XP you get, and the fight basically serves to get you used to commanding Eevee instead of a Salamence. Which is a pretty big change-up, less so if you did optional SIM battles right from the start of the game.

Chobin is a recurring opponent in this game, although he's not quite your typical Pokemon rival. I can think of three trainers in particular that you could call XD's rival, but no one in particular fits the bill for this game. For one thing, Chobin never carries Shadow Pokemon, which doesn't make him much of a suitable counterpart to Michael.

Like I said, the fight with Chobin is not all that special. His Sunkern is five levels lower than Eevee, and his only move is Absorb. There's no special type advantages at play, and we're basically working with the babiest of baby battle techniques. That said, this is a good time to go over Eevee's strengths. Her core stat is Speed, which in the grand scheme of things is the best stat to excel at. Speed is the god of competitive play because it is usually the deciding factor in attack order, although there are always exceptions to the rule. Even among the exceptions though, it is possible to tie your attack priorities and force Speed to be relevant again, meaning that it will always be a key part of battle and can never be relegated to being a dump stat. Eevee's Timid nature also further increases her Speed growth by 10%, while decreasing Attack growth by 10%. One shortcoming of this particular Eevee is that in spite of her Speed growth, her base Speed right now is the lowest possible, but I don't feel like resetting for a better one when getting Timid to come up as her nature takes so long already.

In terms of the raw stats, Eevee's Special Defense is actually the highest right now, but what we want to focus on is that between her Attack and Special Attack, regular Attack wins out. Basically, physical moves are the way to go with Eevee. For her base moves, she comes with Tackle, Tail Whip, Bite and Sand-Attack. Two of these will not see regular use.

Bite is the only unusual thing for her level. Eevee doesn't normally learn Bite until level 25, but XD is thankfully more merciful in that department. This attack is her main point of offense and can actually serve all the way to the endgame if you choose to evolve your own Eevee into Umbreon, but in my playthrough it will probably be phased out eventually. Tackle actually gets a 1.5x damage bonus here for being of the same type as the Pokemon using it, so while its base power is 50 versus the 60 BP of Bite, the final damage will slightly exceed Bite's. However, Bite also has a 30% chance to inducing flinching, which interrupts whatever attack the opposing Pokemon has coming, and this works back into Eevee's high Speed growth because we want the Bite to connect before the opponent's attack is coming up. The possibility of inducing flinching and the small difference in damage means that Bite takes precedence for now.

We sort things out with Chobin soon enough. XD has a lot of good angles in its cutscenes, it really likes to show off the environments, but it is a problem that the camera is usually fixed during normal gameplay. You never see those doors outside of a select few scenes. The focus on them here is with a purpose.

Because someone is coming out of them! Jovi may be XD's female co-protagonist and little sister, but like a lot of things to come, this is one parallel that the game is working its hardest to subvert. Colosseum had you rescue a damsel in distress who was kidnapped by a band of thugs carting her off to the first new location, but XD has her running out on her own to the new map point and as it happens, in no danger at all. I'm grasping at straws here because the opening to XD is really cut and dry and Jovi's constant third person dialogue grates on me.

"Chobin thinks that it is superlative."

In spite of the American inspiration for the setting, I don't think that there are any other characters in the entire franchise that are as distinctly Japanese as Chobin and Doctor Kaminko. I mean, these are some Ozzie-Slash-Flea/Vinegar-Soysau-Mayonne level characters. And Chobin's entire personality can be summarized with a ◎3◎ kaomoji.

This is the first major fake-out of XD. Like with Rui in Colosseum, we have a little girl tagging along with the protagonist, ready to get stuck on key points of the map, clip through the scenery, and awkwardly shuffle backwards as our player character continuously walks into her model anytime that we need to turn around on a narrow walkway.

Except that XD lets us ditch her the moment we get back to the HQ Lab. Seriously. Colosseum is the rough draft, XD is the thesis project.

Professor Krane, that nice gentleman that was standing behind Lily before, outfits us with XD's model of the Snag Machine the moment we get back to base. This one has a theft protection system built in so that we can't steal anything that its Aura Reader doesn't react to, although that makes me think that any criminal out to exploit Shadow Pokemon really ought to just focus on manufacturing ones that are out of the Reader's visible range. Maybe that's why it's been eight years with no sequel in sight.

So, we now have access to a new game mechanic, which is really just the core game mechanic of the entire franchise minus Colosseum's amazing Poke Ball replication glitch. So what happens next?

The professor gets kidnapped. The first actual damsel-in-distress of the game is also our version's Pokemon professor.

 It's time for our first encounter with Naps!

We encounter our first Shadow Pokemon, a Shadow Teddiursa. This is a scripted battle, we can't actually choose any attacks and have to go with Krane's order to capture it, setting us up for proper double battles for the rest of the game.

On one hand this is good, because Teddiursa is a potential permanent addition to the team, but...

Well, for now relish in the idea that this is one of two battles in the game that will be won solely through stealing everything on the opposing trainer's team.

Our efforts are pretty much purely for our own benefit at this point, as at the end of the battle Otacon Krane gets thrown in the trunk and the Cipher peons run off with their mission accomplished.

The professor has been kidnapped. Work on the purify chamber and snag machine has ceased. Shadow Pokemon have been sighted. It is all very sad.

Lily, as Professor Krane's right hand, is in command. Like everyone, she doesn't have much to say at first. And then, she says the only words in the whole scene that really matter.

See, Lily is a mother in a Pokemon game. Her role, as laid out by three generations and nine games preceding her, is to give the protagonist his running shoes, maybe offer to store extra cash for him and decorate his room, then sit at home once he walks out the door and act as a free healing spot in a world of free healing spots for the rest of the game with no additional lines. Meanwhile, Krane is the lifeblood of the HQ Lab. He is the purification chamber and the snag machine. Without him, there is no project. But Lily is the first person to acknowledge that they simply don't have the Professor as an option any longer, so they have to do it themselves.

She takes an active role in a position of power and agency, and acts as the one issuing orders to Michael throughout this part of the game. She is a strongly characterized single mother commanding one of the bastions of scientific knowledge in a desolate and lifeless frontier, running crisis management in a Pokemon game. That is in total defiance of every convention the series has established. Lily is not forced to compromise her femininity to accomplish these things, least of all her maternal traits--she still worries about her kids and tries to help them grow without putting them in overt danger in spite of the problems inherent to Orre--but she maintains her work and family together as the head of both her house and her laboratory. Her husband's been dead for some time now, but even though there's a romantic subplot hanging around in the backstory, the game never actually pushes for Lily to remarry. Most telling of all, unlike previous mothers Lily has a real name. Her impact doesn't come from being a perfect person, but from breaking the mold so severely from her predecessors. Lily's one of the more memorable characters despite her lack of screentime, and it can be easy to forget that Krane is the actual region Prof. Because of her more active role, Lily's probably my favorite out of any of the Pokemoms.

Having come back to clarify this part a couple times now, I can attest that writing about exactly what makes her such a good character is difficult, because any female character in a video game made after 1990 immediately becomes a target for feminist critique, and there isn't "one feminism" to read those characters through. What I should stress is that Lily is a surprise. She's designed to be a very old idea to Pokemon veterans, and she contradicts your expectations by showing that old idea in a new light. Lily is a "what if" examination of the archetypal Pokemon protagonist being fatherless, in the same light as the mother from Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald. But where the mother in the GameBoy Advance games was married to a famous Pokemon gym leader that became an intrinsic part of the protagonist's personal journey and growth, Lily has outlived her husband whose absence is an intrinsic part of Michael's journey. The void in their lives is apparent and what makes Lily interesting is how she approaches and deals with that void. We know that she is a strong character because she has not been broken by the loss of her husband, and the experience has given her the perseverance and inner calm to take control of the lab when Krane is kidnapped. Losing her husband prepared her to lose the professor.

Her presence in XD is also important because unlike in the handheld games, you can't choose the protagonist's gender. Pokemon is a franchise that has to be constantly aware of the younger audience playing, and while the games are far from a moralized Sunday School experience, they do recognize the need to present role models and different images of what success and life can be. Children are more likely to become successful when they see successful people that look like them. In a standard Pokemon game, female role models are filled not just by gym leaders and elite four members, but also by the protagonist herself whose successes encourage girls to see themselves as successful. Lily provides a role model that is both a career woman and a mother of two, who has endured disaster already and is facing more even now. She shows someone who can do anything regardless of their gender or circumstances.

She gives us our next destination upstairs. I lied a little, Jovi will be joining us for it, but after this little fetch quest she's gone for good.

...and here's why Krane's order is a mixed blessing. See, Shadow Pokemon have no set makeup other than their base level. Every time you encounter one, it's rolled up as a random encounter. That means that the nature, gender and IVs are never set in stone. I've mentioned nature previously, it boosts one stat's growth by 10% and decreases another by the same (or increases and decreases the same stat in five cases for a neutral nature) but IVs are another differentiating part of any given Pokemon. Individual Values represent the characteristics of that Pokemon as an individual.

All stats can have an IV of 0 to 31, and these  increase the stat of the Pokemon. The effect of an IV on a stat is more visible at higher levels. For example, if you compare two level 10 Eevees with neutral natures, one with 31 IVs in Speed and one with 0 in the same, the 31 IV Eevee will have 19 Speed while the 0 IV Eevee will have just 16. But at level 100, the 31 IV Eevee will have 146 Speed while the 0 IV Eevee will have 115--a difference of exactly 31 points in Speed, 1 for every IV.

The upshot of IVs is that they characterize a Pokemon so that, along with its Original Trainer, ID, place of origin, gender, nature and nickname, the odds for any one Pokemon to be identical to another of the same species are about the same as they are for a human being. The downside is that not all Pokemon are created equal. There is such a thing as a "runt of the litter" that is objectively inferior to others of its kind, and it's not a very happy thing to ruminate on, so I tend not to dwell on it. Because IVs are pretty much invisible, you have to rely on Pokemon calculators to determine them, and prior to higher levels you can only get a somewhat general range of what your IVs look like rather than an actual number.

I'm not gonna pay an enormous amount of attention to IVs because trying to get the nature correct on its own is tedious enough. In order for Teddy here to really turn out, I need an Adamant nature, which increases Attack and decreases Special Attack. For Shadow Pokemon though, the nature is hidden as ???? until the second bar of the Heart Gauge drops. Ordinarily you can drop it quickly with special scents and reset for the right nature if you don't get a good one, but this is the start of the game when we still don't have that. So I have to essentially work blind until I can reduce that Gauge through battles or regular walking, without saving, and then go back and sit through those cutscenes and reduce the gauge all over again if it's not Adamant.

...Or that's what I was doing initially, but a simpler way is to calculate the Pokemon you're looking for and then compare its stats immediately after capturing it (or as near as you can get, which in this case means sitting through a couple cutscenes first) to see if it's the right one or not. Shadow Pokemon are rolled with 0 Effort Values (another thing that is a thing that I will get to), so their stats would be identical to an untrained Pokemon of that level, plus or minus nature and IVs.

My method, working with Pokemon calculators, was to first establish that a level 11 Adamant Teddiursa would have Attack between 24-28 and Special Attack 14-19. These are the stats that an Adamant nature modifies, but they also overlap with some of the others (Naive, Rash, Jolly, Lonely etc.) so you still have to actually decrease the Heart Gauge to be certain. To expedite this further I decided to cut down to just the unique ranges, meaning stats that are only possible on an Adamant level 11 Teddiursa. Since Adamant modifies Attack and Special Attack, the unique ranges are;

1. 27-28 Attack
2. Special Attack lower than 16

So any Teddiursa with both 27+ Attack and a Special Attack of 14-15 will be Adamant. This...this took about four days.

This Speed is really, really bad considering that the cap for her level is 18, but I'll roll with it. (And no, I'm not resetting for gender either; both of my core team members being female is coincidental.)

I love XD to pieces, enough that I want to show it off in the best playthrough I can manage, but sometimes this game gets to me. Later Shadow Pokemon are going to be much easier to get the right natures for because XD cuts right to the chase and gives you all of the mechanics within the first two hours of gameplay.


As a closing point on this visit to the HQ Lab, there's a very easily missed Antidote x2 off to the west side of the building exterior. This is an item to cure a status problem, which I'll talk more about later, but more than that I appreciate the little hidden path here because I didn't find it until years after first picking up this game in 05 and the eastern path is just a secondary exit to the world map.

Before we proceed, I make a detour back to Kaminko Manor. The second battle with Chobin is entirely skippable, and it mainly serves as a way to try out our first Shadow Pokemon. Chobin's Sunkern has gone up a level but doesn't know any new attacks, and he now has a level 6 Magikarp on his team, but it only knows Splash and that is literally a turn-pass move. So to elaborate a bit on Shadow mechanics, Shadow Pokemon start off with all of their non-Shadow moves sealed from use. The Heart Gauge below their HP is divided into five sections, and each section opens up something new when the Gauge depletes below that point. The Gauge can be decreased very slowly through normal walking, and it also decreases dramatically every time that the Shadow Pokemon is sent out into battle, although only once per battle. Because the Heart Gauge replaces the experience bar, Shadow Pokemon cannot level up until their Gauge is emptied and they are purified, although they do gain experience before then.

In Pokemon Colosseum, Shadow Rush was the only Shadow move, albeit it was also an extremely potent one. XD adds 13 moves to the mix, with Shadow Blitz being the most basic and the one that Teddiursa comes with. Blitz has a BP of 40 and is a physical move, which is good for Teddi since that means that it's working off of her good Attack stat rather than abysmal Special Attack, but Blitz inflicts no secondary effects.

My strategy in this fight is to have Eevee use Bite for two turns to get rid of the Magikarp, while Teddiursa uses Shadow Blitz on Sunkern for a turn 1 One-Hit Knock Out (OHKO.) Surprised? Get used to this; all Shadow moves are supereffective versus non-Shadow Pokemon, so Shadow Blitz is dealing double damage and its final damage output is something like 32 on a Sunkern with an HP of like 20.

Eevee goes up to level 11, and...

Teddiursa enters Reverse Mode at the end of the round! Reverse Mode is a fun mechanic. Colosseum introduced Hyper Mode, but XD brought some changes as part of the modifications made to the Shadow Pokemon formula. The original Hyper Mode activated instead of attacking, which made it aggravating to use because you lost a turn to it, but Reverse Mode triggers at the end of the turn and can actually activate even if you've already won the battle! Like with Hyper Mode, affected Pokemon can sometimes disobey if you tell them to use a move that isn't a Shadow move, and items can't be used on the Pokemon at all.

The first major difference is that at the end of a turn in which a Pokemon is still in Reverse Mode, it deals damage to itself. This is XD's way of rebalancing Shadow Pokemon to account for the introduction of the 13 new moves. In Colosseum, Shadow Rush dealt damage to the Pokemon every time that it was used, but since not every Shadow move deals recoil damage now, Reverse Mode serves to make up for that. The other major difference is that unlike Hyper Mode, Reverse doesn't increase the critical hit ratio of Shadow moves. This has consequences for XD's version of Shadow Rush, since consistent critical hit manipulation is a little too good to be true.

The main reason that Reverse Mode is so wonderful is because by calling out to the Pokemon, they'll be instantly snapped out of it, which dramatically decreases the Heart Gauge and saves a lot of time spent walking and battling in the process. Strategically, Reverse Mode doesn't have any real value and I would take Hyper Mode any day, but it triggers more consistently than Hyper Mode without actually losing turns and that expedites purification.

While I was hoping to get all of the awkward introductory business out of the way within the first update, I need to cut about 5000 words for readability, so I'm going to split things here.

Next time: Sailors, evolutions and Shadow Pokemon at Gateon Port!